Yesterday I saw a film on TV, which is not new, depicting the events leading to the liberation of Europe and the battles up to Christmas 1944.

To anybody not familiar with the facts, and that means most people nowadays, the impression is given and is intended to be given that it was an American operation, whereas the forces engaged at the outset were evenly balanced. Whilst the Supreme Commander was the American General Eisenhower the General in command of the invading army was the British General Bernard Law Montgomery. He appears fleetingly in the film presenting a medal to an American Serviceman.

An American airborne drop on the Cherbourg peninsular overnight on June 5^th-6^th is mentioned. Whatever the plan was two Airborne Divisions were dropped, in darkness, all over the Cotentin Peninsular. Many of the men fell on a small French town, some landing on roofs, some caught up on telegraph poles and other projections where they were left hanging helpless. One film dramatising the event shows one parachutist dropping directly into a well. True or false, in the madness of war, some people have luck of that kind.

The landing of a substantial glider force is represented by a number of abandoned gliders on the ground. This was a British operation but is not so described. It is stated that they arrived after the beach assault whereas they were in fact part of the initial assault, landing in darkness, and aimed at the bridges over the River Orne which they seized.

Most is made of the horrendous casualties suffered by American infantry in attempting and eventually succeeding in landing on Omaha beach.

No mention is made of the fact that the Airborne drop was an expensive fiasco. Their drop was so scattered that they were not able to coalesce into the formidable fighting force they were supposed to be. Ste Mère Église is etched on the memory of many American families. As a result the port of Cherbourg, which had been the objective, was not taken until late in July. Fortunately the detailed planning for Operation Overlord had included two artificial harbours. Of these only the one constructed in the British sector survived a violent storm which happened during the construction. This Mulberry harbour, as extensive as Dover, was the conduit through which tens of thousands of men and vehicles and untold tonnages of supplies of all kinds flowed to military units, both US and British, until late in the year.

There is no mention of the fact that American infantrymen were launched from the sea against defences which had not been degraded by prior bombardment, although this was standard practice and had been planned. Wherever the blow fell it was not on the defences which the American infantry encountered. The support they expected from swimming tanks, so valuable elsewhere, was not available. Instead of taking them in close, at some risk, they were launched into a choppy sea some miles out and all sank. Given the nature of the defences they would have saved countless lives had they been properly managed. Did somebody have the wrong beach?

There is no mention of successful landings further east by two British Divisions and one Canadian. For the record six British battalions and the Canadians successfully captured the 3 beaches assigned to them. The 50^th Northumbrian Division, which was the only experienced unit in the whole operation, was led ashore by the 5^th Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment, the 6^th Battalion of the Green Howards, the 1^st Battalion of the Dorsets and the 1^st battalion of the Hampshires. The 2^nd British Infantry Division was led ashore by the 2^nd Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment and the 2^nd Battalion of the South Lancashire Regiment. They were accompanied by 47 Marine Commando which was tasked with silencing a coastal battery.

The two battalions with which I am familiar, the 5^th East Yorkshire and the 6^th Green Howards, each sustained some 300 casualties on the beach, dead and wounded. That figure has to be set against the fact that in an infantry battalion of the time the assault riflemen numbered 500. The amazing thing is that the assaulting force was so small. On the 50 Division front of 4 battalions 2,000 men breached the vaunted Atlantic wall at a cost of 1,200 of their number, and not all of them dead. Of course they were supported by the full panoply of naval gunnery but more especially by ancillary units like swimming tanks and flail tanks which beat a safepath through barbed wire and minefields.All played their assigned role in the planned attack which went, as military plans do, not quite as expected but effective in the end.The losses at Omaha were many times more and that is only counting the dead.

By nightfall the light infantry of 50 Division (the Durhams) were 8 miles inland in the outskirts of Bayeux which the Germans evacuated during the night. Bayeux was occupied the next morning without the devastation which occurred elsewhere.

Only one British military unit is depicted in extenso. A battalion of the Shropshire Light Infantry is shown as consisting of 18 and 19 years olds, as indeed much of the British Army was, and as the cemeteries testify. To any experienced soldier their behaviour must seem somewhat inept as perhaps was intended.

Raking over old bones in this way is rather distasteful and not something I would engage in were it not for this blatant attempt to write the British out of the most important event of the 20^th Century.

The United States contributed vast quantities of equipment and eventually large numbers of men to the liberation of Europe. One of the things French civilians, who had become accustomed to seeing the German Army, commented on was the vast amount of material the allies possessed. Militarily they contributed a catastrophic airborne operation and a disaster at Omaha beach converted into a tragedy by the heroism of thousands of ordinary men who died to redeem failure. It did not end there.

Following upon the destruction of the German Army in France, to which American forces contributed considerably as the encircling force looping round from the west, its hardware trapped in the Falaise pocket, a headlong pursuit of fleeing remnants was in progress. General Eisenhower, by then having assumed full command in the field of what was becoming a predominantly American force, called off the pursuit.

Petrol supplies were a problem. They were still coming across the beach in jerrycans hundreds of miles back. Eisenhowers's argument was that because there was insufficient petrol for the whole army to move forward everybody must stand still. That was an error. Although petrol had to travel a long way to the front the supply had not been interrupted. It would have been possible and desirable to sustain harrying probes on a narrow front north and south.

As a result the British Army, which faced no opposition, was halted on the Albert Canal although men on the ground knew from the locals that there were no German units remaining in Belgium. The German High Command, if nothing else, understood soldiering. They were given time to restore control, to cobble together a chain of command and to make the best use of what resources they had. As a result when Montgomery was belatedly given the go ahead for his ill conceived Operation Market Garden it was subjected to fatal delay, whereas three weeks earlier much slighter forces would have been unopposed.

The most dangerous event however, in which American involvement underlined the extent to which they could be a liability, came in the so called Battle of the Bulge. In the film this, not unsurprisingly, is massively misrepresented in an attempt to rewrite history.

The story that is told is of the heroic defence by the 101^st American Airborne Division of Bastogne thus denying to the Germans use of a confluence of roads. Undoubtedly this was an episode of which any unit could be proud but it was not all.

What happened was that in unbelievably bad winter weather before Christmas 1944 the German Army launched a surprise blitzkrieg through the Ardennes Forest against the American line.  Faced with this onslaught the American line broke in panic and confusion leaving the way open to the coast. Had the Panzer army reached the coast it would have severed allied supply lines which still stretched back to the Mulberry harbour in Normandy, the British Army in Holland would have been isolated and the outcome of the war in the west might have been radically different.

That this final desperate throw failed, but only just, can be ascribed to a number of factors. First of all luck in that the weather lifted and allied air supremacy was able to be deployed against the marauding panzers. Secondly, decisive and unpopular action by General Montgomery in dropping a parachute division (6^th Airborne) in the path of the panzers  to form a defensive line on the River Meuse at the same time as he took command of American units on the British side of the bulge and co ordinated them in a cohesive defence. Then there was the old problem of logistics. It appears that the German High Command had counted on overrunning fuel supplies or reaching them somewhere. This did not happen so the momentum of the attack was lost and time was given to an equally capable commander to take defensive action and for the rot to be stopped. It was the most dangerous episode in the whole campaign and our American allies were found wanting.
 
They never forgave Montgomery for daring to take command of shattered American forces and imposing order where there was chaos.

This is not generally the story told in the film D-Day. Its inaccuracy should not go unremarked.

Footnote:

The assessment by British soldiery at large of their American allies is illustrated by an army order issued by 21^st Army Group during the Normandy campaign. At this distance in time I am not able to vouch for the precise wording but it was to the following effect.            

"The use of the abbreviation US to signify unserviceable or useless will cease forthwith. With immediate effect it will be replaced by the letters UF signifying unfit."

This occasioned considerable amusement at a time when there was not a lot to laugh about.