D-Day: History in an Hour

by Rupert Colley

  With the Soviet Union’s Red Army approaching from the east and the US and its allies from the west, it was not so much a case of if Germany could be defeated, but when. The aerial bombardment of German cities continued – Dresden, for example, was flattened in February 1945. The full extent of Nazi horror was exposed as, one by one, the death camps were liberated. Still Hitler refused to surrender. On 30 April, with Soviet troops fighting within yards of his bunker beneath the German Reichstag, he committed suicide. On 7 May, Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Western Allies, and, the following day, to the Soviet Union. The war in Europe was over.

  The war in the Pacific continued for another three months. With the USA bombing Japanese cities at will, Japan’s situation was hopeless. Unable to secure Japan’s surrender, the USA dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Two days later, the Soviet Union entered the war against Japan. The following day, 9 August, the USA dropped a second atomic bomb, this time on the city of Nagasaki. Finally, on 2 September, Japan surrendered. After six years and a day, the Second World War had come to an end.

  WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN…

  The debt we owe to those who took part on D-Day and the subsequent Battle of Normandy is immense. The invasion of 6 June 1944 changed the course of history.

  In retrospect, given the Allies’ intense preparation, and the extent of Germany’s dwindling resources and overstretched commitments, East and West, the success of the invasion seems almost inevitable. But of course that was far from the case. The prospect of failure loomed large in the minds of Eisenhower and his political masters, and for all those involved and for all those who, under the yoke of Nazi oppression, awaited liberation. The outcome of the war and the make-up of a post-war Europe would have been very different had, on 6 June, the invasion of Normandy failed. The story of D-Day would have marked the continuation, not the beginning of the end, of Europe’s new Dark Age. Had the Allies’ invasion of France been repulsed, had the Germans triumphed during the Battle of Normandy, had the Germans not been so emphatically deceived, it would have spelled disaster for the Allies and the cause of freedom. Germany would have been on full alert for a repeat attempt, which would have taken another year or more to prepare, had it taken place at all. The USA would have turned its attention and its resources to the war in the Pacific. Hitler would have had a free hand to concentrate his efforts in defeating the Soviet Union in the East. Had he failed, which, in all likelihood, would have been the case, Stalin’s troops, having overrun Berlin, would have advanced into western Germany and, from there, into Western Europe. The post-war map of Europe would have looked far different – instead of an ‘Iron Curtain’ separating East from West, the curtain would have separated North and South, dividing Britain from a Europe dominated throughout by Stalin. Much of Western Europe would have suffered continued subjugation – only under a different master and different uniform. The Cold War, as chilly as it was, would have been that much colder.

  May we never forget…

  A poppy on Juno beach, 6 June 2004

  Appendix 1: Key Players

  DWIGHT ‘IKE’ EISENHOWER (1890–1969)

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Born in Texas into a family of German immigrant pacifists, Dwight Eisenhower, the third of seven boys, was brought up in Kansas. He attended the West Point Military Academy, graduating in 1915. Although he rose to the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel during the First World War, he never saw any action; a drawback, as he saw it, that caused him embarrassment and was later used against him as an example of his lack of frontline experience.

  Eisenhower married his wife, Mamie Geneva Doud, in 1916. (But during the Second World War he became very close to his driver, Kay Summersby. When Eisenhower visited US troops on the eve of D-Day, Summersby accompanied him. Whether they had an affair is open to speculation, although Summersby clearly said so. In 1975, after the death of Eisenhower, Summersby wrote her autobiography entitled Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower.)

  During the interwar years, while stationed in France, he wrote a guide to the battlefields of the Great War, as it was still known.

  In 1939, Eisenhower, or Ike, was a 49-year-old lieutenant colonel (now no longer temporary). Yet, within three years, he had been appointed ahead of 366 more senior officers to take command of US forces in Europe. Based in Britain, he commanded Operation Torch, the Allied landing in North Africa; and, in 1943, oversaw the invasion of Italy. As Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, appointed in December 1943, he masterminded the D-Day landings, the Battle of Normandy and the subsequent push into Germany.

  Despite his lack of combat experience, Eisenhower was known for his diplomacy, bringing together a sense of collaboration between the British and Americans, and his ability to cope with conflicting egos, especially with the likes of Montgomery and Patton.

  Following the liberation of Nazi-occupied France, Eisenhower favoured a ‘broad thrust’ into Germany rather than the quicker but riskier narrow front favoured by Bernard Montgomery.

  He served briefly as Governor of the US Zone in post-war Germany, before returning to the USA and becoming Army Chief of Staff. He was courted by both the Republican and Democrat parties ahead of the 1948 presidential election, but refused to be drawn in. Instead, Eisenhower became President of Columbia University and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during which time he wrote his bestselling Crusade in Europe. In 1951, he was appointed the Supreme Commander of the newly created North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), serving for just fifteen months.

  In 1953, standing as a Republican, Eisenhower became the thirty-fourth US President, serving two terms. The first Republican president for twenty years, he oversaw the ending of the Korean War, sent the first US troops to South Vietnam and, in 1956, stopped the Anglo-French invasion of Suez. Although he had a serious heart attack in 1955, and a series of minor ones throughout his time as president, he fought and won a second term the following year. As president, Eisenhower was much criticized for allowing Senator Joseph McCarthy, with Vice-President Richard Nixon’s backing, too much of a free hand in exposing supposed communists within American society. It was only as McCarthy started to attack the military, most famously, George C. Marshall, Eisenhower’s old mentor, that Eisenhower finally and rather belatedly intervened.

  Eisenhower refused to stand behind Nixon during the 1960 presidential election. Nixon narrowly lost to Democrat, John F. Kennedy.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower died, aged 78, on 28 March 1969.

  OMAR BRADLEY (1893–1981)

  Omar Bradley

  Born in 1893 in Missouri, Omar Nelson Bradley fought on the Western Front during the last months of the First World War. His father, a schoolteacher who had married one of his pupils, died in 1906 while Omar was still only thirteen.

  In 1943, during the Second World War, Bradley led US troops on to Sicily. The following year, based in London, he was given command of American troops assigned to the Normandy landings. His immediate commander was Bernard Montgomery. After a battle of attrition, he led the capture of Cherbourg, then the advance into the town of Avranches. On 1 August 1944, Bradley was given command of the US Twelfth Army Group, consisting of one and a quarter million troops, the largest US army ever assigned to a single general. Bradley’s army fought in the Ardennes, during the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944–January 1945, and his soldiers were among the Allied troops who shook hands with their Soviet counterparts on the River Elbe in April 1945.

  Post-war, Bradley served on the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and in 1950 was appointed ‘General of the Army’, the highest rank in the US army. He oversaw US strategy during the Korean War and retired in 1953, a month after the end of the war. Although retired, he advised President Lyndon Johnson on military policy during the Vietnam War.

  His memoirs, A Soldier’s Story, were published in 1951.

  Omar Bradley died on 8 April 1981, aged 88, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.


  ROBERT CAPA (1913–54)

  Robert Capa.

  ‘If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.’

  Considered one of the greatest war photographers, Robert Capa’s images, especially those taken during the Spanish Civil War and the D-Day landings, are among the iconic images of the twentieth century.

  Born Andre Friedmann in Budapest in 1913, he had, by the age of 18, turned into a political radical, opposed to the authoritarian rule of Hungarian regent, Miklós Horthy. In 1931, Friedmann was arrested and imprisoned by Hungary’s secret police. On his release, after only a few months, he moved to Berlin where he studied journalism and political science while working part-time as a darkroom apprentice. In 1933, alarmed by the rise of Nazism, Friedmann, who was Jewish, moved to Paris.

  Two years later, while in Paris, Friedmann met Gerta Pohorylle, a German Jew who had also fled Hitler’s Germany. Together they worked as photojournalists, fell in love and, in an attempt to make their work more commercially appealing, pretended they both worked for the famous American photographer, Robert Capa. Friedmann took the photos, Pohorylle hawked them to the news agencies and credit was given to the fictional Robert Capa. (The name ‘Capa’ was chosen as homage to the American film director, Frank Capra.)

  In 1936, Friedmann, having now assumed the name Robert Capa, and Pohorylle, who had also changed her name, becoming Gerda Taro, travelled to Spain to cover the Civil War, which had erupted in July that year. It was in Spain that Capa took the photo, first published in September 1936 by French magazine Vu, and later in Life magazine, that made him a household name – The Falling Soldier, a photograph of a Republican soldier supposedly at the moment of death from a sniper’s bullet. The photo has been the subject of much debate. While Capa’s defenders, particularly his brother, maintain its authenticity, others accuse Capa of having staged the scene. Research shows that the photograph was taken some thirty-five miles away from where Capa said it had been, in an area that saw no fighting on the day the shot was taken. Perhaps more damning is that the photo bears no evidence of a bullet wound.

  On 25 July 1937, while Capa was away in Paris, Taro was injured in Spain, crushed by a reversing Republican tank. She died the following day, a week short of her twenty-seventh birthday. Grief-stricken, Capa travelled to China to document the Sino-Japanese War.

  With the outbreak of war in 1941, following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Capa was in New York, and started working for various magazines, including Life and Time. Sent to Europe, he accompanied American troops during the 1943 advance through German-held Sicily, and, in October, the battle for Naples.

  In April 1944, he transferred to London ahead of the planned invasion of Normandy. He landed with the second wave of troops on Omaha beach on 6 June, D-Day. Sheltering from German gunfire and shaking with fear ‘from toe to hair’, Capa managed, over the course of two hours, to take 106 shots of American soldiers fighting and struggling on the beach. He quickly returned to London to have the four rolls of film developed. Unfortunately, a laboratory assistant dried the pictures too quickly, thereby melting three rolls and half the fourth. The only surviving eleven photographs were, as a result of the blunder, blurred. Since dubbed the ‘Magnificent Eleven’, part of the set was originally published in Life on 11 June.

  Following the war, Capa became an American citizen and, in 1947, founded Magnum Photos in Paris with French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson. He continued his travels, working in Israel and the Soviet Union, where he took photos for the novelist John Steinbeck on his tour of the country.

  Although Capa had decided not to work in any more war zones, in 1954 he accepted Time’s request to cover the war in French Indochina, modern-day Vietnam. On 25 May, in the city of Thái Bình, Capa stepped on a mine and was killed. He was 40.

  JUAN PUJOL GARCIA (1912–88)

  Juan Pujol Garcia

  Juan Pujol Garcia was unique among Second World War agents – he was the only one to offer his services as a double agent as opposed to all others who had been captured and ‘turned’. Bespectacled, balding and timid, Pujol was not the image usually associated with a double agent, let alone Britain’s most effective one.

  Born in Barcelona in February 1912, Pujol was working on a chicken farm when, in 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out. He managed to fight for both the Republican side and the Nationalists. He was committed to neither and hated the extreme views they each represented. By the end of the war, he was able to claim that he had served in both armies without firing a single bullet for either.

  He emerged from the experience with an intense dislike for extreme ideologies and, for the ‘good of humanity’, sought to help achieve a more moderate system. Three times he approached British services in Lisbon and Madrid, offering to spy for them, only to be turned away without an interview. Undeterred, Pujol decided to become a double agent. He offered his services to the German Abwehr service based also in Lisbon, proposing to spy on the English, claiming that as a diplomat working in London, he knew England well. His audacity was certainly impressive – he had never visited England nor could he speak the language, and he had forged a British passport without ever having seen a real one. Incredibly, the Germans fell for the story, put him through an intensive training course, and supplied him with the tools of the trade – invisible ink, cash, and a codename, Arabel – and sent him on assignment to England with instructions to build a network of spies.

  This Pujol did. Soon, he had a team of agents working for him. They included disillusioned men and women, disaffected English nationals, and people prepared to betray Britain in return for wine. Between them, they supplied Pujol a steady stream of information which, in turn, he passed on to the Abwehr.

  But it was all false. Pujol never went to England. Instead, he ensconced himself in Lisbon and armed with a Blue Guide to England and various books he found in the library, made everything up. He reported on non-existent troops, and routinely mixed up his pounds, shillings and pence. The Germans seemed not to notice. He even had the nerve to post his reports from Lisbon letterboxes, telling his German paymasters that among his agents was a pilot who regularly flew to Portugal, posting his correspondence locally.

  Soon, the British were intercepting his messages and were delighted at the amount of false information being fed to the enemy. They determined to track him down. But in April 1942, Pujol approached them. This time, not surprisingly, they took his offer more seriously. Given the codename Garbo, Pujol began working with a Spanish- and German-speaking Security Service officer, Tomás (Tommy) Harris.

  The Germans were so impressed with the work of their Arabel and his network of agents that they rarely bothered to recruit further agents. For the British, it was imperative that the Abwehr continued to trust Arabel. Thus, the information Pujol and Harris fed them was often accurate but of low importance, or of high value but timed so that by the time the Germans received it, it was too late to do anything.

  Soon, Pujol’s team of fictional agents numbered twenty-seven, each with their own backstory, supposedly based across Britain. Some were caught, imprisoned or, as Arabel told the Germans, had become untrustworthy. On one notorious occasion, a Liverpool-based agent had died. The Secret Service even had his obituary published in the local newspaper, and Arabel got the Abwehr to pay the agent’s ‘widow’ an annual pension.

  Pujol played a major role in keeping much of German strength focused on a possible invasion at the Pas-de-Calais. The difficulties the Allies had landing on Normandy, particularly via Omaha beach, would have been that much greater if it had not been for the efforts of Britain’s Spanish double agent.

  Such was Pujol’s success, he was awarded an MBE by Britain’s King George VI and an Iron Cross, personally authorized by Hitler (a rare event for a foreigner of the Reich). Pujol was perhaps the only individual to be so highly decorated by both sides.

  Following the war, Pujol faked his death in Angola, and settled to a quiet life with his family in
Venezuela. Pujol died in Caracas on 10 October 1988, aged 76.

  BERNARD MONTGOMERY (1887–1976)

  Bernard Montgomery

  The son of a bishop, Bernard Montgomery, or ‘Monty’, was born in London but spent his early years in Tasmania. He fought during much of the First World War, and was twice badly wounded. An obstinate individual, he fell out with his mother to such an extent that when she died in 1949, he refused to attend her funeral. Training to be an army officer at Sandhurst, he was demoted for having set a fellow student on fire, and during the First World War he allegedly caught a German by kneeing him in the testicles.

  The early death of his wife in 1937 from septicaemia, caused by an insect bite, devastated Monty and from then on, he devoted himself entirely to his career.

  Self-confident in the extreme, prone to odd headwear, Montgomery was adored by his men, especially during the desert campaigns in North Africa during which he made his name by defeating Erwin Rommel at El Alamein. But he frequently clashed with his American counterparts and, because of his immense self-pride, took offence easily. Having planned the successful invasion of Sicily, he believed himself worthy of being in overall command of the Italian campaign, and took great umbrage at having to work under Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  In December 1943, Montgomery was appointed land commander, again under Eisenhower, for Operation Overlord, the planned invasion of France. His D-Day objectives included the capture of Caen within the first twenty-four hours. In the event, it took several weeks and proved costly, for which he was heavily criticized. During the chaotic days of mid-June, his American counterparts felt that Montgomery’s strategy was too cautious and hoped to have him replaced, a view endorsed by Churchill. But Montgomery held on to his post and his tactics did draw much enemy attention to the east of the Allies’ bridgehead, allowing the Americans to successfully break out from the west.