Inferno - Max Hastings [336]
The American and British air chiefs were also hostile. Believing themselves close to achieving Germany’s defeat by strategic bombing, they bitterly resented the diversion of their aircraft to invasion support. Churchill had his own objections to bombing French rail links because of the inevitable civilian casualties, displaying a sensitivity that disgusted Bomber Command’s C-in-C Sir Arthur Harris: “Personally I couldn’t have given a damn if I killed Frenchmen. They should have been fighting the war for themselves. But I was being bullied all the time by Winston.” Roosevelt, Marshall and Eisenhower overruled the prime minister. In the course of the war, some 70,000 French people were killed by Allied bombs: “collateral damage” in France thus included almost one-third more civilians accidentally killed than the British suffered from the Luftwaffe’s deliberate assault on their island. Bombing played a critical role in slowing the German buildup after D-Day, but the price was high.
If the peoples of 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 the 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 northwest 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 U.S. Army’s 8 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 prewar 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 U.S. 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 U.S. ground