The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  There was much to be grim about. Thanks to Allied jamming and downed phone lines, little was known with certainty. Somehow thousands of ships had crossed the Channel undetected. No Luftwaffe reconnaissance planes had flown for the first five days of June, and naval patrols on June 5 were scrubbed because of the nasty weather. A decoded radio message—intercepted about the time the 101st Airborne launched from England—suggested a possible invasion within forty-eight hours. But an advisory on Monday evening from OB West, the German headquarters for western Europe, declared, “There are no signs yet of an imminent invasion.” Besides Rommel, two of the top four German commanders in the west had been away from their posts on Tuesday morning, and several senior field officers in Normandy had driven to Rennes, in Brittany, for a map exercise. The Fifteenth Army, near the Pas de Calais, was placed on full alert before midnight, but the other major component of Rommel’s Army Group B, the Seventh Army occupying Normandy, sounded no general alarm until 1:30 A.M. despite reports of paratroopers near Caen and in the Cotentin. Even then, OB West insisted at 2:40 A.M.: “It is not a major action.”

  Not until that fantastic armada materialized from the mist had the truth struck home. In subsequent hours the German navy remained supine; so too the air force. Luftwaffe pilots were supposed to fly up to five daily sorties each to disrupt any invasion, but German aircraft losses in the past five months exceeded thirteen thousand planes, more than half from accidents and other noncombat causes. Air Fleet Three, responsible for western France, had just 319 serviceable planes facing nearly 13,000 Allied aircraft; on D-Day, they would fly one sortie for every thirty-seven flown by their adversaries. Of the mere dozen fighter-bombers that reached the invasion zone, ten dropped their bombs prematurely. German soldiers now bitterly joked that American planes were gray, British planes black, and Luftwaffe planes invisible.

  Still, Seventh Army asserted through much of the day that at least part of the Allied landing had been halted at the water’s edge. “The enemy, penetrating our positions, was thrown back into the sea,” the 352nd Infantry Division reported at 1:35 P.M. That soap-bubble delusion soon popped: at six P.M. the division acknowledged “unfavorable developments,” including Allied troops infiltrating inland and armored spearheads nosing toward Bayeux.

  Rommel’s grim face grew grimmer. Here, in Normandy, he had first made his name as “the fighting animal,” in one biographer’s phrase, driving his 7th Panzer Division more than two hundred miles in four days to trap the French garrison at Cherbourg in June 1940. Soon after, in Africa, the fighting animal took vulpine form as the audacious Desert Fox, although even he could not forestall the Allied triumph in Tunisia. Now, he told a comrade, he hoped “to re-win great fame in the West.”

  Hitler’s decision in November 1943 to reinforce the Atlantic Wall against “an Anglo-Saxon landing” offered him that chance. As commander of half a million men in Army Group B, with responsibility for the coast from Holland to the Loire, the field marshal had flung himself into building the “Rommel Belt.” All told, 20,000 coastal fortifications had been constructed, 500,000 foreshore obstacles emplaced, and 6.5 million mines planted in what he called “the zone of death.” To Lucie he wrote on May 19, “The enemy will have a rough time of it when he attacks, and ultimately achieve no success.” Hitler agreed, declaring, “Once defeated, the enemy will never try to invade again.”

  If confident enough to travel home for his wife’s birthday, Rommel harbored few illusions. He had never forgotten the endless acres of high-quality American war matériel he had inspected at Kasserine Pass; the battered U.S. Army was reeling then, but he knew it would be back in killing strength. Two years of campaigning in Africa gave him great faith in land mines, but he wanted 200 million of them, not 6 million. Some divisions were composed of overage troops, as well as many non-Germans—paybooks had been issued in eight different languages just for former Soviet citizens now serving the Wehrmacht. Army Group B relied on 67,000 horses for locomotion; across the entire front, fewer than 15,000 trucks could be found. A corps commander in Normandy complained, “Emplacements without guns, ammunition depots without ammunition, minefields without mines, and a large number of men in uniform with hardly a soldier among them.”

  Worse yet was the Anglo-American advantage in airpower and seapower, a frightful imbalance that Rommel knew firsthand from the Mediterranean. German officers with battle experience only against the Soviets misjudged the enemy edge in the west. “Our friends from the East cannot imagine what they’re in for here,” Rommel had warned in mid-May; battling a foe with air superiority was like “being nailed to the ground.” Moreover, 71,000 tons of Allied bombs had already eviscerated the German transportation system in the west. Train traffic in France had declined 60 percent since March—a testimony to those spavined Seine bridges, almost half of which were rail spans—and even more in northern France. Allied fighter sweeps proved so murderous that German daytime rail movement in France was banned after May 26. Beyond the 45,000 armed railwaymen already transferred from Germany to forestall saboteurs, almost 30,000 workers were seconded from the Atlantic Wall to rail repair duties. Some field commanders, Rommel grumbled, “do not seem to have recognized the graveness of the hour.” Six weeks earlier he had warned subordinates:

  The enemy will most likely try to land at night and by fog, after a tremendous shelling by artillery and bombers. They will employ hundreds of boats and ships unloading amphibious vehicles and waterproof submersible tanks. We must stop him in the water, not only delay him.… The enemy must be annihilated before he reaches our main battlefield.

  In this injunction lay what one German general called “a cock-fight controversy.” For months the high command had bickered over how best to thwart an Allied invasion. Rommel argued that “the main battle line must be the beach,” with armored reserves poised near the coast. “If we can’t throw the enemy into the sea within twenty-four hours,” he told officers in Normandy, “then that will be the beginning of the end.” In March he had proposed that all armored, mechanized, and artillery units in the west be bundled under his command, and that he assume some control over the First and Nineteenth Armies in southern France.

  This impertinence found little favor in Berlin or Paris. The OB West commander, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, who called his brash subordinate “an unlicked cub” and “the Marshal Laddie,” argued that to disperse counterattack forces along seventeen hundred miles of exposed Atlantic and Mediterranean coastline would be foolhardy. Better to concentrate a central mobile reserve near Paris, able to strike as a clenched fist whenever the invaders committed themselves. Better to follow Napoléon’s dictum, as one panzer commander urged: “S’engager, puis voir.” Engage the enemy, and then we shall see.

  Hitler dithered, then ordered a compromise that pleased no one. Frontline forces on the coast were to fight “to the last man”—that phrase so easily uttered by those far from the trenches—and Army Group B would command three armored divisions among the ten on the Western Front. Three others went to southern France. The remaining four, controlled by Berlin, were clustered near Paris in a strategic ensemble called Panzer Group West. Neither Rundstedt nor Rommel could issue orders to air or naval forces, who were vaguely advised to cooperate with ground commanders. “In the East there is one enemy,” an officer in Paris complained. “Here everything is so complicated.” Just a few days earlier, Hitler had shifted troops from OB West to Italy and the Eastern Front. Perhaps predictably, when frantic pleas to release the armored reserves had arrived in Berlin and Berchtesgaden this morning, more than eight hours passed before the panzers were ordered to begin the long, tortuous journey toward Normandy. Rommel denounced the delay as “madness,” adding, “Of course now they will arrive too late.” S’engager, puis voir.

  * * *

  Dusk sifted over the Seine valley. Swallows trawled the river bottoms, and the day’s last light faded from the chalk cliffs above the château, where antiaircraft gunners strained for the drone of
approaching bombers. Telephones jangled in the salon war room, and orderlies bustled across the parquet with the latest scraps of news.

  In Berlin it had been whispered that Rommel suffered from “African sickness”—pessimism—to which he answered, “Der Führer vertraut mir, und das genügt mir auch.” The Führer trusts me, and that’s enough for me. He remained “the Führer’s marshal,” in one colleague’s phrase, loyal in his own fashion and as beguiled by Hitler as steel filings by a magnet. War and the Nazis had been good to him: he was a stamp collector not above adding looted issues to his album, and the handsome villa in leafy Herrlingen where he delivered Lucie’s shoes had been confiscated from Jews after the occupants were sent to Theresienstadt. Hitler was a bulwark against bolshevism, he had told staff officers; if the invasion was repelled, perhaps the West would “come round to the idea of fighting side by side with a new Germany in the East.” The onslaught against the Atlantic Wall would be “the most decisive battle of the war,” he had predicted a few weeks earlier. “The fate of the German people itself is at stake.” His fate, too.

  The struggle in Normandy would depend in large measure on the only armored unit within quick striking distance of the invasion beaches, the 21st Panzer Division. A stalwart from Africa, the division had been obliterated in Tunisia, then rebuilt with sixteen thousand men—some still wearing oddments of tropical uniforms—and 127 tanks. Even while racing back to France this afternoon, Rommel had stopped midway to confirm by phone that the unit was hurrying into action. Now the harsh truth came clear: orders, counterorders, and disorder had plagued the division almost as much as marauding Allied planes and scorching field-gun fire. Not least among the 21st’s troubles was the temporary absence of the commanding general, who reportedly had spent the small hours of June 6 in a Parisian fleshpot. The division’s antiaircraft battalion had been pulverized by naval gunfire north of Caen, and the tank regiment gutted from the air and by British gunners. This evening a panzer grenadier regiment knifing toward Sword Beach in the two-mile gap between Canadian and British troops had nearly reached the strand. Then, just before nine P.M., almost 250 more British gliders escorted by fighters swept into the Orne valley, doubling British airborne combat power in France and threatening to pin the grenadiers against the sea.

  At 10:40 P.M., General Friedrich Dollmann, who had commanded Seventh Army since 1939, phoned La Roche–Guyon with baleful news. The “strong attack by the 21st Panzer Division has been smothered by new airborne landings,” Dollmann reported. The counterattack had failed. Nearly two-thirds of the 21st Panzer’s tanks were lost. Swarming enemy aircraft impeded movement, even at night. Grenadiers skulked back from the coast to blocking positions with two dozen 88mm guns in the hills around Caen.

  Rommel returned the receiver to its cradle. Hands again clasped behind his back, he studied the wall map. The critical crossroads city of Caen remained in German hands, and nowhere did the Anglo-American penetration appear deeper than a few kilometers. The 12th SS Panzer and the Panzer Lehr Divisions were finally moving toward Normandy despite fighter-bombers flocking to the telltale dust clouds like raptors to prey. “We cannot hold everything,” he would tell his chief of staff. The first critical twenty-four hours was nearly spent, yet perhaps the coastal battle could still be saved. He turned to an aide and said, as if reminding himself, “I’ve nearly always succeeded up to now.” He was, as ever, the Führer’s marshal.

  * * *

  A monstrous full moon rose over the beachhead, where 156,000 Allied soldiers burrowed in as best they could to snatch an hour of sleep. Rommel was right: the invader’s grip on France was tenuous, ranging from six miles beyond Gold and Juno to barely two thousand yards beyond Omaha. A crude sod airstrip had opened alongside Utah at 9:15 P.M., the first of 241 airdromes the Americans would build across Western Europe in the next eleven months. Yet only 100 tons of supplies made shore by midnight, rather than the 2,400 tons planned for Omaha dumps. Paratroopers, particularly among the nineteen airborne battalions on the American western flank, fought as scattered gangs in a score or more of muddled, desperate gunfights. Every man who survived the day now knew in his bones, as one paratrooper wrote, that “we were there for one purpose, to kill each other.”

  If the 21st Panzer had failed to fulfill Rommel’s imperative by cudgeling the enemy into the sea within twenty-four hours, the division had blocked the capture of Caen, gateway to the rolling terrain leading toward Paris. “I must have Caen,” the British Second Army commander, Lieutenant General Miles Dempsey, had declared at St. Paul’s School three weeks earlier. But he would not have it today, or any day soon, in part because his landing force was unprepared to fight enemy armor so quickly. Even so, a British captain wrote, “We were not unpleased with ourselves.”

  The failure of this truncated drive fell hardest on civilians in Caen. Gestapo killers hurried to the city jail and murdered eighty-seven Frenchmen in batches of six, including one victim who cried, “My wife, my children!” as he was gunned down in a courtyard. Caen was among seventeen Norman towns warned in leaflets dropped from Allied planes on June 6 that bomber fleets would follow, often in little more than an hour. Beginning at 1:30 P.M., high explosives and incendiaries, aimed at rail yards and other targets intended to impede German reinforcements, also shattered Caen’s medieval heart, igniting fires that would burn for eleven days. Thousands sought refuge in the quarries south of town, whose stone had been used by Norman kings to build Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London. Amid the ruination, five hundred coffins stockpiled in a funeral home were reduced to ashes. “We won’t have a single coffin to bury the dead,” the deputy mayor told his diary.

  All told, three thousand Normans would be killed on June 6 and 7 by bombs, naval shells, and other insults to mortality; they joined fifteen thousand French civilians already dead from months of bombardment before the invasion. Some injured citizens were reduced to disinfecting their wounds with calvados, the local brandy fermented from apples. “Liberation,” wrote the journalist Alan Moorehead, “usually meant excessive hardship for the first few months.”

  As for the liberators, the eight assault divisions now ashore had suffered 12,000 killed, wounded, and missing, with thousands more unaccounted for, most of whom had simply gotten lost in the chaos. Allied aircraft losses in the invasion totaled 127. The 8,230 U.S. casualties on D-Day included the first of almost 400,000 men who would be wounded in the European theater, the first of 7,000 amputations, the first of 89,000 fractures. Many were felled by 9.6-gram bullets moving at 2,000 to 4,000 feet per second, or by shell fragments traveling even faster; such specks of steel could destroy a world, cell by cell. Aboard U.S.S. Samuel Chase, mess boys who that morning had served breakfast in white jackets were now as blood-smeared as slaughterhouse toughs from sewing corpses into burial sacks. A British doctor who spent Tuesday evening on Sword Beach reported that for most of the wounded “nothing was being done for them as there was no plasma or blood, and they lay there being bombed and machine-gunned all night long.” On Utah, handkerchiefs draped the faces of the dead because, as a Navy lieutenant said, “They do not seem to matter as much with faces covered.”

  Omaha was the worst, of course. Stretcher bearers with blistered hands carried broken boys down the bluff to Easy Red—now dubbed Dark Red—only to find that a medical battalion had come ashore with typewriters and office files but no surgical equipment or morphine. Blankets were stripped from the dead or salvaged in the tidal wrack between petulant outbursts of German artillery. Fearful of mines and rough surf, most landing craft refused to pick up casualties from the beach after dark. A single ambulance with cat’s-eye headlights crept along the dunes, delivering the wounded to collection-point trenches where medics plucked scraps of GI boot leather from mine wounds. Listening for the telltale crackle of gas gangrene, they hushed sufferers who asked only for a bullet in the brain. A soldier returning to Omaha for ammunition found many comrades “out of their heads. There were men crying, men moaning, and the
re were men screaming.”

  Others were beyond screams. Dead men lay in windrows like “swollen grayish sacks,” in one reporter’s image. “I walked along slowly, counting bodies,” wrote the correspondent Gordon Gaskill, who prowled the beach on Tuesday evening. “Within 400 paces I counted 221 of them.” More than double that number—487—would be gathered on Omaha, toes sticking up in a line as if at parade drill. “One came up on them rather too suddenly and wanted to stare hard,” a Navy lieutenant wrote, “but there was that feeling that staring was rude.”

  Graves Registration teams tied Emergency Medical Tag #52B to each corpse for identification, then shrouded them in mattress covers fastened with safety pins. Two inland sites had been chosen for cemeteries but both remained under fire, so temporary graves were scooped out below the escarpment. Shovel details fortified with brandy buried their comrades in haste.

  * * *

  So ended the day, epochal and soon legendary, and perhaps indeed, as in the judgment of a Royal Air Force history, “the most momentous in the history of war since Alexander set out from Macedon.” In southern England, “the first of the Master Race” arrived as prisoners on an LST, Martha Gellhorn reported. She studied the “small shabby men in field gray … trying to see in those faces what had happened in the world.” A badly wounded American lieutenant, evacuated on a surgical litter next to a German shot in the chest and legs, murmured, “I’d kill him if I could move.”

  Such sanguinary purpose would be needed in the weeks and months ahead. For the moment, the Allies savored their triumph. “We will never again have to land under fire,” a Navy officer wrote his wife on June 7. “This is the end of Germany and Japan.” If too optimistic—assault landings were still to come in southern France and on various god-awful Pacific islands—the core sentiment obtained. For four years Hitler had fortified this coast, most recently entrusting the task to his most charismatic general, yet Allied assault troops had needed less than three hours to crack the Atlantic Wall and burst into Fortress Europe. Though far from over, the battle was won.