Brigade, who landed on Sword Beach.
Among the ranks of the reinforcements was Galwegian Private Pat Gillen, who described his exit from his landing craft in the following terms, ‘The whole thing was to move fast, not to be an object for the snipers. They used to say “if you want to see your grandchildren then get off the landing craft faster than Jessie Owens [an Olympic sprinter]”. Seemingly I was fast.’
Thousands upon thousands of Allied assault troops ran that gauntlet and diced with death, disembarking, under intense enemy fire, onto the D-Day beaches, at dawn on 6 June 1944. Many died, but the carnage was especially horrible in the opening hours on Omaha Beach. Among the first to die on Omaha was Joseph Madagan, whose mother was from Clouna, near Ennistymon in County Clare. Joseph was with the US Rangers, who, alongside ‘A’ Company 116th Infantry Regiment, were among the first wave. Weighed down with heavy backpacks and equipment, staggering and stumbling through water, those moving sluggishly were easily picked out by the enemy snipers. Earlier, Allied aerial and naval bombardments, although immense, had not always achieved the desired results, and there was plenty of fight left in the defenders.
But it was the Allies, with naval support, tank fire, air support and the sheer grit of courageous small units, that won the day; by day’s end, the Allies had a foothold on the Normandy coast. Most survived the horrors of D-Day, but many fell in the fierce fighting in bocage countryside: the small fields, high hedgerows, earthen embankments and sunken roads which were ideal for the wily and determined German defenders, who still had considerable resolve left.
The Germans had been surprised by the Allied landing at Normandy, and, significantly, continued to believe, as they had been led to believe, that the Allied invasion at Normandy was only a diversion for a still-to-be-executed main Allied effort at the Pas-de-Calais. They had become convinced by their own logic – with assistance from the Allies – of a phantom army that was poised to strike across the English Channel from Dover. This highly successful Allied deception continued to keep the Germans’ very real and very strong Fifteenth Army in situ to fight a very fake First United States Army Group formation.
The Allied penetration inland was not going as fast as hoped for, and certain key cities – Bayeux, Caen, Carentan and Saint-Lô – took a lot of fighting to capture. The Allies had done well, but they experienced a lot of intense and bloody fighting in the bocage. After three weeks of this, US Ranger Sergeant Ed Ryan, who had successfully scaled the cliffs and captured the gun emplacements at Pointe du Hoc, was shot and wounded. He survived the war. Also wounded was Lance Corporal James Bryan, a farm labourer from Thurles; he fought with 3rd Battalion Irish Guards on D-Day, sustaining the injury on 9 July, outside Caen, from a German Stuka dive bomber. Shot in the neck by a sniper was Dubliner John Donnelly, whose obituary in The Irish Times, 15 June 2019, tells us that, apart from fighting with the British army, landing on Sword Beach on D-Day, he became one of Ireland’s foremost insolvency experts after the war and lived to be ninety years of age. John Donnelly lost many friends as a young soldier, and this affected him very deeply. It was perhaps this fact that led him to spend two years training for ordination as a Jesuit, and, later, to have a short-lived dalliance as a medical student. In time he settled down in his father’s chartered accountancy practice, which he bought out two years before qualifying himself.
James ‘Jim’ Sullivan was conscripted at Reading, England. He was a point-to-point jockey at Wantage in the United Kingdom. A member of 51st Highland Division, he was part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) evacuated from Dunkirk, on 4 June 1940, on a ship called The Princess Maud along with 1,270 others. Later, as a tank driver attached to the 7th Armour Division (‘The Desert Rats’), he took part in the North African campaign; on the way back from this campaign he became involved in the invasion of Sicily, then returning to the UK to prepare for D-Day. Wounded on the approach to Caen, he was brought back to the Royal Memorial Hospital at Netley, Southampton, and on recovery he was sent back to Salisbury. His younger brother Denis also served in the British army during the war, with the 16th Carrier Platoon, while his three other brothers, Donal, Jerry and William ‘Bill’ Sullivan served in the Irish Defence Forces.
The hard fighting on the ground involved three separate operations to try to take Caen. Heavy aerial bombardments of German defences became a feature of the bloody struggle, with casualties mounting on both sides. Progress through the bocage was painfully slow and cost the lives of many men and a lot of materials. That it was not unnecessarily slow was always a concern of General Montgomery, who was criticised by his detractors for being overly cautious but praised by the soldiers for not being wantonly wasteful with their lives – a lesson Monty had learned personally on the Western Front during the First World War.
Fixing the Germans into positions and wearing away their strength, the various Allied (British and Canadian) operations were actually achieving what they were designed to. The outcome was in line with the operational narrative Montgomery had envisaged; the uncertainty and delayed timelines frustrated many, however. Meanwhile, the hard fighting and dying continued on the ground. Allied aerial and artillery bombardments had a brutal physical effect on the Germans, and where this was not actually the case, the psychological impact caused many to become dazed, even demoralised and some practically ‘demented’. Drawing in the Germans on the east flank of the bridgehead, keeping them there, and making them commit their reserves of men and, more particularly, their tanks, allowed the Americans on the west flank to push southwards, facing minimum resistance; next they turned eastwards, then sweeping northwards and creating a pincer movement with the British and Canadians. This manoeuvre forced open the ‘breakout’ as the Allies finally penetrated the Germans’ fiercely defensive posture. This was Monty’s battle plan, and even though it took longer than first assessed, the strategy eventually worked. The fighting in the bocage was behind them. The Germans fell back in disarray and narrowly avoided annihilation at the Falaise Pocket, where the encircling Allies failed to close the gap quickly enough. There was much left to do and a second, much smaller, amphibious invasion of France in the southeast, near Nice and Marseilles – known as Operation Dragoon – which was successfully completed on 15 August. The liberation of Paris quickly followed and the Allies swept eastwards, at speed, making a rapid advance towards Germany. Their momentum was curbed on the Dutch border due to highly extended supply lines that still stretched all the way back to Normandy. The port of Antwerp was in Allied hands; the difficulty was that it was forty miles inland and the Germans still had control of the Scheldt estuary, which led from the sea to Antwerp.
With the Allied advance stalled due to a shortage of supplies – particularly of fuel and ammunition. The Red Ball Express, the convoy system which was its lifeline, could not keep up the flow of supplies needed to maintain an advance against the German resistance. In order to continue to capitalise on the Germans’ confusion, the Allies needed to be hot on the heels of their retreat. The Germans were not to be given time and space to reorganise and recover. Along the Belgium–Netherlands border, considerations of time and space, Monty felt, were best addressed by surprise and speed; airborne surprise combined with the speed of XXX Corps (30 Corps) were the keys to success.
It was not, however, the newly-promoted Field Marshal Montgomery’s decision to make, because on 1 September 1944 General Dwight D. Eisenhower assumed direct operational command and control of all Allied ground forces in Europe. Monty was no longer the overall co-ordinator of the land battle – an appointment he had been granted by Eisenhower for the D-Day assault and the Battle of Normandy. This, of course, had placed American troops under Montgomery’s command; back in the US, public opinion turned against this, due to the already superior number of American troops in Europe and the ever-increasing US contribution, of equipment and supplies, to the Allied cause.
It had been Eisenhower’s intention to drive forward on a broad front, forcing the now-unsettled Wehrmacht to try and cope with many points of Allied attack simultaneously. However, the slowly arriving supplies meant he was unable to exploit US General Patton’s advance in the south and Montgomery’s in the north. Both had an intense dislike of the other and they had a longstanding rivalry – each wanted to beat the other to Berlin.
Montgomery
