History's Greatest Battles

Masterstrokes of War

Nigel Cawthorne

• Publisher: Arcturus
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781848584372
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

Great battles mark history's turning points, occurring as they do where cultures and ideologies clash. While some battles have been won by the superior force, others have been won by a sheer dogged refusal to surrender in the face of overwhelming odds. Superior weaponry has sometimes brought victory, as at Plassey, while the superior generalship of a Napoleon, a Wellington, or a Marlborough has won the day on other occasions. All the great battles in this book are pivotal in history: if any one of them had gone the other way, the world would have been a very different place. And none of them - with the exception, perhaps, of Iwo Jima and Berlin - was a foregone conclusion. Even Iwo Jima and Berlin mark significant points in larger conflicts whose results could easily, and catastrophically, have gone the other way. From the battle of Marathon in 490BC, when the vastly-outnumbered Athenian army turned back an invasion of the mighty Persian empire, up to the Vietnamese defeat of the French army at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the battles in this book demonstrate that God is not always on the side of the big battalions. History's Greatest Battles is chronologically organized for ease of reference and includes over sixty photographs and illustrations.

D-Day
The Liberation of Europe
1944

The Red Army were advancing from the east. The Western Allies were moving up the Italian peninsula. But it was not until the Allies made an amphibious assault in Normandy that the cage slammed shut on Hitler.

SINCE THE SOVIET UNION had come into the Second World War in 1941, it had been urging Britain to begin a second front in western Europe. When the US entered the war, they wanted to make an attack on the Germans in France as soon as possible but the British were more circumspect. Having been in the war longer that their new allies, the British felt that it would be foolish to risk everything in a single reckless operation. Many of the British commanders had experience of the carnage of the First World War and were afraid of throwing men against enemy lines in a frontal attack – which is inevitable if you make an amphibious assault against a fortified coastline. As First Lord of the Admiralty in the First World War, Churchill himself had been responsible for the disastrous amphibious assault at Gallipoli in the Dardanelles where 250,000 men, largely Australians and New Zealanders, were lost before the 83,000 survivors could be evacuated. Britain's worst fears were realised when 5,000 Canadians, 1,000 British and fifty US Rangers staged a disastrous raid on the Channel port of Dieppe in August 1942, for 2,600 men were lost. The American Army was still untested, so President Roosevelt was persuaded to join the war in North Africa.

British airborne troops synchronize watches before spearheading the attack on Normandy before dawn on 6 June, 1944. Their task was to seize key bridges behind the beaches.

When this was brought to a successful conclusion, Churchill proposed an attack on the 'soft underbelly of Europe'. On 10 July 1943 an Anglo-American force landed in Sicily. Italian resistance collapsed and on 25 July Mussolini fell from power and was arrested. The German forces, under Field Marshal Kesselring, were then evacuated from Sicily and prepared themselves to defend the Italian mainland.

On 2 September, a small Allied force landed on the 'heel' of Italy and quickly captured the ports of Taranto and Brindisi. On the following day Montgomery's Eigth Army crossed the Strait of Messina and landed on the 'toe' of Italy, meeting with little resistance. That same day the new Italian government agreed to change sides and its capitulation was announced on 8 September. On 9 September the combined US–British Fifth Army under General Mark Clark landed on the 'shin' at Salerno. This was where Kesselring had expected the attack to come. The situation was precarious for six days, but the Fifth Army eventually broke out, taking Naples on 1 October.

Italy declared war on Germany on 13 October 1943. This was not unexpected, and Kesselring had already consolidated his hold on central and Northern Italy. He also held the Allies at the Gustav Line, a defensive line that ran right across the narrow peninsula of Italy some sixty miles south of Rome. To circumvent this, the Allies landed 50,000 men north of the Gustav Line at Anzio. They met with little resistance, but instead of driving directly on to Rome the landing force stopped to consolidate the beachhead. Kesselring quickly counterattacked, almost pushing the Allies back into the sea.

The main Allied force was held up by the German defenders at Monte Cassino, a mountain-top monastery that occupied a pivotal position on the Gustav line. The Eighth Army was then switched from the Adriatic side of the peninsula to the western flank. The Allies managed to breach the Gustav Line to the west of Monte Cassino on the night of 11 May 1944. It was then outflanked and it fell to the Polish Corps of the Eigth Army on 18 May. On 26 May, the main Allied force joined up with the beachhead at Anzio and on 5 June 1944 the Allies drove into Rome.

However, progress on such a narrow front as the Italian peninsula was bound to be slow and it did little to divert German strength from the Russian front. By this time the Red Army was making good progress against the Wehrmacht. By sheer weight of numbers it would eventually overwhelm the German army and overrun Germany. Even if the Allies pushed Kesselring all the way to the Alps it would have been impossible to cross them before the Red Army had swept right across Germany, perhaps also taking the rest of western Europe as many people feared. By the spring of 1944 a landing in France was politically vital.

The delay in staging an amphibious assault across the English Channel gave the Germans time to fortify the coastline. They built what they called the 'Atlantic Wall', which ran down the west coast of Europe from the Arctic Circle to the Pyrenees. By the time of the invasion 12,247 of the planned 15,000 fortifications had been completed, along with 943 along the Mediterranean coast. Also 500,000 beach obstacles had been deployed and 6.5 million mines had been laid.

Rommel inspects an artillery battery in the Atlantic wall. Although the Germans knew a cross-Channel invasion was imminent, a brilliant British deception operation led them to believe that it would come at the Pas de Calais, not in Normandy.

The huge extent of the wall was partly the result of a campaign of misinformation called Operation Fortitude. The British had used this ploy to feed the Germans with the idea that a landing might come anywhere at any time. Hitler would have to spread his forces thinly in order to defend his empire against attack from the west.

At the beginning of the war, the British had arrested every German spy in Britain. They had turned many of them into double agents so that they could be used to feed false information back to their spymasters in Hamburg and Berlin. Disinformation was also conveyed by means of the radio traffic that the Germans intercepted. The British had also broken the German Enigma code, so they were able to know if their deception was working or not. On occasion the British even fed the Germans the information that the invasion would come in the South of France or Norway, or perhaps through the Balkans or the Black Sea. This meant Hitler had to disperse his troops to the four corners of his empire.

British troops of the 13th/18th Hussars suffer a temporary hold-up on the beaches. Their casualties are relatively light compared with those of the Americans on Omaha beach.

However, the major thrust of Fortitude was to convince Hitler that the western Allies would take the most direct route. They would take the shortest Channel crossing at the Straits of Dover to the Pasde-Calais. It would be easy for them to support the landings with air and artillery cover from England at that point. Also, it would give them the shortest route to Paris and even Germany itself. This deception was reinforced by the fictional First US Army Group, a non-existent army apparently mustered in Kent, ready for embarkation at Dover. Radio traffic poured out of Kent and set builders from theatres and film studios were employed to make mock tanks and landing craft that would look like the real thing in German aerial reconnaissance photographs. One badly-wounded prisoner of war, a Panzer officer who was being returned to Germany, actually saw the First US Army Group with his own eyes – although the tanks and trucks he saw were not in Kent at all but in Hampshire, ready for embarkation at the southern ports. He was also introduced to General Patton, who had been represented to German intelligence as the commanding officer of FUSAG. Hitler became convinced that FUSAG existed and that this was where the attack would come from. So much so that he kept his mighty 15th Army in the Pas-de-Calais and his Panzers east of the Seine for seven weeks after the Allies had landed on the beaches in Normandy.

The Calvados coast in Normandy was chosen as the site of the landings because it had a number of wide flat beaches. The forces that landed on them would then be able to join up quickly and form a single bridgehead. It was poorly defended, however. The fortifications there and in other places had been built by slave labourers who had weakened them by deliberate sabotage. Many of the defenders were Russians, Poles or other Eastern Europeans who had little motivation to fight against the Americans or the British. Any Germans who were there were either too old to fight on the Russian front or else too young. Others had been wounded in action.

The other advantage enjoyed by the Calvados coast was its lack of a major port. The conventional wisdom was that for an invasion to succeed the landing force would have to seize a port in order to get men and materiel ashore quickly enough to defend themselves against a counterattack that would aim to push them back into the sea. This was another reason why Hitler and his High Command were so convinced that the attack would come in the Pas-de-Calais, where there were three ports – Calais, Boulogne and Dunkirk. However, the raid on Dieppe had taught the British that an attack on a heavily-defended port was not a good idea. Even if a landing force managed to take it, the Germans had placed demolition charges within the harbour facilities of all the ports they had occupied. Once these had been set off they would render the port useless and the invasion would inevitably fail. Instead, British planners came up with an ingenious solution – the Allies would bring their own harbour. Two prefabricated 'Mulberry' harbours would be built in sections which would then be towed across the Channel and assembled at the landing beaches. The Americans laughed when they first heard the idea, but began to take it very seriously when they realised that landing in an area that had no existing port would give the invasion force the element of surprise.

The Allies' plans were well advanced when, in November 1943, Hitler sent his most trusted commander, now Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, to take charge of the Atlantic Wall. He found it wanting, especially in Normandy and he began to strengthen it. Then, just a week before the Allied landings, the battle-hardened 352nd Infantry Division, direct from the Russian Front, was posted to man the defences along what was to become Omaha Beach.

Southern England had become a huge parking lot for tanks, trucks and aeroplanes during the late spring of 1944. There were weapons and ammunition dumps in country lanes and village pubs were full of soldiers from every part of the English-speaking world, along with Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Free French and Jews from Germany, Austria and all parts of Nazi-occupied Europe. In all, more than six million people were involved in the D-Day landings. Twenty US divisions, fourteen British, three Canadian, one French and one Polish division were billeted in southern England, along with hundreds of thousands of other men who be longed to special forces and headquarters units. There were also communications staff and corps personnel. Then suddenly, as this huge force made its way to the embarkation ports, silently at night, these men simply disappeared.

Assault troops of a Royal Navy demolition unit went ashore from landing craft to blow up beach obstacles which would have made the amphibious landings impossible.

In the ports, waiting out to sea, were the 138 battleships, cruisers and destroyers that would bombard the French coast. They were accompanied by 279 escorts, 287 minesweepers, four line-layers, two submarines, 495 motor boats, 310 landing ships and 3,817 landing craft and barges for the initial assault. Another 410 landing craft would join them as part of the ferry service that would get more personnel and equipment ashore after the beachhead had been secured. A further 423 ships, including tugs, would be involved in the construction of the Mulberry harbours; the building of the 'Pluto' pipeline that would pump petrol under the Channel; and the laying of the telephone cables that would connect the commanders on the ground to SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) in London. Another 1,260 merchant ships would also be involved in supplying the landing force, making a total of over 7,000 vessels.

Some 10,000 aircraft were also deployed in Operation Overlord. They would bomb key fortifications, drop paratroopers, tow gliders carrying airborne troops, attack enemy formations and protect the airspace above the beaches.

For political reasons the head of the invasion needed to be an American and Churchill got on well with General Eisenhower – who had demonstrated his competence as a commander in Operation Torch and the landings in Sicily and Italy. However, four British officers under Eisenhower were actually running the landings – Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Eisenhower's deputy; Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, in charge of the operation at sea; Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, responsible for air operations; and General (later Field Marshal) Bernard Montgomery, the leader on the ground. This caused some resentment among American officers, who felt that they should have been represented at the high levels of command. However, one reason for the choice of Eisenhower as supreme commander was his skill in handling the rivalries between British and Americans.

When Montgomery was appointed on New Year's Day 1944, he first threw away the invasion plans that the American planners had been working on since 1942. He considered that the front in the American plan was too narrow and that the assault force was not big enough to do the job. He raised the number of divisions landing on the beaches from three to five and the number of airborne divisions from one to three. Montgomery presented his plan to the military commanders and senior politicians at St Paul's School in West Kensington on 15 May 1944. It was accepted. A key part of the plan was that equal numbers of British and American troops would be landed on D-Day itself. But as losses mounted the battle-ravaged British would be unable to sustain this commitment, while the US had an almost bottomless well of recruits. Eventually, the war in western Europe would become a predominantly American affair. In order to reflect this, Eisenhower himself would take over command of the land forces once the beachhead was well established.

D-Day was to be 5 June 1944. By then the Allies had complete air superiority over France and the bombing campaign had softened up the enemy. Much of it was directed against the railways in order to prevent men, weapons and ammunition being brought to the front. Bombing and sabotage by the French Resistance had knocked out 1,500 of the 2,000 locomotives that had been available. Eighteen of the twenty-four bridges over the Seine between Paris and the sea had been destroyed, along with most of those over the Loire. Marshalling yards, crossings and other vital parts of the railway system had been attacked and bombs and rockets had knocked out nearly all the radar stations along the northern coast of France.

As 5 June approached, the fine, sunny days that had lasted throughout May came to an end. The defenders along the Atlantic Wall, who had been kept on constant alert by false alarms for months, began to believe that the Allies had missed their chance. Rommel himself took the opportunity to go back to Germany to see his wife on her birthday. On the following day, 6 June, he was to have a meeting with Hitler.

The first-wave Allied troops had already embarked on 4 June when the weather worsened and a storm blew up. Eisenhower had no option but to postpone the invasion. However that night the meteorologists calculated that there might be a break in the weather on the following day and Eisenhower gave the order for the invasion fleet to sail. Broad lanes across the channel had been swept by navy minesweepers and as the invasion fleet headed out to sea huge waves of RAF heavy bombers flew overhead to bombard the coastal defences with 5,200 tons of bombs. As dawn broke on 6 June, the USAAF's medium bombers and fighters took over and continued the pounding of the emplacements behind the invasion beaches.

Under Montgomery's plan the US had two landing beaches – Utah at the base of the Contentin peninsula and Omaha further to the east, along the Calvados coast. The three British beaches – Gold, Juno and Sword – lay further still to the east. The two fronts were each about twenty miles long. During the night, between midnight and 03.00, one British and two American airborne divisions landed on what Hitler called Festung Europa (Fortress Europe) behind the Atlantic Wall. The British 6th Airborne Division landed east of Caen to seize vital bridges across the River Orne in order to prevent the Panzers that were stationed to the east from attacking the landing force's left flank. In addition, the American 82nd and 101st Airborne dropped at the base of the Contentin peninsula in order to prevent troops stationed in Cherbourg from counterat-tacking. They were also charged with securing the causeways across the flooded areas behind the invasion beaches.

The paratroopers had been carried across the Channel on 1,100 planes from twenty different airfields. The British paratroopers were dropped too far east, but they caught the enemy by surprise all the same. They took the village of Ranville and secured the landing zones for the gliders that would bring in more men and anti-tank guns about two hours later. These aircraft dropped close to the bridges and seized all but one of their objectives – the bridge at Troarn that carried the main road from Caen to Le Havre and Rouen. A team under Major Rosveare then grabbed some explosives, commandeered a jeep, drove hell-for-leather for the bridge and blew it up. Meanwhile 150 British paratroopers attacked the coastal battery at Merville that covered Sword beach. After fierce hand-to-hand fighting that cost half their number the paras captured the battery and destroyed its guns.

The American airborne landings fared rather worse. Heavy flak and clouds caused the transports to disperse. The pilots flew too high and too fast scattering the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne over an area of 375 square miles. Of the 6,100 men that had been dropped, only 1,000 made it to their rendezvous point. The 82nd had better luck and managed to capture St Mère Église on the road from Cherbourg. It was the first town in France to be liberated and, by dawn, the Stars and Stripes fluttered outside the town hall in the place where the Nazi swastika had hung for four years. The American gliders also had a bad time. Only twenty-two of the fifty-two gliders landed in the drop zones and most were badly damaged on impact. This left the airborne troops short of transport, signals equipment and anti-tank guns, which made it impossible for them to capture the bridges across the River Merderet. The paratroops that were drop...