If the peoples of the Allied nations were impatient for the invasion of France, some of those who had to carry it out displayed less eagerness: British soldiers who had served for years in North Africa and Italy resented the call to risk their lives again in Normandy. They felt that it was somebody else’s turn. ‘Who else is fighting this war?’ demanded bitter soldiers of 51st Highland Division, which was ‘softened, rather than hardened’ by six months’ training in England after its return from the Mediterranean, in the opinion of one of its senior officers. Among other Mediterranean veterans, ‘3rd Royal Tanks were virtually mutinous before D-Day,’ their brigade major Anthony Kershaw wrote later. ‘They painted the walls of their barracks in Aldershot with slogans such as “No Second Front”, and had it not been for their new commanding officer – the best CO of an armoured regiment that I met during the war – I really think they might have mutinied in fact.’
Few British units that had fought in the Mediterranean performed impressively during the north-west Europe campaign, and this seems unsurprising; they looked askance at millions of other British and American soldiers who had thus far escaped combat. On D-Day, thirty months after Pearl Harbor, half the US Army’s eight million men had yet to deploy overseas, and many more had still to see action. The 24th Infantry Division, for instance, spent nineteen months performing garrison duties in Hawaii, then a further seven months in Australia training for jungle warfare; some of its men were pre-war regular soldiers who became eligible for return to the United States before the formation had seen a single day of battle. While the Russians had been fighting continuously for three years, less than a dozen formations of the US Army had fought the Germans. Many British soldiers had likewise been training in England since 1940: statistically, in May 1944, less than half of Churchill’s army had fired a shot in anger, when account is taken of troops fulfilling support and garrison functions which did not involve combat. If the campaign Montgomery’s forces afterwards fought proved arduous and bloody, it was brief in comparison with the struggle on other fronts
Only relentless American pressure on Britain’s leadership enforced the D-Day commitment. This rendered it ironic that the British secured for themselves the initial invasion commands: Montgomery directed British and US ground forces, Ramsay the fleet and Leigh-Mallory the air armada. Although Dwight Eisenhower was Supreme Commander, Montgomery deluded himself that he might retain operational control of the Allied armies all the way to Berlin, with his American boss as a figurehead; the little general’s unfailing insensitivity caused him to cling to this ambition until the last months of the war.
Meticulous planning and immense armaments promised Overlord’s success, but the hazards of weather and the skill of the German army fed apprehension in many British and American breasts. The consequences of failure must be appalling: civilian morale would plummet on both sides of the Atlantic; senior commanders would have to be sacked and replaced; the prestige of the Western Allies, so long derided by Stalin for feebleness, would be grievously injured, likewise the authority of Roosevelt and Churchill. Even after three years’ attrition in the east, the German army remained a formidable fighting force. It was vital that Eisenhower should confront von Rundstedt’s sixty divisions in the west with superior combat power. Yet the invaders were supported by such a vast logistical and support ‘tail’ that, even when they reached their maximum strength in 1945, they would deploy only sixty American and twenty British and Canadian combat divisions. Air power, together with massive armoured and artillery strength, was called upon to compensate for inadequate infantry numbers.
Churchill and Roosevelt deserved their nations’ gratitude for delaying D-Day until 1944, when their own resources had become so large, and those of Hitler were so shrunken. Allied losses in the ensuing Continental campaign were a fraction of what they must have been had an invasion taken place earlier. For the young men who made the assault on 6 June 1944, however, such grand truths meant nothing: they recognised only the mortal peril each one must face, to breach Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. The invasion began with drops by one British and two American airborne divisions on the night of 5 June. The landings were chaotic but achieved their objectives, confusing the Germans and securing the flanks of the assault zone; paratroopers engaged enemy forces wherever they encountered them with an energy worthy of such elite formations.
Sgt. Mickey McCallum never forgot his first firefight, a few hours after landing. A German machine-gunner mortally wounded the man next to him, Private Bill Attlee. McCallum asked Attlee ‘if he was hit bad’. The soldier replied, ‘I’m dying Sergeant Mickey, but we are going to win this damn war, aren’t we? You damn well A we are.’ McCallum did not know where Attlee hailed from, but thought his choice of words suggested an east coast man. He was passionately moved that this soldier, in his last moments, thought of the cause rather than of himself. In the hours and days that followed, many other such young men displayed similar spirit and were obliged to make a matching sacrifice. At dawn on 6 June, six infantry divisions with supporting armour struck the beaches of Normandy across a thirty-mile front; one Canadian and two British formations landed on the left, three American divisions on the right.
Operation Overlord was the greatest combined operation in history. Some 5,300 ships carried 150,000 men and 1,500 tanks, scheduled to land in the first wave, supported by 12,000 aircraft. On the French coast that morning, a drama unfolded in three dimensions such as the world would never behold again. British and Canadian troops poured ashore at Sword, Juno and Gold beaches, exploiting innovative armoured technology to overwhelm the defences, many of them manned by Osttruppen of Hitler’s empire. ‘I was the first tank coming ashore and the Germans started opening up with machine-gun bullets,’ said Canadian Sgt. Leo Gariepy. ‘But when we came to a halt on the beach, it was only then that they realized we were a tank when we pulled down our canvas skirt, the flotation gear. Then they saw that we were Shermans.’ Private Jim Cartwright of the South Lancashires said, ‘As soon as I hit the beach I wanted to get away from the water. I think I went across the beach like a hare.’
The Americans seized Utah, the elbow of the Cherbourg peninsula, with only small loss. ‘You know, it sounds kind of dumb, but it was just like an exercise,’ said a private soldier wonderingly. ‘We waded ashore like kids in a crocodile and up the beach. A couple of shells came over but nowhere near us. I think I even felt somehow disappointed, a little let down.’ Further east at Omaha beach, however, Americans suffered the heaviest casualties of the day – more than eight hundred killed. The German defending unit, while no elite, was composed of better troops than those manning most of the Channel front, and kept up vigorous fire against the invaders. ‘No one was moving forward,’ wrote AP correspondent Don Whitehead. ‘Wounded men, drenched by cold water, lay in the gravel … “Oh God, lemme aboard the boat,” whimpered a youth in semi-delirium. Near him a shivering boy dug with bare fingers into the sand. Shells were bursting on all sides of us, some so close that they threw black water and dirt over us in showers.’
A private soldier wrote: ‘There were men crying with fear, men defecating themselves. I lay there with some others, too petrified to move. No one was doing anything except lay there. It was like a mass paralysis. I couldn’t see an officer. At one point something hit me on the arm. I thought I’d taken a bullet. It was somebody’s hand, taken clean off by something. It was too much.’ For half the morning, the Omaha assault hung on the edge of failure; only after several hours of apparent stalemate on the sands did small groups of determined men, Rangers notable among them, work their way up the bluffs above the sea, gradually overwhelming the defenders.
When news of the invasion was broadcast, across the Allied nations churches filled with unaccustomed worshippers, joining prayers for the men of the armies. On US radio channels commercial breaks were cancelled, as millions of anxious listeners hung on bulletins and live reports from the beachhead. Industrial strikes were abandoned and civilian blood donations s
oared. In Europe, millions of oppressed and threatened people experienced a thrill of emotion. As a Dresden Jew, Victor Klemperer had more cause than most to rejoice, but he had been rendered cautious by past disappointments. He compared his wife’s reaction with his own: ‘Eva was very excited, her knees were trembling. I myself remained quite cold, I am no longer or not yet able to hope … I can hardly imagine living to see the end of this torture, of these years of slavery.’
As for Hitler’s soldiers in France, ‘On the morning of 6 June, we saw the full might of the English and Americans,’ one man wrote in a letter to his wife which was later found on his corpse. ‘At sea close inshore the fleet was drawn up, limitless ships small and great assembled as if for a parade, a grandiose spectacle. No one who did not see it could have believed it. The whistling of the shells and shattering explosions around us created the worst kind of music. Our unit has suffered terribly – you and the children will be glad I survived. Only a tiny, tiny handful of our company remains.’ Luftwaffe paratrooper Lt. Martin Poppel, for so long an ardent Nazi, confident of victory, wrote on 6 June: ‘It turns out that this really is the Allies’ big day – which unfortunately means that it’s ours too.’ Geyr von Schweppenburg, commanding Panzergroup West, was convinced that Rommel, who directed the deployments behind Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, was wrong to stake everything on a ‘forward defence’. Von Schweppenburg had urged that the armoured divisions should be held back and massed for a counter-attack. Nonetheless, like most thoughtful German officers, he believed the outcome inevitable whatever deployments the defenders had made: ‘No landing or lodgement attempted by the Allies could ever have been defeated by us without an air force, and this we utterly lacked.’
Late in the afternoon of 6 June – much too late to have any realistic prospect of success – 21st Panzer Division staged a counter-attack on the British front, which was easily halted by anti-tank guns and 17-pounder Sherman ‘Fireflies’. At nightfall, Eisenhower’s forces were securely established, holding perimeters between half a mile and three miles inland which achieved linkage during the days that followed. In the German lines, Martin Poppel wrote: ‘We all reckon that [our] battalion has been thrown into battle alone and with few prospects of success … The men are damned jittery … Everybody is frankly shit-scared in this eerie night, and I have to curse and swear at them to get them to move.’
On the beaches, reinforcements poured ashore from shuttling landing craft, so that by the end of D+1 Montgomery deployed 450,000 men. The first Allied fighters began to fly from improvised local airstrips. The Luftwaffe was so shrunken by months of attrition over Germany that its planes scarcely troubled the invaders. Allied pilots marvelled at the contrast between their daylight view of the beachhead, where long columns of vehicles could be seen advancing with impunity, and the stillness in the enemy’s lines: the Germans knew that any visible movement they made would bring down fighter-bombers. Only during the brief hours of summer darkness were Rommel’s forces able to redeploy and bring up supplies; their commander was himself later wounded by a strafing fighter.
The D-Day battle cost only 3,000 British, American and Canadian dead, a negligible price for a decisive strategic achievement. The people of Normandy, however, suffered terribly for their liberation, losing as many dead on 6 June as the invaders. Allied soldiers shocked local people by their contempt for civilian property; a Civil Affairs unit noted in Ouistreham: ‘Looting by troops pretty general. British prestige has fallen here today.’ Similarly, a Frenchwoman described the ransacking of her home in Colombières by Canadians: ‘It was an onslaught throughout the village. With wheelbarrows and trucks, the men stole, pillaged, sacked everything … There were disputes about who got what. They snatched clothing, boots, provision, even money from our strongbox. My father was unable to stop them. The furniture disappeared; they even stole my sewing machine.’ Looting remained a universal practice among Eisenhower’s armies throughout the campaign, almost unchecked by commanders. Meanwhile, Allied bombs and shells killed some 20,000 people in north-west France during the bitter attritional fighting that now began.
Eisenhower and his generals had always recognised that the ‘battle of the build-up’ in the weeks following D-Day would be as critical as the landings: if the Germans could concentrate forces in Normandy more swiftly than the Allies, the invaders might still be evicted – as Hitler hoped and demanded. Deception planners made a vital contribution, by their brilliantly sophisticated Operation Fortitude, which convinced the Germans of a continuing threat to the Pas de Calais, where important forces lingered for weeks. But, though Allied air force destruction of rail links and road bridges slowed the arrival of reinforcements, throughout June and July new formations rolled into Normandy, to be hurled piecemeal into the cauldron. The eleven-week campaign became by far the most costly of the western war, and Normandy the only battlefield where casualty rates at times briefly matched those of the Eastern Front. Though D-Day had huge symbolic significance and commands the fascination of posterity, the fighting that followed was much bloodier: for instance, while D Company of the British Ox & Bucks regiment triumphantly seized ‘Pegasus bridge’ across the Caen canal early on 6 June for the loss of only two killed and fourteen wounded, next day it suffered sixty casualties in an inconclusive little action at Escoville.
Montgomery had declared ambitious initial objectives for the British on the eastern flank, including seizure of the city of Caen. Unsurprisingly, however, momentum was lost on 6 June, as troops advancing inland from the beaches were delayed by a maze of German strongpoints and hastily deployed blocking forces. During the succeeding days, dogged fighting consolidated the beachhead and gained some ground, but German formations, notably including 12th SS Panzer Division, prevented a decisive breakthrough. Again and again British troops pushed forward, only to be checked by enemy tanks and infantry fighting with their accustomed energy.
‘The attack entailed crossing about one thousand yards of open cornfield which fell away from Cambes Wood,’ wrote an officer of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. ‘We had barely crossed the start-line when the enemy reacted fiercely, with well-sited machine-guns and intense mortar fire which enfiladed the companies as they moved forward. It was a situation almost reminiscent of some First World War battlefield … We could see the tracer bullets flicking off the corn.’ Private Robert Macduff of the Wiltshires said: ‘One of the scenes which will live forever in mind is the arms and legs on the roadside covered in maggots. The smell was vile. Someone had been killed, someone had gone forever … There but for the grace of God go I.’ Brigadier Frank Richardson, one of Montgomery’s ablest staff officers, wrote afterwards of the Germans, whom he admired boundlessly: ‘I have often wondered how we ever beat them.’
But the Wehrmacht was also capable of extraordinary blunders, and made many in Normandy, especially before its commanders grasped the significance of the Allies’ power to punish daylight movement. ‘Here we encountered one of the most terrible images of the war,’ wrote a German NCO near Brouay on 8 June. ‘The enemy had virtually cut to pieces units of the Panzer Lehr Division with heavy weapons. [Half-tracks] and equipment had been ripped apart; next to them on the ground, and even hanging in the trees, were body parts of dead comrades. A terrible silence covered all.’ On 9 June a dozen Panthers of 12th SS Panzer Division launched a reckless headlong charge against Canadians emplaced at Bretteville. SS sergeant Morawetz described what followed:
The whole company drove as a body, at high speed and without any stops, in a broad front … After a muffled bang and a swaying, as if a track had been ripped off, the vehicle came to a stop. When I looked to the left, I happened to see the turret being torn off the panzer driving on the left flank. At the same moment, after another minor explosion, my vehicle began to burn … Paul Veith, the gunner sitting in front of me, did not move. I jumped out, then I saw flames coming out of the open hatch as if from a blowtorch … To my left, other burning panzers … The crews burned without exception on
their faces and hands … The whole area was under infantry fire.
Within minutes seven Panthers were destroyed by anti-tank guns; their commander returned from receiving treatment for wounds inflicted in an earlier action to find his regiment sorely depleted. He was exasperated by the attack’s futility: ‘I could have cried with rage and sorrow.’
The Americans fought a series of hard battles to secure the Cherbourg peninsula, where the small fields, steep banks and dense hedges of the bocage country enabled the defenders to inflict heavy losses for every small gain. ‘We had to dig them out,’ said a US infantry officer. ‘It was a slow and cautious business, and there was nothing dashing about it. Our men didn’t go across the open fields in dramatic charges … They did at first, but they learned better. They went in tiny groups, a squad or less, moving yards apart and sticking close to the hedgerows on either end of the field. They crept a few yards, squatted, waited, then crept again.’ Soldiers of the US airborne divisions, who had expected to be withdrawn from combat after D-Day to prepare for another assault, instead fought on in Normandy for five weeks; they displayed an energy and commitment lacking in some infantry formations, and made a vital contribution. An operational report from the US First Army highlighted ‘the urgent need for the development of an aggressive spirit in the infantry soldier … Many units do not acquire this attitude until long after their entry into combat and some never acquire it. On the other hand units containing specially selected personnel such as Airborne and Rangers exhibited an aggressive spirit from the start.’
Whenever the Germans attempted to attack, they were devastated by artillery, fighter-bombers and anti-tank guns; but the strategic imperative to advance rested upon the Allies. The British lost vast numbers of tanks in a series of unsuccessful attempts to break through to Caen and beyond. Local successes were often undone by enemy counter-attacks. ‘We were essentially defensive and the Germans essentially both attacking by nature and also fighting for their existence,’ wrote Major Anthony Kershaw. ‘We are not very dashing soldiers and the English cavalry has never been very good.’ Allied infantry assaults were unimaginative, coordination with armour poor.
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