A Study in Fear and Courage

IT WAS THE POIGNANT delusion of the nineteenth century that history was rational. We know better; the twentieth century has taught us that the only human quality we can expect from history besides cruelty is irony. The irony of history left its mocking hand all over D-Day and the great ten-week battle for Normandy that followed it, and, crucially, on the plan that inspired the whole operation. It was the brainchild of an American officer named Albert Wedemeyer, and the odd thing about him was that he was a 1938 graduate of the German Staff College, where he learned the strategy and tactics that would guide the Allies to victory in Normandy. The Kriegsakademie taught geopolitics as the basis of strategy; according to this dispensation, the U.S. could not win a world war with air or sea power alone, but must exploit its isolated geopolitical position by invading the European continent and fighting a land battle, in which tanks would be the decisive weapon. Blitzkrieg—or Breakout, as the Allies were to call it—would be the master tactic.

Submitted to the President in September of 1941, Wedemeyer’s plan was called the Victory Program. Picked up and refined by General Eisenhower, his successor at the War Plans Division, it became just that. “Its conception and delivery was to be one of the decisive acts of the Second World War,” according to John Keegan.

Mr. Keegan, a professor at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, is the author of that singular book The Face of Battle, a 1975 history of warfare, and he is too careful a historian to make such judgments as the one above promiscuously. His way of doing history favors “intense particularity” over flaccid generalization. One can be sure that he will not miss an irony such as Wedemeyer’s having matriculated at the German war college, for he has the novelist’s eye for vivid fact. Reading him is therefore not only instructive but a literary pleasure. If it seems perverse to take pleasure from a factual account of war, then perhaps a distinction needs to be made between the abstract category “war,” of which it is a test of one’s moral mettle to disapprove, and “battle,” which is too humanly complex a subject to elicit only moral resistance. No one has put that complexity more eloquently than John Keegan.

The study of battle is . . . always a study of fear and usually of courage; always of leadership, usually of obedience; always of compulsion, sometimes of insubordination; always of anxiety, sometimes of elation or catharsis; always of uncertainty and doubt, misinformation and misapprehension, usually also of faith and sometimes of vision; always of violence, sometimes also of cruelty, self-sacrifice, compassion; above all, it is always a study of solidarity and usually also of disintegration—for it is towawls the disintegration of human groups that battle is directed.

Those words from The Face of Battle evince the quality of the sensibility that in Six Armies has produced an outstanding narrative of battle in this richly imaginative sense.

Six Armies begins with a charming chapter on Mr. Keegan’s “war” when he was a boy growing up in the west of England, far from the danger of the conflict but not from its excitement. Even when England stood alone, young Keegan was sure it would win; but when the Americans arrived, showering chocolates on the countryside like manna, he became smug. Against the British will to fight, incarnated in Winston Churchill, and the American plenitude of materiel, Hitler did not stand a chance. The invasion of the continent would soon take place; the war would end.

It was therefore something of a shock for Keegan when, in the 1950s, declassified wartime documents revealed the degree of British irresolution before the prospect of an invasion. It was the Americans who, in line with Wedemeyer’s plan, urged a cross-Channel invasion as early as the fall of 1942. The British repeatedly “shrank from the knife,” first urging on FDR the North African invasion and then following up that diversion with the invasions of Sicily and Italy in the hope of thinning out the German defenses in France. As Keegan shows in a fine chapter on the diplomacy of D-Day, it was only under constant pressure not just from Chief of Staff Marshall but from Molotov, the Russian foreign minister, who pleaded with FDR for the opening of a second front to relieve his mortally threatened country, that the British shook off the incubus of the agonizing stalemate of 1914-1918 and committed themselves to the invasion. It proved a costly delay.

In a recent book, the historian John Grigg argues persuasively that by failing to mount an invasion in 1943, the Allies allowed the Germans vastly to strengthen their Atlantic Wall defenses, thereby costing many Allied casualties on D-Day and perhaps even the lives of the millions of Jews murdered in 1944. Such speculation, however, is idle. What is certain is that General Eisenhower’s doubts about the 1944 invasion were so serious that even as the ships of his armada were leaving their English ports on June 5, he was writing these remarkable lines:

Our landings in the CherbourgHavre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place were based on the best information available. The troops, the air and navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

“These,” says John Keegan, “were the words of a great man and a great soldier.” Indeed.

THE REST OF THE book is made up of chapters on the parts played in the far-flung, multi-phase battle by Keegan’s six armies: the American airborne troops who landed on the eve of D-Day behind Omaha Beach and performed the critical mission of frustrating German counterattacks against the vulnerable troops on the beaches; the Canadians who faced the guns on Juno Beach, thirty-five miles to the east of the parachutists, haunted by fears of another Dieppe, where so many of their countrymen had fallen two years before; the Scottish Division, which made the costly but important offensive east of Caen in late June, and the British tank force, whose advance west of Caen in mid-July, though checked, inflicted terrible punishment on the defending Germans; the German Army itself, many of whose senior officers were plotting to kill Hitler even as their troops, with no air cover and no hope of replacement or relief, were making a herculean effort to drive the Allies into the sea; the Polish Division, which made a gallant attempt to staunch the German escape through the Falaise gap at the very moment the Home Army in Warsaw was fighting to wrest the city from the retreating Germans before the advancing Russians arrived; and the extraordinary Free French forces of Leclerc and De Gaulle, who liberated Paris on August 25. Each chapter becomes a portrait of national character as revealed in the crucible of combat.

In this Tolstoyan a canvas, the chapter on the airborne nighttime assault seems to me the strongest and most coherent narrative of the lot. In the course of it, Mr. Keegan touches on the most interesting of details, and moves with ease from the big picture to the humblest fact. He treats us to a brief history of mass airborne operations and tells us why they are now obsolete; he lets us heft the parachutists’ heavy packs, then jumps with us through the open door when the green light blinks on, and warns us to be ready for a concussive shock when the chute pops open. He notes the “savage disciplinary consequences and total social ignominy” faced by the seven troopers out of 13,000 who refused to jump, and he provides a grisly quotation from a witness to the fatal fall of seventeen men whose chutes failed to open: “They made a sound like large ripe pumpkins being thrown down to burst against the ground.”

To compare Keegan’s pages on the battles that ensued with even so fine a firsthand account as that of General Gavin, who was one of the leading officers on the scene, is to see why history remains an art. In his book On To Berlin, the admirable general gives a terse version of an ambush that a handful of his troopers sprang on a large German column at the crossroads hamlet of Neuville-au-Plain. Gavin has the Germans marching “as though on peacetime maneuver,” but in Keegan they are “singing—another of those bizarre flights of insouciance displayed by the defenders throughout the morning.” This is a superb example of his method of “intense particularity,”and one doesn’t know what to admire more, its scholarship or its artistry. The whole book is full of similar touches.

This is history energized by a will to literary significance. By turns horrific and stirring, Six Armies, so its author dares to hope in his epilogue, may be the epic of Europe’s last invasion. €