Marc, many congrats on the new book. It seems this is a book a long time coming – at least for me since Saving Private Ryan so outrageously dismissed British and Canadian efforts on D-Day. What was your motivation to write the book?
Two primary motives, as outlined in the preliminary pages of the book. My father landed at about 8:20 in the morning of 6 June 1944 on Juno beach – where the Cross of Lorraine now stands. He was a poorly educated depression era kid who read voraciously. He was well attuned to the biases in the literature and never stopping questioning the narrative. So I have been living with the Normandy campaign and the problems with the received account my whole life. I also found during my frequent trips to Normandy that the literature did not always square with the ground. So I set out to track the origins of what we think we know about Normandy. I pursued that quest over twenty years, through two dozen archives in three countries, and through a vast literature. Second Front is the result.
It was very good of the Americans to chip in, but surely the invasion of Normandy was a British and Canadian victory?
No: The American role was critical. In fact, Operation Overlord was to be a conduit for channelling American combat power onto the continent in order to defeat Nazi Germany. The Anglo-Canadians played a vitally important role in allowing that to happen. In fact, more Brits and Canadians landed on D-Day than Americans, and the combat power of the Allies in Normandy was about equal right to the end of August. But, ultimately, only America had the manpower to defeat the Wehrmacht.
Your book looks earlier than D-Day, to the Great War – was this when the Anglo-American rivalry began?
As I discussed, the roots of the Anglo-American rivalry go very deep, certainly back to the American revolution, and they smouldered thereafter. The Great War was America’s debut as a global player, which happened at a time when Great Britain was the global hegemon, so they were bound to clash.
Was this more of a rivalry that existed between commanders, rather than the GI or Tommy?
The GI and Tommy got along well enough, and at the operational level there was little to carp about. The tension was at the political level of command, which included Army-level and above. The Monty-Patton rivalry is the classic, and often overplayed, rivalry. But they were both prima donnas and both understood the need – in democratic societies — to appear bigger than life in order to motivate both troops and the home front.
Churchill always believed the ‘New World’ would be vital in coming to the aid of the old. How much persuading did FDR and the New World need?
If by the “New World” you mean the USA and not Canada (or Australia or New Zealand etc), the answer is “a lot.” FDR and many Americans along the eastern seaboard identified with those who fought the Nazis, and they needed little persuasion to support France and Britain. But the vast majority of Americans saw no reason to fight Germany, even after 1940 – all the European states and their empires were the same; corrupt, decadent, inherently evil, Great Britain was no exception. So FDR and his supporters had to coddle America along. It is indicative of the problem that FDR did not declare war on Germany after 7 December. It was Hitler who declared war on the USA on 11 December: it’s not clear that Roosevelt would have entered the European war. Not much had changed by 1944. American weekly journals and news magazines in early 1944 all lament, as the landings in France loomed, that Americans still did not know why they were fighting the Germans (the war against Japan was another matter entirely).
Prior to D-Day the British, Commonwealth and US troops had fought together in North Africa and Sicily. How well, or poorly, had these armies worked together?
Well enough. Units were mixed up during the Tunisian campaign – British guns supporting American and Free French battalions. The reason for not doing that later on had more to do with the effectiveness of formations – divisions and corps – fighting as integrated forces according to their own methods and doctrine. So after Tunisia there was not much opportunity, or even need, to mix-up national formations. American and British Commonwealth/Empire forces fought within their own formations and armies, alongside one another and occasionally under command of a General from the other power – like the British divisions under Mark Clark, which occasionally outnumbered American divisions in 5th US Army – but any friction based on nationality was minor.
Your subtitle mentions the ‘hidden story’ – is the rivalry the unknown element to your book?
Not really, it is the way in which the politics of the moment – and of memory – skewed our understanding of the narrative. So the book looks a lot at contemporary press coverage, primarily American versus British, but also at the troubled relationship between the British and Canadians and the way in which British sought to subsume Canada under the imperial umbrella, which masked the vitally important role Canada played in the war in general and the Normandy campaign particular. Our existing understanding of the Normandy campaign is dominated by the Anglo-American battle of words over who did the heavy lifting and what roles their senior general played – especially Montgomery. Second Front is an effort to cut through all that.
You’ve written that by 1944 Britain was effectively bankrupt. Did US loans breed resentment at high level or were we grateful for financial assistance in the immediate years following 1945?
At the level of senior British politicians and bureaucrats both gratitude and resentment. They knew that the objective of the US Treasury Department was to destroy the British Empire. It is fair to say that most Brits (and Americans for that matter) were only dimly aware of what was going on in Anglo-American finance during and even after the war. The Brits certainly knew by 1945 that they were broke, and that America was wealthy, but they had little idea of how Lend-Lease was structured to ruin Britain financially. As Churchill said in the spring of 1940, if the British people knew what he had they would have strung him up! By the time the Americans wrote-off the debt in 1946, and offered a loan to help Britain get back on its feet, it was too late. America went looking for a strong ally to confront the Russians by 1947 and found that they had destroyed the only one that really mattered.
Marc Milner is a military historian and the author of
