Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (45 page)

When Montgomery and Eisenhower met privately on the afternoon of 20 July – one of their nine personal encounters during the campaign – it seems clear that the Supreme Commander vented his distress. It is possible, even probable, that Montgomery emphasized to Eisenhower his concern over British manpower and casualties, and said something of the Americans’ greater ability to overcome these problems. For in Eisenhower’s subsequent letter to his Commander-in-Chief, written the following day, he reminded Montgomery sharply that ‘eventually the American ground strength will necessarily be much greater than the British. But while we have equality in size we must go forward shoulder to shoulder, with honors and sacrifices equally shared.’
¹⁵
Confidence in Montgomery, and in the performance of the British Second Army, had reached the lowest point of the campaign in north-west Europe among the Americans, among the airmen, and even among some of the British, including their Prime Minister. ‘Whatever hopes he [Montgomery] had of remaining overall ground commander died with Goodwood,’ Bradley believed.
¹⁶
He afterwards
asserted his conviction that Eisenhower would have sacked the British general, had he felt able to do so.

Montgomery’s behaviour throughout this period seems dominated by the belief that he could afford to spurn Eisenhower, whose unfittedness for field command was so apparent to every senior officer. It is undoubtedly true that even Bradley, the most loyal and patient of men, was irked by Eisenhower’s inability to ‘read’ the battle that was taking place in Normandy. As early as 7 June, Bradley was irritated by Eisenhower’s sudden appearance aboard the
Augusta
in mid-Channel: ‘On the whole Ike’s visit had been perhaps necessary for his own personal satisfaction, but from my point of view it was a pointless interruption and annoyance.’
¹⁷
The First Army commander, both then and later, acknowledged the justice of Montgomery’s claim that Eisenhower never understood the Allied plan in Normandy. The Supreme Commander laboured under a misapprehension that he himself could best serve the Allied cause by touring the touchline like a football coach, urging all his generals to keep attacking more or less simultaneously. Eisenhower’s personal life-style, journeying between fronts with a ragbag of sycophantic staff officers, his Irish driver and mistress, occasionally his newly-commissioned son and cosseted pet dog, was more suggestive of an eighteenth-century European monarch going to war than a twentieth-century general.

Yet Dwight Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of the Allied armies, upon whom hung the fervent hopes of two governments for the unity and triumph of their armies. His charm and statesmanship deeply impressed, even moved, all those who worked closely with him. Montgomery’s inability to establish a personal relationship with the American, to confide to Eisenhower his own private hopes and fears for the battle, cost him dear. 21st Army Group’s Commander-in-Chief made the immense error of believing that the Supreme Commander could be side-stepped, deluded, soft-talked into leaving himself, Montgomery, the supreme professional, to fight the war. He might indeed have been
successful in this had his armies on the battlefield fulfilled his early hopes in Normandy. But when they did not, it was Eisenhower, fretting impotent in England, who bore the impatience of the American press, the doubts and fears of the politicians, the charges of failure of generalship which the ignorant associated with himself. Eisenhower might have been willing to ride passively upon a tide of success created by Montgomery. He was quite unwilling idly to accept responsibility for apparent failure and stagnation. At the time and for some years after the war, the extent of the breakdown of relations between Montgomery and Eisenhower was concealed. Today there is no doubt that by late July 1944, the American was weary to death of his ground-force commander.

Brooke urgently warned Montgomery on 19 July to drop his objections to a prime-ministerial visit to Normandy, and use the opportunity to rebuild a little of Churchill’s flagging faith. The CIGS warned his friend ‘of the tendency of the PM to listen to suggestions that Monty played for safety and was not prepared to take risks’. Brooke wrote in his diary:

Brigadier Richardson said that ‘in strategic terms, things were going according to plan. In tactical terms, they were not.’ It is much easier to understand the criticisms made of Montgomery by the Americans than those made by his fellow countrymen. Until the very end of the war, the British demanded that they should be treated as equal partners in the alliance with the United States, and vied for a lion’s share of Allied command positions. They could scarcely be surprised if the Americans showed resentment when
the British flinched before heavy casualties, and fought on the eastern flank with less apparent determination and will for sacrifice than the American army in the west. Whatever the Americans’ weaknesses of command and tactics, their willingness to expend men to gain an objective was never in doubt. ‘On the whole, they were prepared to go at it more toughly than we were,’ said Brigadier Carver of 4th Armoured Brigade.
¹⁹

Montgomery, however, was never allowed to forget that he was charged with responsibility for Britain’s last great army, her final reserves of manpower in a struggle that had drained these to the limit. With the constant admonitions reaching him from England about casualties, he would have faced bitter criticism – from Churchill as much as any man – had losses risen steeply. It is indisputable that this knowledge bore hard upon the British conduct of operations in Normandy, from the summit to the base of the command structure. Butcher wrote on 24 July, after visiting Southwick House for an hour when Eisenhower drove there to see de Guingand:

With hindsight it may be easy to suggest that a more ruthless determination to break through on the British front earlier in the campaign would, in the end, have cost fewer lives. Tedder’s allegation that Second Army was not trying hard enough had some foundation, but it was much easier to take this sanguine view from the distance of SHAEF – or from the perspective of history – than for Montgomery and his commanders in Normandy, who had
to watch their precious army take persistent punishment. Tedder’s attitude proved his claim to be an outstanding Alliance commander, with a truly Anglo-American perspective, but it showed little sympathy for valid if more parochial British sensitivities. If the British army was to achieve major ground gains on the eastern flank against the powerful German forces deployed before it, the evidence suggested that the cost would be terrible.

Montgomery is entitled to the gratitude of his country, as well as of his soldiers, for declining to yield to the temptation to mount a ruthlessly costly attack merely to stave off the political demands made upon him. He judged, correctly, that if the Allies persisted with their existing plan for pressure in the east and breakthrough in the west, the Germans would eventually crack without a British bloodbath. Yet in July as in June, he denied himself the goodwill of either American or British sceptics by creating a smokescreen of distortion and untruth to conceal his disappointment with the failure of Second Army to gain ground at acceptable cost. It is a measure of the criticism now directed against him, and of the political pressure within the Alliance, that as late as 28 July, when the American breakout was already making good progress, Brooke was writing to him:

It is impossible to imagine that Montgomery could have been sacked – whatever Tedder’s delusion on that count – without inflicting an intolerable blow to British national confidence. He whom propaganda has made mighty, no man may readily cast aside, as Portal was compelled to acknowledge a few months later in his difficulties with ‘Bomber’ Harris. But it is difficult to guess
what new pressures and directives might have been forced upon the Commander-in-Chief of 21st Army Group had not the perspective of the Normandy campaign now been entirely transformed by the American Operation COBRA.

COBRA

Throughout the first half of July, while the British and Canadians were fighting their bitter battles around Caen, the Americans were enduring equal pain and frustration in their efforts to disentangle themselves from the clinging misery of the
bocage
. On 3 July, Middleton’s VIII Corps attacked south towards Coutances–St Lô–Caumont. The corps commander himself was one of the most experienced fighting soldiers in the American army, having led a regiment in France in the First World War, and more recently a division in Italy. But Middleton was now seriously troubled and weakened by the pain of an arthritic knee, and his staff were conscious that this reduced his ability to concentrate upon the battle. Not that it was likely that the outcome of the early fighting would have been different had he been fit. By far the toughest initial objective was the 300-foot height of Mont Castre, dominating the Cotentin plain. After heavy fighting the superb 82nd Airborne Division, halved in strength by weeks in action, gained the hill and proved what a first-class formation could achieve even against dogged opposition. Elsewhere on the front, however, matters went much less happily. The accident-prone 90th Division made no headway, and Bradley prepared to sack yet another of its commanders, Landrum. The 79th Division suffered 2,000 casualties in the next five days to crawl forward a little over three miles. There was nothing to suggest that these difficulties were caused by command shortcomings, for when VII Corps joined the attack on
4 July under the dynamic Collins, they too found themselves rapidly bogged down. On the 7th, XIX Corps was thrown in, although Corlett, its corps commander, like Middleton was in visibly poor health, and even when fit had never been considered a driver of men. Hodges described him at the time as possessing ‘that hospital look’.
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Scenes of near-farce ensued when advancing elements of 30th Division became entangled with the tanks of 3rd Armored, creating terrible congestion. There was a furious confrontation between Generals Bohn and Hobbs about whose fault this was, which ended in the sacking of Bohn, the junior officer, but a tough old veteran who had started as a private soldier and risen through the ranks of the American army.

After 12 days of battle, VIII Corps had suffered 10,000 casualties to advance some seven miles. Corlett’s and Collins’s men had fared no better. ‘Thus my breakout and dreams of a blitz to Avranches failed badly,’ wrote Bradley, ‘a crushing disappointment to me personally.’
²
The principal American achievement was the defeat of a counter-attack by Panzer Lehr towards St Jean-de-Daye on 11 July, which 9th and 30th Divisions threw back causing the loss of 25 per cent of the Germans’ strength. Once again, it had been demonstrated that movement by either army was the crucial difficulty in the
bocage
, and that in defence American troops could hammer the Germans as hard as Hausser’s men of Seventh Army had hit the Americans when they were defending.

Enduring the pain of their own difficulties, the Americans sometimes forgot the scale of suffering that they were inflicting upon the Germans. Sergeant Helmut Gunther, of 17th Panzer-grenadiers, each day watched his company of the reconnaissance battalion whittled away without hope of replacements: Hahnel, who was killed by small-arms fire in their first battle; Heinrich, his veteran chess partner, who died on the Carentan road; Dobler, who took over a platoon when its commander was killed and was shot in the head as he jumped from the ditch to lead a counter-attack. All these old friends and many more were gone: ‘I used to think – “What a poor pig I am, fighting here with my back to the
wall.” ’
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Yet Gunther’s self-pity was mixed with astonishment that the survivors stood the strain and the losses so well, and fought on. He was astounded that the Americans did not break through their line in early July. His own company was reduced to 20 men out of 120, yet when he sought his CO’s permission to withdraw 50 yards to a better tactical position, it was refused.

On 9 July, they were at last driven from their positions, and Gunther found himself staring at a Sherman tank bearing down upon him only yards away. He was working forward to throw a sticky bomb at it when a German voice called ‘Come back!’, and he glanced round to see a German tank behind him. He stood confused and uncertain for a moment as the panzer commander shouted, ‘Get down, he’s going to shoot!’ and a shell from the Sherman blasted into the German tank, splinters ricocheting into Gunther’s back. Characteristically, the panzer survived the encounter. The Sherman did not. Gunther was evacuated to hospital.