There were other advantages. The mouth of the Orne River was the boundary between the Wehrmacht’s Fifteenth Army to the northeast and Seventh Army to the southwest, and boundaries between armies are inherently areas of weakness. The attack would come against Seventh Army, which had only one panzer division (the 21st) to Fifteenth Army’s five. Calvados was 150 kilometers or so from the major southern British ports of Southampton and Portsmouth.I The Cotentin Peninsula protected it from the worst effects of Atlantic storms. From the mouth of the Orne River westward there were thirty kilometers of open sand beaches, for the most part with only a gradual rise inland, and there was a good road net inland. From Arromanches westward for another ten kilometers the bluffs were almost vertical, but beginning at Colleville the bluffs receded from the coastline for a ten-kilometer stretch. Although the bluff behind was as much as forty to fifty meters high, it was not vertical and the beach was open, sandy, and 200 or so meters wide at low tide, ten meters at high tide. There were four draws with roads running down to that beach, making for suitable exits.
• •
Already the British had collected an enormous amount of intelligence on the French coast. Shortly after Dunkirk, the BBC had broadcast an appeal for postcards gathered over the years from families who had taken prewar vacations in France; 30,000 arrived in the first post and eventually 10 million pictures were collected. Throughout 1942 and 1943 aerial reconnaissance photographs had been gathered; they were put together into panoramic photos. The French Resistance supplied information on beach obstacles, strong points, enemy units, and the like. Information on tides, currents, and topography could be dug out of old guidebooks.
So a great deal was known about the Calvados coast, but not the answer to a key question. Would the beaches west of the mouth of the Orne River support DUKWs, tanks, bulldozers, and trucks? There was reason to fear that they would not, because British geographers and geologists reported that there had been considerable erosion of the coastline over the past two centuries. The original port at Calvados, the old Roman port, had been two kilometers out from the twentieth-century shoreline. French Resistance people managed to smuggle four volumes of geological maps out of Paris, one in Latin done by the Romans, who had surveyed their entire empire for a report on fuel sources. The survey indicated that the Romans had gathered peat from the extensive reserves on the Calvados coast. If there were boggy peat fields under a thin layer of sand on the current coast, it would not hold tanks and trucks.
COSSAC had to know. The only way to find out was to obtain samples. No. 1 Combined Operations Pilotage and Beach Reconnaissance Party, consisting of Maj. Logan Scott-Bowden and Sgt. Bruce Ogden-Smith, set off on New Year’s Eve 1943 in a midget submarine to take samples. They figured the Germans would be celebrating that night. Lt. Comdr. Nigel Willmott of Combined Operations was in command, with a submarine skipper and an engineer. Major Scott-Bowden and Sergeant Ogden-Smith swam ashore, carrying pistols, daggers, wrist compasses, watches, waterproof flashlights, and a dozen twelve-inch tubes.
They came in on a rising tide at the seaside village of Lucsur-Mer on the beach later given the code name Sword. They could hear singing from the German garrison. They crawled ashore, walked inland a bit, went flat when the beam from the lighthouse swept over the beach, walked some more. They made sure to stay below the high-water mark so that their tracks would be wiped out by the tide before morning. They stuck their tubes into the sand, gathering samples and noting the location of each on underwater writing tablets they wore on their arms.
“The trouble really started,” Scott-Bowden recalled, when they had filled their tubes. “The breakers were quite heavy and we were positively bogged and tattered up with all our kit, and we had a go at getting out to sea and were flung back.” They took a breather, tried again, were flung back a second time. “So we went as far out in the water as we could, there were smaller waves coming over us, and watched the rhythm of these breakers until we could time it. The third attempt, having timed it right, we got out, but we got separated a bit and we swam like hell to make sure we weren’t going to be pitched back in again. We didn’t quite lose contact.”
Suddenly Ogden-Smith started yelling. “I was thinking that he’d probably got a cramp or something,” Scott-Bowden related, “but when I got close enough to him, all he was yelling was ‘Happy New Year!’ He’s a good chap, a marvelous fellow. I swore at him, then wished him a Happy New Year too.”2
The samples showed that the sand could bear the necessary weight. The Combined Operations Pilotage Parties (COPPs) did a series of reconnaissances all along the Calvados coast that winter, at beaches named Juno and Gold. They sometimes set the midget submarine on the sea bottom at periscope depth to take bearings and photographs. Scott-Bowden explained, “We could see things which weren’t visible from air photographs as we were looking from a worm’s eye view. It was quite a tricky operation, because if anybody moves inadvertently in a midget submarine and you’re bottomed at periscope height on a wavy beach, you can upset the trim and put the bottom off, put the stern up, or anything, so one had to be very careful indeed.”3
On one occasion, the submarine passed right underneath a French fishing trawler with a German spotter in the bow. Scott-Bowden was able to watch workmen on the beach using two-wheeled carts pulled by horses. He and Ogden-Smith made other swims, including one at the beach between Colleville and Vierville (by this time, late January, code-named Omaha) and did other reconnaissance missions.
At the end of January, Scott-Bowden was called to COSSAC headquarters at Norfolk House, St. James’s Square (by then taken over by SHAEF), to report to Admiral Ramsay, General Bradley, General Smith, four other generals, and five more admirals. Rear Adm. George Creasy, Ramsay’s chief of staff, drew the curtains and said, “Now, describe your reconnaissance.”
Scott-Bowden looked at the map. It was too big, too general. “Well, I’m afraid, sir, it’s going to be very difficult to give much detail from this.”
“Oh,” Creasy replied, “we’ve got another map down the other end, it might be better.” So the major followed him across the large room, looked at the map hanging there, and indicated it would do. Creasy called out, “Come on, chaps, bring your chairs down here.” As the generals and admirals picked up their chairs and came over, the twenty-three-year-old Scott-Bowden thought, Oh dear, oh dear, I’m getting off to a bad start.
“I’d never been confronted with such a galaxy before,” he recalled, “so I stumbled through my account. Then they started shooting questions for getting onto an hour. The Navy were not quite so interested in what I had to say, but General Bradley was. He wanted me to say whether Sherman tanks could go up this track or that track. I thought of the two wheel carts and said it must be possible. And so on.”
When the brass ran out of questions, Scott-Bowden offered an opinion. “If you don’t mind my saying so, sir,” he told Bradley, “I think that your beach with all these tremendous emplacements with guns defilading the beaches from here and there and all over, it’s going to be a very tough proposition indeed.”
Bradley patted Scott-Bowden on the shoulder and said, “Yes, I know, my boy, I know.”4
• •
When Eisenhower and his team arrived in London to take over from COSSAC, they studied Morgan’s plan and accepted his logic, except that everyone involved—Montgomery, Eisenhower, Smith, Bradley, and the others—insisted that the invasion front had to be widened to a five-division assault. They demanded, and got, an allotment of additional landing craft. Extension to the east, toward Le Havre, was not advisable because it would bring the assaulting troops directly under the Le Havre coastal guns, among the most formidable in the Atlantic Wall. Morgan had ruled out extension to the west, on the southeast corner of the Cotentin Peninsula, because the Germans were flooding the hinterland there.
Eisenhower overruled Morgan; he decided to extend to the west. He would deal with the problem of flooded areas behind the coastline by dropping the Amer
ican airborne divisions inland and giving them the task of seizing the raised roads that crossed the flooded areas, so that the seaborne assault troops could use the roads to move inland.
The U.S. 4th Infantry Division would lead the way on the Cotentin, where the beach took the code name Utah. The U.S. 29th and 1st Infantry divisions would land at the beach on the Calvados coast code-named Omaha. The British and Canadians would land on the beaches stretching westward from the mouth of the Orne, code-named (from east to west) Sword (British 3rd Division, plus British and French commandos), Juno (Canadian 3rd), and Gold (British 50th). The British 6th Airborne would land between the Orne and Dives rivers to protect the left flank.
COSSAC had been tempted to use only one army, either British or American, in the initial assault—that would make things very much simpler and eliminate what is always the weakest spot in any allied line, the boundary between the forces of the two nationalities. But it was politically impossible. As General Barker had put it in July 1943, “It can be accepted as an absolute certainty that the P[rime] M[inister] would not, for one moment, allow the assault to be made wholly by American troops. The same is true with relation to the U.S. Government. We must be practical about this and face facts.”5
So it was settled. The invasion would come against the Calvados coast, with the British on the left and the Americans at Omaha, with an extension to the right onto the Cotentin coast at Utah.
• •
The great disadvantage of the Calvados coast was that landing there would put the Allied armies ashore southwest of the Seine River, thus putting between them and their objective the major river barriers of the Seine and the Somme. But disadvantages could be made into advantages; in this case, COSSAC believed that the bridges over the Seine could be destroyed in preinvasion bombardments, thus making it difficult for the Wehrmacht to bring panzer divisions from the Pas-de-Calais across the river and into the battle.
The greatest advantages of Calvados were that surprise could be achieved there and that the Germans might be fooled into believing the landing was a feint, designed to draw their armor away from the Pas-de-Calais to the west of the Seine. The basic reason for surprise was that by going to Calvados the Allies would be moving south from England, away from the area the Germans absolutely had to defend, the Rhine-Ruhr, rather than east from England on the straight line toward their objective. It might be possible to persuade the Germans on an ongoing, postinvasion basis that Calvados was a feint by mounting a dummy operation aimed at the Pas-de-Calais.
COSSAC recognized that it could not reverse the process; that is, the Allies would not be able to attack the Pas-de-Calais and mount a dummy operation aimed at Calvados that would be believable. If the attack came ashore at Pas-de-Calais, the Germans would not keep troops in lower Normandy for fear of their being cut off. Instead, they would bring their forces from lower Normandy to Pas-de-Calais and into the battle. But they might be persuaded to keep troops in the Pas-de-Calais following a landing on the Calvados coast, as the men and tanks in the Pas-de-Calais would still stand between the Allied forces and Germany. In short, geography would help to pin down the German armor in the Pas-de-Calais.
• •
To reinforce the German need to keep their panzer armies northeast of the Seine, COSSAC proposed (and Eisenhower, after he took command, mounted) an elaborate deception plan. The code name was Fortitude; the objectives were to fool Hitler and his generals into thinking that the attack was coming where it was not, and into believing that the real thing was a feint. Each objective required convincing the Germans that the Allied invasion force was about twice as powerful as it actually was.
Fortitude was a joint venture, with British and American teams working together. It made full use of the Double Cross System, of Ultra, of dummy armies, fake radio traffic, and elaborate security precautions. Fortitude had many elements designed to make the Germans think the attack might come on the Biscay coast or in the Marseilles region or even in the Balkans. The most important parts were Fortitude North, which set up Norway as a target (the site of Hitler’s U-boat bases, essential to his only remaining offensive operations and thus an area he was extremely sensitive about), and Fortitude South, with the Pas-de-Calais as the target.
To get the Germans to look toward Norway, the Allies first had to convince them that they had enough resources for a diversion or secondary attack. This was doubly difficult because of the acute shortage of landing craft—right up to D-Day it was touch and go as to whether there would be enough craft to carry six divisions ashore at Normandy as planned. Therefore, the Allies had to create fictitious divisions and landing craft on a grand scale. This was done chiefly with the Double Cross System, the talents of the American and British movie industries, and radio signals.
The British Fourth Army, for example, stationed in Scotland and scheduled to invade Norway in mid-July, existed only on the airwaves. Early in 1944 some two dozen overage British officers went to northernmost Scotland, where they spent the next months exchanging radio messages. They filled the air with an exact duplicate of the wireless traffic that accompanies the assembly of a real army, communicating in low-level and thus easily broken cipher. Together the messages created an impression of corps and division headquarters scattered all across Scotland.
Of course the messages could not read “We will invade Norway in mid-May.” The Germans would never believe such an obvious subterfuge. Instead, they read “80 Div. request 1,800 pairs of crampons, 1,800 pairs of ski bindings,” or “7 Corps requests the promised demonstrators in the Bilgeri method of climbing rock faces,” or “2 Corps Car Company requires handbooks on engine functioning in low temperatures and high altitudes.” There was no 80th Division, no VII Corps, no II Corps Car Company, but the Germans did not know that and they would come to their own conclusion as to what was going on in Scotland.6
Fooling the Germans was not easy; they were experts at radio deception. At the beginning of 1942 they had mounted one of the more elaborate and successful deception operations of World War II, Operation Kreml. Its objective had been to make the Red Army think that the main German offensive for 1942 would take place on the Moscow front, not at Stalingrad. As historian Earl Ziemke writes, Kreml “was a paper operation, an out-and-out deception, but it had the substance to make it a masterpiece of that highly speculative form of military art.” The Germans used radio traffic to manufacture dummy armies that supposedly threatened Moscow; in most of its essentials, Kreml was similar to Fortitude.7
Thanks to the Double Cross System, however, the Allies had one advantage over Kreml. The turned German spies in the United Kingdom, whose reliability had been “proved” to the Abwehr over the past three years, were put to work. They sent encoded radio messages to the Abwehr in Hamburg describing heavy train traffic in Scotland, new division patches seen on the streets of Edinburgh, and rumors among the troops about going to Norway. In addition, wooden twin-engine “bombers” began to appear on Scottish airfields. British commandos made some raids on the coast of Norway, pinpointing radar sites, picking up soil samples, in general trying to look like a preinvasion force.
The payoff was spectacular. By late spring, Hitler had thirteen army divisions in Norway (along with 90,000 naval and 60,000 Luftwaffe personnel). These were hardly high-quality troops, but still they could have filled in the trenches along the Atlantic Wall in France. In late May, Rommel persuaded Hitler to move five infantry divisions from Norway to France. They had started to load up and move out when the Abwehr passed on to Hitler another set of “intercepted” messages about the threat to Norway. He canceled the movement order. To paraphrase Churchill, never in the history of warfare have so many been immobilized by so few.8
Fortitude South was larger and more elaborate. It was based on the First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG), stationed in and around Dover and threatening the Pas-de-Calais. It included radio traffic, inadequately camouflaged dummy landing craft in the ports of Ramsgate, Dover, and Hastings, fields full of papie
r-mâché and rubber tanks, and the full use of the Double Cross System. The spies reported intense activity around Dover, including construction, troop movements, increased train traffic, and the like. They said that the phony oil dock at Dover, built by stagehands from the film industries, was open and operating.
The capstone to Fortitude South was Eisenhower’s selection of Lt. Gen. George S. Patton to command FUSAG. The Germans thought Patton the best commander in the Allied camp and expected him to lead the assault. Eisenhower, who was saving Patton for the exploitation phase of the coming campaign, used Patton’s reputation and visibility to strengthen Fortitude South. The spies reported his arrival in England and his movements. So did the British papers (available to the Germans in a day or two via Portugal and Spain; in addition, German agents in Dublin had the London papers the day they were printed and could send on hot items by radio). FUSAG radio signals told the Germans of Patton’s comings and goings and showed that he had taken a firm grip on his new command.
FUSAG contained real as well as notional divisions, corps, and armies. The FUSAG order of battle included the U.S. Third Army, which was real but still mostly in the States; the British Fourth Army, which was imaginary; and the Canadian First Army, which was real and based in England. There were, in addition, supposedly fifty follow-up divisions in the United States, organized as the U.S. Fourteenth Army—which was notional—awaiting shipment to the Pas-de-Calais after FUSAG established its beachhead. Many of the divisions in the Fourteenth Army were real and were actually assigned to Bradley’s U.S. First Army in southwest England.
Fortitude’s success was measured by the German estimate of Allied strength. By the end of May, the Germans believed that the Allied force included eighty-nine divisions, when in fact the number was forty-seven. The Germans thought the Allies had sufficient landing craft to bring twenty divisions ashore in the first wave, when they would be lucky to manage six. Partly because they credited the Allies with so much strength, partly because it made good military sense, the Germans believed that the real invasion would be preceded or followed by diversionary attacks and feints.9
The Men of World War II Page 47