A Bloody Victory
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Post D-Day, with the Allies on the newly created ‘Second Front’ driving fast eastwards beyond Paris, and the Russians on the ‘Eastern Front’ pressing westwards, the fervour of the fanatical Fascist Nazi Regime remained undiminished. For the Third Reich it was intolerable to believe that they must now concede. Instead of ending the war and suing for peace, the levels of hostility, hatred, and horror heightened, and the brutality, viciousness and terror increased. The resistance to the Allied advances across Europe, first towards, then within, Germany intensified, and every inch of the Fatherland was bitterly contested. With the Allies, in their thousands, were the Irish. A Bloody Victory unearths these people from the corners of Irish history and transports them back to the D-Day beaches and the bridge at Arnhem, to the frozen landscapes at the Battle of the Bulge, the banks of the River Rhine, to the unimaginable horrors of Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald concentration camps, and finally to the ruinous Battle of Berlin. There was no one individual ‘Irish narrative’ in the Second World War, but there was a narrative of Irish Individuals, and in A Bloody Victory, Dan Harvey pays due tribute to their significant contribution.
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A BLOODY
ALSO IN THIS SERIES
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The Germans along the Atlantic Wall were stationed in concrete constructions behind purpose-built structures of solid stone and steel. Where there were minefields and tank traps, Rommel had them enlarged and dug deeper; already-built bunkers were further reinforced. This was all done to channel the attacking Allied troops – and especially their tanks – to within range of carefully-sited anti-tank weapons and powerful Mauser MG-42 machine guns. These weapons, in addition to being placed in bunkers, were sited on the ground floors of fortified houses, beachfront villas, farmhouses inland and other ‘strong point’ buildings. These buildings, sturdy and ideal for adaptation, had been captured by the Germans and strengthened by buttressing them with logs, sandbagged earth and concrete. In some instances, entire coastal and inland villages were manipulated towards this end. These lines of beach and inland obstacles – minefields, bunkers, gun emplacements, fortified houses and resistance points – were a serious stumbling block for any attempted assault.
It was at the beaches, however, that the holding back of the Allied assault waves would occur – not indefinitely, necessarily, but for duration enough to allow the Panzer reserves to be brought forward and deployed, and then, with all their combined fire power, push the invasion back into the sea. Rommel wanted these Panzer divisions already present at the coast, primed and prepared, during the first hours of the invasion, to drive the Allies back into the sea in what he foresaw as a violent and brutal defence. The Panzers were not available to him, however; instead they were held far back and only to be released on Hitler’s direct orders. Rommel doubted that they would not arrive on time; in fact, he believed they would not arrive at all. They would become stalled, or more likely completely destroyed, by Allied aircraft, as the Allies had almost unfettered air superiority.
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