MONTGOMERY AND OPERATION OVERLORD
Operation Overlord was the code name given to the anticipated landings in North-West Europe in 1944. General Sir Bernard Montgomery was recalled from his command of the Eighth Army in Italy to prepare for it, as was General Eisenhower from overall command in the Mediterranean. Most of the planning for Overlord had already been done by a team headed by the British Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan, but it was not Montgomery’s plan and so when Montgomery arrived he roundly condemned it and its author. Morgan had drawn up the plans based on the time-frame he had been given – the invasion would happen in early May 1944 and there would only be enough landing craft to land three divisions and one airborne division in the first wave. Both Eisenhower and Montgomery considered that three divisions would not be sufficient to guarantee that a landing, once made, could be held, and persuaded the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the British and US professional heads of their services) that the invasion must be delayed until June to give time for more landing craft to be built and for five divisions and three airborne divisions to land on five beaches rather than three. Morgan had no great difficulty in adjusting his plans to incorporate these amendments, although Montgomery always claimed that the planning had been his.
Although the British would land more men on D D-Day, eventually fixed as 6 June 1944, the American build build-up would thereafter be faster and American troops would soon outnumber those of the British, and so the overall commander would be an American, General Eisenhower. Under him would be the air and naval commanders and the Commander Land Forces, Montgomery, who in his 21 Army group would have the Second British Army commanded by Lieutenant General Miles Dempsey, and the First United States Army under Lieutenant General Omar N Bradley. During the planning stage it had been intended that Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson would command Second Army, but Montgomery had done his best to demean and disparage Anderson in North Africa and refused to have him, demanding, and getting, Dempsey instead. Dempsey had served under Montgomery and although a perfectly competent officer was an uncritical admirer of Montgomery – exactly what Montgomery wanted.
Putting the US First Army under Montgomery was not a happy situation. Montgomery did not like Americans – they did not grovel and he could not dismiss them on a whim – and he was brusque and ill-mannered towards them. To the Americans Montgomery seemed slow and unimaginative and relations got so bad that during the final stages of the Battle of Falaise in August 1944 Patton had suggested, only partly in jest, that he should drive the British back into the sea for a second Dunkirk. Any reverse was never the fault of Montgomery but resulted in wholesale sackings of those whom he blamed, often unfairly.
The landings on D day, 6 June, went well but after Operation Goodwood, in July, when Montgomery claimed that all had gone exactly as he had planned it, when it transparently had not, and the discovery of his subsequent attempts to recall maps and operation orders to cover up that fact, Eisenhower’s deputy, the British Air Marshal Tedder, recommended that Montgomery should be sacked. He could not be sacked – the British public had created a hero and when it became increasingly obvious to those on the ground that he was neither omniscient nor particularly good at his job, it was impossible to admit it. Montgomery stayed, but with American officers increasingly threatening to refuse to serve under him, from 1 September Eisenhower assumed the appointment of Land Forces Commander with Montgomery and Bradley reporting directly to him. Montgomery had 21st Army Group, now consisting of the Second British and First Canadian Armies, while Bradley took on Patton’s Third US Army in addition to the First to form the 12th US Army Group. As a sop Montgomery was promoted to field marshal.
And then in September 1944 Montgomery did something that was totally out of character: normally cautious, meticulous, painstaking, ponderous, he proposed a lightning thrust to bypass the West Wall, the German frontier defences. He planned to drop airborne troops to seize a series of bridges over rivers all the way from the Dutch border to the town of Arnhem on the lower Rhine – Operation Market – and then drive an armoured corps along a sixty-mile corridor through German-held territory to link up those bridges – Operation Garden. Having thus outflanked the West Wall, the British would then turn right and penetrate into the heart of the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland.
Eisenhower approved the plan and gave Montgomery logistical priority for it. It didn’t work, and when it all ended in failure with the evacuation of the remnants of the British Airborne division on 25 September 1944, Montgomery made sure than no stain attached to him. He blamed Lieutenant-General Sir Richard O’Connor, who had escaped from an Italian POW camp and was now in command of one of the flanking corps. Montgomery was well aware that if O’Connor had not been captured it would have been he, and not Montgomery, who would have commanded Eighth Army, and he sacked O’Connor while protecting his long-time toady, Lieutenant-General Horrocks, commanding XXX Corps, to whom, after Montgomery himself, the blame should really have been attached. Even if Market Garden had worked it is difficult to see how a German army commanded by Field Marshal Walter Model would have allowed a sixty-mile-long narrow corridor with only one road to exist for long.
Having lost overall command of ground forces, Montgomery now embarked on a campaign to regain it and he began to tout his theory that Eisenhower should revert to being Supreme Commander with a single Land Forces Commander under him – meaning, of course, himself – a proposition that he constantly put to anyone who would listen, and repeated in letters to Eisenhower. One of Montgomery’s peculiarities was that he spent his time either in his relatively small tactical headquarters surrounded by admiring young sycophants, or out visiting formations in his own army group, and hardly ever went to coordinating conferences at Eisenhower’s headquarters, claiming he was too busy and sending his chief of staff instead. It may, perhaps, have been that he had an inkling, even if only on a subconscious level, that he cut a somewhat ridiculous figure with his posturing and boasting. What is certain, however, is that his lack of contact with the other commanders and their staffs left Montgomery blissfully unaware of the effect his lobbying had on them, for the politics of the Anglo-American alliance were such that there was not the slightest possibility that, with forty-two US divisions in theatre compared to nineteen British, there could be an overall British commander – even if Montgomery was a reincarnation of the Duke of Wellington, which he palpably was not. Montgomery’s chief of staff was Brigadier Freddie de Guingand, a long time protégé of Montgomery, who had the social polish and awareness that his master lacked. He got on well with Americans, who liked him, and it fell to him to smooth the feathers ruffled by Montgomery’s ill manners and lack of awareness.
The Germans still had one shot left in their locker and on 16 December, when bad weather prevent Allied aircraft from flying, they launched an armoured thrust towards Antwerp – the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ – with the aim of splitting the Americans and the British and forcing a second Dunkirk. It very nearly succeeded and when Eisenhower ordered that two American armies north of the German salient should come under Montgomery, Bradley threatened to resign, but was persuaded not to. When the German assault was finally halted, Montgomery’s claim, taken up by the British press, that he had ‘saved the Americans’ bacon’ caused an outcry in the USA and when Montgomery insisted that he could not yet continue the advance but needed time to re-equip, and again asked that he should take command of all Land Forces, this was the last straw and Eisenhower drafted a letter to the Combined Chiefs of Staff demanding Montgomery’s dismissal. Only de Guingand, by cashing in much goodwill towards himself and persuading Montgomery – who could not understand where he had gone wrong – to write a cringing letter of apology, caused Eisenhower to relent.
In March 1945 the Allies were across the Rhine, and in April they reached the River Elbe where they linked up with the Soviets as agreed. On 16 April the Red Army began its attack on Berlin; on 30 April Hitler committed suicide; at 0500 hours on 4 May the German Admiral von Friedeburg and a delegation arrived at Montgomery’s headquarters on Luneburg Heath, twenty-five miles south-east of Hamburg. After being unnecessarily humiliated by the British field marshal by being kept waiting and then not allowed to smoke, von Friedeberg surrendered all German forces in Holland, Denmark and North West Germany. On 8 May at Eisenhower’s headquarters at Rheims, Colonel General Alfred Jodl signed the unconditional surrender of all German forces, and on 9 May, as insisted upon by the Russians, he repeated the procedure in Berlin. The Second World War was over.
Excellent Gordon!