13

Thunderclaps and Fabius

‘I do not think you could have chosen any man more capable than General Eisenhower of keeping his very large heterogeneous force together through bad times as well as good, and of creating the conditions of harmony and energy which were the indispensable elements of victory.’

Winston Churchill, speech to the Joint Houses of Congress, 19 May 1943¹

The Overlord plan was finalised in two major briefings on 7–8 April and 15 May 1944 at Montgomery’s headquarters, St Paul’s School in west London, coincidentally where he had once been a pupil. At the first – both were code-named ‘Thunderclap’ – the British general in the presence of Eisenhower set forth the detailed plan for the ground assault against the beaches. As Eisenhower recalled: ‘an entire day was spent in presentation, examination and co-ordination of detail’. According to Bradley, ‘A relief map of Normandy the width of a city street had been spread on the floor of a large room in Saint Paul’s School. With rare skill, Monty traced his 21st Army Group plan of maneuver as he tramped about like a giant through Lilliputian France.’²

It was a long session, with Monty introducing the day and speaking for ninety minutes; Ramsay’s and Leigh-Mallory’s presentations concluded the morning. Sergeant John Green was part of the detail responsible for the plan’s safety, with his comrades of the 50th Field Security Section attached to GHQ. He remembered the map ‘laid out on the floor of the lecture room for the high-ups. Two of us slept there every night and one of us was always on duty at the door. It was a very big model. The shores of Normandy all laid out with the phase lines, D+1, D+2, and so on, that Monty expected to reach. It was rather frightening knowledge to have.’³

Later, Green’s task was to mix with the thousands of waiting troops and listen for any loose talk. Monty liked his phase lines, but the Americans were furious that they had been included, as they felt a failure to adhere to what, at best, were guidelines to the forthcoming fighting might be used as evidence in the future, were there to be political squabbling about the conduct of the campaign (how prophetic).

However, his putting a D+90 phase line next to Paris was felt to be unnecessarily optimistic. Monty’s stated view, however, was that ‘it was not of any importance where he would be ground-wise between D+1 and D+90, because he felt sure he could capture the line D+90 by the end of three months’. Besides, he saw his task as not to capture ground – he was out to destroy German forces. His ideas were not appreciated by French and Allied politicians, who thought of the campaign in terms of winning back territory.⁴

The afternoon saw Bradley, Gerow and Collins, the V and VII Corps commanders, present the American forecast of their battle, followed by the Second Army’s Dempsey with Lieutenant Generals John Crocker and Gerard Bucknall (of British I and XXX Corps). Sir Alan Brooke, the CIGS, noted: ‘A long day with Monty! I paraded at Saint Paul’s School to attend a wonderful day which Monty ran to run over all the plans for the coming offensive. Bucknall was very weak, and I am certain quite unfit to command a Corps. The PM turned up and addressed a few remarks to the meeting. He was in a very weepy condition, looking old and lacking a great deal of his usual vitality.’⁵ General Sir John Kennedy, Director of Military Operations at the War Office, observed, ‘when the conference started in the morning, Montgomery has asked us not to smoke. Later on he announced that he had had a message from Winston to say that he would join us after tea. Monty [an obsessive non-smoker] added that, as the Prime Minister would undoubtedly arrive with a large cigar, smoking would be allowed after tea. He made the announcement in such a puckish way that there was a great roar of laughter.’⁶

The accounts of Brooke and Kennedy leave it in no doubt that it was Montgomery who was in charge of the ‘Thunderclap’ Conference, not his American counterparts. Perhaps he sensed that command would soon slip from British hands. Ramsay recorded, ‘First day of Ex. Thunderclap at Saint Paul’s. Monty gave 1½ hours of the army plan layout. I gave one hour of the naval problems which affect the army & L.M. gave an hour of the air plan. I was congratulated by many people on my talk which I think was good & it certainly it went much better than I anticipated.’⁷

Bradley’s recall of the eventual strategy is important because the conduct of the Normandy invasion would provoke huge debate, with allegations that the British were slow and had been ‘fixed’ by the Germans at Caen, when they intended to break out. The American general continued:

The American forces would then pivot on the British position like a windlass in the direction of Paris. Third Army would then advance into Brittany to clean up that peninsula. In the meantime we were to complete our turning movement until the Allied line faced east toward the Seine on a 140-mile north–south front. Its left flank would be anchored on the British beaches, its open right flank on the Loire. From there we would advance to the Seine, where it was anticipated the enemy would hold behind that river bank.

During our battle for Normandy the British and Canadian armies were to decoy the enemy reserves and draw them to their front on the extreme eastern edge of the Allied beachhead. Thus while Monty taunted the enemy at Caen, we were to make our break on the long roundabout road toward Paris … [W]hen reckoned in terms of national pride, this British decoy mission became a sacrificial one, for while we tramped around the outside flank, the British were to sit in place and pin down Germans. Yet strategically it fitted into a logical division of labors, for it was toward Caen that the enemy reserves would race once the alarm was sounded … As Monty discussed this plan for Caen, he became increasingly optimistic. Pointing towards Falaise, he talked on breaking his tanks free on D-Day ‘to knock a bit down there’. Falaise lay thirty-two miles inland by road from the beach; it was to take Monty sixty-eight days to get there.⁸

Much of Montgomery’s plan for I Corps, including his old 3rd Infantry Division, was based on the premise of not only capturing Caen, eight miles inland, on D-Day itself, but reaching to the billiard-table-flat, open landscape further south, near Falaise – suitable both for his tanks and temporary airstrips. He and Bradley agreed that all the panzer units, even those heading towards the American beaches, would likely pass through the great road and rail centre of Caen to counter-attack the invasion – thus capturing it at the earliest opportunity made sense. However, having handed the task to Crocker’s I Corps, Monty then did little to ensure they had enough resources to achieve the task.

Initially the 3rd Division were to land on a two-brigade front (as at Juno, Gold and Omaha), but due to shipping resources this was trimmed back to a couple of infantry battalions from the 8th Brigade with a battalion of tanks (the 13th/18th Hussars) assaulting at H-Hour. They were to be followed by successive waves, each of a brigade plus armour, at roughly two-hour intervals. The deployment of the 6th Airborne Division to the north-east of Caen was meant to offset some of the 3rd Division’s tasks. Nevertheless, the Sword Beach assault had been fatally compromised. An official Russian military delegation visiting the area during a British-hosted staff ride in 1994 noted that according to their doctrine, ‘the 6 June attack at Sword and advance to the city of Caen required at least a two-division corps landing during the day to be sure of success – nothing less would do the job. They couldn’t understand Montgomery’s “incorrect” allocation of insufficient forces.’⁹

Indeed. This lack of combat power arriving early meant that the 3rd Division, whose three brigades trickled into Normandy sequentially, thus failing to achieve a basic principle of war – concentration of force, or mass – had no hope of taking Caen on D-Day, as Bradley observed. Writing in 1951, the American’s observation seemed pretty level-headed and objective criticism, but Montgomery took great offence, which eventually bubbled to the surface in his retaliatory Memoirs of 1958.

There is no doubt that Monty was bullish and over-optimistic on 7 April (in retrospect absurdly so), but with good reason. The Anzio landings had recently taken place on 22 January, which saw John P. Lucas’s Anglo-US VI Corps capture the small Italian port; but instead of striking out, Lucas had lingered at the beachhead to consolidate his position, allowing the Germans to rush in substantial reserves by road and rail and surround his forces. The Allied troops would stay bottled up until 23 May, incurring casualties of forty-three thousand killed and wounded. Lucas was roundly criticised for his inaction and sacked on 22 February. Thus, Monty’s plan to reach out from the invasion beaches towards Caen and Falaise immediately was also a demonstration to Brooke and Churchill that there would be no second Anzio in Normandy.

Certainly Anzio, Salerno and Sicily – all of which had seen violent German reactions nearly pushing the invaders back into the sea – played on the minds of those connected with Overlord, never mind the debacle of Dieppe. This was an unquestionably anxious time, with Alliance tensions beginning to affect even the mild-mannered Ramsay, who despite noting that the second day’s conference at St Paul’s of 8 April ‘went off quite well & was of value’, then recorded: ‘The US were tiresome, demanding flotillas of minesweepers which they know I cannot provide. It is a curse that we should have undertaken to provide all naval forces for Overlord and given the US a blank cheque to demand what they want from us.’

In the event, the naval split was roughly twenty per cent USN (with forty-nine major warships) to eighty per cent Royal Navy and other Allied nations (258 major vessels).¹⁰ Emphasising the wide-ranging nature of the Western Alliance that comprised Neptune, this included contributions from the free navies of France (nine vessels), Poland (three), Norway (three destroyers), Greece (two corvettes) and the Netherlands (two sloops).¹¹

The final conference at St Paul’s on Monday 15 May was a far different affair. Exactly 146 formal gilt-edged invitations and passes were issued. Attendees included the King, Prime Minister, the War Cabinet and scores of Allied generals. Eisenhower began with engaging humility: ‘Here we are on the eve of a great battle, to deliver to you the various plans made by the different force commanders. I would emphasise but one thing – that I consider it to be the duty of anyone who sees a flaw in the plan not to hesitate to say so.’ The conference was barely under way when there was a furious hammering at the door that would not cease. Eventually the doors were opened and George Patton strode in, unabashed, ‘fashionably late’ – in all probability, deliberately so.¹²

Eisenhower recalled in Crusade in Europe:

During the whole war I attended no other conference so packed with rank as this one. This meeting gave us an opportunity to hear a word from both the King and the Prime Minister. The latter made one of his typical fighting speeches, in the course of which he used an expression that struck many of us, particularly the Americans, with peculiar force. He said ‘Gentlemen, I am hardening toward this enterprise’, meaning to us that, though he had long doubted its feasibility and had previously advocated its further postponement in favor of operations elsewhere, he had finally, at this late date, come to believe with the rest of us that this was the true course of action in order to achieve the victory.¹³

Churchill’s undisputed ‘hardening’ quote was published in Eisenhower’s book in 1948, when the former Prime Minister was out of office, and illustrated the depth of American scepticism of the British commitment to invading Normandy. It was in part the beginning of the ‘Churchill against Overlord’ American narrative, though the Prime Minister was to blame for lighting the fuse in the first place. It mattered enough to Churchill that he tried – unconvincingly – three years later to qualify his ‘hardening’ comment in Volume 5 of his The Second World War.

Eisenhower was writing partly in response to the first post-war tide of sensationalist books – one by his own personal aide, Commander Harry C. Butcher, which magnified some of the Anglo-US disagreements.¹⁴ However, as we can see, if Churchill might have been lukewarm towards the cross-Channel enterprise, then Montgomery was positively bubbling with excitement for Overlord. In fact, Churchill had used the ‘hardening’ term in speeches, conversation and memos elsewhere, as an antonym of his true meaning. He often used understatement as a linguistic device, when meaning the opposite; but its use here caused the Americans – and subsequent historians – great confusion.

At the second Saint Paul’s Conference, wartime austerity abounded, General Sir John Kennedy remembering, ‘It was very cold. Winston and [Field Marshal] Smuts came in overcoats, and kept them on for luncheon. I got hold of a blanket and shared it with an admiral and an air marshal; we were glad to have it on our knees.’ The King’s biographer noted that the hall was a big panelled room:

The King and Mr. Churchill accorded the privilege of armchairs, but the rest of the company sat on school forms facing a large map of the invasion area which hung above a low dais. After a brief introduction by General Eisenhower, each commander demonstrated his own particular role and task in the invasion. When the last had concluded his statement on this portentous blue-print of the shape of things to come, the King rose and, to the surprise of all, stepped on to the platform. He had not been expected to speak and he did so without notes.¹⁵

King George VI was by nature rather shy and not a natural public speaker – a situation aggravated by a pronounced stammer, which had been tentatively cured by an Australian speech therapist, of which many in his audience were aware – the 2010 movie The King’s Speech depicted this very well. Consequently it took personal courage on his part to mount the dais and make his short speech, which Kennedy observed ‘was perfect for the occasion, and created an excellent impression on the Americans, as well as on us. I met Alan Lascelles [the King’s private secretary] at dinner and he told me he had no idea the King would speak until he got onto the platform.’¹⁶

Although the Allied armies had grown in expertise and confidence, their lacklustre performance at Anzio that January had provoked unease among the most senior generals and politicians about the forthcoming Normandy operation. This was such a vast undertaking that it could not be allowed to fail. Overlord utilised the best of commanders, their staff and equipment. Any setback which resulted in the landings being rebuffed would prolong the war, give the Germans new hope and disillusion the Russians. The futures of Eisenhower, Churchill and Roosevelt and their retinues were on the line. The two ‘Thunderclap’ Conferences were probably Montgomery’s finest moments. He more than any other Allied commander was associated with battlefield victories over the Germans. His stage management and egotistical self-belief – no matter how much historians would pick over his words in the future – brought much needed confidence; every memoir suggests this. They were performances, rather than briefings. After ‘Thunderclap’, the leading commanders went into battle convinced they would win – which had not been the case beforehand.

However, removing some of the positive gloss, General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, Churchill’s chief military assistant during the war, noted of this conference,

The administrative arrangements were explained in considerable detail by Humfrey Gale, 21st Army Group’s Chief Administrative Officer. In his desire to give an idea of the magnitude of the undertaking, he revealed that the number of vehicles to be landed within the first twenty days was not far off two hundred thousand. The Prime Minister winced. He had been much amused, but shocked, by the tale – probably apocryphal – that in the Torch operation, twenty dental chairs had been landed with the first landing craft flight. The first instruction he gave me as we drove away from Saint Paul’s was to write to Montgomery and tell him that the Prime Minister was concerned about the large number of non-combatants and non-fighting vehicles which were to be shipped across the Channel in the early stages of Overlord.¹⁷

Churchill – embarrassingly ignorant, as we have seen, of modern military logistics – certainly had an obsession about the administrative tail of the 21st Army Group and was prepared to push the point sufficiently to want to quiz Monty’s staff over what equipment was absolutely necessary. Alanbrooke noted on 17 May that his PM ‘was very disturbed at statements connected with the thousand clerks of the third echelon and the fact that the invasion catered for one lorry for every five men. It took me ¾ hour to pacify him.’¹⁸ Not enough, for on 19 May, the Prime Minister visited his general’s temporary headquarters at Broomfield House in Southwick village.

Montgomery took the ‘long screwdriver’ of Churchill’s interference personally and led the Prime Minister into his study, and behind closed doors the two strong personalities came head to head. No one else was present but it was clearly a spirited debate. Monty – according to his not-quite-reliable Memoirs – bade the Prime Minister sit, then said: ‘I understand, Sir, that you want to discuss with my staff the proportion of soldiers to vehicles landing on the beaches in the first flights. I cannot allow you to do so. My staff advise me and I give the final decision; they then do what I tell them. I consider what we have done is right; that will be proved on D-Day. If you think it is wrong, that can only mean you have lost confidence in me.’¹⁹

Monty’s alleged response was clever, for he knew he could not be replaced at such short notice. It was a charged atmosphere and both parties clearly became very emotional. Again, Churchill devoted some paragraphs in Volume 5 of his The Second World War (1951) to refuting allegations of an emotional encounter, but admitted, ‘I do not remember the actual course of the conversation. All of our proceedings were of a most friendly character’ – which hardly rings true, and goes a long way to illustrating how the premier was selective with the history he reproduced for his readership.

In later life, Churchill apparently threatened to sue Monty’s first biographer, Alan Moorhead, if he revealed that ‘he had broken down and wept’, and the wartime diary of his CIGS, Sir Alan Brooke, is highly illustrative of how mercurial and ill-tempered Churchill was at times. Eventually the doors opened and Churchill was introduced to Monty’s waiting staff officers, and said ‘with a twinkle in his eye’, ‘I wasn’t allowed to have any discussion with you gentlemen.’²⁰

Exercise Tiger had been the final preparation for Force ‘U’. The last major practices for the other four Normandy task forces were the Fabius exercises of May 1944. These witnessed the assault-wave forces bound for Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword – each of more than thirty thousand personnel – mount dress rehearsals of everything learned, amounting to the largest ever simultaneous amphibious exercise.²¹ Troops were herded into marshalling areas from 27 April, embarking on their landing craft between 29 April and 1 May. The ‘invasion’ was originally scheduled for 2 May, but was postponed by poor weather for twenty-four hours – fortuitously, just as the real D-Day would be. Thus, on 3–4 May 1944, Exercise Fabius I put the Omaha assault troops (Force ‘O’) through their paces at Slapton Sands. As Sergeant Bob Slaughter observed, ‘some of the men remarked that the code name, Fabius I, stood for Final Assault Before Invasion, US Infantry. Even a blind man could see that something big was about to happen.’²²

Lieutenant George ‘Jimmy’ Green with the 551st Landing Craft Assault Flotilla recalled, ‘Live ammunition was used in this exercise and our first wave had little time after the ceasefire to make for the shore. At the scheduled time, the bombardment ceased and we left the safety of our mother ship, HMS Empire Javelin, making full speed for the beach. As we neared the shore, about ten minutes after ceasefire, we were straddled by a salvo of fourteen-inch shells from USS Texas [in fact, the 7.5-inch shells of the British heavy cruiser HMS Hawkins], which missed our craft but soaked most of the occupants.’²³ Two cruisers and nine destroyers were part of the bombarding force, but the weather was not good, and after twenty-four hours Fabius I was cut short, most of the vital issues having been exercised.²⁴

Landing at Slapton on Fabius I was Brooklyn-born-and-bred Sergeant Mike McKinney with the Omaha-bound 16th Infantry of the 1st Division. One of ten kids whose father had died when he was young, he had signed on for a three-year stint in the regular US Army in 1940, without a thought of war coming. McKinney had already taken part in two amphibious landings, Torch and Husky, before June 1944; after the Sicilian campaign, ‘Somebody said Eisenhower needed a good outfit to lead the invasion into Normandy, so he tagged the Big Red One. We felt pretty cocky and pretty good about that, and went back to England to a place called Weymouth. They told us we were going to go up against pillboxes.’

The 5th Special Engineer Brigade lands in Exercise Duck, January 1944, during one of many rehearsals held at Slapton Sands, Devon. LST-325 would take the same engineers to Omaha on D-Day and today lies at anchor at Evansville, Indiana, as a floating museum. Nearer the camera, LCTs 27 and 153 were part of Omaha Flotilla-18. On D-Day LCT-27 turned turtle 1,500 yards offshore, scattering her vehicles on the ocean floor. In the foreground M10 tank destroyers climb ashore. (US Army Signal Corps)

McKinney recalled, ‘We broke the platoon down into four sections and headquarters section; each section had riflemen; a couple of guys who were gonna handle Bangalore torpedoes [tubes bearing explosives that could be connected together]; a few who were gonna have satchel charges. We’d blow the barbed wire up, to make a path for the guys with the flamethrower and the satchel charge to get through.’ He mused, ‘I knew it was gonna be tough, but I also knew it was gonna be the last fight of the war, the last big fight addressing all of the drudgery of ground fighting, dig a hole, get up, walk ten miles, dig another hole and get up, walk another ten miles, dig another hole, but I knew it was the beginning of the end. That’s what I was hoping for.’²⁵

Brigadier ‘Sammy’ Stanier of the 231st Brigade with Force ‘G’ on Fabius II, observed: ‘the plan was exactly the same as the real thing, but nobody below the rank of lieutenant colonel knew that. These exercises gave us the opportunity to meet the Royal Navy personnel who would be transporting us over and providing additional gunfire from offshore and our relations were excellent throughout.’²⁶ Private Stan Hodge, a newly arrived soldier with the 2nd Essex of the 56th Brigade, was nervous he had never learned to swim: ‘My biggest fear was that my landing craft would be sunk and I’d drown. I wanted to be part of it; I wouldn’t have minded taking a bullet later on, but I did not want to die on the first day.’ In the event, the immature eighteen-year-old would win a Military Medal on 6 June – his first day in action.²⁷

Ken Watts of the 2nd Devons, in Stanier’s 231st Brigade, remembered of Fabius II, ‘Our rurally recruited battalion of farm boys was known in the brigade as “the Swedebashers” and camped in the New Forest near Beaulieu. We lived in bell tents, but the weather was wet and everywhere got muddy, so we were glad to get away for our dress rehearsal. We embarked onto HMS Glenroy, our landing ship and anchored off the Isle of Wight. We spent about a week on board, sleeping in hammocks; the food was good and we had a rum ration; if you were a smoker there was cigarette issue too. On the run-in, waves picked up our flat-bottomed LCA and pitched it about, and it wasn’t long before the crew and a lot of the troops were seasick. Being unaffected, my job was to throw the sick bags over the side. We eventually staggered ashore on Hayling Island, and were later taken back by amphibian DUKWs.’²⁸

Accompanying Fabius II was Lieutenant Ian Hammerton of the 22nd Dragoons, leading a troop of Sherman mine-clearing flail tanks. He recalled ‘loading on to LCTs at Lymington and making a full-scale landing on the beaches of Hayling Island, where it seemed incongruous to find all this military hardware among the deserted holiday chalets’.²⁹ A Sherman tank commander with the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry (8th Armoured Brigade), Corporal John Lanes, also recollected the holiday atmosphere of Hayling Island, to the extent that his crew ‘brought a football and we had a bit of a kick-about on the beach’. Unfortunately their commander, Brigadier Bernard Cracroft, chose this moment to drop by and was less than impressed, shouting, ‘What do you think you’re doing? Don’t you know there’s a war on?’³⁰ Their ‘invasion’, but not the football, was captured by the British Army Film and Photographic Unit, deploying to test their own equipment.³¹

Fabius III at Bracklesham Bay witnessed the landing on East Wittering beach of those Canadian troops soon to head for Juno, and was observed by Churchill.³² Lieutenant Peter Hinton with the 262nd LCI Flotilla recalled watching several of the heavily laden troops drown after a vicious undertow sucked them away during the disembarkation. He thought this ‘a bitter lesson in how not to do things’, but it emphasised that casualties were inevitable with realistic training.³³ Exercise Fabius IV, held at Littlehampton, confirmed the readiness of the Sword forces, based on Rennie’s British 3rd Division. Wren Doris Hayball remembered these preparations: ‘Shoreham harbour became so full of ships you could walk across it on the landing craft. For the month before 6 June, I couldn’t get home from Hove to Worthing without a special military permit.’³⁴ Ramsay watched with Vian as the LCTs of Force ‘S’ passed out to sea. ‘They looked remarkably workmanlike,’ he thought; the naval and land commanders, Rear Admiral Talbot and Major General Rennie, observed from the bridge of the landing ship HMS Glenearn as their troops scrambled into smaller landing craft to be deposited ashore.³⁵

Eighteen-year-old Private Richard Harris of the 1st Suffolks was one of those splashing ashore during Fabius IV. He recalled embarking on Empire Broadsword on 3 May 1944 for what he thought was ‘The Day’. ‘After sailing all night somewhere in the direction of France, we were lowered in assault craft at dawn and found we were storming the beaches of Angleterre, between Littlehampton and Bognor Regis.’³⁶ Captain Peter R. Cruden, a Cambridge graduate with No. 6 Commando, who would be wounded on 6 June, also recollected disembarking ‘at about 0900 hours, more or less the same timing as on D-Day. I seem to remember it was a rather nice spring morning and the weather was calm: quite different from the real thing. There were background effects in the form of smoke and explosions to make the whole thing more warlike.’³⁷

Cruden was part of Lovat’s 1st Special Service Brigade. Lovat himself remembered of Fabius IV that his commandos ‘seized all the cars of the spectators. They reckoned they were getting rather far behind the sweeping inland movement, took the cars, much to the rage of the drivers and people who owned them, and formed a mobile column that followed the main advance towards Arundel Castle.’³⁸ The infantry and commandos were followed by Sherman tanks of the 27th Armoured Brigade who had to advance on the town of Arundel, standing in for Caen.

Everything possible was rehearsed and umpired: minesweepers cleared the sea; aircraft dropped ordnance; the coast was bombarded with live ammunition; command ships issued orders and monitored frequencies. Alongside swimming tanks, LCTs landed armour onto beaches; obstacles and real minefields were removed by engineers; troops waded through the surf covered by smoke screens; the three Ranger companies attached to Force ‘O’ landed away from the main body to destroy artillery positions, as they would on 6 June at La Pointe du Hoc. Bridge-laying tanks spanned anti-tank ditches, whilst engineers and infantry attacked pillboxes. Later on, supplies were landed, simulated casualties treated and prisoners processed. In theory, everyone landing on D-Day was present on a Fabius exercise. At Littlehampton beach the ‘invasion’ was watched keenly by the Second Army’s commander, Miles Dempsey.

Simultaneously, two further Fabius exercises took place, which rehearsed the embarkation of personnel and equipment in the Thames estuary and east coast ports that would head for Sword (Fabius V), and those in the Southampton–Portsmouth area, destined for Juno, Gold and Omaha (Fabius VI). Touring the exercise areas with Vian aboard his flagship, HMS Scylla, Ramsay was ‘very favourably impressed by all that I saw’, and by the afternoon of 4 May, with the weather deteriorating rapidly, the order was given for the landings to cease and maritime forces to return to harbour.³⁹ In retrospect, it is remarkable how much attention has been paid by journalists and historians to Exercise Tiger, because of its unexpected casualties, while the series of Fabius exercises, far larger and ultimately more important, have lapsed into complete obscurity.

The armies were spiritually prepared also, and we have met some of their chaplains already. Once the air was full of hot metal it was the padres of the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department who took the lead in maintaining British morale, and who get only the slightest of mentions in the narratives of D-Day. The majority of 21st Army Group soldiers were Church of England, in addition to 300,000 Roman Catholics and 160,000 Methodists. Amongst the other religions registered in personal documents and on identity discs were Jews, fourteen thousand Christian Scientists, five hundred allegedly pacifist Quakers, Salvationists, Orthodox, Baptists, Mormons, Plymouth Brethren, Muslims, Hindus and ten Druids.

Montgomery, whose father was a bishop, and Dempsey, the Second Army commander, were of a boarding school generation associated with strong religious observance, brought up to attend church every Sunday. Dempsey took his headquarters to Christ Church Portsdown, near Portsmouth, on the eve of D-Day for a special service ‘to dedicate to Almighty God the task which lay before them’.⁴⁰ Amongst the lesser-known vehicles being readied for the invasion, Dempsey encouraged the adaption of two mobile churches, converted by Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) fitters from three-ton trucks. As recalled by the staff chaplain at the 21st Army Group, ‘It fell to me to take the first, dedicated to Saint Paul, by Archbishop Temple, “somewhere in England”, in a tank landing craft to the beaches of Normandy. After an apocalyptic crossing we crashed ashore in pouring rain and darkness, to see the spire of Bayeux Cathedral early next day.’⁴¹

The 21st Army Group commander understood that his D-Day army was a force of citizen soldiers who were less deferential and more curious than their predecessors of 1914–18. His generals were part of the First World War generation that remained under ‘the shadow of the Somme’, who appreciated that their men – never mind Churchill’s government and the public at large – would not tolerate the scale of casualties sustained in the earlier world war. However, there was also a general anxiety that ‘our lads are not killers by nature’. Commanders who had experienced the extremes of the trenches expressed concern that the generation who went to war in 1939 were ‘too soft’. Monty’s superior and patron, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, mused in his memoirs whether it would have been wiser to reintroduce the death penalty for cowardice or desertion. One brigadier addressed his men shortly before D-Day, as remembered by his signaller, ‘Some of you will be blown to pieces; that does not matter. But if anyone deserts, he will be court-martialled and shot’ – although he knew full well that military courts could no longer apply the death sentence.⁴²

To avoid losing another generation of young men, British methodology evolved to use ‘metal, not flesh’ to fight the nation’s battles; thus the army of 1944 played to these strengths, excelling in firepower, engineering, intelligence, logistics and staff planning – while acknowledging the Germans’ superiority at close-combat tactics and manoeuvre. The reluctance to deploy infantry until the battlefield had been prepared by artillery – and, where possible, air support – was practised from the morning of 6 June onwards, the guidance coming from the strategically wise Brooke – a gunner by trade. Thus, while bayonet-wielding infantrymen made up fifteen per cent of Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, it was His Majesty’s Royal Artillery which comprised eighteen per cent, or 700,000 men – roughly the size of the wartime Royal Navy. The actual figures were Royal Artillery, 699,993; Infantry, 551,742; Royal Engineers, 231,985; Royal Signals, 133,920; and Royal Armoured Corps, 120,433.⁴³

The Royal Artillery serviced unrivalled firepower – by reputation more deadly than any of their equivalents in the German, Russian or American armies. In addition to the three field regiments totalling seventy-two 25-pounders of each British division, heavier guns were assigned at corps and army levels. By 1944 these were grouped into Army Groups Royal Artillery (AGRAs), often allocated to a corps for a specific battle. Their fire was directed by forward observation officers (FOOs) of three-man teams in Bren carriers, or air observation posts, flying light aircraft. If the other arms providing logistical support to the gunners – particularly the drivers of the Royal Army Service Corps, armourers of the Ordnance Corps and REME fitters – are included, then fully one-third of British soldiers were involved in the business of supplying and lobbing shells at the Germans.⁴⁴

Amongst the millions now preparing to enter France was the Dunkirk veteran and medic Norman Smith. Now promoted to sergeant major with the 22nd Field Dressing Station of the 15th Scottish Division, he sensed a change in everybody’s pattern of life: ‘Practically all the forces in Britain were moving to the south in huge convoys.’ His medical unit reached Brighton, where they started ‘marching around carrying all our kit on our backs, plus about thirty pounds of medical kit. We poured with sweat in the sun. It was annoying to see Italian prisoners of war travelling in trucks.’ Soon, he knew, he would be ‘back to finish the job. A nostalgic moment for us Dunkirk wallahs.’⁴⁵

A GI sergeant noted how ‘the hedges along the way had suffered badly from vehicles too outsized for such a tiny countryside. And in the little towns,’ he observed, ‘tanks, not built for manoeuvring in such cramped space, had knocked pieces of corner buildings as they attempted to make sharp turns on a little street that had never been expected to cope with anything worse than a coach-and-four.’⁴⁶ Scotsmen with the Territorial 5th Black Watch of the 51st Highland Division, who had returned from Sicily the previous November, were training in ‘street fighting techniques and practising in a bomb-torn area off Whitechapel in London. This brought close contact with many of the Cockney dockers and their families, many of whom had remained in that area right through the worst of the blitz. They were a wonderful community and it was hard to reconcile that side of their character’, recorded the battalion’s war diarist acidly, ‘with the fact that they were threatening strike action, unless they were paid danger money for loading ships with ammunition – which had been mostly manufactured by women.’⁴⁷

The unions soon pulled their men out on strike, which affected troops of the 49th West Riding Division, and Rifleman Eric Patience of the 8th Rifle Brigade, the latter an infantry battalion. ‘We arrived just outside Tilbury and stayed in a transit camp for the night while our vehicles were loaded onto the ships. As we went to board the ships the people lined the streets to bid us farewell – they did all right because we threw all our spare change to the children. We were really annoyed that the dockyard crews were on strike and refused to load our transport. Our own engineers and the ship’s cranes had to do the job. The names we called those dockers – well, they were unrepeatable.’⁴⁸

There was, sadly, a wide differentiation in the pay and conditions of British servicemen and their highly unionised colleagues. We have seen how those in uniform were remarkably poorly rewarded compared to American troops, but they were badly paid even in comparison with British industrial workers, some of whom started work as young as fourteen. Those in industry on average received £25 a month, but the most skilled four times that. In the militant shipbuilding and engineering sectors, some 526,000 working days were lost to labour disputes in 1942, which had doubled to a million by 1944. In the nation’s vital aero industries, the figure was 3.7 million days lost in 1944.

The fiercely misogynistic and pro-Communist trades unions instituted stoppages over issues like the use of women workers, or the refusal to allow collections for the Red Army during factory hours. There was also discontent, as we have seen, in the nation’s ports, where there appeared to be – to the servicemen at least – ‘a less than wholehearted commitment to the war effort’. This was evidenced by vehicles and equipment being shamelessly damaged by slapdash handling – bewildering onlooking US Navy personnel, who were equally astonished at the theft of life-sustaining lifeboat rations from their vessels.

If the servicemen felt disharmony with the workforce, the same was true with some civilians. An impatient Lieutenant Tony Gregson with his Essex Yeomanry gunners found themselves billeted in Bournemouth’s Carlton Hotel, on the East Cliff, which had hosted Eisenhower and Montgomery when touring south coast units in February. In May 1944, Gregson recalled, ‘the hotel had suffered from the soldiers, with long dingy corridors bereft of all furnishings. Our guns and half-tracks were lined up on the cliff-top gardens in front of the hotel and they soon made a fearful mess of the tarmac drives to the obvious displeasure of the aged ladies who still seemed to occasionally motor by in their chauffeur-driven Daimlers.’⁴⁹

Though suffering none of the setbacks of Tiger, the Fabius exercises had still resulted in killed and wounded, as recollected by local civilian policemen, news of which the War Office was obliged to suppress until after the real invasion. When the details of the last pre-invasion fatalities were sent to next of kin, it was implied that they had died during the actual landings in France. Brigadier ‘Shimi’ Lovat recalled asking a new padre to hold a pre-battle service. The chaplain ‘preached a rotten sermon about death and destruction which caused surprise. There were a number of complaints; the cleric was suspended and told to return from whence he came. The incident was forgotten but the dismissal was taken badly. On the last day in camp the unfortunate man took his own life. He was put down as a battle casualty.’⁵⁰ Likewise, Major Francis Goode with the 2nd Glosters of the 56th Brigade recorded how ‘one unfortunate who was playing in his tent with a loaded rifle accidentally shot himself in the heart. I arrived a minute after to find blood spurting literally six feet and no hope. We notified his next of kin after the landing [on Gold Beach] that he had been killed in action. It seemed kinder.’⁵¹