“The event of the year so far as the British Army is concerned is the re-entry into Europe from the West” said Sir James Grigg, Secretary of State for War, in introducing the Army estimates on March 13th 1945.
The following extracts from his speech give important details concerning the build up of the British Armies which help to explain the success of that great venture of war.
Few campaigns can ever have gone more “according to plan” than that of June, July and August, 1944.
I remember being present a month or six weeks before D .Day at a conference where the Land, Sea, and Air Commanders expounded their plans, and gave out their provisional orders….
At the end of his exposition Field Marshal (than General) Montgomery put on the wall a large map showing where he expected the Anglo Canadian American forces to be at D + 90. Somewhere about D + 80, I was visiting the General at his field H.Q….
The dispositions of the Allied Forces were almost exactly as they had appeared on the map I saw at the preview, but the position of the Germans was quite different.
They had stood and fought on the wrong side of the Seine, a great part of them had been destroyed in consequence, and the way was open for a rapid advance beyond the Seine to the very German border….
Normally it is not good policy to put a formation into the field unless there is a clear prospect of being able to provide enough reinforcements to keep it up to strength for as long as the operations are likely to last.
But the campaign which was to start in the summer of 1944 held the chance of complete and final victory….
We therefore decided to throw everything we could into the battle…
During this period of preparation we mounted and sustained offensives in North Africa and, after the destruction of the enemy there, we invaded Sicily in July of 1943 and Italy two months later.
These operations provided many lessons for the new venture and many new devices were specially produced for it.
And of course a great many old devices were developed and perfected…..
I must mention the Bailey Bridge, the Flail tanks ,the engineer assault tanks, the flame throwing tanks which Field Marshal Montgomery picks out as a particular success , self
Propelled anti tank guns and the special forms of anti tank ammunition.
Of the entirely new devices the most notable perhaps was the prefabricated harbour the “Mulberry” …….
A set of spare lock gates for the Caen canal were constructed and made ready to be floated over complete in case the Germans destroyed the existing gates.
And again spare parts and assemblies for the repair of vehicles damaged in the early days were packed in special cases such that the required part could be found in the dark and issued without delay….
Two million 24 hour rations, specially packed in waterproof covers, were issued in the period immediately after landing, together with three million cases of compo rations sixty million gallons of tinned petrol and sixteen thousand tons of coal packed in five hundred thousand special rot proof bags were got ready for early shipment.
Twenty thousand feet of railway bridging and twenty five thousand tons of steel trestling were prepared to reconstruct our supply lines as we advanced…..
In the last 14 days alone Ordnance Depots issued one hundred and fifty thousand miles of telephone cable and eleven million yards of minefield tracing tape….
Then began the movement to marshalling areas.
The marshalling camps, which had been constructed near to all ports of embarkation, were designed for two main purposes.
First they enabled the Movements staffs to sort out each unit into appropriate craft loads, and secondly ,they served as hotels where troops arriving and departing at all hours of the day and night could be fed, bathed, accommodated and supplied with all their last minute needs.
It was in these camps too, that the final stages of the waterproofing of vehicles were carried out.
In all one hundred and fiftythousand were waterproofed , and despite the fact that many of them went ashore through five feet of water in heavy seas, less than two in every thousand were drowned off the beaches….
By D – 8 the loading of stores into coasters had been completed and the berths were clear for the loading of the assault vessels.
The road convoys moved down the last few miles from marshalling areas to ports, and the craft were loaded in the order planned long beforehand to ensure that what was first needed on the other side would be first off….
The Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower directed that the assault should begin on June 6th ….
He vested the commend of all the ground forces engaged, of whatever nationality, in General Montgomery.
This was to continue until the number of U.S. troops engaged warranted their separate control by a U.S. Army Group Commander.
The assault began, therefore under General Montgomery’s direction in the early hours of June 6th…..
By June 10th the Allied Armies had won a continuous front along a narrow strip of the Normandy coast….
Generals Dempsey and Montgomery had already set up their Advanced H.Q.s ashore.
During this critical phase when we had no ports, our chief concern was to win what the Americans call the logistic battle….
The enemy’s build up was reduced because he couldn’t make up his mind what was coming next and also because of the success of the R.A.F. policy of interdiction.
Our own build up was successful because of our months and years of careful preparation…..
In the first fourteen days three hundred and ninety thousand men, seventy thousand vehicles and two hundred and thirty thousand tons of shores were landed for the British and Canadian forces alone, and the figures for the U.S. forces were of the same order.
The gales which raged round about June 18th delayed the build up and damaged the two Mulberries, one of them so badly that it was abandoned, but though it delayed it never interrupted and in the end the logistic battle was won…
Argentan was captured on August 13th the Canadians took Falaise on the 17th and to all intents and purposes the German 7th Army was hopelessly trapped.
The time had now come for the U.S. troops to pass from General Montgomery’s command, and he issued his last directive as Commander of all Allied land forces on August 20th……
[Sir James Grigg then described the campaign which in eight months took the Allies “from the wrong side of the Channel to the Rhine and beyond”]
Let me say a little about tanks….
First as regards guns.
The Royal Tiger, alone of the enemy’s tanks, mounts a gun a hotted up 88-mm, firing at 22 ½ lb shot, with a muzzle velocity of 3,340 feet per second, which has a penetrative performance superior to that of our 17 pounder firing conventional shot.
The standard 88-mm, mounted in the ordinary Tiger and the 75-mm, mounted in the Panther are both inferior weapons.
But the 17 pounder firing the latest type of ammunition surpasses the performance of any German gun yet encountered or, so far as I know, in contemplation.
Moreover, we have in action at lest five tanks mounting a 17 pounder for every Royal Tiger the Germans have on the Western Front.
Then as to armour, it is true that the frontal thickness of the Tigers and indeed of the Panther makes them all three formidable defensive war…
Field Marshal Montgomery himself thinks that British armour has come through the campaign in Western Europe with flying colours, and has proved itself superior in battle to German armour.
He holds that if Rundstedt had been equipped with British armour when he attacked in the Ardennes on December 16th, he would have reached the Meuse in 36 hours, which would have placed the Allies in a very awkward situation.
And further that if the 21st Army Group had been equipped with German armour it could not have crossed the Seine on August 28th, and reached Brussels on September 3rd and Antwerp on September 4th, thus cutting off the whole Pas de Calais area in eight days, which the Field Marshal holds to be a very remarkable achievement with far reaching results….
