The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  The German counter-intelligence services were certain that the invasion was near because of resistance activity and radio traffic, but the Kriegs-marine, studying the meteorological reports, concluded that there was no question of an invasion between 5 and 7 June because of bad weather. On the night of 5 June, they even cancelled all their own patrols in the Channel. Rommel, on being informed of this forecast, decided to visit his wife in Germany for her birthday and then visit Hitler at the Berghof to persuade him to release more panzer divisions.

  The state of the weather was Eisenhower’s greatest worry during that first week of June. On 1 June, his chief meteorologist had suddenly warned him that the hot weather was about to end. The battleships of the bombardment force were leaving Scapa Flow that very day. Everything had been timed for the invasion to start on the morning of 5 June. Weather reports were still so bad on 4 June that Eisenhower had to order a postponement. Fresh information soon showed that the weather might ease on the night of 5 June. While storms and heavy seas continued in the Channel, Eisenhower faced a terrible dilemma. Could he trust the accuracy of this forecast? General Miles Dempsey, who was to command the British Second Army in the invasion, considered Eisenhower’s decision ‘to go’ the bravest act of the war.

  The tension eased as soon as Eisenhower had spoken and Montgomery agreed. It was the right decision. A further postponement would have pushed back the invasion by two weeks to accord with the next cycle of high tides. That would have had a disastrous effect on morale and probably lost the chance of surprise. A two-week delay would also have put the operation in the path of the worst storm the English Channel had seen in forty years. It is too easily assumed that Operation Overlord was bound to succeed, simply because of Allied air and naval supremacy.

  Early on the evening of 5 June, the French service of the BBC broadcast a series of coded messages to send the resistance into action. Heavily loaded paratroopers from the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions and the British 6th Airborne began to heave themselves into their aircraft and gliders. South of the Isle of Wight, the invasion convoys began to assemble with ships of every size, and landing ships of every sort. Soldiers crowded the rails to gaze in astonishment at the grey, choppy Channel filled with the vessels of a dozen nationalities in every direction, including 300 warships: battleships, monitors, cruisers, destroyers and corvettes.

  Out ahead, a screen of 277 minesweepers advanced south in the gathering darkness towards the Normandy coast. Admiral Ramsay feared huge casualties among these wooden-hulled craft. Liberators and Sunderland flying-boats of Coastal Command continued to scour the seas from southern Ireland to the Bay of Biscay for U-boats. To Grossadmiral Dönitz’s great embarrassment, not a single German submarine reached the Channel to attack the invasion fleet.

  The hundreds of transport aircraft carrying paratroopers and towing gliders curved out over the Channel to avoid flying over the invasion fleet and risking the disaster which happened during the invasion of Sicily. Even so, three C-47 Skytrains were shot down by Allied warships after they had dropped their ‘sticks’ of American paratroopers on the Cotentin Peninsula.

  The airborne drops did not go according to plan. Heavy anti-aircraft fire as the waves of transports crossed the coast caused formations to split up. Navigation was often faulty. Only a minority reached the correct drop zones and many paratroopers had to trudge for miles to find their units. Others dropped on to German positions and were gunned down. Some fell into rivers and flooded marshes where, weighed down by all their equipment and trapped in their parachutes, they drowned. Yet the wild dispersion of drops had the unintended effect of confusing the Germans about the true targets of the operation, and this contributed to the impression that the attacks were part of a massive diversion in Normandy before the real attack came in the Pas de Calais. Only one operation, the seizure of Pegasus Bridge over the River Orue on the eastern flank, went spectacularly well. The glider pilots landed their craft in exactly the right position, and the objective was seized in a matter of minutes.

  Before dawn on 6 June, almost every airfield in England began to throb with the sound of revving engines as squadrons of bombers, fighters and fighter-bombers began to take off to follow strictly marked corridors to avoid collision and clashes. Pilots and aircrew came from almost all Allied countries: Britain, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Rhodesia, Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark. Some squadrons, mainly of Halifaxes and Stirlings, had departed earlier on deception missions, dropping aluminium ‘Window’ and dummy paratroopers which exploded on landing.

  The crews of the minesweepers and Admiral Ramsay could not believe their luck when, having accomplished their task, they turned back without a shot fired. The rough seas which had persuaded the Kriegsmarine to remain in port had proved their greatest blessing. They signalled good-luck messages to the destroyers which crept closer towards land, to take up their bombardment positions before first light. Cruisers and battleships anchored much further offshore.

  The 130,000 troops crammed on the ships slept little that night. Some gambled, some tried to learn some French phrases, some thought of home, some wrote last letters, some read the Bible. Soon after 01.00 hours the troops, especially on US Navy ships, received generous breakfasts, then they began to put on their equipment which they continued to adjust out of nervousness while smoking compulsively. At around 04.00 hours troops were ordered to assemble on deck. To clamber down the scramble nets into the landing craft, which bucked and heaved alongside in the heavy swell, was a perilous undertaking, especially when so many men were overloaded with weapons and ammunition.

  As soon as each landing craft was ready, its coxswain steered it away from the ship’s side to join a circling queue, following the little light on the stern of the one in front. A member of the 1st Infantry Division departing from the USS Samuel Chase described how ‘the light would disappear and then reappear as we rose and fell with the waves’. Very soon men began to regret the munificence of their breakfast and were sick over the side, into their helmets or between their feet. The decks became slippery with vomit and seawater.

  As a grey glow began to penetrate the overcast sky, the battleships opened up with their 14-inch main armament. Cruisers and destroyers immediately joined in. Generalleutnant Joseph Reichert of the 711th Infantry Division, watching from the coast, noted that ‘the whole horizon appeared to be a solid mass of flames’. By then there was enough dawn light for the Germans to see the size of the invasion fleet. Field telephones jangled furiously in command posts. Teleprinters chattered at Army Group B’s headquarters at La Roche-Guyon on the Seine, and in Rundstedt’s headquarters at Saint-Germain just outside Paris.

  While the naval bombardment continued, landing craft filled with rocket launchers approached the shore, but most of their ordnance fell short in the water. The most frightening moment then came for the crews of the Duplex Drive Shermans, which began to flop off the front of landing craft into a sea which was far rougher than anything in which their tanks’ swimming abilities had been tested. In many cases, the upright canvas screen around the turret collapsed under the force of the waves and a number of tank crews went down trapped inside their vehicles.

  On Utah Beach at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula, the US 4th Infantry Division landed with far fewer casualties than expected, and began to move inland to relieve the paratroopers of the 82nd and 101st Airborne. The long curving beach known as Omaha, dominated by bluffs covered in seagrass, proved an even deadlier objective than the Allies had expected. Much went wrong even before soldiers of the 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions landed. The naval bombardment, although intense, had still been too short to be effective, and the bombing was a waste of time. Instead of following the line of the coast, which would have given aimers a better fix in the bad visibility, the US air commanders had insisted on coming in from the sea to avoid being shot at from the side. As they flew in over the landing craft, aircrew decided to
wait a moment longer to avoid hitting their own men, so their loads dropped on to fields and villages inland. None of the beach defences, bunkers and fire points were touched. There were not even any craters on the beach in which the assaulting infantry could take cover. As a result the first wave suffered very heavy casualties, with enemy fire from machine guns and light artillery raking the landing craft as their ramps came down. Many landing craft became stuck on sandbars.

  ‘Some boats were coming back after unloading,’ wrote a member of the 1st Division, ‘others were partly awash, but still struggling. Some were stuck, bottomed out, racing their motors and getting nowhere. Some were backing up short distances and trying again… I saw craft sideways, being upturned, and dumping troops into the water. I saw craft heavily damaged by shellfire being tossed around by the waves. I saw craft empty of troops and partly filled with water as though abandoned, awash in the surf. Men were among them struggling for the pitiful protection they gave.’

  Traumatized soldiers froze at the foot of the bluffs, until officers managed to force them up with the warning that they would die on the beach unless they got inland and killed Germans. The defenders had been reinforced with a small part of the 352nd Infantry Division, but not nearly as many men as some accounts have claimed. Fortunately for the Americans, the 352nd’s main reserve some 3,000 strong was first sent off on a wild-goose chase in the early hours of the morning in response to the exploding puppet paratroops, and then was wiped out by a British brigade which had advanced diagonally inland from Gold Beach. In any case, the slaughter and chaos at Omaha during the morning was enough to make General Bradley consider abandoning the beach altogether. Just in time, news came back that some groups had made it up the bluffs comparatively unscathed, and that Omaha could yet be won. A combination of a few Sherman tanks engaging the bunkers, and American and British destroyers sailing dangerously close in and firing with impressive accuracy at the German positions, also tipped the balance in the invading force’s favour.

  On Gold Beach, the British 50th Division wasted little time pushing inland. One brigade halted just short of Bayeux at nightfall and took the town without casualties the next morning. The Canadian 3rd Division had a much tougher time on the Juno sector, where the Germans had fortified seaside villages and created networks of tunnels. On Sword, which ran up to the small port of Ouistreham, the British 3rd Division had trouble with the unusually high tide which delayed the landing of tanks. Minefields on either side of roads and artillery fire blocking them with blazing vehicles meant that the rapid attack inland on the city of Caen was slow off the mark. And the dogged defence of a large German bunker complex made things worse. On their flank, the 6th Airborne Division had secured its allotted area between the Rivers Orne and Dives, blowing bridges to prevent a panzer counter-attack from the east.

  Montgomery’s plan was to seize Caen and the land beyond for airfields as rapidly as possible, but German resistance with machine guns and anti-tank guns concealed in solid Norman farmyards and hamlets proved far harder to crack than they had thought. Allied intelligence had also failed to spot that the 21st Panzer Division was already in the area of Caen. There was too a strange contradiction in Montgomery’s scheme. On the one hand, he wanted to take the ancient city of Caen in the first twenty-four hours of the battle, an objective which was clearly over-optimistic. On the other, he had ordered the destruction of Caen with a massive raid by heavy bombers on 6 June, yet the rubble blocking the streets could only hinder his own troops and aid the defenders. Hardly any Germans were killed at all in the raid, while the shock and suffering of the civilian population was terrible.

  Allied commanders were afraid of a great German panzer counterattack, which contributed to their excessive caution. Luckily, Hitler’s failure to take a decision until the late afternoon of 6 June to commit his tank formations played to their advantage. And while ground-force commanders had overestimated the effect of the heavy bomber missions, they underestimated the success of the fighter-bomber squadrons, roving inland to attack any German armoured columns heading for the invasion area. The 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitler Jugend and, most of all, the Panzer Lehr Division received a battering from Typhoons and P-47 Thunderbolts.

  The Canadian 3rd Division saw the need to seize villages and bring forward their anti-tank guns quickly to strengthen the defence. But the British 3rd Infantry Division, with certain honourable exceptions, was slow in pushing forward. The result was that the British Second Army on the eastern flank failed to take ground at the moment when it could have been seized with comparatively light casualties. Once Rommel flung Panzer Group West against the British and Canadian sectors, as General Morgan had predicted, it would be a whole month before Montgomery’s forces took the city which had been their first objective. The shortage of space on the British side of the invasion area prevented the RAF from establishing forward airfields and slowed the build-up of forces. It is surprising, in the light of the failure to seize either Caen or Carpiquet airfield, that Montgomery should have signalled Eisenhower on 8 June: ‘Am very satisfied with the situation.’

  Bradley’s First Army to the west of Caen and on the Cotentin Peninsula faced lighter opposition but much worse terrain. Field Marshal Brooke had warned of the difficulties of the Normandy bocage, with its small fields surrounded by very high, dense hedgerows that rose from solid banks, with sunken tracks in between. Brooke had studied the topography in 1940, but those who had never seen such unusual countryside had imagined it to be like western England, with small hedges which a Sherman tank could smash through with ease. But the first problem American forces faced was marshland and flooded areas. Paratroopers had dropped into it, with many fatal results, and much of the neck of the Cotentin Peninsula which they needed to seize was waterlogged.

  After the beachhead at Omaha had been secured, Lieutenant General Leonard ‘Gee’ Gerow ordered his divisions to advance inland as rapidly as possible. The 1st Infantry pushed south and east to link up with the British at Port-en-Bessin on 7 June. The 29th Infantry Division, which had received such a battering, sent its reserve regiment westwards towards Isigny. Bradley hoped to link up the Omaha and Utah beachheads as rapidly as possible. But the two airborne divisions were still involved in furious fighting along the Rivers Merderet and Douve and round Sainte-Mère-Église, until the 4th Infantry Division advanced inland from Utah with tank battalions in support.

  Once the Germans had been forced back from the south-east corner of the Cotentin Peninsula, the 101st Airborne managed to take the town of Carentan, largely thanks to confusion on the German side. On 13 June, the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen mounted a counter-attack. Bradley knew of its approach from Ultra intercepts and rapidly switched part of the 2nd Armored Division across. American paratroopers south of Carentan fought a semi-guerrilla withdrawal back towards the town, until Brigadier General Maurice Rose appeared, leading his Shermans from an open half-track. The SS panzergrenadiers fled in confusion. Next day, the two invasion areas were joined up.

  The Germans expected a major attack south from Carentan, but Bradley had a much higher priority: securing the Cotentin Peninsula with the port of Cherbourg at its tip. On 14 June the newly landed 9th Infantry Division and the 82nd Airborne attacked across the neck of the peninsula. Urged on by VII Corps commander Major General Lawton Collins, known as ‘Lightning Joe’, they reached the Atlantic coast in four days. Then, with three divisions across the peninsula, VII Corps advanced north with heavy air support and took Cherbourg on 26 June. Hitler was outraged when he heard that Generalleutnant Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben had surrendered.

  The Allies, having been so fortunate with the weather for the invasion, soon suffered badly. An enormous storm in the Channel destroyed the artificial Mulberry harbour constructed at Omaha and smashed vessels and landing craft ashore. The Americans found themselves desperately short of artillery ammunition, thus thwarting an advance southwards
during the Cherbourg operation.

  The British build-up of forces was also brought to a halt, just as a stalemate was developing. German resistance round Caen had intensified with the arrival of the SS Hitler Jugend. To make matters worse, low cloud grounded the Allied air forces. The British 50th Division with the 8th Armoured Brigade had advanced south from Bayeux, but they had come up against violent counter-attacks from the Panzer Lehr Division round Tilly-sur-Seulles and Lingèvres.

  On 10 June Montgomery met Bradley at Port-en-Bessin, and with a map spread on the front of his staff car Monty explained that he did not want to hammer head-on into Caen. He intended to encircle it, with 51st Highland Division attacking from the 6th Airborne’s sector east of the Orne. At the same time, 7th Armoured Division would slip down south out on his right flank into the edge of the American sector near Caumont, then swing back east towards Villers-Bocage behind the Panzer Lehr Division. It was a bold plan, and in many ways a good one, if it had been carried through promptly and with full force. In the event, it turned out to be little more than a reconnaissance in force, which was scandously under-supported.

  On 13 June the spearhead, consisting of just one regimental battle-group, reached Villers-Bocage, but without a reconnaissance screen in front. As a result the Cromwell tanks of the Sharpshooters (the 4th County of London Yeomanry) ran into a devastating ambush of Tiger tanks led by the panzer ace Michael Wittmann, of the SS 101st Heavy Panzer Battalion. This, combined with the sudden arrival of the 2nd Panzer Division on 7th Armoured Division’s exposed southern flank, prompted a humiliating retreat. The French townspeople who had so joyfully welcomed the Desert Rats the day before, now found their town smashed to rubble by RAF bombers.