And now we come to the last full chapter of the European War, a naval account of the invasion of France. I quite enjoyed this chapter, probably because, unlike so many other chapters, none of it felt rushed. There was good coverage of everything from the strategic background to Overlord and Anvil/Dragoon (and yes, you might claim that it went on a bit too long dumping on Churchill's opposition to the second one, but I am absolutely here for dumping on Churchill's screwups like that) to the logistics of the invasion and the action on the beaches. I also like that the Southern France invasion wasn't shortchanged as it so often is in discussions of the European War. Normandy was undoubtedly important, but I'm not sure I've ever seen it undercovered in any history of WWII ever.
Beyond that, the only thing of particular interest in this chapter was Morison's point about the ways in which the different logistical situations of the Americans and British drove their approaches to planning. I had never quite put that together before, but it does make a lot of sense of why there was tension between the two sides over how much planning needed to happen and when.
Also, a couple of brief notes. First, Arkansas was firing 12", not 14", and I also think Morison underrates how difficult the fighting was for some of the British troops on June 6th. But that's about it, although I am reminded that I should look more into the coastal gun battles during this period.
Comments
Montgomery was wholly opposed to Anvil. I do not recall reading anything about Churchill being against, so I know nothing of that.
You seem in favour of Anvil. Can I ask you to enlarge upon that?
Simple. It got more troops into the battle in France more quickly. The major bottleneck in Normandy from like June 8th on was port capacity, so we couldn't simply put the troops used during Anvil into that beachhead. But they could clear Marseilles, which let them be supplied separately, and join in the drive to the Rhine. I'm guessing Monty hated it because it was something he wasn't in charge of, and Churchill didn't like it because it was somewhere sensible and not in the Balkans.
Montgemory wrote in his memoir he opposed it as it was unnecessary, the advance through France was doing just fine already, and because it swung the center of gravity south, and I think he argued center of gravity should be north, to break into north German plain, to force mobile warfare onto the Germans.
I think that more or less confirms my analysis of his motives. His version implicitly assumes that the Allies had a more or less fixed amount of force they could deploy in any configuration they chose, which is obvious nonsense to anyone who has studied the campaign in Western Europe in 1944. The units that were in the north were badly handicapped by lack of supplies, and cancelling Anvil wouldn't have helped that very much because the bottleneck was ports and roads. So at this point, he's complaining about other people drawing off some Germans because they weren't under his command.
(Yeah, I am not a fan of Monty. He certainly had his virtues as a commander, but his ego was MacArthurian in scale.)
I'm not familiar in detail with the number of troops available for deployment into Europe after D-Day, but I have read that by late 1944 the Americans had over-long deployments in the line due to lack of infantry (I recall here also a direct comment on this from Eisenhower, regarding Hurtgen Forest) and looking to the German late 1944 Ardennes offensive, I understand there were only two divisions in reserve, the two airborne divisions. This seems, as far as it goes, to indicate a shortage of infantry by this time. I've also read that by the time of Market Garden, the Brits had fully mobilized their population, and were disbanding units to fill gaps. All this thought was later than Anvil.
This may be so, but at least as far as his memoirs are concerned (and it would be a very rare author would admit to such a thing in their own memoirs :-), he argued for a thrust into the northern German plain, which on the face of it, seems not unreasonable - he wrote that the Germans were by this unable to engage in mobile warfare, and so it must then be that mobile warfare was forced upon them.
So far as it goes, regarding Anvil as something which took the focus away from the northern thrust would be consistent with that thought.
This sort of thing is why I am often suspicious of memoirs. Monty got his chance to try to do a breakthrough onto the North German plain. It was called Market Garden, and I don't think its failure can be traced to Anvil.
Amazon doesn't seem to have any books about naval gunfight support during WWII. There are a number of manuals out there and a couple of books written more at the operational level.
There are several ship histories out there that do cover naval gunfight support during WWII at the ship level with a little more detail about the results of their gunfire. Silver State Dreadnought (USS Nevada) by Stephen Younger covers the USS Nevada at D-Day, Southern France and the Pacific Battleship Texas by Lawrence Burr covers the same as above, but with less detail, but it's a much shorter book. Warspite by Iain Ballantyne has maybe a chapter of HMS Warspite, patched up after the hit by a German X bomb, supporting D-Day and other gun actions. HMS Rodney by Iain Ballantyne is similar to the above.
@Chantry
That was less "I don't have books" and more "I should read the books I have". There's Delivering Destruction, which is actually about gunfire support, and, as you identify, Silver State Dreadnought. I have both. As for Lawrence Burr, no, I will not buy anything by him because I am unconvinced that he has any advantage over what I can do myself.
@Bean
Battleship Texas by Lawrence Burr isn't great, it was mostly a "this is what the USS Texas did" and maybe 96 pages long, but I think it was on sale. Silver State Dreadnought was pretty good. Warspite & Rodney were better than Texas, but not as good as Nevada.
I couldn't get into Delivering Destruction. Apparently it was the expansion of the author's doctoral thesis and much more of an overview of gunfire support, very little from the individual or ship perspective.
I was most struck by the almost juvenile manner in which Morrison dismisses the British opinion about shipping, men, and material in the first half dozen or so paragraphs of this chapter.
It almost seems to be a microcosm of an opinion held by a bunch of people back in the day that the Brits didn't know or understand logistics, which is an absolutely idiotic idea, given that they'd just spent 3 years being very concerned about having to ship around Africa rather than going through Suez and the Med. It appears to me to be a very immature attack on them, and it detracted from the chapter for me.
Also detracting from the chapter was the appearance of the next batch of photos. I understand that Morrison had nothing to do with the placement of the photos, and it was entirely based on and due to the nature of the publishing industry in the 60's, but it was still something that took me out of the narrative, because a bunch of the photos were completely unrelated to the chapter we were in the middle of.
Belushi TD
I can sort of see what you're saying, but I also think he might be pointing to something real that is less derogatory towards the British. Normandy was unlike any other landing in history in the need to build up lots of forces very quickly, and the US was much less able than the British to be flexible in what forces it put across the channel in the first month or two for simple reasons of geography. There was probably also some philosophical difference, and on that front, I'm actually not sure that the US was right, given our experience with rapidly-planned amphibious operations in the Pacific. But those were also smaller, and done by teams which had done lots of landings before.
Between Monty and MacArthur: Who was was more overrated contemporaneously, and who is more overrated today?
I think it depends on which side of the Atlantic you're on.
At the time? Yes.
Today? MacArthur still has defenders on this side of the pond, for some reason. Montgomery's biographers by contrast seem more willing to acknowledge that he was not, in fact, Ares incarnate.
Upon further reflection...
Each of Mac and Monty earned sacking for insubordination at least once, and were saved only by political considerations. Also, both men were incredibly arrogant, and treated allied forces with disrespect bordering on contempt. In Mac's favor, he did adopt the very successful "bypass and strangle" strategy in New Guinea, and Inchon was a masterstroke; it's hard to pick out any achievements on a comparable scale for Monty (though he does seem to have done very well in divisional command during the German invasion of the Low Countries). So maybe Monty was the more overrated at the time.
I stand by Mac being more overrated today.
(I mean to say that they each earned sacking for insubordination alone at least once. Whether either or both should have been sacked for their performance at various stages of the war is open to argument; I lean toward Yes for both, but there are other schools of thought.)