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Challenges in Armoured Warfare

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Challenges in Armoured Warfare Challenges in Armoured Warfare For History 394 - Dr. S. Cafferky By Steve Weatherbe December 2005 The failure of the Allies, after their successful landing in Normandy in June, 1944, to execute a breakout as planned despite heavy superiority in men, materiel, and air support, generated “a choking pall bordering on panic” over the Allied leadership, states American historian William B. Breuer. Moreover, it almost split the Grand Alliance of the U.S. and Great Britain “wide open”—at least at the command level of the Allied Expeditionary Force. 1 When breakout finally occurred on the American front and the opportunity emerged for the Allies to encircle the German forces opposing them at Falaise, the fissures in their leadership were matched by quite literal gaps in the Allied line. Three Canadian divisions played a crucial part in the Allies’ efforts both to break out in June and now to encircle in August. While 200,000 Germans surrendered by the end of August and the same number were slain,2 anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 escaped. 3 Because of its tardiness in closing the gap from the north, the Canadian Army has received its share of this negative attention. The Canadian Army’s official historian, Colonel C.P. Stacey, opened the debate for Canadian historians with his Victory Campaign , acknowledging the Canadian Army had “failed to make the most of their opportunities” and especially, “the capture of Falaise was long delayed.” He blamed 1 William B. Breuer, Death of a Nazi Army: The Falaise Pocket (Chelsea, Miss.: Scarborough House, 1990),11. 2 Carlo D’Este, Decision in Normandy: The Unwritten Story of Montgomery and the Allied Campaign (London: Collins, 1983), 517-8. D’Este puts the total captured during the Normandy phase ending August 25 at 135,000. German equipment losses included 1,300 tanks, 20,000 vehicles and 2,000 assault and field guns. Five panzer(armoured) divisions were destroyed along with 20 of infantry while six panzer divisions were “severely mauled” along with 12 infantry divisions. Much lower fatality figures for the Germans appear elsewhere. Richard Holmes, for example, says “at least 50,000” Germans died in Normandy in The D-Day Experience: From the Invasion to the Liberation of Paris , (n.p.: Imperial War Museum,n.d) ,59. 3Breuer, 294. Breuer credits German General Heinz Eberhard for the smaller number and British Field Marshal Alan Brooke for the larger. 2 officers at the regimental level “whose attitude towards training was casual and haphazard.” The Canadians “had probably not got enough out of our long training as we might have.” 4 After Stacey, the first Canadian war history to focus critically the question of performance was John English’s tellingly subtitled The Canadian Army and the Normandy Campaign : A Study of Failure in High Command . English accepted Stacey’s complaint about training but argued that Canadian high command should take responsibility. The same group he argued was to blame for strategic and tactical failures in Normandy, indicting most of the army’s general officers except Second Canadian Corps commander Lieutenant-General Guy Simonds. As English puts it in his conclusion, “Simonds stood alone.” 5 The latest word in the discussion is that of Terry Copp, who in his revisionist Fields of Fire , challenged the very premises behind the debate that Allied forces were markedly inferior to their German opponents in quality and that Canadian forces, especially so. He argued that “the achievement of the Allied and especially the Canadian armies in Normandy has been greatly underrated…The destruction of two German armies in just 76 days was one of the most remarkable military victories of the Second World War.” 6 4 C.P. Stacey, The Victory Campaign: North West Europe, 1944-1945 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1962). The quotes are all from Chapter 11, 271-7,and all cited in Terry Copp. Fields of Fire: The Canadians in Normandy (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto, 2003), 5. 5 John A. English, The Canadian Army and the Normandy Campaign: A Study of Failure in High Command ( New York, Westport, Connecticut, London: Praeger, 1991), 313. 6 Terry Copp, Fields of Fire: The Canadians in Normandy (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto, 2003), 13. His view is remarkably close to the popular account of the Normandy campaign held by Canadian veterans of it. See, for example, Ben Dunkelman, Dual Allegiance (Toronto: Macmillan, 1976), 86-87. In this autobiographical, and somewhat hagiographical, account, Canadians held down the bulk of the best German armoured units, thus freeing the Americans to make their storied breakout under Patton. 2 3 Can the memories of the Canadians who fought in Second World War inform both the ongoing debates on Normandy and also those on the value of oral history? In addressing these questions this paper will rely on interviews conducted in the fall of 2005 by this writer with three Canadian tank commanders, two of whom served in North West Europe beginning in June, 1944 and the third who served throughout the Sicilian and Italian campaigns, before shifting to the North West European theatre. Oral history, historian A.J.P. Taylor has warned, can degenerate to “old men drooling over their youth” who “forget truth and manufacture myth.”7 Even oral historians such as Paul Thompson contend that their branch of history is “most useful in explaining the social structure and pattern of everyday life, least helpful in understanding a crisis.” 8 But military historian Nigel de Lee has responded that armies in battle are “mutually destructive and often careless of their records,” while many important orders are not recorded at all. Therefore, he argues, oral accounts are essential to developing a “comprehensive idea” of military operations, and sometimes are the only source explaining certain decisions or events. 9 Given that crisis is the essence of warfare, what might we hope to glean from our three tank commanders about what amounts to an extended crisis? The interview questions themselves targeted what military historians have identified as ongoing issues rather than specific events. These were leadership, training, manpower and German superiority in weaponry and performance. Were squadrons and regiments well led? Did the interview subjects find their training useful for the battles of North West Europe and 7 Quoted in English, 2. 8 Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 134. 9 Nigel de Lee, “Oral History and British Soldiers’ Experience,” in Time to Kill: The Soldiers’ Experience of War in the West , ed. Paul Addison and Angus Calder (London, Sydney and Auckland: Random House, 1997), 359-368. 3 4 Italy ? And finally, what were they able learn about dealing with better-trained, better- equipped German forces as they went along? The leadership question especially raises ethical and legal questions for the interviewer and interviewees because all of the latter are drawn from a cohesive social group, veterans of the Second World War Canadian army, and officers, resident in or near Victoria, British Columbia in 2005. Frank comments about named superior officers might have legal implications such as those described by Valerie Yow. 10 Apart from defamation suits, there is the risk, as Maurice Punch put it, of “spoiling the field.” 11 If my subjects were critical of their leaders of other current or deceased members of the veterans’ group or their friends, not only might doors be subsequently closed to university oral history research, but bad blood could be caused amongst its members. This writer followed Punch’s injunction to “just do it,” but in the course of interviews did not record the names of those criticised, nor pursue them. 12 The answers in the event did not always match the questions, or fit neatly into the pre-ordained categories. Notably omitted as a topic was the manpower crisis that saw, according to Copp, Canada’s three divisions in Normandy reduced in terms of their rifle companies by one third their strength by the end of the campaign. 13 The interview subjects, however, made up for this omission by responding to questions about training with comments on the manpower shortage. Questions on training also elicited predictable yet heartfelt comments on the oft-chronicled lack of preparedness and 11 Maurice Punch, “Politics and Ethics in Qualitative Research,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1994),83-97, 93 . 12 Ibid., 83. 13 Terry Copp, “Battle Exhaustion and the Canadian Soldier in Normandy,” in Canadian Military History: Selected Readings, ed. Marc Milner (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1993) 240. 4 5 poverty of training in the Canadian Army at the outset of the Second World War. Major General A.J. Tedlie recounted how as a newly-commissioned officer with the Royal Montreal Regiment in 1939 he scoured Montreal pawn shops for such essential personal gear as a compass, binoculars, and a sidearm, “It was a disgrace to our country,” he said. “Had I gone on to do a Ph D [he earned a post-war MA in History], its thesis would have been ‘Canada: Always Willing, Never Ready.’” 14 Robert Rogers told of the First Hussars’ initially preparations to go overseas with the First Canadian Division as cavalry.15 Patrick Sheppard, who joined a year later, in 1940, was sent to a centralized officer training camp in Brockville and thence to Camp Borden for armoured warfare training. 16 Both he and Rogers had low opinions of their first tank, the Canadian- designed Ram, and of their second, the more robust, but still under-gunned,Churchill, with which they were equipped in England.
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