The Making Of The British Army (60 page)

They were landing on an incoming high tide, and with the canvas flotation screen lowered so that the gun could be used, water was coming through the driver’s hatch. But the mines on the beach had not yet been cleared, so driving on would likely have had but one result. Then a wave suddenly broke over the rear of the tank, and the engine spluttered to a halt and obstinately refused to restart. The crew continued to give covering fire, but with all power gone and the tide fast overwhelming them, there was soon no alternative to baling out:

With appropriate cavalry nonchalance, after the war the 13th/18th Hussars, who on D-Day won five MCs and twelve MMs, a record for a single regiment in one day, added a few bars of ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’ to their regimental march.

‘D-Day’ stands as one of the army’s finest hours, as well as a model of what inter-service and inter-allied cooperation could achieve. The sheer ingenuity of every branch, combat and logistical, in preparing to overcome the redoubtable defences of the ‘Atlantic Wall’ –
Festung Europa
(Fortress Europe) – and the problems of supply over the beaches until a major port could be captured has never been surpassed. The daring of the glider troops who swooped out of the moonlit sky to take Pegasus Bridge on the Caen Canal would be hailed as a masterstroke even today, when troops have helicopters and satellite navigation instead of the flimsy airframes flown by serjeant-pilots with their maps on their knees. The intrepidity of the ‘amphibious’ tank-men in their long swim, the cool courage of the sappers among the mines and booby-traps in the rising tide, the sheer determination of the infantrymen to get across the beaches and inland to grips with the depth defences – these and exploits like them were the common currency of 6 June 1944. D-Day was a battle in itself, fought largely by men who up to that day had not fired a shot in anger – even the regulars, many of them, not since 1940. And those who went ashore that day knew in their hearts that they might have to fight to the last to gain a beachhead for those who would come ashore on D+1 and in the days and weeks afterwards – the men who would take over the business of fighting the Germans out of Normandy. It was unspoken, in the main, and some learned of it later indirectly: the 13th/18th Hussars, for example, were slow to get replacements for the tanks they lost on 6 June, for the planners had simply not expected them to survive the day as a formed unit, and had therefore not allocated any. It was the same across the entire first wave.
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The fighting inland was a grim affair, the Germans seeming to contest every house and field. The countryside –
le bocage –
was so close, offering easy concealment for anti-tank weapons, that the tank had few advantages, and the infantry’s casualties mounted as they cleared the hedgerows and hamlets yard by yard. It was the middle of August before the Germans cracked – but when they did it looked as if their hasty retreat might turn into rout as the remains of the German 7th Army – perhaps 100,000 men and a prodigious number of tanks, guns and transports – struggled to escape what became known as the ‘Falaise Pocket’, the area south of Caen which an allied pincer movement had turned into a shooting gallery for the fighter-bombers. The RAF’s rocket-firing Typhoons and the USAAF’s Mustangs and Thunderbolts pounded the Germans remorselessly: between 20,000 and 50,000 – the estimates are still imprecise even today – managed to slip out of the noose, but 50,000 surrendered, and the roads and fields around Falaise were littered with the dead – 10,000 at least.

The battle for Normandy was at last over, and with it the uncertainty of the price that the British army would have to pay in the defeat of Germany. For by now the Russian offensive in the east was making progress, and henceforth the road from Normandy to the Baltic, although it would be a hard one, could never be completely closed to the allies for more than a few weeks, perhaps only days, at a time. They had lost 200,000 men in Normandy: 37,000 of these had been killed, 16,000 of them British, Canadian or Polish, a slightly higher percentage than the US. The Germans had lost 300,000.

But inter-allied rivalry, mistrust and straightforward differences of strategic opinion dogged the subsequent advance through France and the Low Countries. In early September Montgomery over-reached himself in a serious miscalculation – or, as Field Marshal Lord Carver, then a 28-year-old armoured brigade commander, put it in his
Seven Ages:
‘Montgomery now let success go to his head.’

‘Monty’, by now a field marshal but having ceded overall command of the allied ground forces to Eisenhower at the end of the battle of Normandy,
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had been advocating for some time that one of the two army groups, preferably his own, be given the logistic priority so that a
decisive effort could be made on a narrow front instead of continuing with Eisenhower’s ‘broad front’ policy (which Montgomery dismissed as ‘everyone attacks everywhere’). The principle was sound, but the difficulty lay in identifying the object against which to concentrate the effort. In other words, what was of decisive importance to the enemy’s capacity to resist?

By September the logistical problems had also increased to the point where even concentrating support on one army group was not going to be enough to sustain it in a major thrust. Not since Marlborough’s ‘scarlet caterpillar’ had the British army been so stretched on the Continent. Day in day out the trucks of the magnificent Royal Army Service Corps hauled the ‘C Sups’ – combat supplies (ammunition, rations and ‘POL’ – petrol, oil and lubricants) – from Cherbourg, the only major port in full operation, and the few captured Channel ports sufficiently cleared of demolitions and mines, along 400 miles of frequently indifferent roads which the sappers struggled constantly to maintain, marshalled throughout by the immaculate red-capped, blanco-belted (later ‘Royal’) Military Police.
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It was indeed a continuous khaki conveyor belt, the image of Cicero’s notion of the ‘sinews of war’.

The need to shorten that conveyor belt was all too evident; but, instead of directing a major part of 21st Army Group’s effort towards capturing Antwerp, which the Germans were still holding stubbornly, Montgomery now proposed an uncharacteristically bold plan to thrust north-east over the Rhine, envelop the Ruhr and thereby bring the war to an end. But to get across the Rhine (his troops were still only at the Albert Canal on the Belgian – Dutch border) he would have to seize a number of bridges on the way, including the enormous span over the Waal at Nijmegen, and cross the Lower Rhine itself at Arnhem. Eisenhower was not prepared to call a halt to the US 12th Army Group’s easterly advance and put all supplies Montgomery’s way (for Patton, commanding US 3rd Army, was anyway moving fast and ‘Ike’ did not want to slow him down), but he reckoned that extending the allied line as far as the Rhine would anyway protect Antwerp once
captured, so he gave the plan the green light and allocated Montgomery the 1st Allied Airborne Army – formed only the previous month – with which to seize the bridges.
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The commander of the Allied Airborne Army was General Lewis Brereton, who had commanded the US 9th (tactical) Air Force in Normandy, his deputy the British lieutenant-general Frederick (‘Boy’) Browning.
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Brereton had initially been sceptical about the need for a separate army-level command for glider and parachute troops. He had not been confident that the First Airborne would be used en bloc as an army, for a number of operations had already been planned in detail and then abandoned at the last minute as ground troops over-ran the airborne objectives. Now, with the German collapse, it even looked as if its divisions would never jump again. Browning especially was anxious for them to be committed lest they be grounded and used as normal infantry: the Parachute Regiment had only been formed in 1940, and its status was therefore precarious. It is hard to fault a commander with such fighting spirit, but this was scarcely the military judgement expected of a lieutenant-general in command of a strategic asset. Browning’s eagerness to use his own 1st (British) Airborne Corps, together with Montgomery’s over-optimism, now led to the last of the British army’s true battlefield defeats – albeit a magnificent defeat, and one which ironically has had a greater moral effect than if the operation had been a resounding success.

Operation Market Garden consisted of two separate but dependent elements: ‘Market’, under Browning’s tactical command, was the airborne operation to seize the bridges along the main road through Nijmegen and beyond to Arnhem, while ‘Garden’ was the follow-up ground forces plan. The advance of 2nd (British) Army north over the secured bridges and beyond the Rhine would be spearheaded by XXX Corps under the ebullient Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks. There were eight major water obstacles between XXX Corps’ start line and the ultimate objective, the north bank of the Rhine beyond Arnhem some
60 miles distant, and Browning judged that bridges over all these obstacles would have to be seized simultaneously or else the Germans, guessing what was happening, would reinforce or demolish those that remained. And although the smaller canals and rivers could be bridged by XXX Corps’ sappers without too much loss of time, the larger rivers – the Waal at Nijmegen and the Rhine at Arnhem – were too wide for ‘combat bridging’ (in other words, they could not be bridged from one bank only, and under fire). To make matters even harder, Highway 69, astride which XXX Corps would advance, lay like a dike or levee across the flat terrain of the Dutch polder, single carriageway for most of its length, and the ground on either side was too soft to support tactical vehicle movement.

‘Market’ would need three of the five divisions of the Airborne Army. The US 101st under Major-General Maxwell Taylor would drop in two places just north of XXX Corps’ start line to take the bridges north of Eindhoven at Son and Veghel. The 82nd under Brigadier-General James Gavin would drop north-east of the 101st to take the bridges at Grave and Nijmegen, while the British 1st Airborne Division, under Major-General Roy Urquhart, and the Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade, commanded by the redoubtable veteran Major-General Stanislas Sosabowski, would take the road bridge at Arnhem and the rail bridge at Oosterbeek and hold on for forty-eight hours – the time it was calculated that XXX Corps would need to reach them. For all his urgent desire to get his airborne corps into action, Browning said memorably to Montgomery beforehand, ‘I think we may be going a bridge too far.’ But without a bridgehead beyond the Rhine the operation was unlikely to be worth the effort, for all its secondary purpose in securing Antwerp (once, that is, Antwerp had fallen to the allies – which did not happen until November).
A Bridge Too Far
(1974) was the title of the third of former war correspondent Cornelius Ryan’s Second World War trilogy of battle accounts, and also of Richard Attenborough’s epic 1977 film, parts of which veterans say are accurate.