April 27, 2024

The Precipice of Victory

Richard Dannatt and Allen Packwood, Churchill’s D-Day, US edition: Diversion Books, 2024, 352 pages, $29, ISBN 978–1635769593; UK edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 2024, 368 pages, £25, ISBN 978–1399727839

Review by Alastair Stewart

Do you remember the TV series 24, the seminal noughties show that followed Special Agent Jack Bauer as he chased down terrorists in a “real-time” 24-hour format?

Strange, then, to think that Allen Packwood, Director of the Churchill Archives, and General Sir Richard Dannatt, a former Chief of the British Army, have recreated that rip-roaring intensity with Churchill’s D-Day: The British Bulldog’s Fateful Hours During the Normandy Invasion. (The UK edition of the book goes with the more pedestrian subtitle The Inside Story.)

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D-Day naturally became one of the most famous events of the Second World War, sitting alongside the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, and Pearl Harbor. Codenamed Operation “Overlord,” the Allied landings on the beaches of Normandy commenced on 6 June 1944 and marked the start of a lengthy and costly campaign to liberate northwest Europe from Nazi occupation.

That cold factual description does nothing to emphasise the lynchpin moment D-Day was for those who orchestrated it. From its inception, Overlord could have collapsed under its ambition and scale and forced the early resignation of Winston Churchill, as well as both British and American senior military chiefs.

Dannatt’s own military experience is palpable as he charts the knife-edge-could-go-horribly-wrong reality of a 1,200-plane airborne assault, followed by an amphibious assault involving more than 5,000 vessels, 289 escort vessels, and 277 minesweepers. Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel on 6 June alone, and more than two million Allied troops were in France by the end of August.

The Allies failed to accomplish many of their objectives on the first day, but they did gain a tenuous foothold, which was gradually expanded when they captured the port at Cherbourg on 26 June and the city of Caen on 21 July. By the time the river Seine had been crossed and Paris liberated, there had been a quarter of a million Allied casualties, with nearly 45,000 British, US, Canadian, and Polish soldiers killed among the ground forces and a further 16,000 deaths among the Allied air and naval forces. That reality leads to one of the book’s guiding questions: when did Normandy become synonymous with turning the tide against the Nazi regime?

Packwood brings an unrivalled knowledge of Churchill’s personal, political, and policy-making realities to answer another myth that has sprung up in recent years. Was the Prime Minister on the cusp of actually calling off D-Day at the eleventh hour? Did he try to put the brakes on at any point, or was he reluctantly pulled along by a supreme coalition of his own making? This book’s selling point lies in understanding and dissecting the idea that Churchill “wobbled” on the eve of D-Day and the constraints on his decision-making powers.

In the public mind and in academia there are two Churchills at D-Day. One was depicted in a recent movie with Brian Cox, in which the Prime Minister is portrayed as being so addled with guilt from his responsibility for the events at Antwerp in 1914 and Gallipoli in 1915 that he tries in vain to scrap the 1944 Normandy invasion. Some authors have more generously tried to interpret Churchill’s reservations over the potentially enormous loss of life as being guided by lessons learned from mass operations in the First World War.

The “other” D-Day Churchill, as Dannatt and Packwood convincingly show, is more nuanced. The horrors of the First World War undoubtedly affected the Prime Minister, given that he both orchestrated mass operations in high office as First Lord of the Admiralty and later commanded a battalion of the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front. There was, though, a second part of Churchill’s reservations about Overlord that is decidedly less romantic: if the invasion failed or casualties were perceived to reach the levels of the Somme or Dardanelles operations, his position would become untenable.

By June 1944, Churchill had survived two votes of confidence since becoming Prime Minister, faced huge rows in Cabinet, and dealt with a much greater barrage of criticism from the press during his wartime ministry than is generally remembered today. His was a wartime coalition government; his military commanders could be stubborn or capricious. In the later years of the war, all operated within a supreme allied command very sensitive to the blurring of jurisdiction, national sovereignty, and military accountability—particularly with the United States.

Churchill’s D-Day is deceptively simple. The authors divide the text into two sections: “Planning” and “Execution and Aftermath.” At nearly 400 pages, however, it could be triple the size without tiring the reader, given the expertise of the two authors. The themes are clear and coalesce around a riveting narrative built on unrivalled access to sources. Readers will greedily want more in the future from this superb writing partnership.

A chapter called “Lockdown” is particularly interesting, given recent history. The UK government considered locking down parts of the British Isles to limit security breaches about the massive number of servicemen and gargantuan movement of material required in the preparations for D-Day. Civilian frustration, including strikes at the Clyde, Tyneside, and Yorkshire, has frequently been an overlooked concern with which Churchill had to grapple. Speculation in the newspapers was rife, as pressures mounted on infrastructure and the economy. A prohibition of visiting coastal towns and Ireland was seriously contemplated.

At least conceptually, Churchill was long a proponent of establishing a second front in Europe to relieve the pressure on the Soviet Union and enable the Western Allies to attack Germany directly. Yet he was hardly ever a unilateral “plenary authority” of Allied strategy, even before America entered the conflict. War is historical materialism meeting political necessity.

Too often, studies of Churchill’s legacy concentrate on what he achieved, despite the strength of his enemies. Dannatt and Packwood have produced something fascinating by considering Churchill’s decisions within the limits of his office, including the structure of his government and of the military. Yes, the Prime Minister could galvanise with speeches, micromanage, and desire to be close to the action wherever possible, but he also had to work closely with his military advisers, including Overlord Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower, to develop a strategy that would maximise the chances of success.

The book rightly focuses on the Allied relationships and the intermeshing of a command structure. Much is also made of Churchill making himself Minister for Defence to streamline decision-making. Still, not enough emphasis is placed on what the British public would tolerate and over which actions military chiefs were prepared to resign if they did not have the Prime Minister’s support.

Overlord was a long evolution and the product of failure, success, frustration, and vision for the post-war world. Digging deeper down, one finds Churchill, the politician at war, and not Churchill, the pastiche warlord. He was also a man of transient interests and innate pugnacity, who would constantly prod and interrogate. As a result, there are inevitably competing accounts as to whether Churchill offered Overlord his complete enthusiasm at any given moment. That is very different from concluding that the Prime Minister felt regret about the invasion of Europe as it was underway.

Churchill, at his core, was determined to preserve the British Empire. Many of his tactical moves were not random misadventures but calculated decisions. “The tyranny of Overlord,” as he called it, committed British forces away from the Mediterranean and Balkans theatres, which had a decidedly pro-imperial, anti-Soviet long-term dimension.

The Prime Minister was a realist, desperate to preserve an Empire he loved, in a post-war world soon to be dominated by American and Soviet influence. Churchill was a proven Francophile, as demonstrated by his diehard support for the French in 1940. The book is particularly adroit at unpicking the increasingly sour relationships between Churchill and General Charles de Gaulle and the Prime Minister’s unapologetic pro-American sentiment as he tried to maintain British influence.

As a subject of historical study, D-Day appears nearly close to being exhausted, save for the endless stream of inaccurate, stylised, but highly questionable movies and TV series that shows no sign of abating. It is invigorating, therefore, that Dannatt and Packwood have brought blockbuster flair to an enormously broad subject. The result is an engrossing delight, and it is immensely satisfying to know just how much more there is to explore about the motivation, circumstances, and challenges faced by someone as titanic and well known as Churchill on an even better-known day. Dannatt and Packwood have produced an account of Churchill’s D-Day worthy of both the Great Man and the colossal event.

Alastair Stewart is Chair of ICS Scotland. Richard Dannatt and Allen Packwood will speak about Churchill’s D-Day during this year’s conference of the International Churchill Society in London, 24–27 October. For more information and to register, please CLICK HERE.