Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (6 page)

There were, however, no delusions among 21st Army Group about the likely quality of resistance: ‘The Germans will probably base many of their main and rearguard positions on river obstacles . . . Our formations will be well-trained, but most of them will have little battle experience . . . The enemy . . . will fight fiercely in all encounters, whether major battles or battles simply to gain time for withdrawal . . . An all-out pursuit is considered unlikely until the German army is emphatically beaten in battle, and likely to come only once in the campaign. It will herald the end of the German war.’
¹⁴

The landing plan developed at St Paul’s called for four corps to feed their men in columns through the five Allied beaches during the period following D-Day. On the right, at Utah beach, the US VII Corps would be led ashore on D-Day by 4th Division; at Omaha, V Corps would be led by 1st and 29th Divisions; at Gold, the British XXX Corps would be led by 50th Division; British I Corps on Juno would be led by 3rd Canadian Division, on Sword by 3rd British Division. Various Ranger and Commando units would land alongside these major formations, but at no phase of the war was the high command’s enthusiasm for Special Forces lower than in 1944. There was a strong feeling that these ‘private armies’ had creamed off precious high-quality manpower, and could contribute little to the massive clash on the battlefield that was now to begin. The raiding days were over. With the sole exceptions of the American Ranger assault on the Pointe du Hoc west of Omaha, and some SAS drops deep inland to work with the Resistance on German lines of communication, the Commandos
and other Special Forces were employed for normal infantry tasks on D-Day and for most of the war thereafter.
¹⁵

Montgomery’s subsequent attempts to pretend that the Normandy battle developed entirely in accordance with his own plans have distorted what was essentially a clear and simple issue. The evidence of all the planning documents before D-Day about Allied intentions is incontrovertible. The British Second Army and Canadian First Army were to ‘assault to the west of the R.ORNE and to develop operations to the south and south-east, in order to secure airfield sites and to protect the eastern flank of US First Army while the latter is capturing CHERBOURG. In its subsequent operations the SECOND ARMY will pivot on its left (CAEN) and offer a strong front against enemy movement towards the lodgement area from the east.’
¹⁶
The US First Army was to capture Cherbourg, and thereafter:

Patton’s Third Army was to advance through First Army’s front, clearing Brittany, seizing St Nazaire and Nantes, then covering the south flank, ‘while the First US Army is directed NE with a view to operations towards PARIS.’ From all this, it is obvious that the eventual American movements in Normandy followed the plan created in the spring of 1944 by 21st Army Group. Where Montgomery distorted his intentions after the event, and made possible the bitter controversy that has persisted for so many years, was by pretending that the British and Canadians fulfilled their purpose by holding a line north of Caen. Indeed, they did offer a ‘strong front’ to the great weight of German armour. But as Montgomery made abundantly clear before D-Day, he wished that ‘strong front’ to be somewhere in the area of Falaise, which would provide
adequate room for build-up and airfield construction between the perimeter and the coast. In the event, the Allies suffered severely from the lack of space within their beachhead as well as the shortage of airfield sites to increase the range of their tactical aircraft. From 6 June until the final Canadian push towards Argentan in August, Montgomery made it plain that he hoped that his troops could surpass his minimum hopes, gain more ground and break through the German front. This they were never able to do, and Montgomery’s credibility with his peers and superiors diminished with each letter of intent that he dispatched before Second Army’s operations, expressing ambitious hopes which were not fulfilled.

The Commander-in-Chief of 21st Army Group was justified in claiming that nothing which happened in Normandy changed the broad shape of his plan or the intended pattern of the American advance. But all those who knew him and knew the plan – not least the Americans – had a clear idea of what he wanted the British element to accomplish, and were not for a moment deluded by his evasions when these hopes were not fulfilled. Had he himself been more honest and less arrogant about his difficulties on the eastern flank as they took place – above all with Eisenhower and Tedder – he might have avoided much of the acrimony that descended upon him.

The issue was further confused by the so-called ‘phase line controversy’, the argument surrounding the map, drawn up by the 21st Army Group HQ at St Paul’s, showing the perimeters which the Allied armies might expect to hold by given dates following the landings, concluding at the line of the Seine on D+90. Bradley was furious to see this map, and demanded the deletion of the phase lines for the American sector, to which he refused to be committed. In reality, it is difficult to attach much importance to them, or to believe that Montgomery did so either. 21st Army Group expected to fight a measured, stage by stage battle in which the Germans retreated to newly-chosen defensive positions as their front was driven in by successive Allied attacks. Some notion of
where the Allies might hope to get to in the weeks after D-Day was desirable. But no general as skilled in the art of war as Montgomery could have intended that a battle lasting many weeks should be conducted
operationally
in accordance with lines on a map. Approximate phase lines were essential
logistically
, for the guidance of the supply planners, because the balance in the armies’ relative requirements of ammunition and fuel would vary by many thousands of tons in accordance with their distance from the nearest offloading point, and the speed at which they were advancing. The ‘phase line controversy’ only assumed its subsequent importance because of the tensions within the Alliance, and the willingness of mischief-makers to find a stick with which to belabour Montgomery during the weeks of wrangling that reached a pitch in high summer.

Between 15 January and 5 June – the new target date for invasion after delay became inevitable to provide sufficient landing craft – Montgomery’s original concept for the assault was refined, but not altered. Enormous problems of organization and supply were overcome, difficult issues such as the role of de Gaulle and his Free French were painfully resolved.
¹⁸
It was not, however, the future of the ground battle for Normandy, nor even the political future of France, which lay at the heart of the most bitter struggle within Eisenhower’s command in the spring of 1944. This concerned the role and direction of the Allied air forces.

Airmen

Disagreements, even full-blooded quarrels, between the services were not uncommon either in Britain or America in the Second World War. But none generated more heat and passion or diverted so much attention from the struggle to defeat the Germans than that surrounding the proper use of the Allies’ vast air power in
1944.
¹
In the First World War, aircraft were directly controlled by the armies and navies of their respective nations. In April 1918, British airmen successfully escaped the thraldom of the generals and admirals to form the Royal Air Force. In America, air power remained under the direction of the two senior services, but at no time from the 1920s onwards did the nation’s leading fliers lose sight of their ambition of independence. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that, between the wars, the air forces of both countries embraced Mitchell, Douhet and Trenchard’s theories of strategic air power, which claimed the bomber unsupported to be a war-winning weapon, because of their passionate anxiety to discover a role for themselves beyond that of mere flying eyes and artillery for the older services. Their enthusiasm for strategic air power critically hampered the development of close air-ground support techniques such as the Luftwaffe took for granted from its inception. Such was the obsession of the RAF with its bomber force that during the rush to re-arm in the last years before war, the Air Ministry would have built far too few fighters to enable the Battle of Britain to be won, had it not been compelled to switch emphasis by civilian politicians more concerned with the defence of their own country than with demonstrating the potential of bombing an enemy.

Yet Britain’s inability to strike directly against Germany with her ground forces between 1940 and 1944 thrust upon the RAF the opportunity to play a role of unique strategic importance. The programme for the creation of a vast heavy bomber force, conceived in the days of despair in 1940, had borne full fruit for the airmen by 1944. Each night, up to a thousand British aircraft set off for the industrial cities of Germany, to pour explosives upon them with the aid of the most sophisticated technology that the nation possessed. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, the formidable Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, had become one of the
best-known and most fiercely independent war leaders in Britain, waging his campaign with implacable determination, convinced that by this means alone Germany could be beaten, without recourse to a major land campaign. When the Casablanca conference committed the Allied air forces to POINTBLANK, a bombing programme specifically designed to pave the way for the invasion of Europe, Harris paid lip service, but in reality pursued uninterrupted his campaign of ‘area bombing’ against the cities of Germany. ‘It is my firm belief,’ he wrote to Portal on 12 August 1943, ‘that we are on the verge of a final showdown in the bombing war . . . I am certain that given average weather and concentration on the main job, we can push Germany over by bombing this year.’
¹
In January 1944, almost unbelievably, Harris declared his conviction that, given continued concentration upon his existing policy, Germany could be driven to ‘a state of devastation in which surrender is inevitable’ by 1 April.

By day, meanwhile, the American Fortresses pursued their precision bombing campaign guided by General Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz, an airman who disagreed with Harris about the best means of defeating Germany from the air, but made common cause with the Englishman’s commitment to independent air power. The American official historians wrote of the USAAF that it was:

As the directors of OVERLORD gathered the reins of command into their hands in the first months of 1944, one of their foremost concerns was to ensure that the full weight of Allied air power was available to provide whatever support they felt need of as the campaign unfolded. Eisenhower concluded early on that the
‘bomber barons’’ promise of goodwill would not be sufficient: the lure of their own convictions had often proved too strong in the past. Even more serious, both the British and American bomber chiefs had been proclaiming for months that they considered OVERLORD a vast, gratuitous strategic misjudgement, rendered wholly unnecessary by their own operations. Harris bombarded the Air Ministry with minutes declaring that ‘clearly the best and indeed the only efficient support which Bomber Command can give to OVERLORD is the intensification of attacks on suitable industrial centres in Germany . . .’
³
Spaatz’s diary note of the critical 21 January Supreme Commander’s meeting at which the OVERLORD framework was laid down declared only:

As late as April 1944, the minutes of a meeting between Spaatz and General Hoyt Vandenburg, American Deputy Air Commander-in-Chief for OVERLORD, recorded: