The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  One major problem was the shortage of landing craft. So few were available that Operation Anvil, an attack in the south of France originally scheduled for the same day as Overlord, had to be postponed until 15 August, by which time the Germans had largely withdrawn their forces from the region. Quite why the US Maritime Commission was capable of building a 10,500-ton Liberty cargo ship in under a week (and 2,700 of them in total) but not enough basic, wooden, 10-ton landing craft is a continuing mystery of the war. Marshall suspected a Navy plot at the Bureau of Yards and Construction. Overlord did in the end deploy the necessary number of landing craft, but only at the cost of a diversionary operation that might have been strategically useful in early June but was largely obviated by mid-August.

  Meteorology was in its infancy in the 1940s and, as the weather in the Channel was never predictable, Eisenhower had to order a postponement of the attack from Monday, 5 June to Tuesday the 6th, on the advice of his chief meteorological officer, a twenty-nine-year-old civilian called James Stagg who had been awarded the rank of group captain in order to give him some weight among the much more senior officers. With too many clouds and too strong winds, the crucial aerial part of the operation could have been compromised, with disastrous results. Yet as Stagg later pointed out, with the Navy wanting onshore winds of not more than Force 3 or 4, as well as good visibility for bombarding coastal defences, and the Air Force also wanting specific cloud cover and heights, ‘When I came to put them together I found that they might have to sit around for 120 or 150 years before they got the operation launched.’21

  Had Overlord not been launched on 6 June, considerations of fuel, moonlight and tidal flows would have meant that the whole invasion would have had to have been postponed for a fortnight, with concomitant problems regarding the troops’ morale and the security of keeping so vast an operation secret. Fortunately Stagg was able to report at 04.15 on 5 June the approach of a new, favourable weather front. Pausing only to pen a resignation letter for release in the event of defeat – ‘If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone’ – late that day Eisenhower gave the final go-ahead, with the hardly morale-boosting remark to his Staff: ‘I hope to God I know what I’m doing.’22

  The Pas de Calais, as the shortest route across the Channel, would have had the best cover from fighter aircraft from the RAF’s Kentish airfields. The Abwehr also believed the information supplied by its spy network in the United Kingdom, centred on an anti-Fascist Catalan called Juan Pujol García, who lived in a safe house in Hendon and was codenamed Garbo by the Allies (who awarded him the MBE) and Arabel by the Germans (who awarded him the Iron Cross), his twenty-four fictitious sub-agents and other German spies who had been infiltrated into Britain, every single one of whom had been successfully ‘turned’ by MI5. These included the real and imagined agents Gelatine, Hamlet, Meteor, Brutus (Roman Garby-Czerniawski), Cobweb (Ib Riis), Beetle (Petur Thomsen), Bronx (Elvira Chaudoir), Tricycle, Artist, Freak, Tate, Mullet, Puppet and Treasure.23 As they fed the Abwehr with reports about FUSAG’s activities, all co-ordinated by Garbo (so called because he was such as accomplished actor), the spy network became completely trusted by the Germans.24 Meanwhile Ultra built up a picture of the enemy’s order of battle and command structure in France, helped by the French Resistance destroying landline connections, thus forcing the Germans to resort to wireless communications. It took the Germans nearly a week after the Normandy landings had begun to appreciate that they were not a southern feint, but the true invasion itself, and even up to 26 June half a million troops of the German Fifteenth Army stayed stationed around the Pas de Calais, guarding against an invasion that would not come.

  At 00.16 hours on D-Day, Staff Sergeant Jim Wallwork landed his Horsa glider a mere 50 yards from the road bridge over the Caen Canal, now known as Pegasus Bridge, and only 500 yards from the bridge over the River Orne. These two coastal road bridges were strategically vital, because any German counter-attack from the east would need to cross them, as would any Allied breakout to the plains east of Caen. ‘The Horsa seemed to skim the tall trees at the end of the field,’ recalled one of those on board, ‘and came in to land with an ear-splitting crash that shook us all to our bones.’25 One minute later, at 00.17, a second glider landed and then at 00.18 a third. The pilots had flown 5 miles by moonlight with only a stopwatch and a flashlight attached to a finger to guide them, yet they landed precisely where the French Resistance had pinpointed, through the perimeter-wire defences of the bridge.

  Ninety men from D Company of the 2nd Battalion, the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, under the command of Major John Howard, debouched from the gliders and captured Pegasus Bridge without difficulty, so total was the Germans’ surprise. They then held it until relieved by Lord Lovat’s Commandos, who marched from the beach up the canal tow-path at 13.00 hours to the sound of bagpipes played by Lovat’s piper, Bill Millin, ‘blowing away for all he was worth’.26 Less accurate in their landing zones were the American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, some units of which landed as far as 35 miles off target. Yet this, and the practice of dropping dummy parachutists, had the added advantage of so confusing German intelligence that it estimated that 100,000 Allied troops had landed by air, more than four times the true number. The majority of parachutists landed in the correct drop-zones, however, and were to play an invaluable part in attacking the beaches from the rear and holding back the inevitable German counter-attack.

  The French Resistance had been ordered to ready itself for the invasion by the BBC broadcast on 1 June of the first line of the poem ‘Autumn Song’ by Paul Verlaine, which went: Les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne (The long sobs of the autumn violins). The Abwehr had tortured a Maquis leader and learnt that when the second line – Blessent mon coeur d’une langeur monotone (wound my heart with monotonous langour) – was broadcast, it meant that the invasion was imminent. So when it was duly broadcast at 23.15 on 5 June, the commander of the Fifteenth Army in the Pas de Calais put his troops on alert, but no one warned the Seventh Army in Normandy. At Army Group B’s château headquarters at La Roche-Guyon it was assumed that it must be mere disinformation, as the Allies would hardly have announced the invasion over the BBC.27

  When shortly before 05.00 the Seventh Army’s chief of staff warned Army Group B that the attack was indeed taking place, Rommel himself was unavailable as he was in Germany celebrating his wife Lucie’s birthday which fell that day. He only made it back to La Roche-Guyon at 6 o’clock that evening. His chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Hans Speidel, ordered the 12th SS Hitler Youth Panzer Division to counter-attack at Caen at first light, but some of the 4,500 bombers that the Allies fielded that day severely blunted this assault. As Rommel later pointed out:

  Even the movement of the most minor formations on the battlefield – artillery going into position, tanks forming up, etc. – is instantly attacked from the air with devastating effect. During the day fighting troops and headquarters alike are forced to seek cover in wooded and close country in order to escape the constant pounding of the air. Up to 640 [naval] guns have been used. The effect is so immense that no operation of any kind is possible in the area commanded by this rapid-fire artillery, either by infantry or tanks.28

  Interrogated after the war, Speidel quoted Rommel as having said, very perceptively:

  Elements which are not in contact with the enemy at the moment of invasion will never get into action, because of the enormous air superiority of the enemy… If we do not succeed in carrying out our combat mission of warding off the Allies or hurling them from the mainland in the first 48 hours, the invasion has succeeded and the war is lost for lack of strategic reserves and lack of Luftwaffe in the west.29

  Although Hitler was not woken at Berchtesgaden with the news of the Normandy landings – he had been up with Goebbels until 3 o’clock the previous night, ‘exchanging reminiscences, taking pleasure in the many fine days and weeks we have had together’, recorded Goebbels; ‘the
mood is like the good old times’ – it made very little difference. Even by the lunchtime conference OKW was unsure that this was the true attack rather than a diversion. Rundstedt was not certain either. So by the time two Panzer divisions were sent against the beaches 100 miles away, much valuable time had been lost.30 This was not the fault of the adjutants who failed to wake the Führer, so much as evidence of the success of the Allies’ deception operation in confusing the minds of the OKW and OKH about where the main attack was going to take place, and of the difference of opinion between Rundstedt and Rommel about what should be done. Rundstedt thought the Allies could not be prevented from landing and so needed to be flung back into the sea in a counter-attack; Rommel felt they had to be stopped from getting ashore, telling his Staff that ‘The first twenty-four hours will be decisive.’31 In all there were fifty-nine German divisions in the west at the time of D-Day, of which eight were in Holland and Belgium. More than half that total were mere coastal-defence or training divisions, and of the twenty-seven field divisions only ten were armoured, with three of these in the south and one near Antwerp. Six divisions, four of them coastal defence, were stationed along the 200 miles of Normandy coast west of the Seine where the Allies attacked. ‘These dispositions would more truly be described as “coast-protection” rather than as defence!’ stated Blumentritt later.

  At 05.50 a massive naval bombardment opened up on the German beach fortifications and the villages along the Normandy coast. At H-hour, 06.30, the main American landings took place on Utah and Omaha beaches, with the British and Canadians arriving on their three beaches an hour later. The crossings had taken several hours in some cases. It had been feared that the Germans would use gas on the beaches, and the anti-gas chemical with which uniforms were sprinkled smelt so disgusting that, once added to the landing crafts’ tossing about in the waves, it induced vomiting in many troops who had not already been seasick.

  At Utah 23,000 men got ashore with only 210 killed and wounded, partly because the current swept the 4th Division’s landing craft some 2,000 yards south of the original area designated for attack, on to a relatively lightly defended part of the coastline, and twenty-eight of the thirty-two amphibious Duplex Drive (DD) Sherman tanks got ashore. The one regiment facing them from the German 709th Division surrendered in large numbers once the 101st Airborne had secured at least four exits from the beaches.

  On Omaha beach, however, where two-thirds of the American effort that day was to land, it was a very different state of affairs. The veteran US 1st Division (known as the Big Red One from its shoulder flash) and the 29th Division, which had never seen combat before, were to suffer ten times the losses as did the 4th Division at Utah.32 Despite all the intense preparation, with tourists’ photo albums pored over by Staff officers for years, the ground had been seemingly ill chosen for attack. However, once the decision had been taken to expand the lodgement area (that is, the territory to be secured by Overlord from which further operations could be conducted) as far as Utah beach to the west, Omaha beach was the only feasible landing area between Utah and the British and Canadian beaches. The cliffs and bluffs at Omaha were in some places more than 150 feet above the sea wall at the end of the dunes; the inward curvature of the coast at that stretch helped German fields of fire to overlap; underwater sand bars and ridges snagged landing craft; the powerful and well-placed fortifications (which can still be seen today) were not silenced by naval shelling; the anti-personnel mines, barbed wire and huge steel anti-tank ‘hedgehogs’ proved murderous obstacles; accurate German artillery fire, and above all a regiment of the 716th Infantry Division and units from the crack German 352nd Infantry Division, caused havoc. Ultra had conveyed that there would be eight enemy battalions at Omaha, rather than the four that had been planned for, but it was too late to alter the entire plan because of them. These battalions provided, in the words of Overlord’s historian Max Hastings, ‘by far the greatest concentration of German fire on the entire invasion front’. This nearly led to disaster for the Americans on Omaha.33

  ‘With unbelieving eyes we could recognize individual landing craft,’ recalled Franz Gockel of the 726th Infantry Regiment of the 716th Division. ‘The hail of shells falling on us grew heavier, sending fountains of sand and debris into the air.’34 The opening scene of the movie Saving Private Ryan is the best cinematographic representation of those first monstrous minutes of the American landings on Omaha beach, but even that cannot begin to show the extent of the chaos and carnage on the beaches. This would have been even worse had Rommel been right about the Allies arriving at high tide, as every gun had been fixed for that eventuality. As it was they came in at low tide in order for the obstacles to be more visible.35 This had its own disadvantages, however, for as Signal Sergeant James Bellows of the 1st Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment recalled of the men he had landed with on Sword: ‘A lot of them had been overridden by their landing craft as they came off. The landing craft became lighter as men came off and as it surged up the beach, and many who were in front went straight underneath.’36

  The 6,000 yards of Omaha beach along which the Americans landed were soon a scene of confusion and destruction. American soldiers – whose age averaged twenty and a half, far younger than the British twenty-four or Canadian twenty-nine years – had to leap out of their landing craft into a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire loaded down with 68 pounds of equipment, including gas-mask, grenades, TNT blocks, two ammunition bandoliers, rations, water bottle and related kit. Many simply drowned when the water they jumped into proved deeper than expected.

  Although the British beaches were in part cleared of German killing apparatus by a series of specialized tank-based gadgets, known as Hobart’s funnies after Major-General Sir Percy Hobart of the 79th Armoured Division, which employed inventions such as giant thrashing metal chains to set off mines, Generals Bradley and Gerow preferred massive frontal assault. Because of heavy seas and being transferred from their transport vessels 11½ miles out, ten landing craft and twenty-six artillery pieces sank on the way to the beaches. ‘I never saw water that bad,’ recalled Sergeant Roy Stevens, ‘the seas were rolling and rolling, and there were whitecaps way out where we were, twelve miles from the coast.’37 Most of the troops had been seasick on the three-hour journey in choppy seas. The British transferred only 6½ miles out, and suffered fewer sinkings as a result in less turbulent weather. The loss of twenty-seven of the twenty-nine DD ‘floating’ tanks, which were launched 6,000 yards from the Omaha shore but then sank when the waves came over their canvas screens, denied the Americans the necessary firepower to get off the beach early. ‘We could see a shambles ahead of us on the beach,’ recalled Leading Aircraftman Norman Phillips of the RAF who landed there, ‘burning tanks, jeeps, abandoned vehicles, a terrific crossfire.’38

  The official account of what happened to Able Company of the 116th Infantry, 29th Division, after its landing craft hit Omaha beach at 06.36 gives a sense of the horror of those next few minutes:

  Ramps are dropped along the boat line and the men jump off in water anywhere from waist deep to higher than a man’s head. This is the signal awaited by the Germans atop the bluff. Already pounded by mortars, the floundering line is instantly swept by crossing machine gun fire from both ends of the beach… The first men out… are ripped apart before they can make five yards. Even the lightly wounded die by drowning, doomed by the water-logging of their overloaded packs… Already the sea runs red… A few move safely through the bullet swarm to the beach, then find they cannot hold there. They return to the water to use it for body cover. Faces turned upwards, so that their nostrils are out of the water, they creep towards the land at the same rate as the tide. This is how most of the survivors make it… Within seven minutes after the ramps drop, Able Company is inert and leaderless.39

  It was not until 13.30, after seven hours being pinned down on the beaches, that Gerow could signal to Omar Bradley, who was on board a ship trying to make out what was going on through
binoculars, that ‘Troops formerly pinned down on beaches’ were finally ‘advancing up heights behind beaches’. Although there were 2,000 Americans killed on Omaha beach, by nightfall a total of 34,000 men had made it ashore, including two Ranger battalions that had silenced the German coastal battery at Pointe du Hoc to the west after scaling cliffs with rope ladders.40 At one point the 5th Rangers had to don gas-masks in order to charge through the dense smoke coming from the undergrowth of a hillside that suddenly caught fire.

  There were no high cliffs at Gold, Juno and Sword beaches, and more time for the naval bombardment to soften up the German defences; however, by late afternoon part of the 21st Panzer Division attacked in the gap between Juno and Sword beaches and almost made it to the Channel before being turned back by naval fire. The British suffered over 3,000 casualties, but by the end the Canadians, who lost 1,074, got the furthest inland on the first day, with their 9th Brigade advancing to within 3 miles of the outskirts of Caen.