Eisenhower

To begin at the beginning: the title. ‘Unbeatable, Unbearable’ is supposedly Winston Churchill’s opinion of Bernard Montgomery – that in defeat he was the first, and in victory the second. Gary Mead acknowledges that it is merely ‘attributed’ to Churchill. According to the late Richard Langworth, the unrivalled curator of Churchillian wit and wisdom, it and the rather more grandiloquent ‘In defeat, indomitable; in victory, insufferable’ are widely bruited about but are not in the Churchill canon. Does it matter? We can be confident that the other major Allied figures of the second world war who dealt with Monty – Alanbrooke, Eisenhower and Ismay – would not have disagreed too much.

The liberation of Paris in August 1944, two months after D-Day, was one of the most highly publicised victories of the second world war, although it was of no military importance. General Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, originally planned to bypass the city altogether but was persuaded by General de Gaulle to allow the tanks of the French 2nd armoured division (the famous Deuxième Division Blindée – 2eDB) to lead a diversion into the city, backed by American infantry. De Gaulle claimed that he was concerned to avoid the danger of a bloody insurrection led by the communist Resistance. His real concern was less about bloodshed than his future political control of France.

In December last year, the last surviving D-Day veteran of my old regiment, the 13th/18th Royal Hussars, died peacefully in his care home. On 6 June 1944, 20-year-old Trooper Lawrence Burn had been the gunner in a specially adapted Sherman tank which, along with others of the regiment, had driven down the ramps of their landing craft 5,000 yards off Sword Beach and swum for almost an hour through the high swell to land a few minutes ahead of the assaulting infantry in order to suppress the defenders’ fire. Years later, Burn was still in awe of the scale and execution of the Normandy landings: ‘I don’t know who planned it – a committee, I suppose,’ he told a journalist on his 90th birthday, ‘but it was wonderfully, wonderfully done.