D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

the battle zones, could not help contrasting it with the sometimes cold reception they had received in Normandy. This showed a lack of imagination. The Normans could hardly be blamed for fearing that the invasion might fail and German reprisals would be harsh. And the local population, surveying the damage inflicted on their lives, were unlikely to be joyful even when it became clear that the Allied footing on the Continent was secure.

Considering the circumstances, most Normans were extraordinarily forgiving. The 195th Field Ambulance set up a dressing station near Honfleur beside a chateau overlooking the Seine. The officers’ mess was in a small house nearby, where the doctors were most hospitably received by the elderly Frenchman living there alone. After a few days, as resistance had ceased south of the Seine and their only patients were local civilians who had been wounded in the fighting, the doctors decided to give a party. They ‘invited the Countess and her relatives from the chateau’. She accepted but requested that the party be moved up to the chateau. Three days before their arrival, she explained, the wife of their host had been killed during an attack by an RAF aircraft on the retreating Germans. The medical officers were dazed when they thought of the courteous behaviour of the elderly Frenchman, ‘so tragically bereaved on the eve of liberation’, especially since it had been a British plane which caused his wife’s death.

‘Civil life will be mighty dull,’ wrote the egocentric General Patton in his diary after the triumph of the Normandy campaign. ‘No cheering crowds, no flowers, no private airplanes. I am convinced that the best end for an officer is the last bullet of the war.’[83] He would have done better to remember the Duke of Wellington’s famous observation that ‘next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained’.

The ferocity of the fighting in north-west France can never be in doubt. And despite the sneers of Soviet propagandists, the battle for Normandy was certainly comparable to that of the eastern front. During the three summer months, the Wehrmacht suffered nearly 240,000 casualties and lost another 200,000 men to Allied captivity. The 21st Army Group of British, Canadians and Poles sustained 83,045 casualties and the Americans 125,847. In addition, the Allied air forces lost 16,714 men killed and missing.

The post-war squabble between Allied generals, claiming credit and apportioning blame in their reports and memoirs, was correspondingly ferocious. That keen observer of human frailty Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke was presumably not surprised. He had once written about a row in June between senior naval officers: ‘It is astonishing how petty and small men can be in connection with questions of command.’

Montgomery placed himself at the centre of the post-war storm mainly because of his preposterous assertions that everything had gone according to his master plan. He felt that he should be seen on a par with Marlborough and Wellington and implicitly denigrated his American colleagues. Almost single-handedly, he had managed in Normandy to make most senior American commanders anti-British at the very moment when Britain’s power was waning dramatically. His behaviour thus constituted a diplomatic disaster of the first order. Whatever the merits of his arguments at the end of August 1944 about the planned thrust into Germany, Montgomery mishandled the situation badly. He had also provoked the higher ranks of the Royal Air Force, who were even more enraged than the Americans at his lack of frankness over operations in Normandy.

The usually tolerant Eisenhower refused to forgive Montgomery for the claims he made after the war. ‘First of all he’s a psychopath,’ Eisenhower exploded in an interview in 1963. ‘Don’t forget that. He is such an egocentric that the man — everything he has done is perfect — has never made a mistake in his life.’ It was tragic that Montgomery should have thus diverted attention away from his own undoubted qualities and from the sacrifice of his troops, who had held down the vast bulk of the German panzer formations and faced the greatest concentration of 88 mm anti-tank guns.

Montgomery’s unplanned battle of attrition, as unplanned as the Americans’ bloody slog through the bocage, had of course been handicapped by the delays caused by the appalling weather in mid-June. Yet British and American alike had gravely underestimated the tenacity and discipline of Wehrmacht troops. This was partly because they had failed to appreciate the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda in persuading its soldiers that defeat in Normandy meant the annihilation of their Fatherland. These soldiers, especially the SS, were bound to believe that they had everything to lose. Their armies had already provided so many reasons for Allied anger.

The battle for Normandy did not go as planned, but even the armchair critics could never dispute the eventual outcome, however imperfect. One must also consider what might have happened should the extraordinary undertaking of D-Day have failed: for example, if the invasion fleet had sailed into the great storm of mid-June. The post-war map and the history of Europe would have been very different indeed.

Acknowledgements

There is an old joke that the collective noun for those in my profession is a ‘mischief of historians’. In my experience, this is certainly not true about historians of the Second World War. Facing many lonely months in foreign archives, it makes an enormous difference to be able to discuss sources and theories with others whose opinions and experience you value. Over the years, the unstinting support of colleagues and friends has been both a comfort and a pleasure.

Nearly a decade ago, when I was still fixated with the eastern front, the late Martin Blumenson first urged me to take on the subject of Normandy. He too was interested in comparing the Nazi-Soviet war with the campaign in north-west Europe. Sir Max Hastings has been endlessly generous in loans of material and good suggestions. Professor Tami Davis Biddle of the US Army War College has given wise advice on the air war and provided me with books, papers and photocopies of documents. James Holland has also lent many books and material from his own interviews. Sebastian Cox, the head of the Ministry of Defence Air Historical Branch, is another in the circle of friends forming an irregular lunch-time tertulia, discussing the war. Many other historians have helped with advice and material. They include Rick Atkinson, Professor Michael Burleigh, Professor M. R. D. Foot, Professor Donald L. Miller, Claude Quetel and Niklas Zetterling.

I have been extraordinarily lucky in all the assistance I have received from archivists while researching this book, especially Dr Tim Nenninger, the Chief of Modern Military Records at the National Archives,

Index

A

Abbaye Blanche

Abbaye d’Ardennes

Abetz, Otto

Abwehr (German military intelligence)

Adair, Maj Gen A.

Airborne assault

aerial support

American (map)

British(map)

casualties

deception measures

embarkation

heavy equipment landings

Alencon

Allied propaganda

Allied troops

British girlfriends

with Frenchwomen