Decision in Normandy

Carlo D'Este

• Publisher: Diversion Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781635762150
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

The strategy and planning behind D-Day:  "The best-researched, best-written account [of the Normandy Campaign] I have ever read."— The New York Times Book Review
One of the most controversial and dangerous military operations in the history of modern warfare, the battle for Normandy took over two years of planning by each country that made up the Allied forces. The event is mired to this day in myth and misconception, and untangling the web of work that led to D-Day is nearly as daunting as the work that led to the day itself.
Drawing from declassified documents, personal interviews, diaries, and more, Carlo D'Este, a winner of the Pritzker Award, uncovers what really happened in Normandy. From what went right to what went wrong, D'Este takes readers on a journey from the very first moment Prime Minister Churchill considered an invasion through France to the last battles of World War II.
With photos, maps, and first-hand accounts, readers can trace the incredible road to victory and the intricate battles in between. A comprehensive look into the military strategy surrounding the Second World War,  Decision in Normandy is an absolute essential for history buffs.
 
"A fresh perspective on the leadership of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and the Allied landings after D-Day."—Publishers Weekly 
 
"Again and again he reveals new facets of familiar subjects—in part from his own dual American army and British academic background; in part by querying everyone and everything."— Kirkus Reviews

PART I

The Great Endeavour

I can get home to England in my Fortress from here [Tunisia] in one night. And when I have done my share of the final business I shall come. But I want to first pay the debt I owe for the days at the end of May 1940 on the beaches at La Panne, Bray-les-Dunnes and Dunkirk. And the debt will be paid.

Montgomery to Brooke
15 April 1943

CHAPTER 1

The Origins of the Second Front

It must be said to our shame that we sent our Army into that most modern war with weapons and equipment which were quite inadequate, and we had only ourselves to blame for the disasters which early overtook us in the field when fighting began in 1940.

Montgomery of Alamein

In May 1940 ‘The Phoney War’ was shattered by Hitler’s armies, who launched a lightning attack through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes Forest against the French Army, and across the lowlands of Belgium against the British Expeditionary Force. As in the First World War the Allies were caught unprepared and thrown into disarray by the new blitzkrieg tactics of the German panzer divisions. One of the spearhead units of the German thrust was the 7th Panzer Division commanded by one of the most imaginative and daring of the Wehrmacht’s commanders, Major General Erwin Rommel, later the famed commander of the Afrika Korps and the man who in 1944 was charged by Hitler with the defence of his Atlantic Wall, which included Normandy. Within days the BEF was cut off from the main elements of the French Army and trapped in a pocket around the coastal city of Dunkirk. Faced with the choice of surrendering or attempting somehow to escape across the English Channel, General Sir Alan Brooke’s 2 Corps¹ fought a magnificent delaying action for the main body of the BEF while the Royal Navy hastily organized what Winston Churchill called ‘the deliverance of Dunkirk’.

The successful evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the beaches of Dunkirk represented a miraculous escape from disaster. But, although a triumph of British will and courage, Dunkirk was also the first in a long series of setbacks that were to beset the British in the early days of the Second World War. The saving of the BEF was almost the only glimmer of hope in an otherwise dismal year. Not only was it the heart of the British Army but its commanders and men were the only professional soldiers capable of defending the United Kingdom against certain invasion by Hitler. More than 339,000 British and French soldiers escaped the German trap at Dunkirk. Among them was the future commander of the ground forces for the Second Front, Major General Bernard Montgomery, General Officer Commanding the 3rd British Division. With him went his future army commander, Miles Dempsey, and three corps commanders: Crocker, Ritchie and Horrocks.² Hitler’s failure to annihilate the BEF by rapidly closing the pincers of his armies cost Germany dear in the next four years.

The salvation of the BEF was best summed up by the man who was to play a leading role in the reshaping of the British Army, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke:

Had the BEF not returned to this country it is hard to see how the Army could have recovered from this blow. The reconstitution of our land forces would have been so delayed as to endanger the whole course of the war. It must be remembered that the majority of our future leaders were at that time all with the BEF—Alex, Monty, Anderson, Dempsey, Barker, Horrocks… and many others who played every great part in the re-raising of our forces, their training and their leading to ultimate victory… Had we, therefore, been deprived of the existing leaders of the Army before Dunkirk, it may be imagined how irreparable this loss would have been… Time and again throughout the years of the war I thanked God for the safe return of the bulk of the personnel of the BEF.³

The sorry state of the British Army after Dunkirk and the pressing need to defend the British Isles against invasion made any thoughts of a quick return to the continent of Europe fantastical. British priorities lay in simple survival; indeed it was evident to the new Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, that immediate American aid was essential if Britain were to hold out against Hitler. To succeed in freeing Europe from the Nazi yoke not only aid but active American participation in the war was, as in 1917, a sine qua non. Aside from such considerations, no invasion of Europe was even remotely possible without the creation and training of an entirely new British Army. The remnants of the BEF would have to become the nucleus of a truly modern force capable of fighting the German Army on equal terms with new weapons and new doctrine.

When Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939 her army was ill-equipped and woefully unprepared for the type of warfare Hitler was about to unleash. No suitable military doctrine existed to cope with a new and revitalized German Army and its new style of warfare, first introduced against the hapless Poles that same month. The British Army of the 1930s had remained neglected and largely static in its thinking. Politicians could not decide on a proper role for the army; its leaders offered nothing constructive; and its budget all but dried up as military funds went primarily to the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. The potential of the tank for revolutionizing warfare was stifled by War Office penury and the traditionalists, while the new Wehrmacht was developing its own doctrine of armoured warfare called the blitzkrieg. While the Germans were developing both a new family of tanks and techniques for tank-infantry cooperation on what was envisioned as a mobile battlefield, the leaders of the newly formed Royal Tank Corps were being told that, with such a paucity of tanks, their future role was primarily to support the infantry. The British were not alone in their backward thinking: in France and the United States, de Gaulle, Patton and a few other imaginative thinkers were finding little interest in their arguments in favour of the tank as an offensive weapon of war.

The question facing Churchill was how could a Second Front, in the form of a cross-Channel invasion, ever possibly be launched? British resources were perilously strained in the first two years of the war. Military forces in the Far East were virtually on their own, half a world away and in the Mediterranean a belligerent Benito Mussolini, his courage bolstered by Hitler’s backing, had declared war on Britain and France on 10 June 1940. Though Italy’s military leadership was of dubious quality and her army ill-equipped, a substantial buildup of forces in Libya posed a serious threat to the British position in the Middle East, where Egypt was defended only by General Sir Archibald Wavell’s tiny desert force. On the high seas the Royal Navy was fighting defensively against a powerful German Navy whose U-boats and capital ships menaced Britain’s lifeline to the United States. Britain herself was under threat of imminent invasion.

There could hardly have been a more depressing atmosphere in which to conceive an offensive counterstroke. It is a tribute to Churchill’s vision that he was able to look beyond the immediacy of Britain’s problems and envision a Second Front.⁴ He understood clearly that once the imminent threat of invasion could be neutralized and America persuaded to join the war, a Second Front was not only possible but represented the only means of defeating Germany. Fortunately the success of the RAF during the Battle of Britain in September 1940 reduced the invasion threat and helped to secure the time needed for reorganization and buildup of the armed forces. There was much to be done; doctrine and strategy for amphibious warfare were non-existent and there were no specialized vessels which could be used to land troops and equipment quickly on a hostile coast.

Shortly after Dunkirk Churchill began the first tentative steps to redress these problems when he established a Combined Operations Staff whose mission was twofold: to plan and execute commando raids against selected points in German-occupied Europe, and to begin the development and testing of suitable amphibious vehicles and equipment, along with a doctrine for their use. In so doing Churchill undoubtedly still retained vivid memories of the ill-fated invasion of Gallipoli in 1915, an operation for whose costly failure the then First Lord of the Admiralty bore a heavy responsibility. Now, for the time being the best Churchill could hope for was defiant harassment of the Germans, a reminder that Britain was not beaten, was still capable of striking back, even if on a small scale.

The first head of Combined Operations was a distinguished naval figure who had led the British raid on Zeebrugge in 1918, Admiral Sir Roger Keyes. He brought to the job an active and original mind and great enthusiasm, but found himself unable to cope with the internal wrangling of the Whitehall bureaucracy which did not embrace his interest in fighting an unconventional war. Within a year his relations with Churchill had soured badly; he was later to tell his successor that ‘the Chiefs of Staffs are the greatest cowards I have ever met’.⁵

Churchill’s relentless demands for action and progress and his growing loss of confidence in Keyes led in the autumn of 1941 to the appointment of a dynamic junior naval officer, Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten, as head of Combined Operations. In him Churchill found exactly the sort of man he was looking for, an opinionated and outspoken public hero possessed of the same sort of high-powered ideas that complemented the Prime Minister’s own impetuous nature.⁶

Mountbatten recalls being summoned by Churchill in October 1941 and told:

You are to prepare for the invasion of Europe, for unless we can go and land and fight Hitler and beat his forces on land, we shall never win this war. You must devise and design the appliances, the landing craft and the technique to enable us to effect a landing against opposition and to maintain ourselves there. You must take the most brilliant officers from the Navy, Army and Air Force to help as our planners to plan this great operation. You must take bases to use as training establishments where you can train the Navy, Army and Air Force to work as a single entity. The whole of the south coast of England is a bastion of defence against the invasion of Hitler; you’ve got to turn it into the springboard for our attack.⁷

Despite later charges that Churchill did not favour a cross-Channel invasion, Mountbatten never had any doubts as to the Prime Minister’s intentions. ‘He always wanted that. It may be that he got so interested in his [later] sideshow in the Mediterranean that at the last he was more interested in carrying it through than in working on [Operation] Overlord, but it was Winston who first saw the need for the cross-Channel business, and who wanted it on the proper scale… I was to have 200,000 men trained a year hence, and another 100,000 six months later.’⁸

Mountbatten was even given a seat on the British Chiefs of Staff Committee, beside Brooke, Portal and Pound. Despite his lofty position Mountbatten was frequently treated with resentment and derision, an experience which he never forgot and which still greatly disturbed him after the war. ‘My job with Combined Operations was a very difficult one. I was a very junior officer and had very few men under me who weren’t my junior … the result was [the military establishment] thought I didn’t know what I was doing; regarded my headquarters as made up of madmen. Refused quite often to pay attention to what we were doing. Hooted every time we suggested something. You know the Lords of the Admiralty are called “Their Lordships”. They gave us so much trouble, we finally ca...

Table of contents

• Decision in Normandy
• Dedication
• Illustrations
• Maps
• Introduction
• PART I: The Great Endeavour
• PART II: Invasion
• PART III: Breakout
• PART IV: Aftermath
• Epilogue
• Postscript
• Appendix A
• Appendix B Battle Casualties 6 June to 29 August 1944
• Appendix C Extract from Eisenhower’s letter of 23 May, 1946 to Field Marshal Montgomery1
• Sources
• Acknowledgements
• Connect with Diversion Books