Category Archives: Second World War

Arts, Books, History, Second World War

Book Review – Normandy ’44: D-Day And The Battle For France

REVIEW

Intro: Astonishingly, the casualty rate of D-Day was even higher than the Somme – just one of the insights in a devastating new account of the horror of the Normandy campaign 75 years ago.

THE D-Day landings 75 years ago spark a concoction of emotions – pride and awe at the courage and heroism; despair and grief at the sacrifice of so many young lives; and, incomprehension.

What was it really like to step out on to those deadly beaches on June 6? The tale is best told by those who lived to tell it.

The aptly named Sergeant Bob Slaughter leapt from a landing craft into 6ft of water as a hail of German artillery and gunfire from the clifftop above tore into his platoon.

“Good men screamed as bullets ripped into soft flesh and others screamed as the fierce, flooding tide dragged the non-swimmers under.”

As he struggled to the beach, a body floated by, the face already of a deep purple colour.

Corporal Walter Halloran managed to reach dry land and simply ran for his life, ducking and weaving to minimise the risk of being killed.

“If you stopped to help someone who’d been hit, then there were two casualties, not one, because the moment you stopped moving you got shot,” he said.

American war correspondent Ernie Pyle witnessed the terrible aftermath when he landed the next day and waded ashore, amid shattered corpses floating in the water. His powerful description echoes down the years.

“Strewn all over those bitter sands,” he wrote, “were submerged tanks and overturned boats, burned trucks and shell-shattered Jeeps and sad little personal belongings” – toothbrushes, a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it and even a tennis racket.

“Lying in rows were the bodies of soldiers, covered with blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in a line as though on drill.”

Here was “a shoreline museum of carnage” and the waste of it all appalled him, even though, after nearly five years of war, it was the necessary first step in liberating Europe from the grip of the Nazis.

Voices such as these are one of the standout strengths of James Holland’s impressive new account of D-Day and the Allies’ subsequent, long drawn-out battle to secure a foothold in Normandy.

Not that he stints on the bigger picture. Seasoned World War II historian that he is, Holland is extremely knowledgeable when it comes to military matters.

The reader is in safe hands navigating each aspect of this complex campaign – from the glider and parachute drops inland with which it began, to the bloody struggles on Omaha, Utah, Sword, Juno and Gold (the five beaches) and beyond.

He reads the minds of the generals, their tactics, their blunders – on both sides.

 

AND he examines the strategic context – the importance of air power in softening up the enemy and destroying vital infrastructures such as the roads and railways that might otherwise have rushed reinforcements to the front line; the Navy’s role in making the invasion possible in the first place.

He praises the enormous achievement of getting 132,000 men over the Channel on that first day alone, then topping up their numbers to a staggering two million in the coming weeks, providing the weight of manpower to make victory certain, however great the human cost.

He approves of the methodical way in which the British, American and Canadian Allies went about their business – building up their strength of men and arms to the point where defeat was virtually impossible, consolidating their gains, rather than rushing ahead, ensuring supply lines of weapons, fuel and food were in place.

It may have been a much less dashing form of warfare than the gung-ho Blitzkrieg mentality of the Germans, but, in the conditions of 1944 (as opposed to 1940, when Hitler’s armies overran large swathes of Europe), was so much more effective.

But what drives Holland’s narrative – and puts his account of the Normandy campaign at least on a par with doyens in the field such as Antony Beevor and Max Hastings – are the memories, in their own words, of scores of those at the sharp end.

Their individual stories, seamlessly woven in, makes this a Bayeux Tapestry of a book. All human life – and, more pointedly, death – is there.

“Bugger!” yelled the gentlemanly paratrooper Lieutenant Richard Todd, in pain as his canopy opened and a rope cut into his hand on the very first drop into France at 2am on D-Day to seize a strategic canal bridge.

Undaunted, he sneaked up on an enemy machine gun nest with his commanding officer and wiped it out.

There are men like gunner Lance Corporal Ken Tout in his tank, toe-to-toe with 20 camouflaged German Panzers in a grim firefight outside the town of Saint-Aignan as the Allies fought their way through the impenetrable bocage, the high hedges, small fields and narrow lanes of Normandy. Inside the belly of the tank, he desperately traversed the turret, trying to arrow in on the enemy, and “the day degenerates into chaos, noise, flame, smoke, grilling sunshine, stinking sweat, searing fear, billowing blast, and our tank shuddering and juddering even as it stands still on the exposed, so exposed crest of a ridge”.

A German shell flashed past. Missed by inches!

Tout returned fire: there was a puff of smoke, a shape jerking backwards among the trees, then thick black smoke tinged with flame. “The Panzer was dead.”

When he got to the crumpled German tank, he saw the commander leaning out of the turret – just the top half of him, it turned out. His entire bottom half had been eviscerated.

Earlier in the campaign, as they advanced towards Caen, he and his colleagues had, out of curiosity, clambered on the burnt-out wreck of a German tank and peeked inside, where what remained of the crew still sat, blackened and wizened.

“The roasting of human flesh and the combustion of ammunition and the defecation of a million voracious flies,” he recalled, “created an aura of such sense-assaulting horror that we recoiled.”

It could just as easily have been their tank that “brewed up”, such was the haphazard nature of the vicious conflict in which they were engaged – and that realisation only added to the horror.

 

HOLLAND counts the grim cost of D-Day and the Normandy campaign – 209,000 Allied casualties out of two million who crossed the Channel; up to 20,000 French dead, mainly from Allied bombing; 300,000 German soldiers killed, wounded, missing or captured – more than half of those who fought.

Over the 76 days of the battle, the daily casualty rate averaged out at 6,870, making it worse, he notes, than the Somme, Passchendaele and Ypres in World War I, which are usually cited as benchmarks for wanton slaughter.

Holland concludes: “It was a terrible battle, and what followed until the final surrender in May 1945 was every bit as horrific.

“Yet out of this tragedy, a better world did emerge. We must look after it and remember how easily we can throw this haven back into turmoil.”

– Normandy ’44: D-Day And The Battle For France by James Holland is published by Bantam Press/Penguin Books for £25, 720pp

Standard
Arts, Books, Britain, History, Second World War

Book Review – Arnhem: The Battle For The Bridges, 1944

REVIEW

This book, written in Beevor’s inimitable and gripping narrative style, is about much more than a single dramatic battle. It looks into the very heart of war. And, why, the Battle of Arnhem was so very wrong from the outset.

EVERY time a paratrooper in Britain’s airborne regiments goes to the stores to pick up his parachute as a prelude to going into action, it’s handed over with the same old corny gallows-humour banter – ‘Bring it back if it doesn’t work and we’ll exchange it.’

You could apply the same logic to the Parachute Regiment’s most famous World War II mission: the abortive attempt to capture from the Germans the bridge over the Rhine at the town of Arnhem in the north-east of the Netherlands in the autumn of 1944.

It spectacularly did not work – and, once it got under way, there was no chance of exchanging it for one that did.

In ten days of blood-letting battles along a 65-mile axis, thousands of men needlessly died, were wounded or taken prisoner, while afterwards, the Dutch people, who aided the British, were savagely punished by their Nazi occupiers with summary executions and deliberate starvation of the entire population.

Others you might also like:

. Book Review: ‘Secret Pigeon Service’ 

. Book Review: Birth of the RAF (& Gallery)

Arnhem – codenamed Operation Market Garden – was never the partial victory that deluded and self-serving British top brass, headed by the vainglorious Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, always claimed it to be. It was a military disaster and had been one in the making from its very inception.

The idea was to catch Hitler unawares by invading Germany through the back door. But the plan was so full of holes that, like a defective parachute, it was never going to float.

 

THERE was much heroism, narrated in this absorbing new account of the battle with the eye for telling personal detail that we have come to expect from Antony Beevor. A British soldier hurls himself from the first-floor window of a house on to a German tank in an attempt to drop a grenade into the turret, but is shot down in mid-air.

There is much poignant suffering, too, endured bravely. A teenage recruit croaks the opening bars of God Save The King as he lies dying in hospital and those around him try to stand to attention in their beds until he falls silent.

At Arnhem bridge itself, where the advance party of Paras – outnumbered and battered by German tanks – hung on for four days in the vain hope of a relief column arriving, one soldier’s jet-black hair turned white with stress.

And there is much horror, epitomised by an officer in the thick of it who saw ‘Mervyn with his arm hanging off, Angus clinging to the grass in his agony and a soldier running across an opening, the quick crack and the surprised look as he clutched his neck and then convulsed as more bullets hit him.

‘I only hope the sacrifice that was ours will have achieved something – yet I feel it hasn’t.’

He was dead right. It all proved pointless. As Beevor scathingly makes clear, this was not just ‘a bridge too far’, the much-quoted epithet about Arnhem which suggests laudable over-ambition. This was a campaign that should never have been launched in the first place. One can understand the mood that encouraged it. Since D-Day, there had been months of hard fighting in Normandy before, in August, the Allied forces broke out and raced through France, with the Germans in full retreat.

But over-enthusiasm allied to war-weariness should have given way to good military sense and probably would have done if Monty had not felt slighted by the ascendancy of Eisenhower and the other American generals and been determined to put on his own tally-ho show.

With Allied forces massed in southern Holland, he proposed a dramatic thrust to the north-east, dropping airborne troops – consisting of parachutists and soldiers in gliders – behind enemy lines to seize strategic bridges and hold them until the tanks and land troops advancing overland caught up with them.

With Arnhem (the furthest away) under their belts, they could spill out into Germany itself. Next stop Berlin and goodbye Hitler.

But there was a basic flaw, as the Dutch Prince Bernhard, knowing the geography of his own country, warned Monty. It could take for ever to get those tanks 65 miles up a narrow road with water meadows on either side, rather than the two days Monty thought possible, leaving those paratroopers up ahead at risk of being stranded. The prince was ignored, as were all the other naysayers. Optimism (and Monty’s egocentricity) triumphed over reality.

It might just have succeeded if every component of the plan had worked. But, in practice, blunder after blunder compounded the original conceptual error.

The fundamental concept defied military logic, Beevor writes, because it made no allowance for anything to go wrong, nor for the enemy’s likely reaction.

Yet, as the operation collapsed into ignominy, surrender and retreat, stuffed-shirt British generals such as Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning looked round for excuses and shamefully criticised a Polish brigade to divert attention from their own failings.

It was typical of the arrogance behind the whole unfortunate Arnhem episode.

Casualty figures were colossal. Of 12,000 airborne soldiers who went into battle, 1,500 were killed and 6,500, many of them badly wounded, were taken prisoner. Only a third made it home.

In some units, the attrition was even greater. The 4th Parachute Brigade started out for Arnhem with more than 2,000 soldiers and returned with just nine officers and 260 other ranks.

Strong men wept when they saw how many of their comrades were not coming back – all the more so when they realised how little, if anything, had been gained by their sacrifice.

This, indeed, was a case of lions led by donkeys. As for its consequences, it was not just that the mission failed dismally in the boast of its instigators that it would shorten the war by six months. Hardest of all to swallow is that it worsened the fate of the people of the Netherlands, who were subjected in the aftermath to Nazi vengeance.

The town of Arnhem was evacuated at gunpoint, its entire population forced to leave on foot with what little they could carry, before it was looted and reduced to rubble and ashes.

In Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the other major cities, food supplies were withdrawn, and the population lived – or, rather, died – through the harsh winter of 1944-45 on a diet of sugar beet and thin air.

Emaciated bodies lay in the streets as the death toll rose to 20,000. Thousands of resistance fighters and hostages were executed in a vicious security clampdown. This was the unseen cost of Arnhem and the author counts it out with unconcealed dismay.

But there is inevitably a noticeable change in tone from his previous much-acclaimed World War II histories on Stalingrad, D-Day and the fall of Berlin.

The uplifting drama of these was their part in the Allied road to victory. It put the undoubted horror in a sort of perspective; made some sense of the slaughter.

This time, though, he turns his adept craft as a military historian to a subject of not just defeat, but dunderheaded stupidity.

It will likely leave most readers horrified and deeply downhearted at the unnecessary waste of it all.

– Arnhem: The Battle For The Bridges, 1944 by Antony Beevor is published by Viking for £25

Standard
Arts, Books, Britain, History, Second World War

Book Review: ‘Secret Pigeon Service’

REVIEW

Intro: How our intrepid pigeons went to war to send back Nazi plans to Churchill – and why, despite top brass doubters, dropping them behind enemy lines wasn’t so bird-brained after all.

GORDON COREA tells a true story that is likely to make you gasp on every page. Once this book has been read you’ll never look at a pigeon disdainfully again. In fact, you might even feel the urge to go straight to Trafalgar Square to pay homage to the species. Some readers might find themselves muttering, again and again, the World War II expression: ‘It’s too fantastic.’

This is the story of the bravery and single-mindedness of both humans and pigeons. It throws light on all kind of facets of World War II, from the realities of life inside occupied Europe and the canny evils of the Nazi regime, to the well-meaning, but blundering, chaos of the British intelligence system, and the generosity and charm of the British pigeon-fancying fraternity.

The most astonishing thing of all, on which the story is based, is that homing pigeons (columba livia, to use their Latin name) can fly back to their home loft in any suburban location, from an unknown field in the middle of Belgium, in six-and-a-half hours. Exactly how they find their way is still a bit of a mystery to scientists.

But when reading this book, you’re constantly thinking about what it must be like to be a pigeon on its own in a gale above the churning North Sea, miles from both shores. It knows only that it must get home and has no idea that it’s carrying vital intelligence written on a tiny square of rice paper rolled up inside a cylinder attached to its ankle.

Pigeons had been used in warfare before – they were sent out in balloons during the Siege of Paris, and in World War I they flew 15 or 20 miles across the front lines.

But this cross-Channel scheme was of a whole new order. It needed an eccentric to dream up such a plan, and in this case the visionary eccentric was an alcoholic veteran spy called Rex Pearson, who was at a loose end after being sacked from his intelligence job in Switzerland.

He saw the potential of dropping pigeons in cages, with tiny parachutes, from planes flying 30,000 feet above gardens in occupied Belgium and Holland.

The cages would contain a questionnaire in Dutch, Flemish and French, a pencil, and a small bag of pigeon feed. MI6 were sceptical of the idea, seeing this as an ‘outmoded’ method of warfare. As Corera punningly quips: ‘Pigeons were low down the pecking order of intelligence requirements.’

 

BUT Pearson persisted, and the Army eventually gave permission for a small ‘Special Section (Carrier Pigeon)’ team to start Operation Columba from the bowels of the War Office, where the eccentrics in charge had a ‘Heil den Fuhrer!’ poster of Hitler on the wall, for reasons of dark humour it can only be assumed.

No Frederick Forsyth thriller could be as gripping as this real-life story. With his pigeon-like instinct for homing in on an individual human story, the author leads us to a small farmhouse deep inside occupied Belgium, and to the Debaillie family. In July 1941, they found one of the Columba’s parachuted pigeons in their back garden.

What should they do? If they were caught sending messages to Britain, their lives would be in danger.

Corera utilises ‘parable of the sower’ cadences to sum up what happened to dropped pigeons: some were lost in planes shot down; some were handed in to the police, some fell straight into enemy hands, some were eaten by hungry locals, and some were taken by hawks.

Every now and then, however, a pigeon came into the hands of true ‘patriots’ willing to take the risk of sending a message back to Britain. It’s painful to relate the stark statistic that out of 16,554 birds dropped between 1941 and 1944, only one in ten made it home.

But this one did. The message, on both sides of a four-inch-square piece of rice paper, is reproduced in the book. It was known as ‘Message 37’, sent by the Debaillie family’s small band of patriots who called themselves ‘Leopold Vindictive’.

SPS3

Carrier pigeons were trained by soldiers to send messages back home.

This message was a thing of such lovingly detailed beauty, revealing the exact positions of German military installations, that it was shown to Winston Churchill, who hailed it as symbolic of the spirit of resistance alive inside occupied Europe.

The man who created the message was a bearded priest called Father Joseph Raskin who, as the book progresses, becomes more and more of a saint – almost a Dietrich Bonhoeffer figure.

Corera (a fully trained investigative journalist) visited and interviewed the descendants of the Debaillie family, and we can see a photograph of them holding the pigeon just before they released it with its message attached.

They knew the pigeon arrived safely because, listening illegally to their radio set, they heard the BBC’s coded message: ‘Leopold Vindictive, the key fits the lock, and the bird is in the lion’s cage.’

If only the whole book were a catalogue of mini-successes like that one. But thanks to a mixture of human error, spies who lost heart, and the refusal of rival sections of the British intelligence service to speak to one another, the story all too soon turns into one of missed opportunities and failed missions.

Raskin was desperate to repeat this message-sending, but he waited in vain for more pigeons.

Some did land, but they were too far away to be found.

Raskin’s desperation was so acute that he took many risks, joining up with other Belgian spy networks so that when the Germans arrested one spy they were easily able to ‘roll up’ the whole network – including Raskin.

The scene where this happens makes almost unbearable reading. Nevertheless, Operation Columba grew in stature as the war went on, and MI6 grudgingly admitted how useful homing pigeons could be. Hundreds of Allied lives were saved by pigeon-borne intelligence.

British pigeon-fanciers from Ipswich to Plymouth who gave up their pigeons for war use were heroes, but the pigeons were the greatest heroes of all.

Take 11-month-old Billy, for instance, who, when his bomber crew crash-landed in France in 1942, delivered his message the next day in a state of collapse. He had flown through a gale-driven snowstorm back to the RAF station in Lincolnshire.

As well as human double-agents, there were pigeon double-agents. Germans put their pigeons into Columba cages so that message intended for London found their way to a German loft, thus exposing ‘traitors’.

Patriots became terrified of ‘Gestapo pigeons’ posing as British birds. Germans, in turn, became terrified of British ‘phoney pigeons’ disguised as German pigeons, with German rings on them.

These would be sent to Britain with a German agent and then fly home to their British loft, bearing useful intelligence.

And wait for the American pigeons, who started arriving in ships in 1942. Handsome well-fed American pigeons started cross-breeding with scrawnier British pigeons, just as handsome GIs did with British girls.

The Americans developed the useful ‘pigeon bra’, which made it easier for soldiers parachuted into foreign fields to carry birds on their person.

For an agent parachuting into occupied Europe, it was a great comfort to release your pigeon and watch it fly off homewards with a message that you’d landed safely.

Corera’s gripping book is an intoxicating mixture of comedy and high seriousness.

A warning: it contains a moment of horrific Nazi violence, or, as they would call it, ‘justice’, that you won’t forget.

– Secret Pigeon Service by Gordon Corera is published by William Collins for £20

Standard