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The seaborne invasion: why we must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day and the battle for Normandy
Ferrying troops to the beaches wasn’t the only contribution sailors made during the Allied invasion of Normandy. As we mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, Nick Hewitt reveals how the Allied navies ended up fighting one of the most overlooked campaigns of the Second World War
On 30 July 1944, nearly two months into the Allied invasion of northern France, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay reflected on his command of the naval operations so far. “It may seem to some people that it was all easy and plain sailing,” he wrote in his diary. “[But] nothing could be more wrong. It was excellent planning and execution.” Ramsay died in 1945 without leaving a full memoir, but thousands of sailors could testify that nothing about their lives was “easy and plain sailing”. As late as 8 August 1944, with Allied troops poised to smash the German army in Normandy, sailors were still fighting to protect the beachhead. On that same day, the German submarine U-667 torpedoed both the US freighter Ezra Weston and the Canadian corvette HMCS Regina, the latter attack claiming the lives of 30 men. Ramsay’s words were prophetic. Today, discussions regarding sailors during the Normandy campaign mainly focus on their actions during the first day of the invasion: 6 June 1944, or ‘D-Day’. They are often absent from the wider story, despite the exhausting and dangerous campaign they fought to seize, exploit and defend the waters around Normandy throughout the summer of 1944. Read more | The road to D-Day: the masterplan The focus of the campaign was the Baie de la Seine, or Seine Bay, the huge inlet of the English Channel stretching nearly a hundred kilometres along the coast of Normandy from Le Havre in the east to the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula at Cape Barfleur in the west. Within the bay lay the five assault areas or so-called ‘beaches’: Utah and Omaha for the Americans, and Gold, Juno and Sword for the British and Canadians. Through this highly congested and vulnerable body of water passed a constant stream of transport ships carrying supplies and reinforcements, without which the military could not hope to win the more widely recognised battle of Normandy on land. Defeat was unlikely, but any setback could have prolonged the war for months. As the Allied commander-in-chief, General Dwight Eisenhower, recognised in his final report: “For the successful maintenance of the armies in France… we were dependent upon the ceaseless work of the Allied navies, assisted by RAF Coastal Command.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/GettyImages-3068867webready-3256be6.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The invasion’s supreme commander, General Dwight Eisenhower (centre), with his deputy, RAF Air Marshal Arthur Tedder (left), and ground forces commander General Sir Bernard Montgomery (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)" title="The invasion’s supreme commander, General Dwight Eisenhower (centre), with his deputy, RAF Air Marshal Arthur Tedder (left), and ground forces commander General Sir Bernard Montgomery (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)" /> Normandy had been confirmed as the site for the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe at the Quebec Conference, codenamed ‘Quadrant’, in August 1943. Two months later, Ramsay was appointed Naval Commander-in-Chief, Expeditionary Force, with the rest of the command team appointed in December. The overall commander-in-chief was Eisenhower, and the military and air commanders were General Sir Bernard Montgomery and Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory. The countdown to D-Day With the leadership structure in place, Ramsay then issued his Naval Operation Plan for Operation Neptune, the invasion’s assault phase, on 28 February 1944. While the planners worked, extraordinary efforts were made to assemble the huge fleet required for the invasion. Royal Navy officer Christopher Clitherow, for instance, commissioned a new Landing Ship (Tank), or LST, which would help transport men and vehicles across the Channel. Created using innovative mass production methods in the US, the vessels resembled welded steel shoeboxes, and offered very little in the way of comfort. “She reacts to a bump like a diving board off which one has just jumped,” Clitherow later recalled. “Every conceivable piece of the ship rattles as if its teeth were about to fall out.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/ulls287509webready-438e073.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="British tanks and trucks are transferred from a Landing Ship (Tank) to a motorised raft known as a Rhino Ferry. Huge numbers of vehicles were transported across the Channel for the push inland (Photo by ullsteinbild/TopFoto)" title="British tanks and trucks are transferred from a Landing Ship (Tank) to a motorised raft known as a Rhino Ferry. Huge numbers of vehicles were transported across the Channel for the push inland (Photo by ullsteinbild/TopFoto)" /> Meanwhile, the sheer number of men required to deliver Neptune meant that most new British recruits were posted to Combined Operations, which had been founded in July 1940 to plan and carry out amphibious warfare. They were put through their paces at special centres across the UK, before joining their units and taking part in huge pre-assault exercises. Exercise Tiger, held on 26–28 April, saw the most significant setback of the training cycle, when a convoy of American LSTs making a practice landing at Slapton Sands, Devon, was attacked by German motor torpedo boats (also known as ‘E-boats’), killing 749 US servicemen and wounding more than 300 others. Yet despite this tragic turn of events, Operation Neptune officially began at 11.30pm on 25 May, when commanders opened Ramsay’s sealed orders and military camps in southern England were closed off to the outside world. D-Day itself was scheduled for Monday 5 June, but after an unseasonal summer gale, it was determined that the invasion would instead be pushed back to Tuesday 6 June. The Normandy landings in numbers 7,016 Ships and major landing craft that participated in Operation Neptune. Approximately 79 per cent of the vessels were either British or Canadian 195,701 Naval personnel involved in Operation Neptune 917 Allied ships and major landing craft lost or seriously damaged between 6 and 30 June 1944 509 German mines, of all types, swept in the Allied assault areas between 4 June and 3 July 1944 183,540 Vehicles landed in the British and US sectors by 4 July 1944 – the day after Operation Neptune officially came to an end After setting out on the 5th, the armada passed along the south coast and turned out into the Channel, with most of the ships passing Area Z, a buoyed patch of water south-east of the Isle of Wight nicknamed ‘Piccadilly Circus’. From there, the vessels then passed down the ‘Spout’ – 10 marked and mine-swept channels – into their designated assault areas. Sweeping and marking this huge stretch of sea was fraught with danger. When the US Navy minesweeper Osprey struck a mine, caught fire and sank, the five sailors and one officer who lost their lives became Neptune’s first deaths in action. Arriving off Normandy, bombarding warships subdued the German coastal defences while soldiers got ashore. Warships provided an overwhelming advantage on the battlefield, but bombardment was exhausting work – and quite different to the stop-start nature of conventional naval action. Gordon ‘Putty’ Painter, a 20-year-old gunlayer aboard the cruiser HMS Belfast, would later recall firing broadsides that rocked the ships “backwards and forwards” for hours on end. In fact, such were the demands of the operation that the only time that Painter and his comrades could leave the turret “was if nature called”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/2T1K4GGwebready-7d3bc56.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Men on board HMS Sirius stand alongside the casings of shells fired from the ship’s 5.25-inch guns. The light cruiser provided vital gunfire support in the Sword area (Photo by piemags/archive/military/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Men on board HMS Sirius stand alongside the casings of shells fired from the ship’s 5.25-inch guns. The light cruiser provided vital gunfire support in the Sword area (Photo by piemags/archive/military/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Naval bombardment would prove instrumental to ensuring D-Day’s success, particularly within the American Omaha area, where destroyers operating dangerously close inshore helped the army establish a precarious beachhead. But the fire support came at a cost: two destroyers, the Norwegian Svenner and USS Corry, were both sunk with heavy loss of life, the former by German torpedo boats and the latter by coastal defence guns. Meanwhile, more sailors carried assault troops to the shore in landing craft – and their experiences were often extraordinary. George Kirkby, for example, was the coxswain of a Landing Craft (Assault) launched from HMS Prinses Astrid, one of several converted Belgian ferries that was tasked with delivering British commandos and US Rangers. Later, he would describe a beach “strewn with dead and wounded bodies, the air thick with smoke and the water around us spraying up into the craft through concentrated mortar and machine gun fire”. After D-Day: the remarkable logistics that kept the fight going The initial follow-up forces also landed in assault craft, but from 10 June onwards, the focus of Operation Neptune switched to methodical logistics, with at least eight convoys of merchant ships sailing across the Channel every 24 hours. The process was remarkably efficient: allowing for loading and unloading, any individual ship could make a round trip from England to France in just four days. They not only brought in fuel, vehicles, ammunition and reinforcements, but they also took out wounded Allied soldiers and German prisoners of war. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/GettyImages-141556290webready-189a081.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A wave of US troops lands on Omaha beach, several hours into D-Day. Sailors were responsible for guiding landing craft to the shore, often under heavy fire (Photo by Mondadori/Getty Images)" title="A wave of US troops lands on Omaha beach, several hours into D-Day. Sailors were responsible for guiding landing craft to the shore, often under heavy fire (Photo by Mondadori/Getty Images)" /> Once the ships had arrived, there were several methods of getting supplies into the beachhead itself. The first was to bring everything over the beaches or from anchorages offshore, using assault craft and barges, while the second was to make use of the small harbours captured in the landings. The third option, meanwhile, was to utilise the two huge artificial harbours known as ‘Mulberries’ that the Allies constructed off Saint-Laurent in the Omaha area and Arromanches in Gold. Assembly of the harbours began as soon as the beaches were secured, with sailors playing a leading role. Able Seaman Kenneth Bungard, for example, crossed the Channel riding on one of the prefabricated concrete caissons used to create the harbours’ walls. Crawling along on a slab-sided monster with the seakeeping qualities of a house brick was far from pleasant. “If we were hit with a torpedo, that would be the end,” he recalled. “It was all concrete [and] it would just disintegrate.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/GettyImages-3287605webready-04a1a4b.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Allied troops in an amphibious truck (known as a DUKW or ‘duck’) alongside the Mulberry harbour at Arromanches. Such vehicles could reach the beachhead quickly and efficiently (Photo by Leonard McCombe/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Allied troops in an amphibious truck (known as a DUKW or ‘duck’) alongside the Mulberry harbour at Arromanches. Such vehicles could reach the beachhead quickly and efficiently (Photo by Leonard McCombe/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> All this vulnerable shipping had to be protected. In the Eastern (British) Task Force area, the defence was largely static to reduce the risk of collisions and friendly fire. Defence Line A, consisting of anchored minesweepers, ran along the assault area, six miles offshore, to guard against attacks from the north, while a line of armed landing craft and Coastal Forces craft (later christened the ‘Trout Line’) ran south to the shore, watching the German naval base at Le Havre. Elsewhere, in the Western (US) Task Force area, destroyers, patrol craft and British steam gunboats patrolled the ‘Dixie Line’, which ran parallel to the coast to meet Defence Line A. Radar-equipped destroyers patrolled south of this, and more Coastal Forces craft watched the ‘Mason Line’, which ran up the Cotentin Peninsula to the northern edge of the Utah area. Timeline: how the Allied navies turned the tide in Normandy 17–24 August 1943 The Quebec Conference (codenamed ‘Quadrant’) takes place in Canada. Allied leaders decide that the liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe, Operation Overlord, will begin with an assault landing in Normandy. 25 October 1943 Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay is appointed Allied Naval Commander Expeditionary Force. 28 February 1944 Ramsay issues the Naval Operation Plan for Operation Neptune – the initial assault phase of Operation Overlord. 28 April 1944 Nearly 750 men are killed in a German E-boat attack at Slapton Sands, Devon, during Exercise Tiger – one of the final rehearsals for the seaborne invasion. 25 May 1944 Operation Neptune officially begins at 23:30. Ramsay’s sealed orders are opened and military holding camps on the south coast of England are closed off. 6 June 1944 The Allied invasion of Normandy begins. Known as D-Day, the first day of the campaign sees 132,715 British, Canadian and American soldiers coming to shore across five landing beaches, with a further 23,400 airborne troops dropping further inland. 25 June 1944 The US-led Task Force 129 bombards Cherbourg in support of a US Army assault on the city. 3 July 1944 Operation Neptune comes to an end. The last of the senior officers leading the assault are withdrawn and new headquarters are established ashore. 5/6 July 1944 Human torpedoes of the German Navy’s Kleinkampfverbände (small battle units) launch their first attack on the Allied assault area. Two minesweepers and the British frigate HMS Trollope are sunk. 12 September 1944 With much of the fighting now moving further inland, British troops finally take the German naval base at Le Havre. Three months and six days after D-Day, combat operations for the Allied navies in the Seine Bay come to an end. Despite these formidable lines of defence, enemy attacks continued apace. E-boats and other German warships frequently sortied from Le Havre and Cherbourg, trying to strike the supply ships or lay mines, while the Luftwaffe carried out bombing and torpedo attacks almost every night. On one particularly bad day, 8 June, three US warships went down to mines, while the British lost the frigate HMS Lawford to a remote-controlled glider bomb. Another Luftwaffe raider hit a huge petrol and ammunition stores dump in the Sword area. On 14 June, an increasingly concerned Admiral Ramsay asked for RAF strategic bombers to strike Le Havre, and they duly responded, sinking three of the German Navy’s large torpedo boats and 10 E-boats. Yet there was more turmoil to come. A few days later, the worst summer storm in living memory swept through the Seine Bay, halting the fighting and delivery of supplies until late on 22 June. The Mulberry harbour at Saint-Laurent was smashed beyond repair, while more than 800 vital ferry craft were left stranded. The churning water also triggered the sensitive detonators on German pressure-operated ‘oyster’ mines, which blew up unexpectedly across the assault area. The assault on Cherbourg Once the storm had passed, the US Army attacked Cherbourg on 22 June, while a naval task force bombarded the defences on the 25th in support. This time, the German gunners were ready to respond, and all but one of the seven battleships and cruisers taking part were hit. US Rear-Admiral Carleton Bryant’s flagship USS Texas came under particularly heavy fire, with one shell smashing the battleship’s bridge structure, killing the helmsman and wounding several others. “Having 11-inch shells fired at you is no fun,” Bryant later recalled. “When the salvo hits the water there is the most ungodly smack you ever heard.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/BAL2945330webready-4a5c07c.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="German prisoners of war are marched out of Cherbourg in late June 1944. The US Army’s assault on the city was accompanied by a major Allied naval bombardment (Photo by Everett Collection/Bridgeman Images)" title="German prisoners of war are marched out of Cherbourg in late June 1944. The US Army’s assault on the city was accompanied by a major Allied naval bombardment (Photo by Everett Collection/Bridgeman Images)" /> Cherbourg surrendered on 26 June, but the submarine and air attacks continued, as did the minelaying, and July saw the arrival of the Kleinkampfverbände – the German Navy’s ‘small battle units’. The first weapons to turn up at Villers-sur-Mer near Le Havre were explosive motorboats and craft known as ‘human torpedoes’, ridden into action by young volunteers whose confidence was boosted by cocaine and amphetamines. Twenty-six human torpedoes attacked on the night of 5/6 July, and although 10 were lost, they succeeded in sinking two minesweepers and the frigate HMS Trollope. Two nights later, the Kleinkampfverbände returned and sank the old Polish cruiser ORP Dragon with the loss of 37 officers and men. Despite the constant pressure from sea and air, the vital supply build-up continued at an impressive rate. By 14 July, a million tons of stores and nearly 300,000 vehicles had been put to shore, and on 25 July, the US First Army was able to break out of the beachhead and race into France. The western flank of the assault area was now secure, and the fleet started to operate further west, blockading German bases in the Bay of Biscay and destroying evacuation convoys. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/GettyImages-webready542896213-a6e7725.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The German Navy’s Kleinkampfverbände arrived in the Seine Bay in July 1944, using hard-to-detect craft such as human torpedoes, like this one, to attack Allied ships (Photo by ullstein bild/Getty Images)" title="The German Navy’s Kleinkampfverbände arrived in the Seine Bay in July 1944, using hard-to-detect craft such as human torpedoes, like this one, to attack Allied ships (Photo by ullstein bild/Getty Images)" /> On the eastern flank, however, Le Havre remained an enemy stronghold. On the night of 30/31 July, German E-boats struck the Allied convoy FTM53 with long-range pattern-running torpedoes, hitting five freighters. Although only one of the freighters, SS Samwake, actually sank, none of the others went to sea again. Samwake’s captain, Owen John, described his ship’s end in a melancholy report: “She dipped by the head, the stern reared up vertically and held for a few minutes, then very slowly she rolled over to starboard and disappeared at 0545 in a small fountain of water.” End of the Normandy's naval campaign Alarmingly, there were more losses to come. As well as the aforementioned HMCS Regina, further Allied casualties included the hospital ship Amsterdam, which was mined and sunk on 7 August, claiming the lives of 55 patients, 10 Royal Army Medical Corps staff, 30 members of the crew and 11 prisoners of war. Among the dead were military nurses Mollie Evershed and Dorothy Field, the only women named on the British Normandy Memorial in the village of Ver-sur-Mer. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/BAL490068webready6-6cc9d8a.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Le Havre lies in ruins after being bombarded and captured by the Allies on 12 September 1944. The port city had been a key German naval stronghold (Photo by Usis-Dite/Bridgeman Images)" title="Le Havre lies in ruins after being bombarded and captured by the Allies on 12 September 1944. The port city had been a key German naval stronghold (Photo by Usis-Dite/Bridgeman Images)" /> Later, the cruiser Frobisher was torpedoed and damaged on the 9th, and the valuable repair ship HMS Albatross was torpedoed on the 11th with the loss of 67 naval and military personnel. It wasn’t until 12 September, with the land fighting far away, that the British captured Le Havre and the complex infrastructure of the Seine Bay was dismantled. More than three months after D-Day, the naval campaign was finally over. Looking back at the events nearly 80 years on, the sailors who served should not be remembered as mere taxi drivers, ferrying men and supplies to the shore, but as active combatants who guarded the vital coastal waters and Allied assault areas until the very end. Whether by day or by night, they maintained a ceaseless watch against all manner of threats – and in some cases, ended up paying with their lives. Counting casualties is not an exact science for a campaign that has never been studied coherently, but nearly 3,000 Allied sailors are known to have died in the operations in and around the Seine Bay – and possibly many more. As General Sir Bernard Montgomery would write in May 1945, “any success achieved by the British Armies has been made possible only by the magnificent support given us by the Royal Navy”. This article first appeared in the June 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Britain’s Russian fiasco: Allied intervention in the Russian civil war
More than a century ago, British troops were engaged in the maelstrom of the Russian civil war. Their campaign against the Bolsheviks, writes Nick Hewitt, was a bloody debacle that enraged a restive public back home
In 2018, the world marked the centenary of the armistice that ended the First World War. But for thousands of British soldiers, the fighting went on. On 11 November 1918, Thomas Dunlop, from Newton Heath, was part of a 400-strong garrison shivering in improvised trenches around Tulgas, north Russia. As Dunlop’s comrades-in-arms on the western front laid down their weapons, the 19-year-old private in 2/10th Battalion, the Royal Scots, was in a vicious firefight with 2,500 Bolsheviks, supported by gunboats. For four days Dunlop’s company, alongside American riflemen and a few Canadian field guns, defended their nondescript piece of Russia. The Bolsheviks finally withdrew, leaving hundreds of dead behind, but victory came at a price. US sergeant Silver Parrish recalled how “we licked the Bolo [Bolshevik] good and hard but lost seven killed and 14 wounded, and the Canadians lost quite a few and the Royal Scots lost 36 men”. In context: The Russian civil war The Bolshevik Revolution of 7 November 1917 was followed by a wave of armed insurrections across the former Russian empire by anti-Bolshevik factions loosely characterised as ‘White’ Russians. At the height of the civil war the Whites appeared to surround the Bolshevik strongholds of Moscow and Petrograd, but in reality they were a disparate group of moderate socialists, ethnic nationalists, Romanov loyalists, proto-dictators and bandits, and never really formed an effective opposition. In Siberia the Whites were led by their self-proclaimed ‘supreme leader’, the former tsarist naval officer Admiral Alexander Kolchak. The Allied intervention in north Russia was partly intended to link up with Kolchak, but his regime was corrupt and unpopular and he lost the support of his most formidable force of 40,000 former Czech and Slovak prisoners of war and deserters, known as ‘the Czechoslovak Legion’. Kolchak was captured by the Bolsheviks and executed. Around the Baltic coast, Estonians and Latvians were fighting for independence alongside the former tsarist general Yudenich’s White Russians, who were trying to seize Petrograd. To further complicate matters, German troops and the paramilitary Freikorps were still trying to seize territory. The Germans left and Latvia and Estonia secured independence, but Petrograd remained defiantly ‘Red’. In southern Russia and Ukraine, the Whites coalesced around General Anton Denikin’s ‘Volunteer Army’. Denikin won a series of early victories but, as well as the Bolshevik Red Army, he also had to contend with Ukrainian and other separatist forces, ethnic militias and even the Turkish army. Although the British sent Denikin millions of pounds’ worth of arms his army still disintegrated; the remnants were destroyed in Crimea in 1920. The Russian civil war effectively ended with the founding of the Soviet Union on 30 December 1922, although some insurgencies continued into the 1930s. In total, the conflict may have cost as many as 12 million lives. Thomas Dunlop was one of them. His body was lost, but his name appears on a lonely memorial at Archangel. One hundred years on, it’s perhaps appropriate to ask, what was he doing there? Dunlop’s terrible fate was partly the result of what today’s military might call ‘mission creep’. At first, Britain’s primary motivation in its dealings with Russia was to keep it in the First World War: to prop up a leading ally in the fight against the Central Powers. Yet, by 1917, that strategy was unravelling. Russia’s tsarist autocracy had been tottering for decades. In 1917 it finally broke under the pressure of a world war for which it was ill-equipped to fight, and growing demands for greater freedom by a resentful and hungry population. Tsar Nicholas II’s regime collapsed in March, to be replaced by a Provisional Government. The new administration, however, failed to extricate Russia from the war, and paid the price when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized the capital, Petrograd, on 7 November 1917. Less than three weeks after the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin began negotiations with the Germans, which ended with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918. But no sooner had Russia quit one conflict than it entered another. Counterrevolutionary armies and alternative governments, known collectively as ‘White Russians’, now began to form all over the country. They were soon posing a serious threat to Bolshevik authority. By July 1918, Nicholas II and his family had been executed, and Russia had disintegrated into a chaotic civil war. Russia’s collapse was a catastrophe for the Allies, as it offered Germany an opportunity to transfer millions of troops to the west. Allied policy makers also feared that Germany might gain access to Russian oil and grain, and that German troops might seize nearly a million tonnes of armaments, munitions and other stores, now piled in great heaps on the dockside at Archangel and Murmansk in northern Russia, and Vladivostok in Siberia. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/02/GettyImages-588227462-20d0d74.jpg" width="4611" height="3028" alt="Japanese soldiers and sailors disembark at Vladivostok, 22 August 1918. Of all the foreign interventions into the Russian civil war, the one from Japan was by far the largest, growing to 70,000 troops. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)" title="Japanese soldiers and sailors disembark at Vladivostok, 22 August 1918. Of all the foreign interventions into the Russian civil war, the one from Japan was by far the largest, growing to 70,000 troops. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)" /> In a desperate attempt to forestall this nightmare scenario, the Allies decided to hurl troops from Britain, France, the United States and a dozen other countries into the middle of the bloody maelstrom that Russia had become. Most had little idea what they were doing. Among them was 18-year-old Bob Vincent of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment who, despite serving in southern Russia for nearly a year, later wrote that he “never really met any Russians at all or had any idea why I was there”. If Vincent failed to grasp what he was fighting for, he was far from alone. But that fact didn’t stop the British government despatching troops to combat zones across the massive Russian landmass – most notably in the north. One of the most significant deployments came in August 1918 when Allied troops landed at Archangel in support of the White Russian ‘Northern Regional Government’. Over time the British-led force expanded to include US, Canadian and French troops, and pushed south along the Dvina and other rivers to secure the railways. Supported by aircraft and the Royal Navy’s improvised Dvina River Flotilla, the Allied Expeditionary Force made unexpectedly good progress against the Bolsheviks, but many of its soldiers were old or unfit and they were dreadfully exposed. Their Russian allies were unreliable, and winter was approaching. Read more | Has Russia always played by its own rules? Elsewhere British warships operated against the Bolshevik Baltic Fleet, losing more than 100 sailors and several warships in the process. The Royal Navy also scored the intervention's most unlikely success, when Lieutenant Augustus Agar's tiny torpedo-armed coastal motor boats penetrated the heavily defended Bolshevik naval base at Kronstadt twice, sinking the cruiser Oleg and a submarine depot ship, and claiming two battleships damaged. Agar was awarded the Victoria Cross. Smaller British expeditionary forces and ‘military missions’ were sent into Siberia, the Caspian and the Caucasus. In the latter, ‘Dunsterforce’, a few hundred soldiers and some armoured cars under the command of Major-General Lionel Dunsterville, worked with local nationalists and other counterrevolutionaries – but found that they often hated each other more than the Bolsheviks. Siberian landgrab The underlying politics of the international intervention was incredibly complex. Britain and France actively supported attempts to overthrow the Bolsheviks, with President Woodrow Wilson of the United States in reluctant support, against the advice of his own War Department. Yet by far the largest intervention force was the 70,000-strong Japanese one, and their crusade was anything but ideological. The Japanese government had an eye on seizing territory in Siberia, and the behaviour of their troops, according to one British Foreign Office memorandum, “was… that of a people who intend to annex what they have occupied”. They cared little about keeping Russia in the war or who governed it afterwards. Even within the British government, there were hawks and doves. Prime Minister David Lloyd George wanted to keep Russia fighting, but was perfectly happy to work with the Bolsheviks if necessary, telling his war cabinet in early 1918 that “it was of no concern to the British government what socialist experiment or what form of government the Bolsheviks were trying to establish in Russia”. On the podcast | Russia’s national past: unpicking history from propaganda In contrast Winston Churchill, Lloyd George’s war minister after January 1919, was a zealous ideological crusader against Bolshevism, who declaimed in a speech in Dundee that “civilisation is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims”. Churchill even argued for rebuilding the defeated German army as a bulwark against Bolshevism. These internal contradictions were reflected on the ground, to the detriment of military cohesion. At one point, the British were operating in a notional partnership with the Bolshevik administration in Murmansk (which sought Allied help in facing down the threat of a Finnish attack) while fighting against Bolshevik forces elsewhere in the country. By the time Churchill had become war minister, of course, the First World War had ended, and the only comprehensible motive for intervention had disappeared. A war-weary British population now started to question exactly why British soldiers were still fighting and dying in Russia. With democratic socialism gaining traction, many people opposed making war on communists to restore tyranny. In January 1919, the Daily Express reflected popular opinion when it paraphrased Bismarck, writing that "the frozen plains of eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier". British opposition coalesced around the ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign, which was launched by prominent socialists in January 1919. The Socialist Labour party politician William Paul, a founding member of the movement’s National Committee, summed up its motives when he wrote that “the sheer savagery of these [White Russian] usurpers has only had the effect of driving honest moderate socialists and non-Bolshevik elements into the camp of Lenin and Trotsky”. The communist firebrand Harry Pollitt described how the ‘Hands off Russia’ message was promoted in London’s East End by a now-forgotten evangelist, “Mrs Walker”, who roamed the streets “talking to groups of women, telling them about Russia, how we must help them, and asking them to tell their husbands to keep their eyes skinned to see that no munitions went to help those who were trying to crush the Russian Revolution”. 'Hands Off Russia' scored its most celebrated success on 10 May 1920, when dockers in London stopped loading a ship, the Jolly George, when they discovered it was carrying munitions bound for Poland, the latest British anti-Bolshevik proxy. By now, government enthusiasm for intervention had waned and the cargo was unloaded. 'Hands off Russia' went on to provide a strong nucleus for the Communist party of Great Britain when it was founded a few weeks later. With the fighting against Germany over, opposition to a new war that nobody understood spread to the troops in the field. One Royal Engineer serving in north Russia wrote that it was “simply scandalous… to be fighting now and under such conditions when there is peace on other fronts”. Meanwhile, Major EM Allfrey of the Royal Fusiliers recorded a rumour in his diary on 2 July 1919 that “the coal miners have threatened that unless the British force in Russia is home within 40 days, they will all come out on strike… in other words, they too are Bolsheviks”. Brutal little battles Many members of the British forces found themselves living in squalid conditions, fighting unacknowledged but brutal little battles against a determined and ferocious enemy. There were too few troops, and many were second-rate and desperate to get home; even the Royal Marines embarrassingly experienced a mutiny in Russia. The White Russian troops were even more prone to mutiny and desertion; many were also Bolshevik sympathisers. Lieutenant Brian Horrocks of the Middlesex Regiment trained some of them: “The filthiest and most unkempt mass of humanity I have ever seen in my life… the dregs from all the call-up depots in Siberia.” There was almost no chance of unifying them into an effective opposition. One regiment of British-trained White Russians went over to the Bolsheviks en masse on 21 July 1919, arresting their commanding officer, a Colonel Laurie, and the other British officers. “At the British offices the day was passing in its usual way,” recalled one of the ring leaders, Viktor Schetinin. “We rushed in and… pointed our rifles at the colonel. He was so surprised he just sat there as if he was nailed to the chair…” By now, it was rapidly becoming evident that the British-led force was too small and its Russian allies too unenthusiastic for the intervention to end in anything but failure. In fact that had been the case since at least the spring of 1919 when the British commander-in-chief Brigadier-General Edmund Ironside, who had led his multinational army in the north with skill in the face of a ferocious enemy, decided to carry out one last offensive to buy time to withdraw. To help him, strong reinforcements – the British North Russian Relief Force – arrived in May largely at Churchill's instigation, commanded by General Sir Henry Rawlinson. The British launched a series of attacks then retreated, fighting all the way. "As we fought our way up the river," recalled Lieutenant-Commander Kenneth Michell of the monitor HMS M.33, "the Bolshies… drifted down all sorts of mines, frequently covered by brushwood". On 26–27 September the British evacuated Archangel, and Murmansk two weeks later. By the spring of 1920 the British and most other Allied contingents had departed Russia altogether. Only the Japanese force remained, finally withdrawing in 1925. The Russian civil war came to an end in 1922. But the legacy of suspicion caused by the Allies’ military support for the Whites, and their associated spying and sabotage in Moscow and Petrograd, lasted long after the last soldier had left. This might help explain Stalin’s difficult relationship with Churchill during the Second World War, and even the well-documented grudging reception received by Allied convoys to the Soviet Union. After all, the last time some Murmansk citizens had seen western ships in their harbours, the same countries had been trying to destroy the revolution, not defend it. For James and Jane Dunlop of Newton Heath, however, undoubtedly the most significant consequence of this ill-judged decision was to condemn their son Thomas and hundreds of men like him to a lonely death in the snow. 6 lessons from the Allies' failed intervention in Russia's civil war Nick Hewitt examines six lessons that can be learned from the Allies' failed intervention and argues that the case has much to teach today’s policy-makers After Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in Russia on 7 November 1917, toppling Alexander Kerensky’s short-lived Provisional Government, the country descended into chaos and civil war as a wave of counter-revolutionary movements sprang up, from Siberia to Ukraine and from the Black Sea to the far north. Faced with this anarchy, Russia’s former Allies in the First World War opted to intervene on behalf of the counter-revolutionaries, collectively known as ‘White Russians’. The Allied intervention utterly failed, costing a fortune in blood and treasure which the exhausted Allies, Britain and France in particular, could ill afford, and leaving a legacy of bad feeling between Russia and the west that arguably still persists today. Disjointed and incoherent strategy Different nations had different goals: from simply maintaining a fighting front against the Germans and keeping essential war material out of Bolshevik hands; through ‘regime change’ or the restoration of the Tsarist autocracy; to defending existing colonial possessions or seeking territorial concessions. Even within individual countries, policy makers often failed to agree; in Britain, Prime Minster David Lloyd George was ambivalent at best, but Winston Churchill, his War Minister, was a committed, almost fanatical interventionist. In the United States, President Woodrow Wilson opposed intervention, but also authorised the deployment of US troops. The development the Allies feared the most – and the only goal which united them all – was a separate Russian peace treaty with Germany. But when this actually happened on 3 March 1918, leaving the Germans free to move thousands of troops west to attempt a knockout blow against Britain and France, the resulting German spring offensive made no difference whatsoever to the eventual outcome of the war. Once Germany had been defeated, the only goal which made any kind of sense became redundant. Inadequate resources The Allied commitment was never properly resourced. If the Germans had failed to conquer a disintegrating Russian empire with more than a million men, the Allies were never going to defeat the Bolsheviks and occupy such a vast country with a few scattered penny-packets of troops. The largest deployment, in Siberia, was no more than 100,000 strong, most of which were Japanese soldiers making a blatant land grab on behalf of their government. Of all the foreign interventions into the Russian civil war, the one from Japan was by far the largest, growing to 70,000 troops. Weak, corrupt or unpopular local forces The assumption was that few troops would be needed because the Allies could rely on local anti-Bolshevik forces, but the Allies made no real effort to understand the disparate groups of ethnic nationalists, democrats, Romanov loyalists, proto-dictators and downright bandits with whom they were often reluctantly associated. In reality, the Allies’ Russian ‘partners’ were motivated by everything from loyalty to the late Tsar, to ethnic self-determination, or simple greed and lust for power – and often loathed each other even more than the Bolsheviks. Failure to understand the local politics Perhaps most importantly, the Allies failed to understand that the Russian people had largely already made their choice. However misguided hindsight may tell us it turned out to be, a sizeable proportion of those Russians who actually cared enough to be politically active wanted a Bolshevik government and had no interest in a government run by former Tsarist generals and functionaries, or one imposed by foreign powers. No domestic support The Allied people were sick of war, and in an era when democratic socialism was gaining traction across Europe, making war on communists to restore a Tsarist tyranny did not sit well. In Britain, opposition coalesced around a movement called the ‘Hands off Russia’ campaign which, although it had little direct impact on government policy during the intervention, gained support afterwards. No consideration of consequences The legacy of suspicion and resentment of the west brought about by nearly three years of overt support for the White Russians lasted for decades after the last Allied soldier had left. Historians have argued that the nature of Soviet Russia made this inevitable, and this may well be the case – but the arrival of thousands of Allied soldiers apparently motivated by a desire to roll back the clock on the revolution surely cannot have helped. LISTEN: Lucy Ash tells the story of When Britain Invaded Russia in 1918 for BBC Radio 4 This article was first published in the March 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine and has since been updated
How the battle for Norway in 1940 saved Britain
The RAF’s Battle of Britain heroics are credited with saving the nation. But, argues Nick Hewitt, it was the Royal Navy’s savaging of the German fleet in the battle of Norway in the spring of 1940 that scuttled Hitler’s grand invasion plans
We’re all familiar with the story. In the summer of 1940, Royal Air Force pilots defeated Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe over the skies of southern England and saved Britain from invasion. “Our fate,” Winston Churchill wrote years later, “depended on victory in the air.” The Battle of Britain was a humiliation for the Luftwaffe, which may have lost almost 2,000 aircraft and well over 4,000 airmen killed, wounded, missing, and captured – undoubtedly far more than the British, although figures vary. It was a propaganda triumph for a beleaguered island, with strategic implications, in particular in the US, where Americans considered anew the UK’s will to resist. It was an important victory, and the pilots’ courage was undeniable. But, in truth, there’s little chance that Germany could have invaded England, even if the RAF had been defeated in the Battle of Britain. That’s because, some weeks earlier, Britain had already, in effect, been saved. It had been saved in the battle of Norway, a now widely forgotten land, air and sea campaign fought between 9 April and 10 June 1940. And Britain’s saviour, as so many times before in what Churchill called its “long island story”, was the Royal Navy. Supported by French, Norwegian and Polish allies, the British fleet wrought terrible damage on its German counterpart, the Kriegsmarine, in the icy waters of Scandinavia. So sizeable was that damage, it convinced Germany’s naval leaders that the Kriegsmarine was totally inadequate to play a significant role in an invasion of Britain. Why was Narvik important in WW2? At the start of 1940, Norway was neutral and almost defenceless. Unfortunately, through its economic activities, it was also incapable of staying quietly ‘beneath the radar’ of the belligerents. That’s because, in winter, the ice-free northern port of Narvik provided the only window on the world for Swedish iron ore – a vital resource for Germany. So, while Hitler conquered Poland and the Allies prepared themselves for a German attack into the Low Countries and France, both sides played cat and mouse in the north. On 16 February 1940, the British destroyer Cossack entered Norwegian waters illegally and a boarding party freed 300 captured British merchant sailors from the German supply ship Altmark, whose presence was also illegal. But the stand-off wouldn’t last for long. During the brief 1939–40 ‘Winter war’ between Finland and the Soviet Union (who had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany), Britain and France prepared a force to cross Norwegian territory, aid the Finns and seize Narvik. Anticipating this, the Germans drew up plans for a full-scale invasion of Norway and Denmark, codenamed Operation Weserübung. More on the Winter war | Simo Häyhä, the world’s deadliest sniper When did Germany invade Norway? The Allies shelved their plans after the Soviet-Finnish armistice on 13 March 1940, opting instead for a more limited mission to mine Norwegian waters, but in Germany the commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, persuaded Hitler that Weserübung should proceed anyway. On 8 April, the British laid their mines. One day later, the Germans invaded. Weserübung was an ambitious simultaneous sea and air attack on Norway’s most important ports, accompanied by a rapid Blitzkrieg through Denmark. The first warning came on the 8th, when the Polish submarine Orzeł sank a German transport and discovered it to be full of armed troops. Read more | What would you have done? 6 terrible choices people had to make during the Second World War The following day, the British destroyer Glowworm stumbled across the German heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper and was sunk with heavy loss of life, while the British battlecruiser Repulse fought a brief, inconclusive action against the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in the teeth of an Arctic gale. German paratroops seized the Norwegian capital, Oslo, in broad daylight, although when seaborne reinforcements came up the Oslo fjord, a Norwegian coastal defence battery sank the heavy cruiser Blücher. The cities of Bergen and Kristiansand fell after brief firefights. Trondheim was also taken without difficulty. At Narvik, 600 miles to the north, German destroyers landed elite mountain troops who easily seized the port. After one day, the Germans held Norway’s key towns, but the garrisons were isolated and under-supplied. Much depended on the Allied response at sea. How did the Allies respond to the invasion of Norway? That response, when it came, was devastating. Allied submarines were first on the scene. They wrought havoc on German transport ships along the Norwegian coast, and also sank the cruiser Karlsruhe and seriously damaged the pocket battleship Lutzow. They were followed by Fleet Air Arm Skua dive-bombers, which sank the cruiser Königsberg in Bergen harbour, history’s first sinking of a major surface ship by air attack. “The tracer bullets were drifting up towards us like lazy golden raindrops,” wrote Skua pilot Captain RT Partridge. “Now, 2,500 feet, no fear or apprehension, just complete and absolute concentration; mustn’t drop too high and must watch going too low and blowing myself up with my own bomb blast… at 1,800 feet I dropped my bombs and was away towards the sea at nought feet. My observer reported a near miss on the ship’s port bow.” What happened in Narvik? At Narvik, the German destroyers were stranded through lack of fuel, and the Royal Navy responded immediately and violently. Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee’s 2nd Destroyer Flotilla entered Narvik fjord on 10 April, sinking two destroyers, damaging three more, and sinking seven stores ships. Warburton-Lee’s action provided more evidence of British naval superiority, but it ended in disaster. While racing for safety, the British flotilla was ambushed and, in a short, bloody engagement, the Germans sank two British destroyers, including Warburton-Lee’s flagship HMS Hardy, which was driven ashore in flames. Warburton-Lee was killed; he later received a posthumous Victoria Cross. Leading Seaman Mason witnessed his last moments: “They had the captain lashed on a stretcher, lowering him feet first, and wanted me to grab him and lay him on the deck. As he came down I saw that his head and face were in a terrible state; he was groaning and breathing heavily… the officers dumped the skipper in the water and dived in after him. He was dead when they got him to the beach.” Early on 13 April, the British battleship Warspite, with nine destroyers, arrived to wreak more havoc – Warspite’s float plane almost immediately sank the German submarine U-64. The day did not improve for the Germans, who were unable to either fight or flee due to their lack of fuel and ammunition, as the British sank or drove ashore all the surviving destroyers, leaving the German mountain troops isolated and vulnerable. But for all their successes in the waters around Norway, the Allies couldn’t prevent German ground forces advancing north from Oslo. The Allied high command was under pressure to respond, but was unsure whether to retake Trondheim or go for Narvik. Eventually, it made the questionable decision to undertake both operations simultaneously. The Trondheim force landed at two small ports to the north and south of the city on 17 April and advanced inland, but both forces were poorly organised and equipped, and had almost no air cover. John Hodgson of the 49th West Riding Division recalled how “we did not see any German soldiers, but saw plenty of German planes which bombed and strafed us throughout the long hours of daylight”. Pushed steadily backwards and under round-the-clock aerial bombardment by Luftwaffe aircraft operating out of Denmark and southern Norway, the troops were evacuated after just two weeks. The Allies now focused their efforts on Narvik alone, launching an assault on the town on 12 May. Under sustained pressure from British, French and Polish forces, Narvik fell on the 28th, the Germans withdrawing east towards the Swedish frontier. But, with German armies sweeping through France, the victory at Narvik was irrelevant. Given that Allied forces were crumbling in the west, keeping more than 24,000 troops in Norway would have been ridiculous. And so, once more, the decision was taken to evacuate. By 6 June, troopships had taken off 15,000 troops, and the first group was on its way home. The following day, HMS Devonshire evacuated Norway’s government and king from Tromsø, further north. Finally, on the 8th, the RAF contingent left, the pilots skilfully landing their aircraft on HMS Glorious, despite being entirely untrained in deck landings, and the carrier headed home. It never made it. Its deck cluttered with RAF fighters, Glorious was almost defenceless, and on being found by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, was sunk with the loss of around 1,500 lives. What the battle of Norway meant for WW2 The sinking of the Glorious was the final act of the battle of Norway – and a grim one for all that. But it couldn’t mask what was obvious to everyone – the battle had been a chastening experience for the Kriegsmarine. In deploying most of his navy to Norway, Adolf Hitler allowed the Royal Navy and its allies to score a vital victory. Admiral Raeder, with Hitler’s blessing, had planned for a war in 1946, writing later that the tiny fleet was so ill-prepared in 1939 that “it could do little more than show that it knew how to die valiantly”. In Norway, it was eviscerated – its only two modern capital ships, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, were torpedoed, and the pocket battleship Lützow seriously damaged, leaving her sister Admiral Scheer as Germany’s only big-gun ship. The rewards for Great Britain were immediately apparent, first during the evacuation from Dunkirk, which the Kriegsmarine failed to impede, and then when naval weakness became perhaps the single determining factor undermining proposals for the invasion of England. Read more | What was Operation Sealion, Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain? And why was it cancelled? When the German army proposed a broad invasion front stretching from Lyme Bay in the west to Ramsgate in the east, the Kriegsmarine rejected it, arguing that it could only defend the invasion fleet if it was restricted to a narrow front, and the shortest possible route, across the Strait of Dover. Even then, strong coastal gun batteries and control of the air were a prerequisite, and for all the hyperbole, the evidence indicates that the Luftwaffe alone could not have hoped to defeat the Royal Navy in 1940. The Royal Navy’s defining purpose was to defend the United Kingdom, alongside which all other tasks paled into insignificance. To do this, at the start of the war it boasted 15 battleships, seven aircraft carriers, 66 cruisers, 184 destroyers and 60 submarines, with more under construction. Despite serious losses sustained in Norway and elsewhere, much of this force remained intact – the British could simply endure far higher losses than the Germans. Even if the most modern ships were initially kept out of range of the Luftwaffe in the event of a German invasion after an RAF defeat in the Battle of Britain, this would still have left hundreds of 1914–18 vintage warships, which could have been thrown into the defence. And even if the Luftwaffe had sunk half of them, enough would have survived to massacre the motley array of improvised ferries and converted Rhine barges in which the Germans hoped to cross the Channel (especially at night, when German dive-bombers could not operate). Furthermore, evidence suggests that the Luftwaffe would have struggled to achieve this ambitious level of destruction. Read more | The sinking of the Bismarck: a cat and mouse chase across the Atlantic German bomber crews had been trained to act as precision flying artillery to support the army. Sinking ships that were manoeuvring fast in open water was a different skill, particularly if they were shooting back, and it was a skill the Luftwaffe had not mastered in 1940. To take just one example: on the first day of the Norway invasion, nearly 100 German bombers attacked five British cruisers and seven destroyers steaming without air cover. They sank just one destroyer, HMS Gurkha, after she became detached from the main force. Based on this and similar incidents, it is, I believe, without question that enough British warships would have survived to destroy the invasion force, regardless of whether the Germans controlled the air. Admiral Raeder confirmed this on 19 July, when he wrote to Hitler explaining that: “The task allotted to the navy [in the invasion] is out of all proportion to the navy’s strength.” In doing so he was effectively admitting that, during April and May 1940, the Royal Navy had saved Britain. This article was first published in the January 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine