Engineers of Victory

by Paul Kennedy

  At Juno Beach the Canadians and British invaders had it much harder. The objectives were farther away, the defensive fire greater, the beach obstacles more intricate, and naval support much less. Still, 21,400 men were put ashore that day, with 1,200 casualties. This was the beach where the inflatable-skirted tanks came into their own, amazing Canadians and Germans alike as they arrived on the shingle, retracted their skirts, and then advanced and started firing. The seawall at Juno was considerably higher than at Omaha, but the Funnies went over it, cut through the barbed wire behind, and flailed through the minefields, with exhausted and overladen infantrymen trying to keep up. Then, perhaps as a natural reaction, most units slowed down, bivouacked, made tea, and fell fast asleep. Montgomery had planned for a very fast postinvasion move against Caen and right down the Orne River valley, but it didn’t happen like that. The 6th British Parachute Division had made a stunningly successful capture of the Orne bridges, the three beachheads had held, and many more troops and tanks were pouring in. But within a week much tougher German opposition was being sent to the area, and there was to be no fast, expanding exploitation, as had happened in North Africa and Sicily. There was no second Dieppe, either, to the deep satisfaction of a now vastly grown Canadian Army.

  The third D-Day tale was a far less happy one for the Allies: it was the dreadful, grinding slaughter of the American infantry units who landed (or sought to land) on Omaha Beach. The amphibious assault faltered horribly, with tanks, trucks, and overladen men tumbling to the ocean’s bottom. The casualty list is dismal. Only five of the thirty-two amphibious tanks launched way out at sea came ashore, and thirty-two of the fifty howitzers sank with the flat barges that were transporting them. Most soldiers found themselves on the sand with only the weapons they carried, and pushed forward because it was impossible to return into the maelstrom at the water’s edge. They then found the beach obstacles were virtually intact, and the crossfire from the gullies was obliterating. With most of their tanks sunk, the craft carrying their howitzers and cannon washed away, and many of the engineer teams drowned in the overlong watery crossing, the infantry and the Ranger platoons pressed on. The tanks that did land were hit within minutes, although a few bulldozer tanks hacked gaps in the defenses. American destroyers came in as close as 1,000 yards offshore—way too close to possible shore minefields—to fire at the German defenders.

  By late morning the rising Atlantic tide cruelly narrowed the strip of beach still further, crushing new vehicles onto the damaged ones already ashore. The situation was so desperate that when Montgomery learned of it later in the day, he—like Clark at Anzio—briefly considered moving the American follow-on units from Omaha to the British-Canadian beaches; Bradley thought the same, and also wondered about moving the fresh waves of troops onto Utah Beach instead, though one suspects that either change would have led to unimaginable confusion offshore. In fact, the sheer press of numbers (Omaha had 34,000 men and 3,300 vehicles for the initial landing, with a similar total in reserve), the desperate daylong shellings by the U.S. Navy and bombings by the USAAF, and the remarkable work of junior officers and NCOs in reestablishing order eventually cracked the German coastal defenses. The troops got off the bloodied beaches and up to the bluffs, to hold a lodgement only a mile deep. Unless Rommel’s panzers attacked (which they were not permitted to do), the 1st and 29th U.S. Infantry Divisions had made it, at bitter cost. They had not been thrown back into the sea. Still, when Eisenhower and Ramsay anxiously surveyed the beach from their warship later the next day, they were clearly much disturbed at how close it had been, and how confused and precarious things still seemed.

  The U.S. Army suffered some 2,400 dead, wounded, and missing at Omaha. That grisly total is not large compared with losses in some Civil War battles, those on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, or the fatalities that occurred in the battles being fought at the same time on the Eastern Front, but it was the highest among the five landings that day, caused consternation and worry among the Allied commanders, and has provoked controversy ever since.

  At one level, it is not difficult to explain why Omaha Beach was much the hardest to take and hold. The bluffs behind the beaches were considerably higher than elsewhere and could only be penetrated by going through the “draws” (small river valleys cutting through to the sea from the villages inland). The Germans had built numerous artillery and machine gun emplacements near the end of the ravines, but they were sited to fire out obliquely, covering the beaches to the right and left, rather than exposing these bunkers directly to the warships offshore. They were almost equally hard to spot from the air, whether by reconnaissance or in the actual bombing attacks. And the bluffs made any effort by tanks or other tracked/wheeled vehicles to get off the shoreline exceedingly difficult. Even with fine weather and calm waters, this would have been a difficult nut to crack, and no such favorable conditions prevailed. Prudence might have suggested that it would have been better to avoid the area altogether, but since the Allies had judged it vital to seize the larger Normandy beaches and to undertake a stroke into the Cotentin Peninsula to seize the harbor of Cherbourg, they could not allow a glaring gap to exist in the middle for the Germans to exploit; that was what had nearly ruined them at Anzio. The assault must take place.

  Nevertheless, it is hard to accept the contention that the stark American losses at Omaha were just the result of rotten tides, hostile topography, and cunning German defensive systems. There is also evidence of poor battlefield management, combined with excessive self-confidence, which was never wise in a fight against the Wehrmacht. The naval bombardment was extremely short and thus very light (especially given the enfiladed position of the German bunkers). Admiral Hewitt’s offshore control team had hoped for surprise, but that is hard to reconcile with the fact that at midnight more than a thousand heavy RAF bombers began massive attacks on German batteries along the Normandy coast and that by 1:30 a.m. the 82nd and 101st Airborne had already begun to arrive inland, or with the fact that the U.S. Navy’s bombardment started twenty minutes after the British naval firing, which could be heard just up the coast, even though the British-Canadian landings were to take place an hour later. Bad luck twisted the knife: when the B-17s came in to crush the German defenses, they were frustrated by clouds. “Not a single bomb landed on the beach or bluff,” observes Stephen Ambrose; cowsheds 3 miles (5 kilometers) inland took the hits.44 The landing craft’s rockets fell short, into the surf, and the swell seemed stiffer and higher at Omaha Beach than elsewhere.

  With the wind increasing and the waves heightening, it was an act of folly for local commanders to order the duplex-drive tanks, the deep-wading Sherman tanks, and the craft carrying the howitzers to be launched more than 5,000 yards offshore. There were no LVTs (landing vehicles tracked); they were all in the Pacific. The Shermans that did get on the beaches fought as best they could, but here the Allies had no mine-clearing flail tanks, wire-cutting tanks, or fascine tanks. If they escaped drowning, the American troops were pounded on the beaches and at the entrance to the draws by the units from the German 352nd Infantry Division, which had been moved behind the Omaha beaches sometime earlier without, disturbingly, Bradley’s staff being aware of it. The U.S. Army eventually got off the bloody shore simply by fighting to the top of the bluffs and forcing the Wehrmacht back. But not having other types of motorized equipment adds to the list of things that might have been done better, or even just tried.

  Overall, the Longest Day gave the Allies an extraordinarily good result, a remarkable reward for what had been remarkable preparation, training, mobilization, and execution. At the end of that evening Ramsay, while noting his worries about Omaha and the western beaches, wrote in his diary: “Still on the whole we have very much to thank God for this day.” Depending upon which sources are consulted, between 132,000 and 175,000 Americans, British, Canadians, French, and Poles had swarmed ashore that day, taking around 4,900 casualties—far fewer than the planning estimates. The front stretched over a
lmost 50 miles; there were big gaps between some beaches, to be sure, but they were gaps that the Germans had no power to fill.45 Their resistance had been much less than feared, in large part because their best troops were not at the beachhead defenses. Commando units and Canadian platoons found themselves fighting old men, Hitler Youth, and east European conscripts. However, this was not a good indicator of what was to come, especially not for the Canadians, who would soon find themselves attacking fanatically held German defenses around Caen, day after day, week after week, with microscopic progress. But that was a later story. Right now, in Churchill’s words, “a foothold has been gained on the continent of Europe.”

  Yet striking swiftly some 5 miles inland, or grasping firmly onto hard-captured bluffs at the end of the first day, was not enough. A successful invasion required a massive follow-up effort; it demanded that more and more men, armaments, and supplies flow through the beachheads as the attacking armies spread out. And, as will be clear from the above sketch of the five landings, Normandy did not possess a major port between Cherbourg, in the far west, and Le Havre and Dieppe, much farther up the English Channel. Overlord therefore included as an essential component something that had never before been seen in the history of amphibious warfare: artificial harbors. At Churchill’s instruction, Anglo-American construction teams were to create maritime havens, with the further requisition that they would also have to construct breakwaters that could float up and down with the tides.

  The resultant Mulberry constructions were gigantic, multi-thousand-ton concrete caissons that nonetheless had enough ballast space within them that they could be towed on flat barges across to Normandy by the unsung heroes of the entire operation, Admiralty tugs, and then linked together like domino pieces into a giant breakwater (with, amazingly, roadways on top). At that stage, they were gently sunk into the shallow ocean bottom. There were also floating breakwaters and floating piers that acted as steel bridges from the sea, an absolute requirement since the tidal rise and fall was as much as twenty feet. Since they were not solid to the seabed, and thus were vulnerable to stormy weather, they were in turn protected by dozens and dozens of old merchantmen and warships (nicknamed “Gooseberries”), which were sunk in line to act as an outer barrier. Despite strong tides, Allied craftsmen and sailors began to anchor the two Mulberry harbors on June 9; on the day following, the Gooseberries were duly sunk. A staggering 1.5 million tons of steel and concrete were thus put in place.

  Of course, there was much chaos at first, but actually far less than what would have attended thousands of light craft stranded on or grinding along an open beach. Outerwork harbors were a reassuring sight; watching U.S. trucks pouring along the artificial road on top of the caissons from ship to shore was even more reassuring. It told the average sailor and soldier that there really was a plan. Six days after D-Day itself, some 326,000 men and 54,000 vehicles had been brought across the Channel.

  As noted above, on June 19 a massive Atlantic storm ripped much of this apart and dramatically slowed the daily infusion of troops, vehicles, and stores into Normandy. But it was not enough to alter the course of Overlord. Three days later, the flow of reinforcements resumed, and the clearing clouds allowed the USAAF and RAF and the heavier warships to resume their pounding of those German units at last directed to the invasion zone. By that stage, while the British-Canadian armies were placing maximum pressure upon Caen and drawing large Wehrmacht forces into mutual debilitation in and around the city, faster-moving American units under Bradley and, slightly later, Patton were pushing southward. By that time, too, the westernmost divisions under Collins had seized Cherbourg itself, a wonderful logistical resource once the German demolitions had been repaired, since American supplies and troop reinforcements could sail directly to the European theater, rather than going via Glasgow, Liverpool, and Southampton. Throughout June and July the Germans held on around Caen against repeated British and Canadian assaults, another testimony to their capacity for defensive warfare; but in so doing they drained their reinforcing divisions into a sort of Verdun-like grinding battle that, finally, they could not win. Meanwhile, the Americans were preparing Patton’s U.S. 3rd Army to burst south, as it did in late July and early August. With Rommel badly hurt on July 17 (by a lone Spitfire shooting up his staff car) and his replacement, von Kluge, committing suicide after the July 20 assassination plot, plus Montgomery’s 21st Army Group charging over the Seine and toward the Somme, the Battle of Normandy was over. On August 25 advance units of the Free French armies arrived in Paris, to immense jubilation. Two days later the Supreme Allied Commander himself, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, entered the French capital for the first time since 1932, when he had been working on the manuscript of General Pershing’s aptly named Guide to the American Battlefields in Europe.46 One wonders whether he still kept in his wallet a copy of his June 5 letter admitting defeat and full responsibility.

  The Allied forces under Eisenhower had a long way to go to Berlin. Despite reinforcement of the original landing troops by another three million men, and despite an Allied aerial predominance that became greater and greater, relentlessly pounding the Wehrmacht in the field, devastating the supply lines from the Third Reich, and wrecking the industries and cities of the homeland itself, the German army fought on determinedly, sometimes aggressively (as in the surprise December 1944 counterattack in the Battle of the Bulge), and always with remarkable tactical efficiency. Nonetheless, this was no longer an amphibious war. It was an air-land campaign, an updated version of the Allied drive toward Germany between August and November 1918. The offshore battleships were no longer needed, the artificial harbors could be left to the tides, and the landing ships and their crews were sent off to the Pacific.

  After the double-headed Normandy and Marianas campaigns of June 1944, the pace of amphibious landings in each hemisphere went to a different rhythm: tapering off in Europe, but building up in the Pacific. On August 15, 1944, the oft-postponed and diminished Allied invasion of the south of France (Operation Anvil, later termed Dragoon) took place, chiefly with French and American troops. By that stage the Wehrmacht was pulling out of France, so although this flanking strike, which was briefly resisted, was important in bringing Allied troops up to the southwestern borders of Germany and increasing the military pressures upon the Third Reich during the last eight months of the year, it had none of the significance of the great campaigns to the north and to the east. By September 1944, too, Red Army pressure across the plains of Poland had compelled the Wehrmacht high command to loosen its grip upon Greece and Crete. The next month British troops were reentering (without much opposition) battlegrounds from which they had been tumbled in that awful year of 1941. But this was no real amphibious operation, and the large Royal Navy force could savor an untroubled experience as they anchored off the Piraeus: another return from the sea, yet in waters where so many of its sister warships lay fathoms below.

  There was much more enemy opposition when on November 1, on the other flank of the assault upon the Third Reich, a mixed bag of British Army units (English, Belgian, Canadian, Scots, Free French, Norwegian, and Polish) launched an attack on Walcheren, of all places. Seizure of the saucer-shaped island (which consisted of mere rimlands after RAF Bomber Command had blown up the outer walls) would free the Scheldt River and give access to the great harbor of Antwerp. Since the lack of a deepwater port in the southern North Sea was acutely affecting the supply situation for Eisenhower’s armies, the taking of Walcheren this time around had a lot more strategic purpose to it than in 1809. By the end of the month that objective had been achieved, albeit after massive bombardments and with severe losses to the commando battalions.47 Although the German garrison consisted chiefly of sick and recuperating troops, it held on weeks longer than Montgomery’s planners had anticipated. Nowadays, the second Walcheren campaign is, like Dragoon and the return to Greece and Crete, a footnote to history. But the assault upon the Scheldt estuary positions is a reminder of how difficult such ope
rations remained, even when employing overwhelming force and close to the crest of victory.

  Amphibious Warfare and the Role of Planning

  The Second World War witnessed the development and intensification of armed conflict in so many different dimensions—from armored warfare to strategic bombing to special operations—that it would be silly to claim that the amphibious campaigns themselves were the chief military expression of the 1939–45 conflict. They were, however, undoubtedly the most complex. The battle over the Atlantic convoys was a mixed struggle of sea power and airpower. The strategic air offensive against Germany was a contest between aerial forces. Blunting the Nazi blitzkrieg was essentially a bare-knuckle fight on land, with increasing airpower contributions. Only amphibious warfare, whether in Europe or in the Pacific, involved land, sea, and air operations in triangular harmony—or lack of it. Some historians describe the Normandy campaign as “triphibious,” an awful-sounding word but not an inaccurate one.48 A successful landing on a hostile shore was not only a massive tactical and operational problem in itself, but one that was contingent upon solving the command of the sea and control of the air problems first. It is a sharp reminder to authors of single-service campaigns in the 1939–45 conflict about how multidimensional the Second World War really was.

  For these reasons it isn’t possible to point either to a single breakthrough (like the long-range escort fighter in early 1944) or to a coincidental cluster of improvements in systems and weapons (as in detecting and destroying U-boats in the middle of 1943) that would organize the argument here on how the Allies eventually learned to land on an enemy-held shore. The circumstances varied from case to case: for example, the factor of surprise was important to MacArthur’s leapfrogging campaign, and deception played a big role before D-Day, yet on Saipan and Guam, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the entrenched Japanese garrisons just sat and waited for the assaults that were to come, with no space for maneuver. Bombarding the Normandy beaches for seven whole days, as was to occur at Okinawa, probably would have been disastrous—by the time the Allies landed, they might have faced twenty or more fully alerted German divisions on the other side of the hedgerows. Again, minute-by-minute orchestration of the beachhead was vital in many operations such as Normandy, but rather less so in Sicily, where the beachhead opposition was so small. Fluctuating clouds and fogs always made airpower more or less useful. An unusually low tide caused havoc at Tarawa; an unanticipated swell pushed the Utah Beach troops toward a safer part of the coast. There was no perfect recipe for a successful strike from the sea, however well one prepared for it.