Engineers of Victory

by Paul Kennedy

  The orchestration of the approach to the beaches, and the organization of the initial landings, still staggers the historical imagination. It would fill the rest of this book, and several more, to describe the landing plan in detail.39 For example, the 171 squadrons of Allied fighters that would be aloft as the invasion unfolded all had their own patrol zones; they would be directed by RAF Fighter Command initially, and then for the first time ever air traffic control would switch to special units in the HQ ships offshore. The bombing of the German rear echelon was timed for around 2:00 to 4:00 a.m., just before the intensive bombing of the immediate coastal defenses, then a reversion by the heavy bombers to interdiction of the roads leading toward the Normandy beaches. As the vast armada came to its launching point, the troops also could not fail to notice the enormous bombardment of the German coastal emplacements by battleships, cruisers, and monitors. Ramsay wanted two full hours of heavy, shattering fire on the beaches before the destroyers and rocket-firing landing craft moved closer in, and they were to continue firing until shortly before the hordes of smaller landing craft, some carrying specialized tanks, most carrying platoons of nervous infantrymen and the specialized assault tools, approached the beaches. Even before them, there went the demolition teams, the bravest of the brave. How exactly does one demolish a spiky tetrahedron with wire and mines dangling off it? Along with those early units went another group of specialists, the naval “spotters,” to scramble onshore to a nearby hill and control the fire from the warships.

  As the troops and amphibious tanks came ashore (or drowned in the effort), their beach master was waiting. This was an obvious, necessary, extraordinary position, one confirmed by the experiences on the beaches of Sicily and Salerno: a Royal Navy captain became supreme director of the landing beach, moving the troops forward, ordering disabled vehicles to be pushed out of the way, sending the landing craft back to sea as soon as they had disembarked their contents. He functioned in a way like an old-fashioned traffic cop at a busy intersection, imposing order on impending chaos, heading off the potential gridlock. One of them, the redoubtable Captain William Tennant of the Royal Navy, had been in charge of getting 340,000 British, French, and Belgian troops off the beaches at Dunkirk in 1940; now, four years later, he was bringing even larger numbers back to the Normandy coasts.

  A few hours before even the beach master and the obstacle-clearing crews had landed, the first units of the Allied airborne divisions had already been parachuted to their positions a few miles inland. Employing paratroops as a key component in a large-scale operation—as distinct from sending them on small special-ops raids—was an unusual and extraordinarily risky step: there was nothing (not artillery, not air support, not naval bombardment) that could be deployed to cover their exposed downward glide in the face of enemy resistance—as even the ultra-competent German paratroops had found when they landed in Crete in 1941. Yet despite the grave risks, Eisenhower’s planners could see that the reward of a successful parachute strike would be enormous: the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions’ capture of small towns a few miles inland from Utah Beach would have a great dislocating effect, and it was even more vital for the British 6th Airborne Division to seize the Orne River bridge and thus outflank Caen from the east.

  Behind the landing force, stood out at sea and occupying different lanes from the amphibious craft and from each other, were the five Allied naval bombardment squadrons. They had, following the schedule mentioned above, begun firing on German coastal fortifications before the first craft reached the shore, then moved to fire at targets farther inland. From zone to zone, there was a marked difference of tactics. Hewitt went for a somewhat later, briefer bombardment (actually, only thirty to forty minutes), rather than Ramsay’s solid two hours of preinvasion fire. Whichever system was preferred, it has to be said that the results were mixed. Solidly built and obliquely aligned concrete bunkers were not easy to destroy, even when fire control directors directed large salvoes onto their roofs. Testimony from captured Germans on the receiving end suggests that the greatest effect was caused by the earsplitting noise, choking dust, and confusion that the great shells brought with them; or, a little later, by the surprise of being caught by a battleship’s salvoes while in a truck convoy 10 miles inland. It took a while for Wehrmacht field commanders to appreciate what those unarmed little spotter planes overhead were up to.

  Above the beaches, as the full day came up, patrolled the Allied air squadrons. It was almost four years to the week that a small number of RAF Hurricane and Fairy Battle squadrons had tried to protect the retreating British and French military from Luftwaffe bombings and strafings as they streamed into the little boats off Dunkirk, just 120 miles northward upon the very same coast. Now the odds were totally reversed. Apart from the famous madcap run over the Allied beaches at 10:00 a.m. on June 6 by the Luftwaffe ace “Pips” Priller and his wingman Heinz Wodarczyk in their Fw 190s, what German interference could come from the air? Farther afield, Allied heavy bombers continued to plaster the enemy’s communications networks running from the Rhineland into France and the Low Countries, while enormous numbers of Coastal Command aircraft patrolled the Channel, the Western Approaches, and the Bay of Biscay. If the Allies had a problem in the air, it was most likely to be confusion and misidentification of other aircraft (at a mile away, a Fw 190 and a Mustang looked very similar) and thus the risk of friendly fire; hence the painting of three parallel white stripes on all Allied aircraft likely to operate over the D-Day beaches. No other air commanders ever enjoyed such a luxury of surplus power.

  The most effective German defensive weapon was, curiously, their new “oyster” mine, which exploded when the waves created by an approaching ship changed the water pressure. These were laid in large numbers by low-flying aircraft and small vessels. Despite the constant work of dozens and dozens of Allied minesweepers, those mines sank considerable numbers of warships and merchantmen and damaged many more, including Admiral Vian’s flagship for the Eastern Task Force, the cruiser HMS Scylla. Many Allied vessels had to be towed slowly back to Portsmouth, crews waving at the reinforcing flotillas heading toward Normandy. By contrast, the German E-boats sent out to contest Operation Neptune were really the equivalent of kamikaze vessels, attacked at every opportunity by Beaufighters and Wellingtons, checked by massive destroyer screens (Canadian, Polish, and French as well as Royal Navy), and having their home bases torn apart by RAF Lancasters. Bomber Command might have had a mixed record over Berlin at night, but their 12,000-pound Tallboy bombs completely wrecked German-held harbors, bridges, and railway lines; when hit by 325 Lancasters on June 14, the concrete roofs of the naval station at Le Havre crashed down upon the fourteen hapless E-boats below. Low-flying Beaufighters terrorized every German-held port from the Channel to Denmark.40 At night, specially equipped Mosquitos took over.

  Setting to sea from Belgian ports was also the choice of the remaining German destroyers. The brave assault by the four destroyers of the 8th German Destroyer Flotilla on the night of June 8–9—detected by decrypts, and smashed by an Anglo-Canadian-Polish destroyer force twice its size—was essentially the last formal sortie of the Kriegsmarine against the navies of the West. When the war had broken out almost five years earlier, a grim Admiral Raeder remarked that his underdeveloped navy at least knew how “to die gallantly.” So they had done.

  The U-boat flotillas ordered to attack the Allied landings were (as noted in chapter 1) also dispatched to a suicidal mission. By this stage Ultra was at last at full effectiveness, and because the submarines reached the Channel waters only after the landings had occurred, a colossal force of aircraft and surface escorts was waiting for them, all of them now equipped with advanced detection systems and horribly effective weaponry. The skies were full of Allied aircraft, the horizons full of frigates. Even the new schnorkel-equipped boats, although sinking a half dozen escorts in initial attacks, had no chance against such odds and, after heavy losses, all the U-boats were ordered out of the area.4
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  Because of such complete Allied preponderance in the air and near-total dominance of the sea, therefore, the only real question to be decided—as each side had recognized long before—was the battle on land: the fight on the beaches, and the further fight by the invaders to move deeper into France and toward Germany. A neutral observer might already have concluded that, given all the trump cards possessed by the Allies (airpower, sea power, logistics, Resistance, etc.), the odds were already heavily stacked in their favor. And that is surely correct. But it was precisely the challenge of landing and then moving on that Eisenhower and his senior officers worried about most. And it was upon the crushing of those Allied moves that the Germans pinned all their hopes, all their resources, and their sole strategy. As the events of June 6 unfolded, both sides were proven right, perhaps Rommel most of all, in seeing the first three days of fighting as being decisive.

  There are in essence three different amphibious-landing parts to the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944. The best, at least from the Allied perspective, was that regarding the westernmost assault, on Utah Beach, by the 4th U.S. Infantry Division. Here was a case of victory being snatched from the jaws of potential disaster. Clouds were already obscuring the coastline before the explosions from the naval bombardment produced massive smoke; the guide vessels could no longer be seen. If there were beach directors (the Americans did not have named beach masters), they were in the mists. As the landing craft chugged toward the murky shore, they found themselves pushed by the tides to a mile south of their target zone and, helpfully, into much less strongly defended territory. Here the landings went extremely well, the rocket ships firing away, the amphibious tanks closing to the shore, the infantry platoons wading waist-high with rifles aloft in the face of very little opposition, and the B-26 bombers flying below the clouds to deliver their assaults. In rare and classic style (compare with Anzio), the 4th Division brushed aside the local opposition, pushed strongly inland, and, with much more wading through swampy land, gained 5 miles of ground by the end of the day. With about 21,000 troops and 1,800 vehicles ashore by that stage, Utah was not going to be dislodged easily, whoever came at it. The 8th and 27th Infantry Regiments lost, in total, twelve men. This was the smoothest amphibious operation the Allies ever made.

  It was behind the Utah beaches that the 82nd and 101st U.S. Airborne Divisions made their early morning landings, the intention being to seize and hold inland towns such as Ste. Mère-Eglise until the main force arrived from the sea. Much has been made of the way in which the perverse winds carried the paratroopers in all directions, dropped them into the marshes, scattered and chiefly ruined their heavier equipment, and prevented them from supporting the glider-borne follow-up, resulting in high casualties for the latter. The 82nd Airborne’s troops were indeed so widely strewn across the wetlands of the Merderet River that two-thirds of them were still missing three days later. But being “missing” was not the same as being ineffective. In fact, chaos became an unexpected advantage: the widespread and sporadic nature of the paratroops’ landings caused immense confusion among the German forces behind Utah Beach and crimped any attempts to reinforce the beachhead defenders. In the course of all this localized fighting, a small group of paratroops ambushed a German staff car and killed (as it turned out) the commander of the German 91st Division, the chief reserve division for the Cotentin Peninsula. By the end of the day, elements of the 82nd Airborne were as far inland as the crossroads town of Pont l’Abbé, and this particular battle had been won.

  All this was critically important because Ramsay’s master plan had had to assume that the U.S. 4th Division would indeed get ashore and then clear of the beaches. The blunt fact was that the 90th Division was coming in close behind it, to be landed between June 6 and 9; then the 9th Division, to be landed between June 10 and 13; then the 79th Division, to pass through by June 30. (Similar buildups were planned for the other four beaches as well.) With four full army divisions put ashore, plus the two airborne divisions ahead, the American VII Corps (under General Joseph Collins) could conquer western Normandy. Had they been held on the beaches, the very size of their invasion force would have produced mass havoc and chaos; but it was not to be so.

  The biggest part of Operation Overlord concerned the three landings by British and Canadian troops at the Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches. Perhaps the best words to describe these strikes from the sea would be adjectives such as thorough, careful, fastidious, and well-orchestrated—apart from the airborne operation, not very bold, showing again the British Army’s deep respect for its old foe. Should the June 1944 Normandy campaign end in a disaster, the Americans could come again; there were four million more GIs waiting back home to cross the Atlantic if needed. The British could not afford another and bigger Dunkirk, Crete, Dakar, or Dieppe. Their manpower reserves were horribly overstretched as it was; this was their last big war. As a result, they were massively invested in deception, intelligence, command and control, signals, beach masters, mine clearance, specially designed tanks—whatever it took not to be pinned down on the shingle and suffer unsustainable losses.

  Hence the attention the British gave to specialized armored units and unusual vehicles that would help them overcome Rommel’s intricate and deadly beach defenses. The driving force here was an acerbic, determined visionary, Major General Percy Hobart, creator of the 7th Armoured Brigade (which would become known as the “Desert Rats”) in the late 1930s, then demoted and retired, then rescued from obscurity by an angered Churchill,g and finally given the 79th (Experimental) Armoured Division and the necessary material resources to develop what his own troops fondly referred to as “Hobart’s Funnies” precisely to deal with beach and field obstacles, a need that became even more obvious after Dieppe.42 The basic instrument for Hobart was the sturdy, reliable Sherman tank or its later British counterpart, the Churchill. The tanks were then converted in all manner of ways: amphibious tanks with inflatable skirts that drove toward the shore, flail tanks whose gigantic metal chains beat the sand and exploded enemy mines, tanks with massive wire cutters or bulldozer blades, fascine tanks that carried their own rolled-up metal or wooden bridges to allow the crossing of ditches and tank traps, flamethrower tanks just like those the U.S. Marines were using in the Pacific, tanks that simply became ramps for other tanks, and so on. Hobart was a genius, and the history of armored warfare had seen nothing like this. (In the same spirit, and frustrated by the slow movement of Bradley’s forces along the narrow lanes and high hedgerows of the ambush-prone Normandy bocage, an American sergeant named Curtis Culin produced another variant, the “Rhinoceros,” with giant front teeth that could rip right through the hedge’s base and allow the regular tanks to race across open fields.)

  Hobart’s Funnies had their baptism by fire on the British-Canadian beaches. It was by no means the case that they worked marvelously on each and every occasion. How could they? No rehearsals off the Scottish coast or Bristol Channel could match the murderous reality of landing on an obstacle-strewn beach and being shot at from all directions. All along the coast, those duplex-drive tanks (with the inflatable skirts) found the heavy tides slowing their progress, so they were often overtaken by many of the landing craft carrying infantry and other sorts of tanks. The British and the Free French at Sword Beach probably had the best of it, since the 6th Airborne Division had already seized the Merville battery while the enormous 155 mm guns at Le Havre (which could have decimated any landing ship or close-in destroyer) spent the morning in a rather foolish duel with HMS Warspite offshore. With the Royal Marine frogmen having dismantled the beach obstacles, Hobart’s obsessive search for problem-solving weaponry came into its own. As one British Army major at Sword recalled in awe:

  A German antitank gun took them under fire. The [bridge-carrying] Sherman drove right up to it and dropped its bridge directly onto the emplacement, putting the gun out of action. Flail tanks went to work clearing paths through the mines. “They drove off the beach flailing,” Ferguson sai
d. “They flailed straight up to the dunes, then turned right flailing and then flailed back to the high-water mark.” Other tanks used cunning explosive devices (called bangalores or snakes or serpents) to blow gaps in the barbed wire and the dunes. Still others of Hobart’s Funnies dropped their bridges over the seawall, followed by the bulldozers and then fascine-carrying tanks that dropped their bundles of logs into the antitank ditches. When that task was complete, the flail tanks could cross to the main lateral road, about 100 meters inland, and begin flailing right and left.43

  These amazing machines, which would later assist the British-Canadian drive into the Low Countries and northern Germany, certainly contributed a great deal in getting the first amphibious units across the beaches and through the cramped and treacherous streets of the small villages that lined the Gold-Juno-Sword beaches. With a few exceptions, such as at Le Hamel, the opposition withered quickly; the “static” divisions consisted of some anti-Communist Russians, together with Lithuanians, Poles, First World War veterans, and sixteen-year-old boys. The safest thing for them to do, after token firing, was to surrender. Fighting from the concrete bunkers was no longer safe, for the advance commandos were dropping grenades through the apertures even as the naval support continued (and in one of the most spectacular naval shots of all time, the cruiser HMS Ajax got a 6-inch shell through the forward slit of a massive emplacement on Gold Beach and exploded the entire magazine). Here, at least, Rommel’s “outer crust” crumpled swiftly. By day’s end, the British had put 29,000 men ashore at Sword, suffered only 630 casualties, and taken thousands of prisoners. At Gold they put 25,000 men ashore at the cost of 400 casualties. These were well below all planning estimates of likely losses.