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By Root 1111 0

the Allied nations were impatient for the invasion of France, some of those who had to carry it out displayed less eagerness: British soldiers who had served for years in North Africa and Italy resented the call to risk their lives again in Normandy. They felt that it was somebody else’s turn. ‘Who else is fighting this war?’ demanded bitter soldiers of 51st Highland Division, which was ‘softened, rather than hardened’ by six months’ training in England after its return from the Mediterranean, in the opinion of one of its senior officers. Among other Mediterranean veterans, ‘3rd Royal Tanks were virtually mutinous before D-Day,’ their brigade major Anthony Kershaw wrote later. ‘They painted the walls of their barracks in Aldershot with slogans such as “No Second Front”, and had it not been for their new commanding officer – the best CO of an armoured regiment that I met during the war – I really think they might have mutinied in fact.’

Few British units that had fought in the Mediterranean performed impressively during the north-west Europe campaign, and this seems unsurprising; they looked askance at millions of other British and American soldiers who had thus far escaped combat. On D-Day, thirty months after Pearl Harbor, half the US Army’s eight million men had yet to deploy overseas, and many more had still to see action. The 24th Infantry Division, for instance, spent nineteen months performing garrison duties in Hawaii, then a further seven months in Australia training for jungle warfare; some of its men were pre-war regular soldiers who became eligible for return to the United States before the formation had seen a single day of battle. While the Russians had been fighting continuously for three years, less than a dozen formations of the US Army had fought the Germans. Many British soldiers had likewise been training in England since 1940: statistically, in May 1944, less than half of Churchill’s army had fired a shot in anger, when account is taken of troops fulfilling support and garrison functions which did not involve combat. If the campaign Montgomery’s forces afterwards fought proved arduous and bloody, it was brief in comparison with the struggle on other fronts

Only relentless American pressure on Britain’s leadership enforced the D-Day commitment. This rendered it ironic that the British secured for themselves the initial invasion commands: Montgomery directed British and US ground forces, Ramsay the fleet and Leigh-Mallory the air armada. Although Dwight Eisenhower was Supreme Commander, Montgomery deluded himself that he might retain operational control of the Allied armies all the way to Berlin, with his American boss as a figurehead; the little general’s unfailing insensitivity caused him to cling to this ambition until the last months of the war.

Meticulous planning and immense armaments promised Overlord’s success, but the hazards of weather and the skill of the German army fed apprehension in many British and American breasts. The consequences of failure must be appalling: civilian morale would plummet on both sides of the Atlantic; senior commanders would have to be sacked and replaced; the prestige of the Western Allies, so long derided by Stalin for feebleness, would be grievously injured, likewise the authority of Roosevelt and Churchill. Even after three years’ attrition in the east, the German army remained a formidable fighting force. It was vital that Eisenhower should confront von Rundstedt’s sixty divisions in the west with superior combat power. Yet the invaders were supported by such a vast logistical and support ‘tail’ that, even when they reached their maximum strength in 1945, they would deploy only sixty American and twenty British and Canadian combat divisions. Air power, together with massive armoured and artillery strength, was called upon to compensate for inadequate infantry numbers.

Churchill and Roosevelt deserved their nations’ gratitude for delaying D-Day until 1944, when their own resources had become so large, and those of Hitler were so shrunken. Allied losses in the