Inferno - Max Hastings [339]
On the beaches, reinforcements poured ashore from shuttling landing craft, so that by the end of D plus 1 Montgomery deployed 450,000 men. The first Allied fighters began to fly from improvised local airstrips. The Luftwaffe was so shrunken by months of attrition over Germany that its planes scarcely troubled the invaders. Allied pilots marvelled at the contrast between their daylight view of the beachhead, where long columns of vehicles could be seen advancing with impunity, and the stillness in the enemy’s lines: the Germans knew that any visible movement they made would bring down fighter-bombers. Only during the brief hours of summer darkness were Rommel’s forces able to redeploy and bring up supplies; their commander was himself later wounded by a strafing fighter.
The D-Day battle cost only 3,000 British, American and Canadian dead, a negligible price for a decisive strategic achievement. The people of Normandy, however, suffered terribly for their liberation, losing as many dead on 6 June as the invaders. Allied soldiers shocked local people by their contempt for civilian property; a Civil Affairs unit noted in Ouistreham: “Looting by troops pretty general. British prestige has fallen here today.” Similarly, a Frenchwoman described the ransacking of her home in Colombières by Canadians: “It was an onslaught throughout the village. With wheelbarrows and trucks, the men stole, pillaged, sacked everything … There were disputes about who got what. They snatched clothing, boots, provision, even money from our strongbox. My father was unable to stop them. The furniture disappeared; they even stole my sewing machine.” Looting remained a universal practice among Eisenhower’s armies throughout the campaign, almost unchecked by commanders. Meanwhile, Allied bombs and shells killed some 20,000 people in northwest France during the bitter attritional fighting that now began.
Eisenhower and his generals had always recognised that the “battle of the buildup” in the weeks following D-Day would be as critical as the landings: if the Germans could concentrate forces in Normandy more swiftly than the Allies, the invaders might still be evicted—as Hitler hoped and demanded. Deception planners made a vital contribution, by their brilliantly sophisticated Operation Fortitude, which convinced the Germans of a continuing threat to the Pas de Calais, where important forces lingered for weeks. But, though Allied air force destruction of rail links and road bridges slowed the arrival of reinforcements, throughout June and July new formations rolled into Normandy, to be hurled piecemeal into the cauldron. The eleven-week campaign became by far the most costly of the western war, and Normandy the only battlefield where casualty rates at times briefly matched those of the Eastern Front. Though D-Day had huge symbolic significance and commands the fascination of posterity, the fighting that followed was much bloodier: for instance, while D Company of the British Ox & Bucks Regiment triumphantly seized “Pegasus bridge” across the Caen Canal early on 6 June for the loss of only two killed and fourteen wounded, next day it suffered sixty casualties in an inconclusive little action at Escoville.
Montgomery had declared ambitious initial objectives for the British on the eastern flank, including seizure of the city of Caen. Unsurprisingly, however, momentum was lost on 6 June, as