9

Overlord

After the successful summit with Roosevelt at Casablanca in January 1943 (from the British perspective at any rate), Churchill flew to Turkey, where he tried to persuade President Inonu to join the Allied war effort, without success. He then went on to inspect a victory parade of the 8th Army in Tripoli. After all the upsets of the war in North Africa, Churchill found this celebration very emotional and tears ran down his face. He then flew on to Algeria before returning to London after another long flight in the primitive Liberator bomber. When he got back to Paddington Station, thirteen ministers headed by Attlee, Eden and Bevin turned out to welcome him on the platform. He had been away for twenty-six days. Within a week of his return, he had been struck down with pneumonia. He was largely out of action for another month but, despite the illness, he continued to dictate minutes. General Brooke, who had been travelling with Churchill, was himself struck down with influenza for two weeks. Both men’s illnesses are a sign of the strain they were under during these intense meetings abroad and the long, gruelling and sometimes dangerous travel involved.

By mid-March, Churchill was fighting fit again and back in control. But he still had to wait for the breakthrough in North Africa. Hitler had decided to reinforce his troops in Tunisia, and the battle to evict the German and Italian armies was progressing far more slowly than planned. Rommel was fighting a superb campaign of withdrawal. The raw American troops suffered a severe setback at the Kasserine Pass in February, and it took several weeks for their advance to pick up momentum again. Churchill once more tried to whip on his commanders and sent off a missive complaining about the ‘many factors of safety’ that were creeping into operational plans, which meant they were ‘ceasing to be capable of making any form of aggressive war’.¹ As always, he called for his soldiers, sailors and airmen to take an aggressive line. In March, Montgomery broke through the German defences known as the ‘Mareth Line’. And, finally, the following month, the American armies advancing eastwards met up with the 8th Army advancing westwards. The Axis forces were now surrounded and the Allied armies edged forward towards the city of Tunis, the site of Rommel’s last stand in North Africa.

In early May, Churchill once again felt the need to cross the Atlantic with his Chiefs of Staff for another Washington conference. Planning for the invasion of Sicily, agreed at Casablanca, had fallen behind. Eisenhower sent a note to the Combined Chiefs of Staff saying that if there were more than two German divisions in Sicily, the landings might have to be postponed. Churchill erupted. He wrote to his Chiefs of Staff: ‘If the presence of two German divisions is held to be decisive against any operation of an offensive or amphibious character open to the million men now in French North Africa, it is difficult to see how the war can be carried on.’ He fumed against these ‘pusillanimous and defeatist doctrines’ and ended by asking ‘what Stalin would think of this when he has 185 German divisions on his front’.²

Churchill was worried that there might be months during the summer when the Anglo-American armies would be fighting no Germans at all, while Stalin and the Red Army were engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the bulk of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Furthermore, it seemed to the British Chiefs of Staff that the Americans were directing more landing craft and supplies away from the European theatre and towards the Pacific. Churchill and his entourage, along with the Chiefs of Staff, sailed on the Queen Mary, the giant Cunard passenger ship that for several years pre-war had held the record as the fastest across the Atlantic but had now been requisitioned for war work. En route, Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff planned strategy. As they crossed the Atlantic, news came through of the final dramatic victory of the American and British armies in Tunisia. Rommel had got away but nine generals and about 240,000 men had been captured. Churchill ordered the church bells in England to be rung again, for the second time to mark a great victory.

Outwardly, the two weeks of meetings in Washington in May, code-named ‘Trident’, were a success. But yet again there were serious divisions not far below the surface of Anglo-American relations. Churchill convinced Roosevelt to mediate in the growing dispute between British scientists and their American counterparts, who were now keeping Britain out of the Manhattan Project, the giant scientific research programme to develop an atom bomb. Roosevelt agreed that the deal he had reached with Churchill was to make the results of this research jointly available, a success for the Prime Minister and for British science. The Combined Chiefs of Staff agreed to proceed with the invasion of Sicily now that there had been victory in North Africa, but there was a dispute as to where to go after that. The Americans favoured Sardinia. Churchill and Brooke argued that an invasion of the Italian mainland was the next logical step, with the objective of knocking Italy out of the war. Churchill said this would divert dozens of German divisions not only to fight in Italy but also to replace the Italian divisions currently operating in the Balkans. Here, SOE-encouraged uprisings were taking place and Tito and his Partisans were tying down about twenty enemy divisions. Churchill argued that this was the best support the Allies could give to Stalin during 1943. To his annoyance, the issue remained unresolved. ‘I was deeply distressed at this,’ he later remembered.³ However, far and away the most important decision made at Trident was that serious planning should now begin for the invasion of Northern Europe.

As we have seen, the Americans had wanted to launch an invasion of Northern Europe as early as 1942, hoping to prevent a collapse of the Soviet Union and in the belief that victory in Europe could be achieved only by crushing the German armies in ground offensives. They regarded other campaigns as sideshows to this central and necessary assault. Churchill and Brooke, along with the rest of the British Chiefs of Staff, believed that such a complex operation as a cross-Channel invasion should be undertaken only when success was certain. And for success, the Allies first needed to defeat the U-boat menace in the Atlantic and then gain air supremacy over Northern Europe. In addition, the British argued that the army that waded ashore would have to be large enough to sustain the heavy counterattacks that would be certain to follow. And it would take some time for sufficient supplies of troops and their vital equipment to be built up in southern England. So the British strategy, which had largely prevailed up to the spring of 1943, was to fight more limited campaigns in places where success was more certain, hence the battles in North Africa and the Mediterranean. The British remained sceptical about Operation Overlord, as the invasion plan became known, right up to the end. ‘Why are we trying to do this?’ Churchill cried out in a depressed moment to Brooke in February 1944.⁴ Brooke himself remained fearful up to the eve of the invasion that if the landings failed, it would be the greatest disaster of the war. Nevertheless, at Trident, both Allies committed themselves to the invasion of Europe. A team led by British General Frederick Morgan and known as ‘COSSAC’ (Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander) was instructed to prepare outline plans for the invasion of Europe. And there was a date to work to, 1 May 1944, to be known as D-Day.

From Washington, Churchill flew with both the British and the US chiefs, Generals Brooke and Marshall, to Eisenhower’s headquarters in Algiers. En route their Boeing Clipper was hit by lightning but not harmed. After the tense atmosphere in Washington, relations improved in the sunshine of Algiers. Marshall was happy to leave open the option of moving on to mainland Italy, depending upon progress in Sicily. Eisenhower impressed Churchill with his sense of authority and command of the situation. And Churchill wanted to ensure that the victorious army now poised in North Africa was kept busy with offensive action over the next year, until the invasion of Europe could be launched. Mostly, the generals agreed with him and he was delighted with the outcome of their meetings. He wrote later: ‘I had never received so strong an impression of co-operation and control as during my visit.’ After visiting the troops in Tunis and giving a speech to soldiers gathered in the dramatic setting of the ruins of an immense Roman amphitheatre in Carthage, Churchill set off for home. He later recalled: ‘I have no more pleasant memories of the war than the eight days in Algiers and Tunis.’⁵

Churchill flew back via Gibraltar, where, because of the weather, he had to leave the luxurious Boeing Clipper and return in the far more basic Liberator. That same day, another plane was flying on a scheduled flight from Lisbon in neutral Portugal back to England. German agents at Lisbon airport noted a large man smoking a cigar boarding the flight and mis-took him for Churchill. Luftwaffe fighters were scrambled and shot down the aircraft. All the passengers were killed. Churchill was not on board, but the leading actor Leslie Howard was. His death was a great loss to British cinema. Although Churchill was totally committed to these long-haul flights, each of them had its element of danger.

Back in London after another month away, there were jokes in the press about ‘Prime Minister visits Britain’. But Churchill as ever threw himself into a full round of War Cabinet meetings, reports to Parliament and a packed schedule. The invasion of Sicily was launched on 10 July. There were some terrible mishaps at the start when airborne troops were dropped in entirely the wrong places, some of them even in the sea, but overall the landings were a success. Furthermore, many important lessons were learned of value to the later Overlord landings. The US Army advanced from the south of the island to Palermo while the British advanced up the east coast through Catania. General George S. Patton, the US commander, felt intense rivalry with General Montgomery and ended up racing him to Messina. Patton won. In just over five weeks, the whole island was in Allied hands.

Another summit with Roosevelt took place in mid-August in the Canadian city of Quebec, code-named ‘Quadrant’. This time, unusually, Clementine accompanied her husband along with their daughter, Mary. At Quebec the same routine followed with the American and British Chiefs of Staff arguing over the details of military strategy while Roosevelt and Churchill met to endorse the Allies’ broad war aims. The Americans were still suspicious of British ambitions in the Mediterranean. And the British continued to press for an attack upon mainland Italy, where Mussolini had now fallen and been replaced by Pietro Badoglio as Chief Minister. But this time the American chiefs were determined not to be out-argued by the British. There was much discussion about policy in the Far East. As we have seen, the British interest here was principally to defend Burma in order to protect India from the Japanese. By contrast, the Americans wanted to use Burma to supply and reinforce the Chinese. In the British delegation was Brigadier Orde Wingate, fresh from leading his ‘Chindits’ in a long-range, three-month penetration raid behind Japanese lines. This was just the sort of high-risk operation that Churchill loved, and he possibly saw Wingate as a sort of Lawrence of Arabia figure. The Combined Chiefs of Staff agreed to support Wingate in future raids behind Japanese lines. They also agreed to appoint Lord Mountbatten as Supreme Commander in South-East Asia. But Roosevelt and Churchill never really saw eye to eye on the Pacific. Churchill’s ambition was to win back all the colonies that had been lost in the Far East. The Americans had no desire to see the war strengthen the British Empire in a region they now regarded as their own.

With regard to Europe, Churchill agreed with Roosevelt that an American general, probably Marshall, should be appointed Supreme Commander for Overlord. Churchill had already offered the post to Brooke but now somewhat abruptly told him that it would be going to an American. He later wrote that Brooke bore his disappointment with ‘soldierly dignity’.⁶ But Churchill had failed to appreciate what a crushing blow this was to his closest military adviser and colleague. ‘He offered no sympathy, no regrets at having had to change his mind, and dealt with the matter as if it were one of minor importance!’ Brooke later wrote. It took him several months to recover from the loss of a command that he had eagerly sought.⁷ This was not Churchill at his best or his most considerate.

In the discussion about Overlord, Churchill again provoked American suspicions by suggesting that, if the German strength in Northern Europe proved too great, the Allies should have ‘a second string to their bow’.⁸ He proposed the invasion of northern Norway, an old hobby horse of his. It was not taken very seriously. More significantly, the Americans proposed an invasion of southern France, Operation Anvil, to coincide with Overlord. This was approved but would cause much tension later. In discussions about Overlord, the COSSAC plan was given preliminary approval. Three divisions of troops were to land not across the shortest stretch of the English Channel in the Pas de Calais, where German defences were at their strongest, but further west, in Normandy, where conditions were better and defences were weaker.

After Quadrant ended, Churchill took a brief holiday in the mountains. He quickly relaxed in his lakeside cabin, spending the days fishing and entertaining his guests at dinner by singing music-hall songs from his youth along with the latest from Noël Coward. On 1 September, he returned to Washington to rejoin Roosevelt, once again living in the White House as the President’s guest. During the course of his stay, Italy formally surrendered. The first of Hitler’s allies had been defeated. At the end of this visit, Roosevelt had to leave Washington and placed the White House at the Prime Minister’s disposal. Here Churchill chaired a final meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. He described this later as a great ‘honour’ – to preside over a meeting of the Allied chiefs in the Council Room of the White House. To him, it was ‘an event in Anglo-American history.’⁹

In many ways, this moment was the peak of the special relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt. But the balance of that relationship was already changing. Churchill had kept Britain going through a critical period in 1940 and 1941. British soldiers and sailors had borne the brunt of the fighting in North Africa and the Mediterranean until the end of 1942. And British scientists had come up with fabulous technological advances to assist the war effort. But America was rapidly becoming predominant in the war in Europe, with ever more troops arriving in Britain to prepare for Overlord. Within months, there would be one million American GIs in Britain. American bombers were matching the efforts of the RAF in the bombing offensive against Germany. For the Pacific, the US Navy was launching ships on a prodigious scale and American marines and heavy bombers would soon play the dominant role in the war effort there. And as the ‘arsenal of democracy’, factories in the United States were producing tanks, weapons, planes and other vehicles on a previously unimaginable scale. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had turned from being an ally facing imminent defeat into a superpower with the strongest army in the world. Like a gigantic steamroller, the Red Army was already driving westwards and engaging the lion’s share of Hitler’s ground forces.

Moreover, the autumn of 1943 saw the British war effort pushed to its extreme. There were now five million men and women in the armed services. Factories were going flat out. Resources were fully utilised. On 1 November, Churchill circulated a minute that noted: ‘Our manpower is now fully mobilized for the war effort. We cannot add to the total; on the contrary it is already dwindling. All we can do is to make within that total such changes as the strategy of the war demands.’ Britain was fully stretched and this would inevitably limit Churchill’s ambition.¹⁰

Following the Italian surrender, Allied forces landed on the beaches in the Gulf of Salerno, south of Naples. Then Monty’s 8th Army began a slow advance up the east coast of Italy. The Allies had missed the opportunity for a quick follow-up to the capture of Sicily and Hitler had reinforced his army in Italy. German troops moved into Rome, and the whole country was effectively occupied by the Wehrmacht. The six German divisions in Italy in the summer had become twenty-five by the autumn. And with the sudden withdrawal of the Italian Army from the Balkans and Greece, Hitler doubled the size of his garrison there, from twelve to twenty-four divisions. So the collapse in Italy had already achieved the first effect Churchill had wanted – to divert German divisions from the Eastern Front. Stalin sent a message to both Roosevelt and Churchill in September congratulating them and noting that ‘the successful landing at Naples and the break between Italy and Germany will deal one more blow upon Hitlerite Germany and will considerably facilitate the actions of the Soviet armies at the Soviet-German front’.¹¹ On the other hand, the reinforcing of Italy by crack divisions from the East meant that the Allied advance up the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’, as Churchill called it, soon slowed to a crawl. This revived Marshall’s fears that, far from offering up swift conquests, the Italian front would act as a drain on Allied resources and pin down troops that were needed for the bigger mission of Overlord. It had been agreed at Quebec that seven divisions would be withdrawn from Italy to aid in the build-up for Overlord in England in November, and that shipping, particularly landing craft, would be reassigned to the English Channel. But after requests from Eisenhower and an intervention from Churchill, the American chiefs reluctantly agreed to leave most of the landing craft in Italy.

Churchill still hankered after operations in the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean to buttress Greece and to encourage Turkey to join the Allies. He was keen to seize Rhodes and the Dodecanese islands along the Turkish coast. ‘Improvise and dare,’ he instructed General Maitland Wilson, the commander in the region.¹² Churchill argued his case in a long document sent to Roosevelt in October, and ended with a simple appeal: ‘I beg you to consider this and not let it be brushed aside.’ Roosevelt responded the very next day: ‘I do not want to force on Eisenhower diversions which limit the prospects … of the Italian operations … It is my opinion that no diversion of forces or equipment should prejudice Overlord as planned. The American Chiefs of Staff agree.’¹³ This unequivocal response made it quite clear who was in charge now.

Despite the put-down, Churchill was desperately anxious that plans for Overlord should not undermine the campaign in Italy, which he had championed for over a year. He felt that the Americans were being too rigid in their support for Overlord and that he was fighting with his hands tied behind his back. He went back to Roosevelt over and over again during that autumn with his concerns about the forthcoming invasion of France. ‘My dear friend,’ he concluded one of these messages, ‘this is much the greatest thing we have ever attempted. And I am not satisfied that we have yet taken the measures necessary to give it the best chance of success.’ Only a few days later in another message he said: ‘I am more anxious about the campaign of 1944 than about any other with which I have been involved.’¹⁴ Meanwhile, Stalin began to express his irritation with the slow progress of the Allied armies in Italy. He protested that, having fortified Italy, Hitler was now sending units back to the Eastern Front.

With these dilemmas and arguments in mind, at the end of November the Allied leaders, this time including Stalin, agreed to meet in Teheran for the first full summit of the war, the first of the ‘Big Three’ meetings. Churchill sailed from Plymouth on HMS Renown on 12 November. He would be away for two months and travelled with his usual team. First, there was the staff of his Map Room. Here, Captain Richard Pim constantly updated wall charts with pins and lines so Churchill could keep abreast of daily movements on every front and in every ocean. Pim packed up the Map Room and set it up wherever the Prime Minister was based. A complete signals unit travelled with him too, so Churchill could be kept in daily or even hourly contact with London, and through which he could send daily summaries to Deputy Prime Minister Attlee and other ministers. The vitally important Ultra reports were also sent to him by secret communication links to keep him updated. And, of course, there was the small group of secretaries who accompanied Churchill everywhere with their silent typewriters, ready and waiting at any hour of the day or night to type up minutes, briefing papers, speeches or any other message that the Prime Minister wanted to dictate. It is a sign of the success and stability of Churchill’s regime that he could afford to travel and operate abroad for such long periods of time. Neither Hitler nor Stalin could have imagined being so far from his power base for so long.

The meeting in Teheran was preceded by another conference between Roosevelt and Churchill and their military chiefs in Cairo, code-named ‘Sextant’. They wanted to get their position clear before presenting it to Stalin and his chiefs for the first time. But this meeting was unlike their previous conferences. Roosevelt set the agenda, literally. Much time was spent discussing the Far East and the Pacific. The presence of the Chinese Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, also meant the conference focused much more on the East. Plans were made for a big amphibious landing in the Bay of Bengal, to help provide supplies for China. This was to be called ‘Operation Buccaneer’. Tensions between the British and American chiefs, never far below the surface, erupted in some violent exchanges. In the afternoon session on 23 November, Admiral Ernest King and General Brooke argued particularly vehemently about the supply of landing craft. The American General Joseph Stilwell, who was present, wrote: ‘Brooke got nasty and King got good and sore. King almost climbed over the table at Brooke. God he was mad! I wish he had socked him.’¹⁵ Many unresolved and uncertain issues were taken on to Teheran. The prospects for a successful summit did not look good.

By the time the Big Three gathered in Teheran on 28 November, Churchill had gone down with a bug. He had left London two weeks earlier with a heavy cold and a sore throat. Now, after many late-night sessions in Cairo, he had, perhaps symbolically, lost his voice. His doctor, Charles Wilson, offered Churchill sprays to restore his vital weapon. Then, at the first dinner hosted by Roosevelt, the President had to withdraw with stomach ache. There were even rumours that he had been poisoned. But despite this inauspicious start, the summit proceeded reasonably well and after some tough talking, several significant decisions were reached. At the first plenary session, having been briefed about Overlord, Stalin surprised both Roosevelt and Churchill by eagerly picking up on the plans for Anvil, the invasion of southern France. No doubt the Soviet leader was already thinking of the post-war world, in which he had no desire to see Anglo-American forces in the Balkans. He wanted that part of South-East Europe in his own sphere of influence. By supporting Anvil, he probably believed he would divert Allied forces away from the Balkans. There was a discussion over the timing of Overlord. The Russians insisted on May 1944. The Americans and the British were now planning on June. Churchill still argued his standard line that he did not want to undermine the campaign in Italy, where there were twenty British or British-controlled divisions, simply to guarantee a 1 May date for Overlord.

Stalin kept up the pressure on the President and the Prime Minister. At the next plenary session, he asked who was going to command Overlord. Roosevelt responded that this had not yet been decided. Stalin retorted that the operation ‘would come to nought’ unless one man was placed in charge of both preparing and leading the invasion. And when Churchill spoke about the need to ensure that German forces in France were not strong enough to throw the Allies back into the sea, Stalin asked bluntly if ‘the Prime Minister and the British staffs really believed in Overlord?’ Churchill responded that, as long as conditions were right, British forces would hurl everything they had across the Channel at the Germans with ‘every sinew of our strength’.¹⁶ But Stalin kept pressing that the invasion must be launched in May. No delay was acceptable.

Roosevelt wanted to build up his own rapport with Stalin in Teheran, which inevitably meant distancing himself from Churchill. As the President put it, he could not appear to be ‘ganging up with the British’. Churchill understood what was going on but sought to reassure Stalin during a personal meeting that he was entirely committed to Overlord, that he had no wish to intrude into the Balkans, and that his plans in Italy were limited.

Then, at the second dinner, hosted by Stalin, an unusual incident occurred. The discussion turned to the subject of punishing the Germans at the end of the war. Stalin suggested that there were fifty thousand leading Nazis who were really behind the whole German war effort, and when the war was won they should all be shot. Churchill was genuinely shocked and responded: ‘The British Parliament and public will never tolerate mass executions.’ Stalin persisted and Churchill said he would rather be taken out into the garden and shot there and then than sully his country’s honour with such infamy. Roosevelt, trying to diffuse the brewing row with humour, suggested a compromise – only 49,000 need be shot. Then, to everyone’s surprise, the President’s son Elliott, who was attending the summit as a military attaché, rose to his feet. No doubt under the influence of the fine wine, he said the US Army would support Marshal Stalin’s plan. Churchill, who was so used to being in command of the table talk, got up in disgust and walked out of the banquet and into an adjoining room. Only a minute had passed before he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Stalin, grinning away, saying it had all been a joke and he had meant none of it. ‘Stalin has a very captivating manner when he chooses to use it,’ Churchill wrote later. The Prime Minister returned to the table and the rest of the dinner passed off pleasantly enough.¹⁷

Churchill was feeling the strain of losing the President’s friendship and support and of being in the unfamiliar position of not getting his own way. Later that evening, Charles Wilson found him in a very depressed state, brooding on an apocalyptic vision of post-war Europe. The doctor took Churchill’s pulse and told him it was high, probably because of the drink. ‘It will soon fall,’ mused Churchill. Then, returning to his gloom and despondency, he asked: ‘Why do I plague my mind with these things? I never used to worry about anything. Stupendous issues are unfolding before our eyes, and we are only specks of dust, that have settled in the night on the map of the world.’ He then turned to his doctor and asked abruptly: ‘Do you think my strength will last out the war? I fancy sometimes that I am nearly spent.’ Then he got into bed. The doctor waited a few minutes and asked if he wanted him to turn out the light. There was no answer. Churchill was already asleep.¹⁸

The following day, Stalin seemed more positive. He agreed to launch a major offensive on the Eastern Front to coincide with Overlord, in order to prevent German troops being diverted to the Western Front. He also announced that once Germany had been defeated, the Soviet Union would join the other two Allies in their assault upon Japan. This transformed planning for the final stages of the war in the Far East. Roosevelt confirmed that Overlord would be launched in May 1944. The three leaders also discussed the value of deception tactics to confuse the enemy. Churchill agreed that ‘truth should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies’.¹⁹ And so Operation Fortitude was born, the secret deception plan for Overlord.

On this third evening, 30 November, it was Churchill’s turn to host dinner. It was his sixty-ninth birthday. General Ismay remembered that the toasts and short speeches began as soon as everyone had sat down. In the Russian style, they then continued throughout the evening. Churchill spoke about the President’s fine achievements and called the Russian leader ‘Stalin the Great’. As the evening progressed, the toasts got merrier. At one point Churchill proposed a toast to the ‘proletarian masses’ and Stalin responded with a toast to the ‘Conservative Party’! For Churchill, it was a memorable birthday: ‘On my right sat the President of the United States, on my left the master of Russia. Together we controlled a large preponderance of the naval and three quarters of the air forces in the world, and could direct armies of nearly twenty millions of men, engaged in the most terrible of wars that had yet occurred in human history.’ Later, he would describe the evening more amusingly: ‘There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor little English donkey who was the only one … who knew the right way home.’²⁰

Back in Cairo after Teheran, Roosevelt took a momentous decision. He decided to appoint Eisenhower rather than Marshall as Supreme Commander for Overlord. The President explained this to Marshall by claiming that he would not be able to sleep at night if the general were to relinquish his role as Chief of Staff and be out of the country. If he were disappointed, Marshall did not show it. He said he would go along with whatever his commander-in-chief wanted. Roosevelt told Churchill of his decision during a short sightseeing visit to the Sphinx, a friendly and relaxed interlude after many days of tension. The two leaders gazed at the ancient statue for some minutes as the evening shadows fell, as if seeking guidance. But, as Churchill later put it, the Sphinx ‘told us nothing and maintained her inscrutable smile’.²¹

Churchill was exhausted by the tensions of the previous weeks. General Smuts, the South African leader, told Brooke that he thought the Prime Minister was working too hard and that he was ‘beginning to doubt whether he would stay the course’. Churchill himself admitted that he felt very tired and noted ‘that I no longer dried myself after my bath, but lay on the bed wrapped in my towel till I dried naturally’.²² He flew on to Eisenhower’s headquarters at Carthage, outside Tunis, where he collapsed in exhaustion and went to bed.

At about four o’clock the following morning, 13 December, General Brooke was fast asleep when he was awoken by someone in his room mournfully calling out, ‘Hulloo, Hulloo, Hulloo!’ The most senior officer in the British Army leapt out of bed and turned on his torch to find the Prime Minister wandering around in his dressing gown with a brown bandage wrapped around his head. He was confused and thought this was his doctor’s bedroom. When he finally found Charles Wilson, he was once again diagnosed with pneumonia. He was given a brand-new antibiotic sulphonamide called M&B that had been launched only recently on the market. But over the next few days Churchill’s health rapidly deteriorated. Specialists were flown in from Cairo. On the night of the 15th, Churchill’s heart began to fibrillate and his pulse became erratic. His doctor was seriously worried and thought this time he might not pull through. Churchill told his daughter Sarah, ‘If I die, don’t worry – the war is won.’ John Martin, the Cabinet secretary who was accompanying him on this trip, alerted the War Cabinet in London. Grave announcements were issued to the press. At Carthage, Sarah read extracts from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to her father. Clementine flew out from London to be with her husband. Then, suddenly, on the 17th, the antibiotics finally started to do their bit. From then on, Churchill recovered a little more each day. He started to dictate messages from his bed again and saw a constant stream of visitors until Clementine said all she could do was ‘poke my nose around the corner of the door’. Churchill soon became irascible with his doctors, but they insisted he have at least a week’s rest. So he spent a few more days in Carthage.

On Christmas Day, his first day out of bed, he had a conference with Eisenhower, Wilson, Alexander, Tedder and Cunningham to discuss plans for the landings at Anzio, south of Rome. Again the shortage of landing craft threatened the future of the whole operation. Churchill argued that the landings were essential to the Italian campaign, and the others agreed that they must go ahead, even if this led to a delay for Overlord. Two days later, Churchill and his entourage travelled on to the same villa in Marrakech where he and Roosevelt had watched the light over the mountains eleven months before. Churchill rested there for three weeks. He had suffered a serious, life-threatening illness and it had been an anxious time for everyone around him. But the old bulldog had pulled through.²³

Throughout his illness, Churchill had been in contact with Roosevelt to agree the senior commanders for Overlord. Eisenhower was to take up his post as Supreme Commander as soon as he could leave his Italian command. Tedder was to be his deputy. And Montgomery was appointed Land Commander. Monty rushed back to London, leaving the 8th Army in Italy. On 2 January 1944, he attended a conference at St Paul’s School (his old school in west London), which had been requisitioned by COSSAC, the group that had been quietly making plans for D-Day since the previous summer. After a briefing on the outline of the plans so far, Monty stood up and spoke. He tore the plans to shreds and said that the invasion was on too narrow a front with forces that were too small. He sent the COSSAC staff back to the drawing board to draw up a new and more ambitious plan. Later, Monty would claim that the redrawing of the invasion plans for Overlord was all his own doing. In fact, he and Eisenhower had already discussed the issue and agreed their line. And they knew that Churchill also thought more divisions were needed. The truth was that COSSAC had gone so far, but now that the Supreme Commander and his field commanders were in place, the whole operation could be scaled up. Serious planning for the invasion began at this point.

Eisenhower arrived in London in mid-January, and on the 21st he presided over the first meeting of his commanders and planners from the office that became known as Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). From here the battle plan for the Overlord invasion soon expanded, as Eisenhower had the authority to convince Washington of the need for extra landing craft, air support, naval escorts, and the troops and matériel vital to launch a successful invasion across a hundred miles of the English Channel.

The invasion of Northern Europe was one of the most ambitious and risky operations of the Second World War. The scale of the challenge facing the planners was genuinely awesome. Each armoured division required forty ships to transport it. The Americans assembled in the South-West and the British troops concentrated in the South-East of England. Every unit required training camps, assembly areas and acres of space to gather their vehicles, armour and weaponry. A total of 137,000 wheeled and semi-tracked vehicles, 4000 full-tracked vehicles and 3500 artillery pieces were brought across the Atlantic in supply ships for the American armies alone. Jeeps from Detroit, K-rations from the farms of the Mid-West, shells, weapons, ammunition and medical supplies from across America were all delivered to the units assembling in England. Stretches of the Devon coast were evacuated of all their inhabitants so practice landings could take place using live ammunition. Ships and landing craft were lined up in all the major ports along the south coast of England. Hundreds of thousands of aerial photographs were taken up and down the French and Belgian coast and distributed so the troops could study the objectives that would face them. Divers crept ashore at night to collect samples of sand to calculate if it could support armoured vehicles, to measure the slope of the beaches and to assess the shore defences.

The final battle plan for D-Day was for three divisions of airborne troops to be dropped behind enemy lines to seize key targets on both flanks in the night before the invasion. During the morning of D-Day itself, four army corps would land on five Normandy beaches from the Cotentin peninsula in the west, on the right flank of the invasion, to the Orne River on the east. US, British and Canadian troops would charge ashore at dawn, and during the day about 170,000 men, 20,000 vehicles and thousands of tons of supplies would arrive to support them. Operational plans were drawn up and hundreds of pages of orders were circulated at corps level, then for divisions, brigades, regiments and companies. The five beaches were given code names, from west to east: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. Each beach was divided into subsections and each unit assigned its targets from H-Hour, the moment when the first wave hit the beaches, onwards.

Churchill was too busy to engage with the day-to-day planning of the largest and most complex military operation of the war. But he still wrote minutes and issued his thoughts on matters like the waterproofing of vehicles, the onshore bombardment from naval ships and the number of transport aircraft available for the airborne assault. His influence was really felt when it came to his support for the Eisenhower–Montgomery plan to broaden the bridgehead and increase the number of men who would land ashore on D-Day. This would mean delaying the date of the invasion and reneging on the promise Roosevelt had made to Stalin at Teheran. The argument dragged on for a couple of months, until late March, when Washington finally agreed to the revised plan. Once that decision was made, and the idea of a May attack was abandoned, the next point when the moon and the tides would be right for a beach landing was from 5 to 7 June.

Churchill attended two presentations by Monty at St Paul’s School, outlining the developing plans for Overlord. At the first on Good Friday, 7 April, Churchill was not well and he seems to have contributed little. The second, on 15 May, was a big show with dozens of senior officers from the British and American armies sitting in rows on benches, and the King, Churchill, Smuts, Brooke and the other Chiefs of Staff in VIP chairs at the front. Churchill was impressed by what he heard and said he was ‘hardening’ to the Overlord project.²⁴ Monty spent the last few weeks before the invasion on a whirlwind tour of southern England, inspecting the troops and visiting factories. His clipped, matter-of-fact style, captured in some of the newsreels, comes across as rather comical today. But it proved genuinely popular at the time. He addressed people in their own language, made them laugh and made them feel that they were really contributing to something important. And he seemed like a real soldier, rather than some aloof and remote château-general. The government was wary about Monty emerging as national figure, a popular warlord, but Churchill never did anything to prevent him from drumming up support.

As we saw in the last chapter, Churchill lost the struggle to keep RAF Bomber Command out of the planning for D-Day. Eisenhower brought all the British and American bombers in Britain under the command of SHAEF to enable strikes at tactical objectives along the beaches and at transport hubs inland. In order not to reveal that Normandy was the objective, this bombing had to be carried out along the whole French and Belgian coast.

Churchill’s influence, however, was still considerable in important aspects of the Normandy invasion. A serious blot on his reputation for many years had been his involvement with the Dardanelles fiasco in 1915. Thousands of men had been landed along the coast at Gallipoli and it had been a near disaster. Obviously, Churchill did not want to be associated with the repetition of anything like this. And memories of the horrible slaughters resulting from First World War human-wave assaults against well-defended positions were strong in the minds of Churchill and the British generals, even if they were not for the American planners. As we know, from his early days, Churchill had been fascinated by new weapons and armoured vehicles of war, such as the tank which he had contributed to the development of in 1915. And in May 1940 he had asked Cherwell to review the production of tanks and called for the construction of an additional one thousand of them. One of the tank men who had given Churchill useful information during his ‘wilderness years’ about the parlous state of British armoured regiments was General Percy Hobart, then one of the most experienced commanders of armoured units in the army. Churchill had been impressed with his fertile mind and his energy. But Hobart was a prickly figure and unpopular with his seniors in the army. In the summer of 1940, Churchill was appalled to discover that the Army High Command had pensioned off Hobart and he was serving his country only as a lance-corporal in the Home Guard. Churchill immediately called for his reinstatement as a major-general, and in a minute to his CIGS he wrote of Hobart’s ‘strong personality and original view’. He concluded in a way that perfectly summed up his view on these matters: ‘We are now at war, fighting for our lives, and we cannot afford to confine Army appointments to persons who have excited no hostile comment in their career … This is a time to try men of force and vision and not to be exclusively confined to those who are judged thoroughly safe by conventional standards.’ More prosaically, he was overheard saying to Dill: ‘Remember it isn’t only the good boys who help to win wars; it’s the sneaks and stinkers as well.’²⁵

Hobart was brought back into the army and given command of what became the 11th Armoured Division. He reorganised the structure of the unit to include a broad mix of heavy and light armour along with artillery, and can lay claim to having been the architect of the modern armoured division.²⁶ Churchill organised a series of four ‘Tank Parliaments’ at Downing Street in May and June 1941, another element in the War Lab. At these meetings, leading military figures and civilian experts met to exchange views about the future use of tanks, and of course to listen to Churchill’s own thoughts on the subject. Hobart made an important contribution at these sessions. It is no surprise that the latest thirty-ton tank to roll off the production lines in 1941 was named the ‘Churchill’. But the tank’s namesake was distressed to discover that the mark-one Churchill had only a two-pound gun that was woefully inadequate for armoured warfare. It was unusual for anything with the name ‘Churchill’ to be known for its lack of bark. The gun was subsequently upgraded to a six-pounder.

In April 1943, Hobart was put in charge of the newly formed 79th Armoured Division, which became known as the ‘Zoo’ or ‘Menagerie’. His task now was to devise a range of armoured devices to assist landing troops in getting through beach obstacles and in capturing the beachhead. The whole stretch of coast from Brittany to Norway had been heavily fortified. Concrete pill-boxes had been built with powerful heavy machine guns to provide arcs of fire across the beaches below. A huge array of steel obstacles had been set up along the beaches, and minefields had been laid in the sand dunes and at the head of each beach. In total, four million mines had been laid. The whole defensive line was called the ‘Atlantic Wall’. In January 1944, in a strange twist of fate, Hitler appointed Field Marshal Rommel to take charge of it. Once again, Monty would be up against his old adversary from the desert war. With great vigour and energy, Rommel toured up and down the coast, reinforcing and building up the defences. It was Hobart’s job to find the armoured machines that could penetrate the Atlantic Wall and support the infantry wading ashore.

Hobart turned his new division into a sort of think-tank for armoured warfare. Everyone was encouraged to come up with ideas. Floating tanks, known as ‘Duplex Drives’ (or DDs), had already been developed in the Mediterranean. They could be launched at sea with floating skirts around them so they could swim in with the landing craft carrying the infantry. Hundreds were built for D-Day. Hobart and his men devised minesweeping flail tanks with a giant rotor that spun a set of whirling chains on the ground to detonate mines ahead of the advancing tank. There were Bobbin tanks, which carried a metal track above the turret. Through an ingenious feeder mechanism, this could be laid in front of the advancing tank to cover ground where the sand was too soft to support tank tracks. Then there were tanks armed with flame throwers to flush out the enemy from well-defended bunkers. Tanks were adapted to lay bridges. And there were bulldozer tanks to remove obstacles. Hobart’s inventiveness turned the British into pioneers of specialised armour, and the machines he devised became known as ‘Hobart’s Funnies’. Churchill was delighted with them. The Americans were more sceptical and used only the floating DD tanks on D-Day. Brooke wrote in his diary after a visit to Hobart to inspect the assault vehicles: ‘Hobart has been doing wonders in his present job and I am delighted that we put him into it.’²⁷ Churchill’s faith in Hobart had fully paid off.

Another aspect of the challenge of landing an army on beaches had exercised Churchill’s mind for some time. A practice assault on an enemy-held harbour had been tried at Dieppe, in August 1942. It proved a disaster, with massive loss of life among the largely Canadian assault force. The lesson learned was that it was going to be very difficult to capture a heavily fortified port from the enemy. With thousands of tons of supplies needing to be brought ashore every day, the solution seemed to be for the Allies to build their own harbours along the invasion beaches. As early as May 1942, Churchill had sent a historic memo to Lord Mountbatten, who was then Chief of Combined Operations, about the problems of building a harbour on a shallow-water invasion beach. This included a handwritten comment that said the piers ‘must float up and down with the tide. The anchor problems must be mastered. Let me have the best solutions worked out. Don’t argue the matter. The difficulties will argue for themselves.’²⁸ This was typical of Churchill, and the last three sentences are still quoted in management training schools today as the attitude to adopt when facing a substantial challenge.

The War Office took on responsibility for pursuing this further, and Brigadier Bruce White was put in charge of the project. When Churchill sailed to the Quebec Conference on the Queen Mary, he debated the issue with his senior commanders. It had been decided to use blockships and giant concrete caissons to protect the harbours from the full force of the sea. Churchill did not understand how this would work, so an impromptu demonstration was staged in his bathroom. Several paper boats were launched and the water was splashed about. The paper boats sank. When a barrier was placed across the bath to represent a breakwater, no amount of splashing sank the little boats at the other end. General Ismay recalled:

If a stranger had visited his bathroom, he might have seen a stocky figure in a dressing gown of many colours, sitting on a stool and surrounded by a number of what our American friends call ‘Top Brass’, while an admiral flapped his hands at one end of the bath … and a brigadier stretched a lilo across the middle … The stranger would have found it hard to believe that this was the British High Command studying the most stupendous and spectacular amphibious operation in the history of war.²⁹

Churchill was now convinced it would work. The harbours were code-named ‘Mulberry’. Two of the giant structures were to be built in Britain, one for the Americans off Omaha Beach and one for the British at Arromanches, off Gold Beach.

In a normal harbour, the quay remains fixed and the boats float up and down with the tide. In the Mulberry harbours, the piers had to float up and down with the ships. Giant pontoons were designed to be sunk on the seabed with four steel legs one hundred feet high. The floating pierheads would then be linked to the shore by a roadway strong enough to support thirty-ton tanks and other heavy vehicles. Major Alan Beckett, a distinguished engineer, came up with the design that combined both strength and flexibility using steel cables and heavy-duty ball-and-socket joints. A new form of anchor was also designed to secure all this to the seabed. And to protect it, huge concrete blockhouses, the caissons, each weighing six thousand tons, would be built in Britain and then floated across the Channel and sunk alongside a set of obsolete ships to form a harbour wall against the sea. The scale of the Mulberry project was gargantuan: 45,000 workers produced 147 caissons, 23 pierheads and 10 miles of floating roadway. This placed a near-impossible strain on British industry, which was already stretched to its limit.

In addition to the industrial challenge faced in the construction of the Mulberry harbours, there was endless bickering between the army, who had led the way on the project, and the navy, who regarded it as a matter for them. Churchill’s constant requests for updates on the progress of his pet project no doubt prevented it from grinding to a complete halt. Despite endless delays, the many different parts were completed on time in ports and shipyards all around Britain. Like a giant jigsaw puzzle, the separate elements were then towed across the Channel and into position, and the two harbours were assembled a week after D-Day. It was an astonishing achievement on every level, and Churchill’s enthusiasm and persistence had been vital to keep it going.

Throughout the whole planning for D-Day, the major fear was of a breach of secrecy – that somehow the plans would get out and the Germans would be waiting. Part of the attempt to prevent this was that huge operation of deception that had been born in the conversations with Stalin at Teheran. Through Operation Fortitude, the Allies tried to persuade the German High Command that the real invasion would be launched along the shortest stretch of the Channel from England, on the Pas de Calais, and that the Normandy landings, when they came, were only a diversion. To this end, a false army known as ‘1st Army Group’ was created in south-eastern England, complete with dummy tanks, trucks and fleets of dummy ships in the ports of Kent. A complete signals unit sent endless messages about training and assembly that could be picked up by the Germans. The 1st Army even had its own commander, the bullish General Patton, whom it was thought the Germans would believe was the most likely person to command the invasion forces. Patton made himself as visible as possible to add to the deception. Again, Churchill loved this sort of operation and gave it his full support.

Meanwhile, the advance in Italy, of which so much had been hoped by Churchill and others, had slowed to a snail’s pace. The Germans had heavily fortified a defensive position known as the ‘Gustav Line’ across the central mountains, focused upon Monte Cassino, which dominated the road north to Rome. For four months, the Allies tried everything to destroy this citadel, including bombing the medieval Benedictine monastery that stood on its peak, destroying a library and antiquities that were over a thousand years old. But it was not until 18 May that Polish troops were able to capture the mountain that dominated the surrounding countryside. Finally, the troops advancing north met up with those who had landed at Anzio. They pressed onwards together, and on 4 June General Mark Clark led the Americans into Rome. It was splendid news which cheered Churchill and Roosevelt.

With the date for the invasion of France now fixed for 5 June, everything slowly came together. The men were trained and ready. They were in their final assembly camps near the embarkation points and received their final briefings. They were then issued with ammunition, seasickness pills and a leaflet about how to behave towards French civilians. From this point, no one was allowed to leave their base. Four thousand landing craft and hundreds of assault vehicles, along with dozens of escort ships, were ready. Thousands of light and heavy bombers were waiting to blitz the beach defences. The process of embarkation began. Anti-aircraft defences and fighter planes were on full alert, ready to attack any Luftwaffe bomber that dared to intervene. From Ipswich, along the whole south coast of Britain, and right round to Bristol, southern England had become an armed camp waiting for the order to go.

As we have seen, Churchill was eager to watch Overlord from HMS Belfast. But his senior commanders were horrified by the thought of the Prime Minister’s being present near the landing beaches – not only for the danger it posed to him, but because of the fear that he might try to intervene at some critical juncture. In the end, to their relief, the King instructed Churchill to remain in England.

Then, at the last minute, the weather intervened. A storm blew up in the Atlantic and Eisenhower was advised that this might cause chaos for shipping and air support. At a late-night meeting on 3–4 June, he agreed to postpone D-Day for twenty-four hours. With 200,000 men in this state of readiness, it could be fatal to delay much longer. In the early hours of 5 June, Eisenhower gathered again with his commanders at his headquarters near Portsmouth. The predicted storm was raging and rain was lashing in horizontal streaks. The chief meteorologist, Group Captain Snagg, reported that he had spotted a slight break in the bad weather out in the Atlantic. He thought it would last for about thirty-six hours. Eisenhower had to make the biggest decision of his life. He turned to Montgomery and asked his opinion. He asked his deputy, Tedder, and the other senior commanders. The Supreme Commander listened carefully to their answers but knew that that only he had the authority to take the final decision. Eisenhower paused, then said, ‘Let’s go.’ It was 4.15 a.m. on 5 June. The invasion was on.

Churchill, who had been sceptical of Overlord for so many months, had by now been won over and was optimistic. He invited the Chiefs of Staff to lunch and told them that the invasion was likely to be a success. Brooke, on the other hand, scribbled in his diary on the night before the invasion: ‘I am very uneasy about the whole operation. At the best it will fall to very very far short of the expectation of the bulk of the people, namely all those who know nothing of its difficulties. At the worst it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war. I wish to God it were safely over.’³⁰ Eisenhower chose that evening to visit the men of the 101st Airborne Division at Greenham Common airbase as they prepared to emplane for their drop behind enemy lines. His advisers had predicted they might suffer up to 80 per cent casualties, but he was cheered by their courage and enthusiasm. ‘Now quit worrying, General,’ one of them said, ‘we’ll take care of this thing for you.’ Eisenhower had in his top tunic pocket a short, handwritten letter of resignation, accepting full responsibility for the failure of the invasion should everything go wrong.

At about 10 p.m. on the night of 5 June 1944, the aircraft carrying the airborne troops began to take off on their missions. They flew in a tight formation in a huge air armada across the Channel. In the west, the transport pilots encountered heavy anti-aircraft fire as they crossed the Cotentin Peninsula. In panic, many of the pilots pressed the green light, the signal to jump, and American paratroopers leapt out of the transport aircraft many miles from their intended drop zones. Some landed so far off course they could not even find where they were from their maps. In the east, some of the British glider troops, by contrast, landed within yards of their target, Pegasus Bridge. In minutes, they had seized control of Pegasus and another key bridge over the Orne. The first blood had been drawn and the ‘Longest Day’ had started.

The amphibious landings took place soon after dawn on 6 June. At the eastern end of Sword Beach the landing drill worked well. The DD tanks beached successfully and the flail tanks, known as ‘Crabs’, cleared the minefields as the men moved up and off the beach. The biggest problem came from traffic jams and bottlenecks as so many men and vehicles became entangled trying to get ashore. On Juno Beach, the Canadian landing went more slowly, but by late morning the bulldozer tanks were ashore and clearing obstacles, and the infantry advanced off the beach. After a few hours of fighting, the first coastal villages were liberated. At Gold Beach there was much heavier resistance and many of the tanks were taken out by the German anti-tank guns. But again the Crabs flailed through the minefields and the Bobbin tanks laid paths for vehicles and infantry to move forwards and capture the German strongholds. In total, the British and Canadians lost only 32 assault tanks out of 170. Hobart’s 79th Armoured Division lost a total of 179 men killed or wounded. These numbers were way below the predicted casualty rates.

To the west on Omaha Beach, the story was entirely different. This was always going to be a tough landing, with two-hundred-foot cliffs at the head of the beach and well-prepared defenders inside thick concrete bunkers. A new German unit, the 352nd Division, had been assigned to this stretch of coast just a few days before the invasion. They were tougher and more determined than many of the other units in Normandy. At Omaha, the tanks were due to get to the beach at H-5, five minutes before the infantry arrived in their landing craft. But the sea was much rougher here in the aftermath of the storm. Many of the floating tanks were launched too far out and sank straight to the bottom. In one group, 29 out of 32 Sherman tanks sank on launching. And when the infantry waded ashore they were met with a furious enfilade of machine-gun and artillery fire. From their well-dug-in nests, the German machine gunners sprayed arcs of withering fire across the beach. Many men in the first wave never even got off the ramps of their landing craft. Others fell into the sea and drowned under the weight of all they were carrying. As landing craft were hit by mines or shells they blocked the beach for the next wave trying to get through behind them. The best the survivors could do was to take shelter behind the iron beach obstacles or under the sea wall. But moving off the beach under the intense fire seemed impossible. Casualties mounted to alarming levels. The first wave was almost entirely wiped out. Watching the massacre unfold from USS Augusta several miles out to sea, General Omar Bradley and his commanders tried to piece together what was going on and considered abandoning the landing. Naval destroyers came in as close to the beach as they dared, within about eight hundred yards, to fire directly into the German gun emplacements. Then, in the late morning, Brigadier Norman Cota, the energetic deputy commander of the 29th Division, showing great heroism, led a group of men up a gully and on to the cliffs above the beach. From here, they were slowly able to fan out and attack the German gun emplacements one by one. By early afternoon, the determination of the US infantry had won through. They had overpowered the German strongholds and cleared the beach exits. But by then there had been three thousand casualties on Omaha Beach.

On the westernmost beach, Utah, by contrast, things went extremely well. The current carried the landing craft more than a mile from their planned landing zone, but the beaches the American 4th Division hit were lightly defended and most of the armour got ashore without incident. Astonishingly, the casualties here during D-Day were lighter than on their last training exercise at Slapton Sands in Devon.

Overall, D-Day was a remarkable triumph. By the end of the day, 177,000 men and their equipment were ashore. Some units had penetrated five miles inland. The Allied air forces had flown 14,600 sorties. The Luftwaffe had barely put in an appearance all day. U-boats had got nowhere near the vast naval armada in the Channel. Hitler’s supposedly impregnable Atlantic Wall had been breached. Not anticipating that the Allies would invade during the storm, Rommel had returned to Germany and so was not present when the landings took place. Other officers were away at an exercise in Rennes. Rommel rushed back later in the day, but only Hitler could order the deployment of the key panzer reserves. He believed that Normandy was just a side show, with the real landings to follow in the Pas de Calais. Operation Fortitude had been a success. So, in the first few critical hours, the panzer reserves waited but did not intervene.

Churchill followed events during the morning of 6 June in his Map Room. Later that day, he addressed a packed House of Commons. He paid fulsome tribute to the ‘ingenious modifications of the British armour’ and said:

This vast operation is undoubtedly the most complicated and difficult that has ever taken place … Nothing that equipment, science or forethought could do has been neglected and the whole process of opening up this great new front will be pursued with the utmost resolution both by the commanders and by the United States and British Governments whom they serve.³¹

He sent a message to Stalin, informing him of the initial success of the invasion. Stalin replied with wholehearted praise for the ‘grandiose scale’ on which the invasion had been carried out. As per the agreement at Teheran, on 10 June the Red Army’s vast summer offensive began with an assault on the Leningrad front.

Churchill was still itching to get across to Normandy to see the bridgehead for himself. He asked Monty if he could pay a visit, saying: ‘We do not wish in any way to be a burden to you or on your headquarters … We shall bring some sandwiches with us.’³² On 12 June, Churchill crossed the Channel in a destroyer. Brooke, who accompanied him, noted: ‘We continually passed convoys of landing craft, minesweepers, bits of floating breakwater being towed out, parts of the floating piers etc. And overhead, a continuous flow of planes going to and coming from France.’ They were taken ashore in a DUKW, a floating truck, and were photographed and filmed as they disembarked on to the beach. Brooke was quite emotional at being back in France four years after he had left in the disastrous defeats of 1940. Monty met them and took the party to his headquarters about five miles inland, where he explained his dispositions and his plans. Then they had lunch in the grounds in a tent. Churchill asked how far away the enemy was. Monty told him about three miles and explained that there was not a continuous perimeter line. Churchill asked: ‘What is there then to prevent an incursion of German armour breaking up our luncheon?’ Monty replied that he didn’t think they would come. Churchill and Brooke finished their tour by sailing up and down the invasion beaches and watching an LCT (Landing Craft Tank) disgorge its cargo of tanks and trucks on to the shore ‘in a remarkably short time’. Finally, they witnessed a bombardment by two British battleships of positions about twelve miles inland. Churchill had never been on a Royal Navy ship firing in anger, so he asked the captain of his destroyer to fire off a salvo as well. This he did, and Churchill was quite disappointed when the enemy did not return their fire.³³

Churchill and his team returned to Portsmouth that evening, having seen some of the giant pieces of the Mulberry harbours being assembled. When it was finally built, protected by the giant concrete caissons and sunken ships, with its floating pierheads and miles of roadway, the British harbour became known, fittingly, as ‘Port Winston’. Although severely damaged in a storm, it continued to process literally millions of men, tens of thousands of tanks and other vehicles, and hundreds of thousands of tons of supplies for five months, until the Allies had advanced into Holland. The remnants of the giant concrete blocks can still be seen in the sea off the beach at Arromanches, the remains of one of the most extraordinary military engineering feats of the war.

The day after Churchill returned to London from his sightseeing trip to the invasion beaches, a mysterious new type of bomb exploded in a street in Bethnal Green, east London. Six people were killed and another nine injured. Hitler had been threatening to use secret terror weapons against Britain for some time. German science had advanced way ahead of what was happening in Britain. A campaign now began in which hundreds of flying bombs and then ballistic missiles were fired against London. Hitler was not defeated yet.