The Making Of The British Army (59 page)

In the making of the British army, Alamein was and remains one of the most important battles in its history, perhaps
the
most important. It was an object lesson in all-arms and inter-service cooperation (if by no means a smooth one), in just how hard men could and needed to fight, and in how command before and during battle should be exercised. And if it did not entirely lay to rest the ghost of the Somme, it put paid to the haunting. For Montgomery had known that this battle would exact far heavier casualties than 8th Army had sustained in any of its previous engagements – indeed, heavier than the British army had yet sustained anywhere in this war – and he had been mentally prepared for it. When one of the armoured commanders protested that he would lose too many tanks as the plan stood, Montgomery icily assured him that he would accept 100 per cent casualties. As for the human cost, his chief personnel staff officer asked for a figure on which to base the medical plan. Montgomery went to his caravan and emerged two hours later with the answer – 13,000, which
turned out to be within 4 per cent of the actual figure. But somehow Montgomery seemed to instil a confidence in his troops (if not in every one of his corps and divisional commanders) that all would be well, that he would not throw their lives away. They understood that war could not be made without casualties; they only wanted to be confident that their army commander knew his business. And thus the ghost was banished: the British army could after all plan and successfully execute a large offensive battle.

The lessons of Alamein served generations of ‘Cold War warriors’ in Germany (in the British Army of the Rhine), and in the First Gulf War; and even today they shape the approach to the all-arms battle, for all that the environment of war may have changed. Montgomery fought his battles according to strictly thought-out principles which he was able to turn into thorough and crystal-clear operational plans, driving these through with unrelenting determination and authority – though he did not, as is sometimes claimed, stifle initiative. Indeed, his ‘master plans’ set out what was to be achieved and with what; the ‘how’ was the business of the subordinate commander, though Montgomery did not always help in this perspective by his tendency afterwards to insist that ‘everything went to plan’. War cannot be scripted; but neither can it be entirely improvised – or, at least, not for long. This, with some modification and reinterpretation, has remained the army’s approach.

In terms of leadership, ‘Monty’ stands with Slim in the pantheon of British greats – if not as well loved as ‘Uncle Bill’, then certainly as fervently admired. Both men created an ‘atmosphere’ (the word which Montgomery himself used) of confidence in their commands. Slim said that the four best levels of command were the platoon, battalion, division and army; and in explaining why the platoon, he said simply, ‘because, if you are any good you will know your men as well as their mothers do, and love them as much’. The notion remains at the heart of Sandhurst training today; and it connects with an even longer tradition, stretching back to Marlborough and even to Monck. And ‘atmosphere’ is everything. After Sir John Moore’s army had been ejected from Spain, and Sir Arthur Wellesley had arrived with his own expeditionary force, Marshal Soult was quick to sense the change in this ‘atmosphere’ – and very soon to feel its effect. ‘In truth, a new actor had appeared upon the scene,’ wrote Sir William Napier, who had fought at Corunna, and subsequently with Wellington: ‘The whole country was
in commotion: and Soult, suddenly checked in his career, was pushed backward by a strong and eager hand.’
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Both Slim and Montgomery, as new actors on the scene, had dramatically changed the atmosphere in their respective theatres of war; and the enemy in Burma and North Africa was now being pushed back with hands as strong and as eager as those of Wellington.

CHURCHILL’S IMAGE OF ALAMEIN AS A WATERSHED
– ‘
BEFORE ALAMEIN NEVER
a victory; after Alamein never a defeat’ – was no truer in absolute terms after the battle than it had been before. But what is true is that after Alamein the trajectory of the fighting was unstoppably towards victory, even in the Far East, for as Churchill explained in the fourth volume of his memoirs,
The Grand Alliance
, with the United States now in the war ‘all the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force’.

After Alamein, 8th Army cleared Libya (February) in a drawn-out affair which led to American criticism of Montgomery’s caution, finally in May 1943 joining with the Anglo-American ‘Torch’ forces, which had advanced east from Algeria, to clear Tunisia. With the southern shores of the Mediterranean thus in allied hands, the invasion of Sicily (Operation Husky) in July went generally well, as did the subsequent landings on the mainland of Italy. But progress thereafter up the long leg of Italy, with its mountainous interior and narrow coastal plains, was painfully slow and costly. After the Italians changed sides in September the Germans quickly occupied the whole of the country, and Rome did not fall to the Allies until June 1944. Italy was not good ‘tank country’, and in the winter around Cassino and Anzio the infantry found their war was remarkably similar to that on the Western Front twenty-five years earlier. After the fall of Rome, the fighting in
Italy became if anything even harder, and the campaign remains controversial: some historians argue that it was a critical diversion of resources from the main effort in north-west Europe – a symptom of the residual British infection, the indirect approach. Brooke remained convinced, however, that it was a crucial diversion of German resources that might otherwise oppose the allied advance through the Low Countries.

And that axis of advance in north-west Europe had itself been hard won. Alamein was the first battle of the war that the British army had fought
à l’outrance
, but the Normandy landings – ‘D-Day’ – were a far bigger affair, planned with an even greater sense of ‘whatever it takes’. Indeed, British (and allied) troops were effectively committed to a fight to the death, for such were the huge resources dedicated to gaining a foothold on the first day that there could be no ‘Plan B’; nor could there have been much evacuation from the beaches. The only alternative was strategic failure; and in the context of the commitment to Stalin to open a true ‘second front’, the failure would have been far-reaching.

In large measure the planning for Operation Overlord was Montgomery’s triumph,
¹⁹⁴
just as Alamein had been. He had been recalled from Italy in December 1943 to take command of the allied ground forces which would spearhead the landings under the overall command of the US general Dwight Eisenhower (Supreme Allied Commander Allied Expeditionary Force) and to remain in command until the build-up of forces ashore permitted the formation of two separate ‘army groups’
¹⁹⁵
– Montgomery’s 21st (largely British and Canadian, and latterly Poles) and Omar Bradley’s US 12th – at which point Eisenhower himself would take the reins on the Continent.

The landings went better than expected, with casualties, though
heavy (particularly on the American beaches), far fewer than most commanders had feared. For the allies had achieved both strategic and tactical surprise. They had through a sustained and imaginative deception plan convinced Hitler and the German high command that the assault would be in the Pas de Calais, and that landings elsewhere (in Normandy) would be a diversion. And so German reserves, which might have counter-attacked successfully on D-Day (6 June) when the allies were at their most vulnerable trying to get ashore and establish a decent bridgehead, were held back. Tactical surprise was achieved with, among other things, the help of the weather. A huge storm had forced Eisenhower to postpone the invasion for twenty-four hours, and the Germans, whose meteorology was not as good as the allies’, had concluded that no landings could take place for several days and had reduced their alert state (Rommel, by then in command of the counter-invasion forces, had even taken the opportunity to slip away to Germany for his wife’s birthday). And during the night, before the invasion fleet appeared off the Normandy coast, airborne forces (parachute and glider troops) seized key bridges, gun emplacements and dominating ground, further confusing and then confounding the defenders.

But equally dramatic was the surprise gained by innovative equipment. The Germans had placed much reliance on their formidable beach obstacle belt – ‘dragons’ teeth’, wire and mines, steel-reinforced concrete gun emplacements – but the allies (in truth, largely the British) had been looking at how to breach the belt as a technical rather than as solely a tactical challenge. As a result, armoured vehicles had been adapted for all sorts of specialist tasks by one of the army’s earliest and most respected tank experts, Major-General Percy Hobart – who, having been sacked in 1940 after a row about the use of armour, had now been brought out of retirement at Churchill’s insistence.
¹⁹⁶
No matter what the problem identified by the planners, ‘Hobo’ always had a solution. The sand was too soft for wheeled vehicles: ‘bobbin tanks’ unrolled flexible trackway like a carpet salesman. The promenade-wall was too high for tanks to climb: ‘ark tanks’ drove against the wall and extended their ramps to allow other tanks to drive over them like a slow-motion game of leapfrog. Whatever the problem, there was one of Hobo’s ‘funnies’ to deal with it. Never has so much technical energy been applied to a single day’s fighting in the history
of warfare. For the stakes on D-Day could not have been higher.

The most astonishing of the ‘funnies’ began its work well before reaching the shore, however. The infantry needed intimate fire support as soon as they hit the beach, but getting tanks in with them was always going to be difficult since their landing craft, being bigger than those of the infantry, were vulnerable both to fire from the gun emplacements and to the explosive obstacles with which the Germans had studded the low-water line. The answer was a swimming tank – the DD (duplex drive) Sherman.

The DD was a standard gun tank fitted with a collapsible rubberized canvas screen which enabled it to float, and with a propeller driven by simple off-take shafts geared from the track-drive (hence ‘DD’). The Americans, to their great cost on Omaha beach (each of the landing beaches, of varying widths, was given a code name), lost the majority of theirs in the swim in, but some of the British regiments, notably the 13th/18th Hussars, who had lost every one of their vehicles at Dunkirk, were able to get theirs ashore in the crucial minutes before the infantry landed. They launched their DDs (two squadrons, thirty-four tanks in all) some 5,000 yards out, and in waves whipped up by force 5 winds headed for the shore at an agonizing 100 yards per minute – almost an hour’s swim, in which all of the crew except the commander, who had to stand on top of the turret to direct the driver, were below the water line. Miraculously – thanks to their training in the Moray Firth in January – only three of the Hussars’ tanks foundered, with the loss of only four crew.

The corporal in command of one of the DDs recalled the moment the tracks made contact with the shingle of Queen beach on the far left of the allied landing zone. Except for the odd frogman-sapper, they were perhaps the first British troops on that stretch of the Normandy shore: