This entry was inspired by my boss, Brunty. He hired me, so I do hold him in high regard. I was clueless about D-Day 2 weeks back. Now I can proudly say I know the history of Britain, and why I have to know, is because Singapore was an ex-British colony. Reproduced from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/.
D-Day - and the Allies are at war
As the 65th anniversary of D-Day approaches, the rivalries between the US and British commanders that almost scuppered the invasion.
As the 65th anniversary of D-Day approaches, the rivalries between the US and British commanders that almost scuppered the invasion.
By Antony Beevor Last Updated: 4:45PM BST 29 May 2009
The invasion of France in 1944 has always been seen as one of the greatest triumphs of meticulous planning and allied co-operation. Before D-Day and during the Battle for Normandy, Allied commanders posed, smiling together for photographs to emphasise their unity. Yet this was often a sham. General Dwight Eisenhower had a thankless task, getting rivals to work together. Perhaps the heaviest cross he had to bear was that of General Montgomery, but the first task was to bring the "bomber barons" into line.
The Allied pre-invasion plan was to cut off Normandy and Brittany by smashing rail communications and destroying all the bridges along the river Seine to the east and the Loire to the south. But "Transportation", as the operation became known, proved very hard to launch because of personal and inter-service rivalries.
Eisenhower's deputy, Air Chief Marshal Tedder, was its main proponent. In February, Air Marshal Harris of Bomber Command, and General Spaatz of the US Eighth Air Force, received warning that preparations for Overlord would require their heavy squadrons to be diverted from the strategic offensive against Germany. Harris, who believed obsessively that his bomber force was on the point of bringing Germany to its knees, objected strenuously. He wanted his aircraft to continue smashing German cities to rubble. There should be only "minimum diversions" from the task of "reducing the enemy's material power to resist invasion", he wrote to his direct superior, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of the Air Staff.
Above all, Harris fiercely resisted the idea that he should be told what to bomb. Spaatz also showed great reluctance to change targets. He wanted to continue attacking oil refineries and German fighter production. Their objections were over-ruled by Eisenhower at a major meeting on March 25, but they still tried to get their own way.
Tedder, however, still faced considerable opposition from the antagonistic Harris. Bomber Harris was at odds with the Air Ministry, he loathed Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, the commander of Allied air forces for the invasion, and he had become increasingly difficult with Portal. "The RAF was a house divided," observed a senior American staff officer afterwards. "The air side stank beyond belief."
But there were also considerable tensions within the American command structure. General Omar Bradley, a workmanlike infanteer who commanded the First Army, deeply disliked that flamboyant cavalryman General George Patton. He was astonished that Eisenhower had given Patton another chance after he slapped a shell-shocked soldier in a field hospital. Eisenhower, who had little idea of how intensely Bradley hated Patton, rightly selected "Old Blood and Guts" Patton to command the Third Army for the breakout from Normandy.
Patton was grateful to Eisenhower for having given him a second chance, but he never respected Ike "as a soldier''. When he accompanied the Supreme Commander on a tour of divisions in the southwest of England, he described his friendly manner with the troops as that of "an office seeker rather than that of a soldier". "His theory is that by this method one gets on a level with the men. A commander cannot command and be on the same level. At least that is my opinion. I try to arouse fighting emotion – he tries for votes – for what?"
Patton, a God-fearing conservative famous for his profanity, enjoyed addressing his troops in provocative terms. "Now I want you to remember," he once told them, "that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." But Patton's greatest contempt was reserved for Montgomery, whom he regarded as boastful, yet over-cautious. In his diary, he called him "the little monkey'.
While every aspect of Operation Neptune, the cross-channel assault, had been meticulously planned, surprisingly little thought had gone into the subsequent phase of Overlord. Montgomery had declared that Caen would be captured on the first day, before the Germans could bring in reinforcements. Then the British Second Army would advance beyond to seize ground and establish forward airfields ready to prepare for the breakthrough. But this was a vastly over-optimistic scenario when he had not put the right forces in place to achieve such an objective. He allocated no more than a single unmechanised infantry brigade and an armoured regiment to advance 10 miles inland and then seize a whole city.
With unexpectedly high tides reducing the beach to just 10 yards, it became very difficult to land the tanks. So the infantry, after waiting an hour, had to set off on foot. The British refusal to follow the American and German system of armoured infantry mounted in half-tracks proved a major handicap. Caen did not fall until just over a month later.
At the end of D-Day, British commanders in the Sword beachhead had played down their failure to take Caen with the misplaced optimism that "we can always take it tomorrow''. But over the next two days the fighting along the British and Canadian front intensified with the arrival of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitler Jugend, the Panzer Lehr Division and elements of the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.
The German high command wanted to launch a massive panzer counter-attack to sweep the Allies back into the sea. But Rommel lacked infantry reinforcements, because of the time it took them to march by night to the battlefront to avoid Allied air attack. As a result, the panzer divisions had to be broken up into Kampfgruppen, or battle groups, to hold the line. This disrupted plans to concentrate armoured forces for a decisive counter-stroke. All they could do was secure a front, especially against the British, to prevent a breakout towards Paris. British hopes of enlarging their beachhead were therefore dashed. The open country south-east of Caen remained beyond their reach, and any thought of pivoting on Caen, as Montgomery had claimed, had become impossible. Thus, in the first few days, the pattern of a battle of attrition became established.
Montgomery had failed to foresee the Germans' reaction. They were bound to send the bulk of their panzer divisions against the British and Canadians round Caen, rather than against the Americans further west. This was because a British breakthrough south-east towards Falaise and Paris would have cut off all their forces in western Normandy and in Brittany. On June 10, Montgomery had a meeting with Bradley and explained that, while the Americans concentrated on seizing the Cotentin peninsula and the port of Cherbourg, he was going to try to encircle Caen instead of attacking it head on.
But the next day, Montgomery wrote to General Freddie De Guingand, his chief of staff back in England, that his general objective was to "pull the Germans on to Second Army so that the [American] First Army can extend and expand". This rather more modest assessment was hardly in keeping with his earlier pugnacious declarations about the need to take Caen immediately. "Inaction and a defensive mentality are criminal in any officer – however senior," he had told commanders two months before the invasion. "Every officer and man must be enthusiastic for the fight and have the light of battle in his eyes."
Montgomery, partly for reasons of morale and partly out of pride, could not admit that any of his plans had gone wrong. He later created resentment and suspicion among American colleagues by claiming that he still intended to break out towards Falaise, yet insisting at the same time that he had always planned to trap the bulk of the panzer divisions onto his front to give the Americans the great chance of a breakout. This simply made a virtue out of a very sore necessity.
But although Montgomery's change of strategy was a perfectly pragmatic reaction to the situation, the Americans were furious at the way he tried to pretend that it had been his "master plan" all along.
On July 7, Patton, who had just arrived in Normandy, joined Bradley, Montgomery and de Guingand. "After lunch, Montgomery, Bradley and I went to the war tent," Patton wrote in his diary. "Here Montgomery went to great lengths explaining why the British had done nothing." Montgomery now wanted to postpone the moment at which Patton's Third Army was to become operational.
This, the Americans suspected, was an attempt to keep Bradley under the command of his own 21st Army Group for longer. Bradley studiously refused to answer. As soon as Patton's Third Army was activated, he would in practice become independent from Montgomery, since he would then command the US 12th Army Group, with two armies under him.
Patton, along with many Americans, felt that Montgomery was being far too cautious. But after the disastrous Villers-Bocage offensive of mid-June and Operation Epsom at the end of the month, both of which failed to encircle Caen from the west, Montgomery was gravely worried about British and Canadian manpower. The War Office warned him that replacements to make up infantry casualties would run out in a few weeks. But Montgomery, like Churchill, was loath to admit the problem to the Americans at a time when the British were becoming the junior partner in the alliance.
Eisenhower was becoming so exasperated that Montgomery's enemies in the RAF, Tedder and Air Marshal Coningham who commanded the Tactical Air Force for the invasion, hoped that he would be sacked. Coningham especially was enraged by Montgomery's claims that everything was going according to plan when he had failed to take the ground needed to build advance airfields.
An intelligence officer with the 7th Armoured Division had recorded with amazement in his diary, on June 22, shortly before Operation Epsom, what he heard from Major General Erskine on his return from Montgomery's headquarters. "General talked about what Monty had said to him," he wrote. "Complete change so far as we are concerned as Monty doesn't want us to make ground. Satisfied Second Army has drawn all enemy panzer divisions, now wants Caen only on this front and Americans to press on for Brittany ports. So attack goes in but we have very limited objective."
In the second week of July, however, Montgomery, aware of the resentment building up, realised that the British had to mount another major offensive. But to avoid any more infantry losses, he decided that for Operation Goodwood, he would use the three British armoured divisions to strike down the Caen-Falaise road. On July 12, he sold the plan to Eisenhower on the basis that it offered the possibility of a decisive breakthrough. The supreme commander, who had despaired of Montgomery's inaction, replied exuberantly two days later: "I am viewing the prospects with the most tremendous optimism and enthusiasm. I would not be at all surprised to see you gaining a victory that will make some of the 'old classics' look like a skirmish between patrols."
Montgomery also wrote to Field Marshal Brooke in London, saying that "the time has come to have a real "showdown" on the eastern flank'. But the very next day, Montgomery gave Dempsey and O'Connor a revised directive, which was much more modest in its objectives. He wanted to advance only a third of the way to Falaise, and then see how things stood. This may have been a more realistic assessment of what was possible, yet Montgomery never told Eisenhower or even Brooke. It would appear that he felt compelled to mislead his superiors to be sure of obtaining the heavy bombers to smash open the German lines. Politically, this was very unwise and the consequences would be disastrous for his reputation.
Every senior commander on the Allied side was praying for Montgomery to make a breakthrough at last. Even his foes in the RAF, including Harris, made no objection to his request for heavy bomber support. Tedder, who had privately been discussing with Coningham the possibility of Montgomery's dismissal, wrote to assure the commander-in-chief that all the air forces would be "full out to support your far-reaching and decisive plan".
But Goodwood, launched on July 18 after massive bombing and with a huge numerical superiority in tanks, ground to a halt by midday after an initial rapid advance. The Germans had recovered quickly and their deadly 88mm guns wreaked havoc on the tank squadrons unsupported by infantry. Even after the 1st SS Panzer Division counter-attacked the leading brigade, Montgomery, with catastrophic bad timing, claimed success. At 1600 hours he signalled Field Marshal Brooke: "Operations this morning a complete success. The effect of the bombing was decisive and the spectacle terrific. . . situation very promising and it is difficult to see what the enemy can do just at present. Few enemy tanks met so far and no (repeat) no mines." He then went on to claim erroneously that the 11th Armoured Division had reached Tilly-la-Campagne, and that the Guards Armoured had taken Vimont. It was one thing to have misled Brooke, but he also issued a similar communiqué to the BBC and gave a press conference. According to one of Montgomery's brigadiers, he talked to the assembled journalists "like children''. This was to produce a bitter backlash. The British had lost over 200 tanks.
Even the next day, when Field Marshal Brooke flew over to see Montgomery, he "found him in grand form and delighted with his success east of Caen". Perhaps Montgomery was simply putting on a brave front. In any case, the gulf between the claims made before the operation began, and the reality of the situation revealed after his press conference was becoming a major embarrassment.
On the eve of battle, war correspondents had been told of a "Russian style" breakthrough, which might take the Second Army forward by 150 to 200 kilometres. Several of the journalists pointed out that that meant all the way to Paris. When two days later the same colonel had to admit that the offensive had come to a halt, he faced tumultuous heckling. He tried to explain that Tiger and Panther tanks had appeared, and that General Montgomery had received a formal order from above not to risk a failure. This statement was openly disbelieved.
The next day Brigadier Alfred Neville from 21st Army Group was brought in to soothe the journalists. He tried to put a positive gloss on what had been achieved. The Second Army had taken the southern part of Caen and now controlled an important communications network. But then he claimed that the objective had not been to break through the German positions, but simply to penetrate them. The next day, Dempsey's chief of staff made another attempt to explain away the situation using impenetrable military jargon. An American correspondent caused roars of laughter by demanding a translation.
In fact the "death ride of the British armoured divisions" during Operation Goodwood, succeeded in nailing down the panzer divisions at a crucial moment, in line with Montgomery's revised plan. This was because it came just before Operation Cobra, the great American breakthrough in the west. It also helped to convince Rommel's successor, Field Marshal von Kluge, that the main Allied breakthrough would come on the British flank. But Montgomery's credibility with the Americans was irreparably damaged.
Eisenhower, who had done everything in his power to be fair to both partners in the alliance, often to the exasperation of his own officers who thought he was "selling out to the British", began to distrust Montgomery. And after the failure to close the Falaise Gap in August at the climax of the battle for Normandy, Eisenhower summarily rejected Montgomery's arguments that both British and American army groups should advance together into northern Germany under his field command.
Montgomery's attempts to preserve his own and his country's pride, had achieved the opposite effect. And the battle of the generals extended after the war by other means. Montgomery's memoirs inflamed old disputes, with his claim that everything had gone according to his master plan. He clearly felt that he should be compared to Marlborough and Wellington.
The usually tolerant Eisenhower was enraged. "First of all he's a psychopath," Eisenhower exploded in an interview with Cornelius Ryan in 1963. "Don't forget that. He is such an egocentric that man – everything he has done is perfect – he has never made a mistake in his life." It was tragic that Montgomery should have diverted attention away from his undoubted qualities and from the sacrifice of his troops who had held down the vast bulk of the panzer formations and faced the greatest concentration of 88mm anti-tank guns.
Bought a PC at Wanchai. And saw the orderly march from Causeway Bay to Central, where the government office sits. I found out after about the Wanchai Metropark Hotel incident of the infected Mexican guy. Unfortunately for the occupants of the hotel, all 300 had to be quarantined for a week. 
