He considered the vicious underground counter insurgency of IRA ambush, Black and Tan reprisals and Auxiliary assassinations, ‘lowered their standards of decency and chivalry’ and was happy when the truce came. At the outbreak of the Second World War he commanded a Division in France in 1940 prior to Dunkirk (Operation Dynamo), was among the last of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), over 225,000 men, to be brought back across the English Channel – the last to be successfully evacuated on 4 June 1940 – leaving the Axis Powers to control the European continent and poised to invade England and Ireland. Major events since had propelled Monty to the fore in the war and so it was that Churchill handed him a copy of the COSSAC Plan for Operation Overlord to review.
‘Impracticable’, was his immediate verdict. The Allied assault needed to be strengthened and widened. His essential revisions included more troops, more space, the US and British troops to be kept separate, that there must be a port for each and the air battle to be won before the operation was launched. The ‘Plan’ needed to be reworked to allow for more troops on the initial landings and the invasion front be widened, from three to five beaches, and an additional air division was required.
The COSSAC Plan and its planners were to be absorbed in the SHAEF Plan, that of the newly established Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force under General Eisenhower. At the end of January 1944, having analysed and re-examined the COSSAC Plan in more detail, it was decided to put the invasion back one month to June 1944. This was not necessarily disadvantageous as it allowed for more of the vitally needed landing craft to be manufactured and crews trained. The COSSAC Plan had wisely taken into account what was available; the SHAEF Plan planned for what was needed, and Eisenhower had the authority to get it; the increased strength, ships and schedule (more time). Montgomery had stressed that the military strategic objective of Overlord was, after all, the main mission, that of attacking and neutralising the German military–industrial complex in the Rhine–Ruhr heartland. The question remained: by removing the ‘source of danger’, the means by which Germany waged war, would Hitler and the Germans be defeated? Operation Overlord would not end with a successful invasion onto northwestern Europe, but merely begin. So begin you must, as you mean to continue, and to continue the plan must include more men, more materials and greater width (attack the beaches on a broader front).
Armies work backwards. The wished-for outcome of operations, the desired ‘end state’, must be kept in mind from the very beginning; it is a necessity to decide the development of the operation before ever initiating action. In other words, you must know strategically what you wish to achieve – how tactically it is to come about – before you ever cross the ‘start line’. It is essential to relate what is strategically desirable to what is tactically possible with the forces at your disposal. Montgomery, reviewing the ‘COSSAC Plan’ in light of his experiences in the stern school of active fighting, made his revisions on the basis that the first need to be decided was how the operations on land were to be developed and then to work backwards from that to ensure that the Allies landed on the beaches in the way best suited to the needs of the achievement of the overall strategic objective.
There were those generals, British RAF Bomber Command’s Commander-in-Chief Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris and USAAF General Carl Spaatz among them, who believed firmly in the cause of independent air power and were also strong in the belief that the strategic objective could be achieved from the air alone and that Operation Overlord was therefore an unnecessary and likely costly risk. Instead, they wished to persist and indeed intensify the aerial bombing of Germany. Operation Pointblank, a specifically designed bombing campaign in support of and in advance of D-Day, diverted their attention and resources to hitting transport networks, railway junctions, stations and bridges over the Seine River to impede the reinforcement capability of the Germans to counter the Allied D-Day invaders.
The targets also included German aircraft manufacturing factories, in order to maintain the air superiority they enjoyed and remove any further German threat from the air on D-Day and thereafter. Harris and Spaatz remained unconvinced that the full weight of Allied air power should be made available to provide whatever support was required to the invasion efforts by their commanders, and General Eisenhower had to insist that Churchill direct that such be the case. Interestingly, when giving fighter support to Allied bombers during Pointblank, the US P-51 Mustang fighter, rejuvenated with the refitting of a Rolls Royce Merlin Engine (it was previously powered by the Allison engine), shot down so many of the Luftwaffe’s fighter interceptor aircraft – held back from the front but now having to deploy to defend targets specially selected to draw them out – that the Luftwaffe’s fighter and bomber air capability for D-Day, and particularly more so its pilots, was seriously decimated. Come 6 June 1944, very few German aircraft (318) and pilots were left and the air superiority identified by Montgomery as necessary for D-Day was achieved, albeit indirectly.
Prior to Operation Pointblank, RAF heavy bombers, sometimes up to a thousand British aircraft at a time, bombed the industrial complexes in Germany’s cities. The aim of this continued concentration of saturation ‘area bombing’ was to drive Germany to a state of devastation, to become dispirited and depleted to such an extent that surrender would be inevitable. Take out their industrial capacity to make war and they would have to make peace. At the same time, only at a much safer distance on the other side of the Atlantic, the American military–industrial machine was in full swing, having been cranked up to a great extent by Irish-American Henry Ford, whose father was from County Cork. Famed for introducing the use of moving assembly belts into his Model T car-manufacturing plants, this enabled an enormous increase in production to be realised. With this vertical integration, he developed mass assembly and revolutionised the manufacturing industry in America. If ever vast quantities of machines were needed in a hurry it was now. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor motivated Ford to begin a tremendous all-out manufacturing effort. In May 1942 in his giant Willow Run plant, Ford began to build and produce B-24 Liberator bombers on an assembly line a mile long at a rate of one plane per hour; with several hundred a month being produced. By the war’s end, nearly 90,000 (86,865) complete airplanes, plus 57,851 engines and 4,291 gliders, as well as engine superchargers and generators were produced, along with tanks, armoured cars, jeeps (‘Willys’) and trucks, among other war materials. In all the Allies were supplied with more than one million fighting vehicles from Ford Operations in the US, Canada, UK, India, South Africa and New Zealand. Engines for the British Mosquito and Lancaster Bombers were manufactured in Ford Plants in the United Kingdom.
Another Irish-American who contributed significantly to the war effort, through his crucial supply of the ‘Higgins boat’ landing craft, was New Orleans based Andrew Jackson Higgins. ‘Surprise’ would be provided by carefully chosen and orchestrated invasion location; ‘supplies’ by the huge military–industrial complex; and the third necessary element for success, ‘speed’, was provided by Higgins’s ‘Landing Craft, Vehicle and Personnel’ (LCVP). ‘He is the man who won the war for us,’ Eisenhower said in 1964. ‘If Higgins had not designed and built the LCVP, we never could have landed over an open beach. The whole strategy of the war would have been different.’ It had not always been possible to put men and materials onto beaches at speed, hence the Higgins boat design and development made it feasible to do so instead of having to land only at ports and harbours. Each boat could hold up to thirty-six infantry personnel or a number of tanks; the bow ramp development allowed them to disembark forward at speed. Over 23,000 boats were produced during the Second World War.
Of Irish ancestry, Higgins was characterised as the stereotypical straight-talking whiskey drinking ‘Irish’ man. Surprise, supplies and speed were regarded as essential elements to achieve success in the D-Day Plan, so that the Allied Troops going ashore could outmanoeuvre and overwhelm their German opponents. That they were able to land an overwhelming number of troops, tanks and equipment in the first few days especially, was due in no small measure