American corps in Britain

In December 1943 the headquarters of two more United States Army corps reached the British Isles: VIII Corps and XV Corps. War chronologies record the arrival of VIII Corps in the European Theater of Operations under 13 December and that of XV Corps under 14 December. The sources do not confirm these dates. For VIII Corps they say only that it arrived in Britain in December 1943. A history of XV Corps published by the veterans’ association of the 70th Infantry Division states that the corps reached England on 27 December, and the Northern Ireland war archives record that at the end of 1943 some of its units arrived in Northern Ireland. Both headquarters thus arrived in December, but the exact days given in the chronologies cannot be confirmed from these sources.

In the US Army the corps was the intermediate level between the division and the army. It had no fixed composition: its headquarters, with signals units, corps artillery and supply units, usually commanded from two to five divisions, assigned to it according to the task in hand. Corps headquarters therefore arrived in Europe earlier than many of the divisions that were to come under them, because they needed time to get to know the ground, the plans and their neighbours.

VIII Corps

VIII Corps was one of the oldest formations at this level. Its headquarters was fully activated on 14 October 1940 at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, and in 1941 it took part in the great Louisiana Maneuvers, at which the American army learned to wage war with large formations. For most of 1943 the corps was commanded by General Daniel Sultan, who in December left for India as deputy to General Joseph Stilwell. The corps was brought to Britain by his successor, Major General Emil F. Reinhardt, a capable officer but one without combat experience.

That was precisely why Reinhardt did not lead it into battle. At the same time as the VIII Corps staff was settling in in England, Major General Troy Middleton, who had commanded the 45th Infantry Division in Sicily and at Salerno, was lying in hospital in Naples with a bad knee. General Dwight Eisenhower, then Allied Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, nevertheless thought so highly of him that after his treatment in the United States he arranged for him to take command in England. Middleton commanded VIII Corps from 15 March 1944 until the end of the war. Reinhardt was later given the 69th Infantry Division, whose soldiers met the Red Army on the Elbe at Torgau in April 1945.

In the spring of 1944 the corps headquarters was stationed at Kidderminster in Worcestershire. The corps was to enter Normandy in the second wave, behind the divisions that would land on the first day.

XV Corps

XV Corps was a much younger formation. Its headquarters was activated on 15 February 1943 at Camp Beauregard in Louisiana, and a few days later command was taken by Major General Wade H. Haislip, who had previously organised and commanded the 85th Infantry Division. In the summer of 1943 the corps trained at the desert training ground in California and Arizona, where the army prepared troops for mobile warfare. In December the staff crossed the Atlantic. Some of the corps’ units were sent to Northern Ireland, where the headquarters set itself up at Kircassock House in County Down, near Lurgan. Since January 1942 Northern Ireland had been the American forces’ first stop in Europe, and it still served as a training base for divisions awaiting the invasion.

Haislip commanded the corps throughout the war in Europe, until June 1945, when he took over the Seventh Army.

Building a great army

Both corps were part of a plan that was to turn Britain into one vast military camp within six months. According to the US official history of logistics, at the end of December 1943 there were some 770,000 American troops in the British Isles, and by the end of May 1944 their number had risen to more than one and a half million. VII Corps had arrived in October, and earlier V Corps, stationed in Northern Ireland and England since 1942. XIX and XX Corps were due to arrive at the beginning of 1944. In November the Allied Expeditionary Air Force had been formed to cover the invasion from the air.

Under the plans of the autumn of 1943, the American ground forces in Britain were to form two armies. The First Army under General Omar Bradley was to land in Normandy with V and VII Corps. The Third Army was to enter the fighting later, once the bridgehead had been enlarged, and take Brittany with its ports. Who would lead it was decided only at the turn of the year. In December 1943 General George Patton was sitting without an assignment in Sicily, punished for slapping two sick soldiers in field hospitals, and the affair had just caused a storm in the American press. Only in January 1944 did he fly to Britain and take over the Third Army, whose headquarters was set up at Peover Hall near Knutsford in Cheshire. VIII and XV Corps were to be his instruments.

From Normandy to the Ardennes

Both corps went into action in the summer of 1944. Middleton’s VIII Corps crossed the Channel a few days after the Normandy landings and on 15 June, still as part of the First Army, took up positions west of Carentan on the Cotentin peninsula. At the beginning of July it fought its way through the Normandy hedgerows towards La Haye-du-Puits, and during Operation Cobra at the end of July its armoured divisions reached Avranches, opening the way south. From 1 August, now in Patton’s Third Army, the corps drove west into Brittany, in keeping with the original plan to capture the ports there. Many historians regard this decision as a waste of two armoured divisions that would have been more useful in the pursuit to the east. Brest fell only on 19 September, and its port was so badly wrecked that it no longer mattered. In December 1944 VIII Corps was holding a long, quiet sector in the Ardennes when the German Ardennes offensive struck it. Some of its troops, notably the 106th Infantry Division, were taken prisoner, but the resistance of its other units and of the reinforcements sent to the corps, among other places at Bastogne, delayed the Germans.

Haislip’s XV Corps went into action at the beginning of August 1944 as part of the Third Army. On 8 August it liberated Le Mans and then turned north to close the trap on the Germans in Normandy from the south. On 13 August Bradley halted it at Argentan before it could link up with the Canadians, which allowed some of the German forces to escape from the Falaise pocket. A few days later the corps seized a bridgehead across the Seine at Mantes. In the autumn it fought in Lorraine, and as part of it the French 2nd Armoured Division under General Philippe Leclerc liberated Strasbourg on 23 November 1944. The corps ended the war in Bavaria, near the Austrian border.

Significance

The arrival of two corps headquarters was not an event that anyone reported in the newspapers. Such movements were kept secret, and their dates were known mainly to staff officers and quartermasters. It was, however, a visible sign that the invasion had ceased to be a promise made to Stalin at conferences and had become an undertaking in progress. In December 1943 the decision was also taken on who would lead the whole enterprise: Eisenhower became Supreme Commander of the invasion, and Bernard Montgomery commander of the ground forces in the first phase. In the summer of 1944 VIII and XV Corps became two of the main instruments of the break-out from Normandy, the pursuit across France and the fighting on the German border.