D-Day. Antony Beevor (p1)

well good evening everybody and thank you very much we'll be welcome for tonight's event at my name's Lindsay Tanner on the federal Member for Melbourne and you are in my electorate and some of you probably live in my electorate and I'm also the Federal Minister for finance and deregulation and I'm delighted to be able to introduce Antony Beevor tonight now Antony Beevor of course as I'm sure you know is the author of a number of landmark histories he has an unusual background in the sense that he has a military background rather than of course an academic historian and he has produced a number of landmark works many of them of course focused on some of the great military phenomena of the 20th century books on Berlin Stalingrad and a couple of my favorites the battle for Spain and Paris after the liberation which was written with his wife Arthur mr. Cooper most recently of course and I suspect probably the main focus of tonight's address he has published d-day I haven't quite completed it on about a third of the way through as you can imagine as Minister for finance I don't have a lot of spare time but I am a voracious reader I'm particularly particularly a voracious reader of of history and already I'm enjoying d-day immensely now just one observation prior to introducing our guest of honor today and that is that studying history as I did essentially in the nineteen seventies early 1980s at Melbourne University I did that at the time when a particular phenomenon called history from below was a dominant theme in how history was studied certainly in the UK and as we are heavily influenced by the UK in Australia and that really did have a big impact and a very positive impact in some respects but in part it had a negative dimension which was that the focus on individuals on key personalities their interaction that had marked earlier history tended to be downplayed to a great extent and in many respects I think that tended to make the discussion of history less interesting than perhaps it could have been and that to a degree the pendulum has now swing back and it's been people like Antony Beevor and a number of other key historians who have managed both to maintain the level of rigor and high quality analysis but also to humanize history so for example for those of you who've already read Dido you'll note that the opening first 10 pages or so are an exploration of the key personalities on the Allied side and their mutual hatred and distrust and dislike of each other and all of the dynamics that inevitably exist in any major human organization and any major human endeavor now in other kinds of history you wouldn't necessarily see much of those things but to me it was an excellent example of how you can have both rigor and analysis of the wider forces of history but also humanize the story and provide an analysis of the people involved in the way that Anthony has done in that case because it is a central part of the story so I'm looking forward to the remainder of the book and I think the other thing that distinguishes his work is the quality of the writing it is something that I always note whether it's people in my department providing with briefings or any books that I'm reading is just the sheer quality of the writing in this case is extraordinary and little snippets every now and then just to lighten things up so that there is a in fact he may want to tell us more about this book there's a bloke called Lieutenant General pinecoffin that he refers to and he then says in parentheses who on that note alone is well-qualified to appear in an evil and war novel which I thought was a delightful little vignette in the image that otherwise serious history so in summary I think you can say that what Antony Beevor does is to bring history alive and it's a testament to that that we have hundreds of people here tonight to hear him speak and I'm delighted to have this opportunity as a fan as a history nut and as somebody who's keen to be here just to listen as well as to have the opportunity to speak could you please welcome Antony Beevor instead thank you very much indeed Keith Douglas the greatest British / to the Second World War who met his death in Normandy wrote the following lines shortly before d-day actors waiting in the wings of Europe we already watch the lights on the stage and listen to the colossal overture begin for us entering at the height of the din it will be hard to hear our thoughts hard to gauge how much our conduct owes to fear or fury all of those who took part in d-day whether soldier sailor or airman would never forget the sight it was by far the largest invasion fleet ever known with over 5,000 ships the view from the air was breathtaking many pilots said later that the sea was packed so full of ships that it almost looked as if he would walk to France the air support plan included over 6000 aircraft with transports dropping 3 Airborne Division's heavy and medium bombers attacking beach defenses and other squadrons on deception operations typhoon and Thunderbolt fighter bombers would roam inland ready to attack German reinforcements layered screens of Allied fighters but roamed between the Parisian region and the Normandy beaches and they would ensure that the Luftwaffe never reached the invasion zone in daylight and anti-submarine patrols of Sunderland's and liberators had already started to patrol every map square of the sea between southern island and brittany the great embarrassment of grand admiral dönitz not a single u-boat got through to the channel in fact one Canadian pilot broke all records by sinking two u-boats within 22 minutes the preparations were staggering read Desmond Scott a New Zealander who commanded a wing of 4 typhoon squadrons the airborne assaults the quantity and variety of shipping the number of army divisions the tremendous weight of the air offensive the scale and the precision of it all made our past efforts look insignificant when the briefing was over there was no conversation no laughter no one lingered and we filed out of the cinema as there we were leaving Church expressions remain solemn the task ahead outweighed all our previous experiences and sent a shiver down the spine even Stalin who had railed so bitterly at his Western allies after all their postponements of the second front could hardly begrudge respect for such a vast operation in the whole history of war he read to Churchill that has never been such an undertaking the planning for operation live Lord was meticulous nothing was left to chance the instructions issued by staff ran to many hundreds of pages in true British style nervousness was camouflaged with jokes Operation Overlord became known as operation overboard a spoof set of instructions for operation overboard circulated just before the invasion it defined the objectives as a to provide some employment for a very great number of officers be2 proved that the cardinal principles of administration movement and common sense may all be disregarded or overcome by improvisation see to reestablish the naffy on the continent of Europe these jokes were as I say to hide anxiety with so much at stake all the American and British planners suffered from what was known as DJ jitters but one of general Bradley's staff officers the wonderfully named Colonel Bonesteel observed later the British had a much greater fear of failure this was indeed true after the evacuation from Dunkirk and the disastrous raid on Dieppe in 1942 to say nothing of manpower shortages and war weariness an unknown aspect of the invasion which is a great interest are the frenzied Nazi conspiracy theories to explain their defeat and these continue to this day in German books and on neo-nazi websites they claimed that a campaign of deliberate sabotage was carried out by General lightnin transpiler Rommels chief of staff who was in charge of Army Group B on the 6th of June because Rommel was absent in Germany spidel is described by them as the center of the cancer of treason and the German armed forces in the West everything which went wrong on the German side was attributed to a conspiracy in mein Yorkin organized by him spidel is accused of sending the 21st Panzer Division on a wild-goose chase down the west side of the river on early on the 6th of June when in fact it was the local commander who ordered it to attack the British airborne landings on that flank spidel is also accused of putting the movements of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend the 2nd SS Panzer Division and 116 towards the invasion area and this is said to have been part of a plot to keep the 2nd and 116 Panzer divisions back to help the 20th of July plotters seize Paris a month and a half later spidel who ironically had been Hitler's guide on his only visit to Paris in the summer of 1940 was indeed a key member of the 20th of July conspiracy but to pretend that he had sabotaged the whole of the defense of Normandy on the 6th of June is completely ridiculous after the July plot he escaped the Gestapo killing machine by a miracle which perhaps partly explains the Nazi vituperation against him in the 1950s he became a senior officer of the West German Bundeswehr and later a senior NATO commander in Europe the Nazis and neo-nazis see this as his payoff for having treacherously helped the Allies in Normandy in their paranoid vision they claim that he had always been an American another conspiracy theory claims that the defense of schaberg was sabotage deliberately with the finger of accusation pointed at generalleutnant graf von Schliemann kleben surrender hitler bitterly compared to policies at Stalingrad simply wanted to avoid a further useless loss of life in any case Normandy formed the great stab-in-the-back legend of the Second World War but unlike in 1918 the traitors this time were not Jews and Bolsheviks but arrastra Krauts and officers of the General Staff despite all the meticulous planning for the ambitious invasion it rapidly became clear that Allied commanders particularly the British had not really thought through the next phase the British plan depended on taking the city of Corps in the first 24 hours before the Germans could bring in reinforcements yet the force allocated an infantry brigade on foot for the single regiment of Sherman tanks was clearly incapable advance of advancing nearly ten miles inland and capturing a city in a single day the British Army's reluctance to adopt the German and American system of armored infantry in half-tracks integrated with tanks was one of the most conspicuous drawbacks of its entrenched and traditional regimental system RAF heavy bought heavy bombers were tasked to attack the smash the city soon after midday on the 6th of June yet as the German bombing of Stalingrad had shown two years before bombing a city just before you attack is totally counterproductive it blocks out SiC access routes and the ruins provide an ideal terrain for the defenders in any case due to holdups on the beach and unexpectedly fierce resistance from one German stronghold codenamed Hillman the British Second Army never came close to ceasing calm and the first day it would take in fact not 24 hours but just over a month to occupy the remains of the city which had been destroyed so unnecessarily French civilian casualties have been largely overlooked in most accounts of the battle for Normandy despite Churchill's attempts to limit French casualties in the preparatory bombing faced Overlord to 10,000 in fact over 15,000 died 3,000 died on d-day alone the same as the total of all Allied soldiers and servicemen killed that day and the battle for Normandy as a whole from 6th of June until the end of August cost another 20,000 French lives it's a truly sobering thought that during the Second World War more French civilians were killed by Allied bombing than the total number of British civilians killed by the Luftwaffe and the flying bombs Montgomery's planned to seize core and the ground beyond to allow the construction of forward airfields and prepare a break out towards fellows ground to a rapid hold the arrival of German Panzer formations on the British front the 12th SS Hitler Uganda vision the Panzer Lehr division and the 1st SS division alleged andata Adolphe Hitler meant the within four days by the 10th of June the pattern of the battle began to take a very different course to the one Montgomery had envisaged it was also very different to what the German commanders had planned Field Marshal von Rundstedt and general Gavin's reppin Berg the commander of Panzer group West and wanted to launch a massive Panzer counter-attack to sweep the Allies back into the sea but now they had to split to their divisions to weaken the Freak Infantry Division simply to hold the line but Ness they managed to do which deadly effect using with their little battle groups a camouflage burger with camouflage a flexible defense and above all their anti-tank guns so despite massive air support and field and naval artillery the British and Canadian attempts to break through failed general Montgomery partly for reasons of morale but also out of vanity could not admit that his master plan had gone wrong he was forced to accept that all the British army could hope to do was to tie down hold down the German Panzer divisions on its front while the Americans captured the cheval Peninsula to the west sadly Montgomery it was not frank with his American allies and especially with Eisenhower the supreme commander they became infuriated with what they saw as his complacency and his disingenuous claim that he had foreseen this all along Montgomerys handling of u.s. army commanders did terrible damage to anglo-american relations in July pressure built up from Eisenhower's headquarters and senior RAF officers to have Montgomery relieved of his command he was almost certainly saved by his reputation as the victor of a low men to have sacked him would have been too great a blow to British pride and morale yet Montgomery for all his disingenuous news walls basically write with the bulk of the German Panzer forces and above all 88 millimeter anti-tank guns concentrated against the British Second Army there was no real alternative to his new plan which made a virtue out of a very painful necessity and this was for the British and the Canadians to hold down those German Panzer divisions while giving later on the Americans the ability to break through on the West further to the west down the Atlantic coast but if only he'd owned up to the Americans and not kept trying to proclaim that he was about to achieve a major breakthrough when he knew he could not risk heavy casualties because of British manpower shortages Churchill was also also painfully aware that if Britain ended the war with a drastically diminished army she would have little influence on the post-war settlement the stalemate round calm with British and Canadians facing fanatic SS Panzer divisions produced a pitiless form of warfare with prisoners killed by both sides the SS Hitlerjugend began a cycle of atrocities and the Canadians especially did not hang back from taking revenge fighting on the American front to the west was just as brutal American paratroopers had landed on the cotton town Peninsula in the early hours of the 6th of June with their blood up many claimed that they've been told to take prisoner take no prisoners by their commanders as that would slow them down and then rumors spread among them of Germans using flamethrowers on paratroopers caught in trees and even of mutilation French civilians were often shocked by the cold-blooded killing of prisoners the Battle of the Bocage which the Americans had to go through was particularly savage neither the British nor the Americans had appreciated before the invasion what perfect terrain these small fields with dense hedgerows would provide for the defenders the Germans using cruelly effective tactics honed on the Eastern Front managed to inflict massive losses on the Allied armies and make up for their inferiority in numbers in artillery and above all aircraft they would plant mines at the bottom of shell craters in front of their positions says an American soldier throwing himself into take cover would have his legs blown off alongside tracks they rigged up what the Americans called castrator mines or bouncing Betties which jumped up and exploded at waist height their tanks and field Gunners became expert at firing tree bursts which meant exploding a shell and the crown of a tree to blast splinters of wood into anyone sheltering below tied to a tree a German rifleman would wait for advancing American infantry to pass then shoot one of them this prompted the others to throw themselves flat in the open then German mortar teams would immediately show them with airbursts aid men who went to help the wounded were frequently shot down because the Germans knew very well what a blow to Morales was and quite often the single German would emerge with his hands up to surrender and when Americans move forward to take him prisoner he would throw himself sideways and hidden machine guns would shoot would shoot them down not surprisingly few American soldiers took prisoners after a body had been killed in this way Savior propagandists such as Ilya Ehrenburg made disdainful remarks in their press claiming that the Western Allies were fighting the dross of the German army but this was true any of a few infantry divisions the British during Operation Epsom found themselves up against 7 Panzer divisions including two SS Panzer Corps the greatest concentration of orphan SS since the Battle of Kursk the Americans meanwhile many more infantry divisions as well as the 2nd Panzer Division and the SS Das Reich although statistics are hard to compare between the Western and Eastern fronts the average casualty rates per division per month appear to have been higher in Normandy than in the East quite considerably sir German losses on the Eastern Front averaged just under 1000 per division per month over the course of that war in Normandy the average figure was around 2300 per division per month German soldiers who'd experienced both fronts were shaken by the fighting in Northwest France I spoke to a veteran of Eastern Front today a corporal in the 91st Lofland a division red him in July he said that it was hard in the East but it was never like it is here general Barton the American commander of the 4th division wrote the Germans are staying in there just by the guts of their soldiers we outnumber them 10 to 1 in infantry at 50 to 1 in artillery and an infinite number in the air he wanted unit commanders to convince their men that we've got to fight for our country just as hard as their Germans are fighting for theirs German troops were deeply indoctrinated by propaganda one prisoner a 19 year old Hitler Youth from the 17th SS panzergrenadier division was convinced that the Americans were in just a desperate state the German forces have retaken schaberg and that Germany would destroy the Western Allies and then defeat the Red Army others to the astonishment of their American captors believed that New York had been destroyed by German bombers to create hatred the German equivalent to say via commissar the National Socialist leadership officers emphasized the destruction of German cities and the killing of German women and children by terror attacks their basic theme was that the Allies intended to wipe out the German race defeat would mean the annihilation of the fatherland their propaganda leaflets addressed to Allied soldiers demanded what do you want to do in Europe to defend America to die for Stalin and Israel this was all part of a basic Nazi theme that American isthmus allied the Jewish Pluto at the United States with the Jewish Bolshevik of the Soviet Union none of course were more committed than the waffen-ss they were told before the invasion by their offers officers that any of them who surrendered to the enemy without being seriously wounded would be treated as traitors but perhaps the most horrific story I came across of FASS discipline came from an Alsatian drafted into the first SS Panzer Division my juice and olive off Hitler a fellow Alsatian in the 11th company of the 1st SS regiment who'd also been forcibly recruited towards the end of the battle deserted and tried to escape in a column of French refugees he was spotted by members of their regiment and brought back their company commander then ordered members of the company to beat him to death with their rib bone in his body broken the corpse was thrown into a shell hole the captain declared that this was an example of Kameraden adds 'i'm an education in comradeship it was hardly surprising that the British were an Canadians captured safe USS alive in the main base hospital nearby the senior medical officer Colonel Ian Frazer recounted how he used to make his rounds of the wounded German prisoners they will smile back when he greeted them then one morning they all turned their backs on him the chief nursing sister told him that a wounded SS officer OSS soldier had been brought in and they were now afraid of sharing any friendliness to the enemy Frazer examined this SS soldier who was in such a serious condition that he needed a blood transfusion but once the needle was in the passionate young Nazi suddenly demanded is this English blood when told that he was he pulled it out announcing I died for his but I died for Hitler which as Frazer noted is in fact what he did and the other German soldiers suddenly soon became friendly again badly wounded prisoners from the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitler Jugend behaved in a similar way Churchill's aide jock coalfields serving as a Mustang federal reconnaissance pilot heard from a young British nurse about her experiences one boy of about 16 had torn off the bandage with which he dressed his serious wound shouting that he only wanted to die for the Fuhrer another had flung in her face the food she brought him she'd quelled a third by threatening to arrange for him to have a transfusion of Jewish blood one could hardly imagine a British or Canadian prisoner of war wanting to die in this way for Churchill or King George the 6th or an American soldier wanting to die for Roosevelt the other major difference between the Allied armies and the Germans was almost certainly connected to these contrasts this was the markedly different pattern of battle shock or combat exhaustion casualties the Americans in Normandy suffered 30,000 cases of psychoneurosis although the British and Canadian figures were slightly lower they were still infinitely higher than the German rates must however be pointed out that even before Hitler came to power the German army had turned its back on the comparatively humane policy adopted by the Imperial Army during the First World War and refused to acknowledge that battle shock existed as a condition the first u.s. army medical services in Normandy where at times overwhelmed by cases of combat exhaustion the vast majority occurred among replacements young badly trained soldiers sent in to make up numbers after heavy casualties American military bureaucracy handled the whole replacement system with a brutal lack of imagination and the British Army was no better the very word replacement which suggested the filling of dead man's shoes was ill chosen it took several months before the term was changed to reinforcements but the basic problem was that these new arrivals were ill trained and totally unprepared for what lay ahead our younger men especially the replacements who came up when I did reported a lieutenant in 32 division were not real soldiers they were too young to be killers and too soft to India the hardships of battle replacements accounted for the majority of suicides just before they went across to France an American Red Cross woman recorded belts and ties were removed from some of these young men they were very very young most were no more than 18 years old

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Length: 27min 33sec (1653 seconds)

Published: Fri May 03 2013