Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (10 page)

Discussion of the airborne landings in support of OVERLORD was complicated by the arrival of a delegation of staff officers direct from Marshall, to project the American Chief of Staff’s strong view that, having created large and expensive airborne forces, the Allies should employ them for an ambitious envelopment plan. Marshall proposed that they should be dropped near Evreux in the ‘Orleans Gap’ to hold a perimeter and create a major strategic threat in the German rear.
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Eisenhower was obliged to point out painstakingly to Washington the inability of paratroops to resist armoured forces, their absolute immobility once on the ground, and the difficulties of supplying them with ammunition and heavy weapons.

More disturbingly, German reinforcement of the western Cotentin compelled Bradley to reconsider his existing plan for the American airborne drop on his flank. The two divisions were now to land on the eastern side of the peninsula only. Then it was Leigh-Mallory’s turn to create difficulties. In the last days before 6 June, the airman became passionately imbued with the conviction that the American drop was doomed to disaster, with huge casualties in men and aircraft; he impressed this view upon Eisenhower. The Supreme Commander at last overruled him. But the Englishman had added to Eisenhower’s huge anxieties and responsibilities at a critical moment, and further diminished confidence in his own nerve and judgement.

It was a remarkable tribute to the power of the image-builders that even among the Americans, in those last weeks before D-Day, nothing did more to boost the confidence of the men of the invasion armies than Montgomery’s personal visits. From mid-May until June, he devoted his energies almost entirely to inspecting the troops under his command, whom he would never again have the opportunity to see in such numbers. The measured walk down the ranks; the piercing stare into men’s eyes; the order to break ranks and gather around the general on the bonnet of the jeep;
the sharp, brittle address – all were studiedly theatrical, yet defy the cynicism of history. ‘Even Eisenhower with all his engaging ease could never stir American troops to the rapture with which Monty was welcomed by his,’ wrote Bradley. ‘Among those men, the legend of Montgomery had become an imperishable fact.’
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Montgomery told them that the enemy had many divisions, but most of these were weak and understrength: ‘Everything is in the shopwindow. There is nothing “in the kitty”.’
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He told Americans that ‘as a British general, I regard it as an honour to serve under American command; General Eisenhower is captain of the team and I am proud to serve under him.’ Lieutenant Philip Riesler and 12,000 other men of the US 2nd Armored Division gathered to hear Montgomery on the football field at Tidworth camp in Hampshire. ‘Take off your helmets!’ he ordered, and off came every helmet except that of Maurice Rose, beside the jeep. ‘You, too, general,’ said Montgomery. He paused and gazed slowly, in silence, round the great mass of men. At last he said: ‘All right, put them back on. Now next time I see you, I shall know you.’ It was brilliant stage-management.

There was less enthusiasm from the British government for Montgomery’s speeches to factory-workers and railwaymen, which were also a feature of his activities at this time. These smacked too much of the national warlord, arousing the deepest instinctive fears in politicians’ hearts. When he drew up a two-page outline, complete with hymns and prayers, for a proposed national service of dedication at Westminster Abbey before the invasion, the plan was speedily squashed. Montgomery would sail for France leaving behind many men who admired his skill and application in bringing the invasion to reality. Not one of his British or American critics could afterwards deny the importance of his contribution to the creation of OVERLORD; no other Allied general could have accomplished so much. But he also left behind a deep reservoir of animosity and bitterness. Morgan, who had laboured so hard and long as COSSAC, would never forgive Montgomery for ruthlessly consigning him to the backwaters of the war after his own arrival
in England. Scores of other senior officers who had not belonged to Montgomery’s ‘desert family’ were also discarded – some for good reasons, others suffering merely for the misfortune of being unknown to the new Commander-in-Chief. Apart from these, there was an abundance of staff officers at Eisenhower’s headquarters ready to poison the ear of the Supreme Commander towards Montgomery. As long as the Englishman remained victorious, he was invulnerable. But should the group campaign falter under his direction, he had provided many powerful hostages to fortune.

Defenders

‘If they attack in the west,’ said Adolf Hitler in December 1943, ‘that attack will decide the war.’
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Whatever the shortcomings of the Atlantic Wall, Hitler’s proclaimed impatience for the Allied invasion was by no means bluff. His armies in Russia were being remorselessly pushed back and destroyed; between July 1943 and May 1944 alone, they lost 41 divisions in the east. Their total manpower had fallen from over three million in July 1943 to 2.6 million in December. Thereafter, between March and May 1944, they suffered a further 341,950 casualties, and lost an additional 150,000 men in the aftermath of the Allied landings in Italy. Germany’s sole conceivable chance of escaping catastrophe now lay in the destruction of OVERLORD. ‘Our only hope is that they come where we can use the army upon them,’ said General von Thoma to a comrade in captivity.
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If the Allies could be thrown back into the sea, it was inconceivable that they should mount a new assault for years, if ever. Almost the entire strength of the German army in north-west Europe, 59 divisions, could be transferred east for a fight to the finish against the Russians. Within the year, secret weapons and jet aircraft should be available in
quantity. Thereafter, Hitler reasoned, anything was possible. If it was a sketchy scenario, it was not an impossible one – granted only that the Allies could be denied a foothold in France.

In January 1944, Jodl toured the Channel coast and reported grimly on the state of its defences.
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The perpetual bleeding of manpower from west to east had crippled every division. In the Channel Islands, 319th Division was reduced to 30 per cent of its establishment. Re-equipment was causing chaos – the artillery was armed with 21 types of gun: French, Russian and Czech. Commanders complained that they were being denied time to carry out essential training because their men were continuously employed on building fortifications. The Germans were as preoccupied as the Allies with the need to maintain air superiority over the invasion coast, yet Jodl recognized that ‘. . . we must not accept battle with the enemy air force’.
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The hapless Commander-in-Chief, von Rundstedt, was never consulted about what forces he deemed necessary to defeat an invasion – he was merely informed of what was to arrive. The bulk of his army was made up of the over-age and medically unfit, convalescents from the east, and an entirely unreliable rabble of Polish, Russian and Italian defectors and forced labourers. Even the majority of the first-line divisions which began to move into France in the spring of 1944, in accordance with Hitler’s Directive 51 for the strengthening of the western defences, were formations shattered in the east, which would need massive reinforcement and re-equipment if they were ever to regain their old fighting power. However well Hitler recognized the need to defend against invasion, he was the victim of a remorseless imperative that demanded men and tanks to fight against the present menace in the east, rather than the prospective threat in the west.

If there was a euphoric belief among the western Allies after their victory that they had monopolized the attention and best efforts of Nazi Germany, the figures belie this. In January 1944, Hitler deployed 179 divisions in the east, 26 in south-east Europe, 22 in Italy, 16 in Scandinavia, and 53 in France and the Low Countries. By 6 June, there were 59 in France and the Low
Countries – 41 of these north of the Loire – 28 in Italy, but still 165 in the east. There were 24 Panzer divisions in the east and eight elsewhere in January, compared with proportions of 18 to 15 by June. It remains astounding that after three years of devastating losses in the east and the relentless bombing of Hitler’s industries, Germany could still produce and equip an army in the west capable of causing the gravest difficulties to the best that Britain and America could throw into the war. ‘The possibility of Hitler’s gaining a victory in France cannot be excluded,’ wrote Brooke gloomily on 25 January. ‘The hazards of battle are very great.’
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Germany’s critical weakness on the Channel coast in the spring of 1944 was her blindness. The Luftwaffe had lost not only its strength, but its will. Despite the difficulties posed by Allied command of the air, some measure of air reconnaissance might yet have been possible given real determination by the German airmen. But there was no sign that they recognized the cost of their failure, or of the weakness of their photographic interpreters beside those of the Allies. ‘That the Luftwaffe did not carry out minimal reconnaissance of the east coast must rank as a miracle of the same dimensions as the destruction of the Armada in 1588,’ the historian of Allied deception planning has written.
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The British and Americans were quick to understand the importance of impeding German weather forecasting, and seized enemy stations in Iceland, Greenland, Sptizbergen and Jan Mayen island – actions that were of decisive importance on D-Day.
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It would have been impossible for an operation of the magnitude of OVERLORD to have sustained its extraordinary level of security had it not been launched from a sealed island. The brilliant British counter-intelligence operations had not only deprived Germany of authentic agents in Britain, but also placed the agents in whom she trusted under the control of the Allied deception planners. The Americans, surprisingly, placed little faith in deception, and showed limited interest in FORTITUDE. Yet it was the Germans’ utter uncertainty about where the Allies would land that contributed decisively to their debacle in June.

There has been recent speculation
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about the possible role of Admiral Canaris himself in Allied deception plans for D-Day. This was prompted by new discussion of the links between the British Secret Intelligence Service and a Polish woman contact of the Abwehr chief. It has been suggested that Canaris was either working actively for British Intelligence, or was at least instrumental in persuading Hitler that the Allies would land in the Pas de Calais. The evidence is overwhelmingly against either of these remarkable notions. Canaris’s loyalties wavered, and he certainly leaked some useful information which reached the Allies through the Polish contact; but there is no evidence whatever that he was personally exploited by the British, or that he was privy to the fact that every Abwehr agent in Britain was in the hands of MI5.

The worst charge thus far made against the authors of the British official history of wartime intelligence is dullness. It has not been suggested that they have concealed important elements of the truth, and they have had access to all the relevant documents. They declared flatly in their second volume, published in 1981, that after 1940 the Secret Service possessed no agents whatever in Germany. Professor Hinsley, the senior historian, confirms
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that there is still no evidence of Canaris’s complicity in Allied deception plans, which relied principally on the transmission of false information through Abwehr agents in Britain controlled by MI5. By the spring of 1944, Canaris was discredited in the eyes of Hitler and OKW. In any event, for the admiral or his associates consciously to have assisted Allied deception plans, they would have needed to know the truth about Allied intentions. It is unthinkable that these could have been revealed to them. The British were successfully employing all manner of conduits to channel false information to the Germans without any need of Canaris’ direct assistance. The balance of probability remains heavily in favour of the view that Hitler’s intelligence departments were incompetent, not treacherous, in their assessments of Allied plans in 1944. No significant historian of the period believes otherwise, and it is only because some recent newspaper
reports have insistently suggested Canaris’s active involvement in the pre-D-Day deception that it becomes necessary to contradict this delusion at such length.

Many narratives of D-Day have focused upon the German failure to heed warnings that the invasion was imminent.
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Yet in truth, while these might have enabled more high commanders to be at their posts when the Allies landed, knowledge of
when
would have been of only the most limited strategic value as long as they remained ignorant of
where
. The confusion of German thinking in the spring of 1944 was astonishing. Hitler’s instinct continued to insist that the Allies would come in Normandy. But with uncharacteristic forbearance, he did not pursue his hunch to the point of demanding special emphasis upon Normandy’s defences. On 29 April, one report suggested that the Allies were concentrating in western rather than eastern England, but on 15 May ‘a good Abwehr source’ reported the 79th and 83rd US Divisions in Yorkshire and Norfolk, and XX US Corps and 4th Armored around Bury St Edmunds. A report from von Rundstedt’s headquarters on 21 May anticipated that the Allies would mount several simultaneous assaults, and use new weapons, including gas – this, of course, was a mirror image of the fear of the invaders. Lieutenant-Colonel Roger Michel of Rommel’s intelligence staff predicted that the Allies would land 35 divisions, but Hitler’s staff were studying likely figures of 85 or 90 divisions, which was not implausible if America had mobilized the same proportion of manpower for her fighting formations as Germany. Some Allied deception schemes made no impression on the Germans – for instance, the dispatch of an army pay corps lieutenant and former actor to impersonate Montgomery on a tour of the Mediterranean, and the creation of a mythical army in Scotland for the invasion of Norway. But a climate of uncertainty had been masterfully created, which would decisively influence German behaviour until deep into July. Its success reflected poorly both on Hitler’s intelligence departments and on the enfeebled self-confidence of his commanders.