The Normandy Campaign 1944

Sixty Years On

John Buckley, John Buckley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134203031
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

With essays from leading names in military history, this new book re-examines the crucial issues and debates of the D-Day campaign.

Ittackles a range of core topics, placing them in their current historiographical context, to present new and sometimes revisionist interpretations of key issues, such as the image of the Allied armies compared with the Germans, the role of air power, and the lessons learned by the military from their operations.

As the Second World War is increasingly becoming a field of revisionism, this book sits squarely within growing debates, shedding new light on topics and bringing current thinking from our leading military and strategic historians to a wider audience.

This book will be of great interest to students of the Second World War, and ofmilitary and strategic studies in general.

1 The 21st Army Group in Normandy
Towards a new balance sheet

Terry Copp

The purpose of this chapter is to offer further evidence in support of the view that the combat performance of the Anglo-Canadian armies in Normandy has been greatly underrated and the effectiveness of the German forces vastly overrated. This argument informs my study of the Canadians in Normandy, published under the title Fields of Fire,¹ but the intention here is to consider questions about combat between British and German units in Normandy.

My views on this subject were influenced by my long association with the late Robert Vogel and the work we shared in researching and writing a basic narrative of the campaign in Northwest Europe published in the 1980s. When we began our decade-long project, I had little knowledge of military history. Vogel, who was a military historian, introduced me to Clausewitz and other theoreticians but I soon decided that a social historian escaping a world dominated by Marxists was entitled to be suspicious of yet another nineteenth-century authority figure.

We agreed that history at the battalion, brigade and divisional level might best be understood by a careful reading of the primary sources and my first visits to Normandy convinced me that one of the most neglected sources was the actual ground, especially when supplemented by 1944 maps and air photos.² The study of the Normandy battlefields suggested to me that the basic question to answer was how the Allied soldiers overcame a powerful enemy, defending ground of its own choosing, in just 76 days. Other historians had answered the question by referring to the decisive role of air power and the application of brute force to the battlefield, but few of them seemed to know very much about what actually happened at the operational and tactical levels.

When our five-volume narrative was complete I began to work on three separate but related subjects: a study of a single infantry brigade; an inquiry into battle exhaustion; and an analysis of the role played by tactical air power in Normandy. The later project led to an interest in operational research in both the air force and army and I was able to interview a number of the most important operational research specialists.³

By the mid-1990s, I was convinced that the Allied campaign in Normandy required re-examination. It was evident that air power, strategic or tactical, had not been the decisive factor in Normandy or elsewhere. Evidence from operational research had also demonstrated that the anecdotal evidence on the vulnerability of Allied armour and the limited effectiveness of Allied tank gunnery was all too true. It was equally apparent that the principal Allied weapon systems, field and medium artillery, were rarely able to inflict damage on prepared enemy positions and were not always able to achieve temporary neutralisation.⁴

These severe limitations in Allied weapons technology helped to explain why the Battle of Normandy produced so many physical and mental casualties but brought us no closer to understanding why the enemy was so quickly defeated. The OVERLORD planners prepared for a campaign that would proceed in a series of managed phases. After the invading troops were ashore they were to establish and defend a bridgehead, defeating the German counter-attacks with naval, air, and artillery fire. The bridgehead was, if possible, to include the city of Caen, the centre of the road and rail network in Normandy. If Caen could not be captured before German reinforcements arrived, the city was to be masked until the build-up of Allied forces was sufficient for a set-piece attack.

South of Caen, the country was open, with good roads leading to the Seine and Paris. The planners assumed that the enemy would defend this area in strength, as a breakthrough here would cut off German forces in the west and bring a quick conclusion to the Battle of Normandy. If the enemy behaved rationally, there would be a fighting withdrawal to a new defensive line at the Seine, with the ground south of the Caen sector held as a pivot.

The OVERLORD plan called for the American army to capture Cherbourg and then fight its way south, turning west into Brittany to capture Brest and create a new port at Quiberon Bay. With the Brittany ports and Cherbourg available, the Allied forces would complete the build-up necessary to liberate France by the autumn of 1944. All of this was the basis of Montgomery’s ‘master plan’, a broad concept that proved to have little operational significance except that it focused attention on Brittany.⁵

If 21 Army Group could be maintained at full strength, there would be ten infantry and five armoured divisions available to wage war against the German forces on the eastern flank. Even with five additional armoured brigades available to support the infantry divisions, the prospects of achieving the force ratios necessary to overcome the enemy in this vital sector were bleak. The presence of three or four German armoured divisions and a like number of infantry divisions would make it impossible to achieve the 3:1 ratio thought to be necessary for successful attacks on well-defended positions. The planners hoped to compensate for this weakness by fighting on Allied, not German, terms. This meant employing the largest possible amount of artillery in the bridgehead. Each corps was to be supported by an Army Group Royal Artillery (AGRA) with 4.5- or 5.5-inch medium guns. Air observation pilots flying light aircraft were to direct this fire, and there were to be abundant allotments of ammunition for both the medium and field artillery. Fully 18 per cent of the men in 21 Army Group were gunners; just 15 per cent were to be wearing infantry flashes. If the allocation of ancillary services is taken into account, fully a third of the army’s manpower was committed to the artillery.⁶

This approach to war required commanders to emphasise logistics, elaborate fire plans, and centralised command and control. If shells were to be substituted for men’s lives, they had to be delivered to the right places at the right times. Little attention has been paid to the pre-Normandy investment in survey regiments, air photo interpretation, meteorological reports, sound ranging, flash spotting and other elements of the gunner’s war, but these efforts were an essential part of the preparations for victory at a blood price the Allies could afford. The gunner’s war deserves much more attention than it has received.⁷

While the assault divisions prepared for an attack on the beaches of the Calvados coast, the divisions committed to the follow-up role prepared to ‘attack, wear down and destroy German troops who would fight a series of defensive battles on ground of their own choosing’.⁸ There was broad agreement on how this was to be accomplished and when Lieutenant-General Guy Simonds decided to issue a directive on operational policy to his inexperienced Canadian divisions, he sent copies to Dempsey, the Second British Army Commander and to Montgomery, both of whom read it with ‘complete agreement’.⁹ British senior officers were a bit puzzled by the Canadian tendency to prepare written papers outlining the obvious but the Canadians with their earnest staff officers and abundant supply of typewriters, clerk typists and duplicating machines produced a written record of considerable value to soldiers and historians.

Simonds’s statement of Allied operational doctrine called for centralised control of virtually every aspect of the battle. The enemy was to be overcome by attacks that were ‘carefully organised and strongly supported by all available artillery’. The Germans forward defences ‘are not thickly held in terms of men, but are strong in automatic weapons and well supported by mortars sited up to three or four thousand yards’ behind forward lines. The essence of the German system of defence was the counter-attack, and ‘as long as fresh reserves are available the Germans will counterattack continuously, supported by self-propelled guns brought up to close-range. The success of the offensive battle hinged on the defeat of the German counterattacks’, and everyone was trained to deal with this reality. The preferred solution was to stage divisional attacks ‘on a single thrust line, disposed in depth on a one-brigade front’. Brigades would be passed through one another to maintain momentum, with the frontage of the attack ‘limited to that on which really heavy support can be given’. When the enemy concentrated its strength across the thrust line, a reserve brigade could be ‘thrown wide of the leading brigade’ to dissipate the enemy’s strength. The weight of artillery support would then be shifted to the reserve brigade.

The infantry division, always and only when supported by the artillery, was the ‘sledgehammer’ in the Allied arsenal. The armoured division was ‘a weapon of opportunity’, capable of dealing with enemy rearguard positions and developing a breakout, but it was too weak in infantry to carry out an attack in depth. Everything experienced in Italy suggested that Allied armour could not be used to lead attacks against prepared German positions given the effective range of their tank and anti-tank guns.

There was no similar doctrine on the tactics to be employed in carrying out Simonds’s ‘operational policy’, partly because such training was carried out in divisional battle schools and partly because the operational doctrine left little room for traditional platoon or section tactics. By 1944, experienced Allied commanders knew that the one certain way of defeating the Germans was to find, fix and then neutralise the enemy with overwhelming firepower. This would allow the infantry to assault and occupy vital ground, which the enemy would then counter-attack. This ‘bite and hold’ doctrine depended on the development of centrally controlled, indirect artillery fire capable of concentrating the guns of a regiment, division or corps on a specific area. This technique provided the best possible answer to the enemy’s doctrinal commitment to immediate and continuous counterattacks and to German technical superiority in infantry weapons and armoured vehicles.

An artillery-based battle doctrine required the infantry to move forward at a steady pace, leaning into the barrage, so as to be on the objective before the enemy could engage the attackers. Rifle companies, supported by tanks, would clear and consolidate, bring the anti-tank guns forward, and dig in to meet counter-attacks from enemy infantry, who would be advancing behind tanks or self-propelled assault guns. Success depended largely on the ability of forward observation officers to direct the fire of the field and medium regiments at observed targets. This procedure, rehearsed in countless exercises, did not require the infantry to practise the fire-and-movement skills learned in battle schools. It did, however, raise questions about other aspects of infantry training. These issues were widely debated within the army, and on 20 April 1944 a four-day conference was held at the School of Infantry to exchange ideas and information.¹⁰

One of the most contentious questions was raised by a staff officer from 2nd British Army, who noted that present teaching placed too much emphasis on the use of infantry weapons in the attack, especially the Bren. Experience had shown that the ammunition problem was acute in the counter-attack phase. Ammunition fired in the attack was seldom aimed and was therefore wasted. The same officer insisted that though the rifleman used his weapon in defending a position, in the attack he was ‘mostly employed as an ammunition carrier for the Bren’.

This realistic view of the impact of operational doctrine on tactics directly challenged the traditional emphasis on teaching the infantry to fight their way forward, with their own weapons, by fire and movement. This approach was evident in a discussion of the implications of the decision that all troops should carry a shovel and a pick into battle. Obviously, the additional weight would limit the ability of the soldier to fight his way forward; yet without entrenching tools, no position could be held against enemy counter-attacks and mortar fire.

The critics of 21 Army Group’s pre-invasion training are quite right when they argue that the army’s leadership ‘failed to enforce a coherent and effective tactical doctrine’.¹¹ But was this a weakness or a strength? There was agreement on operational doctrine, and a flexible approach to tactical problems encouraged officers to seek solutions based on specific battlefield conditions, especially analysis of the terrain using air photographs. A problem-solving approach to combat has little appeal to military theorists, but it proved to be an effective method of dealing with the enemy.

The discussions at the Infantry School barely touched on the role of the armoured regiments assigned to work with infantry battalions. This was the result of an earlier decision that the armoured commander, at the regimental, squadron or troop level, ‘is the sole arbitrator of how he can b...