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multiplying the numbers killed by Saul. (A further 120,000 French and Italians perished as well.) Whereas the Luftwaffe flattened 400 acres of London, the RAF and USAAF turned 6,247 acres of Berlin into little more than rubble. Total War did not allow for what is today called ‘a proportionate response’. No fewer than sixty major German industrial cities suffered colossal material damage during the Second World War. Yet Germany is today such a model democracy, and so pacific in her foreign policy, partly because of the terrible retribution that that war visited upon her. If the Second World War had not seen civilian casualties on German soil, just as the Great War had not, a new spirit of revanchism might have been rekindled there. As it was, the Germans looked into the face of Armageddon, and it has instilled an aversion for foreign military intervention that might occasionally frustrate NATO policy-makers today, but is overall a very welcome development for the world.

15

Norman Conquest

June–August 1944

My dear friend, this is much the greatest thing we have ever attempted.

Winston Churchill to Franklin Roosevelt, 23 October 19431

‘What’s your most valuable possession?’ General Montgomery asked a soldier just before D-Day. ‘My rifle, sir,’ came the reply. ‘No, it isn’t,’ Monty replied; ‘it’s your life, and I’m going to save it for you.’2 Although of course any large-scale amphibious landing on the heavily defended coastline of north-western Europe would be a major risk, the Allies did everything they possibly could to minimize military casualties through the employment of overwhelming force. This had the effect of hugely increasing the already high stakes, because a major defeat in Normandy in June 1944 would almost certainly have had the effect of the United States abandoning the Germany First policy, and turning to the Pacific War instead. Amphibious operations had not had a rosy history in the Second World War so far, let alone earlier. The 1940 attempted landing at Dakar and the 1942 attack on Dieppe had been disasters; Salerno and Anzio had been near-disasters; Torch had been extremely lucky with the tides and anyway had not been undertaken against the Germans. Further back, Gallipoli haunted the minds of many, not least its prime author, Churchill.

Yet the Normandy landings were going to be different because the planners – initially under Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Morgan at COSSAC (the London-based organization of the Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander) – would ensure total air and sea supremacy, would interdict German counter-attack through bombing and airborne assault, and would land truly vast numbers of men – twenty-five divisions by the end of June 1944 and a further fourteen on their way – along with a massive preponderance of war matériel. American war production would be displayed to full effect. Even on top of all that, however, luck would be required. ‘We shall require all the help that God can give us,’ the commander of all naval forces for the operation, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, noted in his diary the night before. ‘I cannot believe that this will not be forthcoming.’3 In Führer Directive No. 51 of 3 November 1943, Hitler had stated:

The danger in the East remains, but a greater threatens to the West – the Anglo-Saxon landings. In the East, in the worst scenario, the vast size of the territory allows a loss of ground even on the large scale without delivering us a mortal blow. But it is different in the West!… It is there that the enemy has to attack, there – if we are not deceived – that the decisive landing battles will be fought.4

These battles, he told his Führer-conferences from the summer of 1943 onwards, would be decisive not only for the invasion itself, but for the outcome of the war. ‘We have to be on guard like a spider in his web,’ he said on 20 May 1943, adding, ‘Thank God, I have a good nose for such things and can usually anticipate these developments beforehand.’5 Enormous amounts of work had already been put into the German fortifications in