Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  German strategy in France was hamstrung by the inability to predict where the main weight of Allied attack would come. Neither was there any firm information about the precise date of attack. ‘I know nothing for certain about the enemy,’ complained Rommel.54 By April there was an evident edginess among German forces in France. Constant patrols were ordered on the coast throughout day and night; sentries walked up and down for two hours at a stretch, forbidden to talk for fear of losing concentration. The pattern of Allied bombing – heavy in north-eastern France, light in Normandy – suggested an imminent invasion of the Pas de Calais in mid-May, but the crisis passed.55 Talk at Hitler’s headquarters was of invasion from mid-June, possibly not until August, There was even speculation that the whole invasion was a hoax. The one glimmer in the darkness arrived by chance. Routine interrogation of French Resistance prisoners in Brittany in October had revealed the meaning of coded messages sent through the BBC to French saboteurs. These included a verse from a poem by Paul Verlaine (‘The long sobs of the violin …’) which was to be broadcast in two parts, the first on the 1st or 15th of the month in which the invasion would take place, the second 48 hours before the invasion itself. German counterespionage succeeded in concealing their knowledge of the message, which remained in force right up to D-Day. German wireless operators on the French coast were instructed to listen out for the one real clue among the babble of signals that would tell them the Allies were on their way.56

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  On 15 May Eisenhower and Montgomery hosted a meeting of senior officers to outline the final plan for invasion. Churchill was invited, and King George VI. Soldiers and politicians filed into the model room of St Paul’s School, where Montgomery had set up his headquarters, and sat on rows of hard wooden benches like so many eager schoolboys, listening to the commanders, who one after the other explained how Overlord would work. The plan was little different from the one proposed by Montgomery in January. Thanks to Ultra intelligence the German order of battle was known with more than the usual degree of accuracy, and this had helped development of the strategy. The Allied attack would be undertaken by five divisions in the first wave. To the west, at the eastern edge of the Cotentin peninsula, the American 1st army under General Omar Bradley would invade on two beaches codenamed ‘Utah’ and ‘Omaha’; to the east, between Arromanches and the Orne river, the British 2nd army (with two British divisions and one Canadian) under General Miles Dempsey was to attack on three beaches, ‘Gold’, ‘Juno’ and ‘Sword’. On both flanks paratroopers would be flown in during the invasion night to secure bridges and cut German communications: the British 6th airborne division on the eastern flank, the American 82nd and 101st airborne divisions in the west. The invasion had the support of over twelve thousand aircraft to ensure air superiority over the beachheads, and 1,200 naval vessels, including seven battleships and 23 cruisers.57 Once ashore the object was to seize the city of Caen in the first 48 hours and then to use the area at the eastern end of the assault to pin down German forces in order to facilitate a long wheeling breakout by the American army in the west, through Brittany and then eastwards to Paris and the Seine. Montgomery gave his forces ninety days to reach the French capital. When the formalities were over the King gave a short exhortation, and Churchill, who only a few days before had confided to Harriman the oppressive doubts he still harboured about invasion, took the opportunity to tell the assembly that at long last, three weeks before D-Day, he ‘was hardening towards this enterprise’.58

  A few days before, Eisenhower had confirmed that 5 June was invasion day, all being well. Now that the plans were finalised and approved the operational orders were sent out on 25 May. Every one of the ships’ captains received a book of seven hundred foolscap pages of instructions; the United States forces distributed 280,000 charts of the invasion area, and 65,000 operational booklets.59 The Allies now faced a security nightmare. The anxiety made Eisenhower tetchy and nervous; one of his staff observed how ‘worn and tired’ he looked. Every effort was made to conceal the date from the enemy. Against vigorous protest, all diplomatic traffic was suspended on 17 April, and diplomatic correspondence censored; a 10-mile exclusion zone was set up around the British coast from Cornwall to Norfolk; from 25 May all letters from American troops were suspended for ten days. All trans-Atlantic communication by cable, radio and telephone was cut. During the second half of May troops were moved into transit camps and denied contact with the population outside. On 28 May all seamen were sealed in their vessels. The more daring stole a last visit to the cinema, or the local bars, but by early June three million servicemen were locked away from a population whose realisation of imminent invasion was hardly less than that of the troops. Cities which had bustled with uniforms and lorries fell suddenly silent; throughout the night the constant hum of engines on the roads of southern England betrayed the secret mustering of forces. If Germany had possessed a single spy in the south the secret could hardly have survived.60

  Now that the timetables had taken over, the whole Overlord force was suffused by a subdued, unbearable tension. ‘I never want again to go through a time like the present one,’ Brooke confided to his diary. ‘The cross-Channel invasion is just eating into my heart. I wish to God we could start and have done with it.’ Bored in his fictitious headquarters, Patton chafed miserably at the bit. ‘This waiting is hard on the nerves,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘I must go and exercise!’61 If it was hard for subordinates it was certainly excruciating for Eisenhower, who lived out the last week in a bored, fatalistic cloud. He played bridge and badminton; he suddenly took up sketching and then abandoned it. He developed a ringing in one ear, and sore eyes brought on by the strain of reading. His impatience was evident. There was little for him to do after the months of planning, except to give the final order to go. This was a responsibility that bore down on him more and more as the final days approached. No one, Eisenhower wrote in his own diary, could understand ‘the intensity of the burdens’ facing a supreme commander.62

  The agony of suspense reached a cruel climax in the last few days. On 1 June the French Resistance, and Sergeant Walter Reichling of the 15th Army Communications Reconnaissance Post, heard the first stanzas of the tell-tale poem broadcast by the BBC at 9 p.m. The 15th army went over to the alert, but not the forces farther west. On 2 June Eisenhower prepared his Order for the Day from his new field headquarters just outside Portsmouth. Then, after weeks of clear, warm days, the weather sharply deteriorated on the 3rd. Eisenhower had always known that this was a risk, but there was nothing to be done about it. The outlook was gloomy. There were anti-cyclones over Greenland and the Azores; across the Atlantic, an easterly depression was already bringing rain and heavy cloud. At four o’clock in the morning on 4 June the commanders met with the senior meteorologist, John Stagg. He predicted low cloud cover and a force six wind. Eisenhower knew that the whole enterprise depended on air support and steady seas. Neither could be relied upon with this forecast. With great reluctance he postponed D-Day from the 5th to the 6th. Ships already at sea were recalled. The crews and soldiers on board now had to endure 24 hours sitting at anchor in high seas, their adrenaline evaporated.63

  By the evening the winds were calmer and the cloud more broken, but the outlook was still poor. At 9.15 Eisenhower reassembled his commanders and the unfortunate weather man. Stagg spoke as wind and rain beat at the mess room windows. He detected an improvement, broken cloud and calmer winds for 48 hours. Eisenhower canvassed the views of his commanders one by one. The airmen were hesitant. Montgomery was keen to start. But Ramsay’s voice was decisive. The navy had only another thirty minutes to give the orders, or risk a postponement for 48 hours, beyond the period of favourable tide. Eisenhower told the navy to start regardless, and asked them all to meet him again at four in the morning. He awoke at 3.30 to gales and driving rain. The group was tired and in drooping spirits. But Stagg had good news: the better weather was a certainty. As if by some divine hand, the rain outside abruptly ceased.
Eisenhower thought for a few moments. The others remained silent. It was a moment of supreme drama. All at once Eisenhower spoke quietly but distinctly: ‘O.K., let’s go.’64 The room cleared in seconds, leaving Eisenhower alone.

  A strategy that had taken years to agree, and months to prepare, had almost been brought to naught by the elements. There was still a great risk. The following day the Supreme Commander sat down to pen in advance a communiqué announcing the failure of the whole enterprise, which he solemnly placed in his wallet. He no longer had any power to halt the task force. From all around the coast 2,700 ships moved to pre-arranged assembly points in the Channel, from where they were guided along five pathways cleared through the minefields. Though it was not an order, the men spoke in whispers. While the ships ploughed through heavy seas the paratroop divisions prepared to fly out. For want of anything else to do, Eisenhower rode out to visit the 101st airborne division as it embarked in the transport aircraft. He waited until the last plane took off, then returned to bed. For the first hours of D-Day Eisenhower slept.

  The gloomy weather had an unexpected silver lining. German commanders relaxed at the sight of heavy rain and cloud. On 4 June the naval command in Paris reported that invasion could not be considered imminent. The regular naval patrols that might have betrayed increased Allied activity were cancelled on the 5th, so poor was the weather. Rommel took the opportunity for a short rest. On the 4th he drove back to Germany, where he arrived in time for his wife’s birthday, on the 6th. The junior commanders of the 7th army in Normandy were on their way to an exercise arranged at Rennes on the same date.65 Only Sergeant Reichling stood between the Allies and complete surprise. On the evening of the 5th he duly intercepted the final lines of Verlaine. His seniors contacted Field Marshal Rundstedt’s headquarters in Paris, only to be told that no enemy would be so foolish as to broadcast invasion over the radio. Fifteenth army stayed on alert, but the rest of Army Group B, including the six divisions directly in the line of Allied fire, received no warning until paratroopers began their graceful descent on to French soil in the early hours of the morning of 6 June.

  It still took time to realise what was happening. Seventh army headquarters had to piece together numerous reports of airborne landings to get any coherent picture. Among local German garrisons there was fear bordering on panic. The fighting was confused and sporadic. At the vital Pegasus bridge straddling the Caen canal British forces achieved complete surprise; the sentry stood still, struck literally dumb with terror.66 Not until three o’clock in the morning was 7th army put on alert, and not until 3.09 did German radar begin to pick up the sea and air activity in the Channel. At five o’clock the first shore batteries opened fire on the approaching fleet. At dawn the invaders began a fearsome fusillade. The first assault came with 1,056 British and 1,630 American heavy-bombers which blanketed the coastal defences with high explosive, except for the Omaha beach, where cloud cover led the bombers to drop their loads 3 miles inland. There then followed a ferocious naval bombardment directed at the big coastal guns and the concrete emplacements too thick for aerial bombing. The shells roared over the heads of the soldiers slowly wending their way through the minefields, packed into landing craft. The naval gunfire was devastating. It did not destroy many of the fortified bunkers and gun casements, but it left their defenders stunned and deafened. As the naval bombardment eased up, swarms of fighter-bombers and medium-bombers flew in low to attack German defensive positions, while from the sea came yet another barrage, this time from thousands of rockets launched from batteries in converted landing craft which floated in on the flanks of the troop carriers. The pall of acrid smoke hanging over the beaches was so thick that the coastline at Utah beach was obscured entirely, and as a result American troops landed over a mile south of the beach they were supposed to storm.67

  Behind the bombs and guns came a swarm of smaller craft, carrying men, supplies and tanks specially converted to an amphibious role to provide firepower in the first stages of assault. Some of the landing craft had to travel up to 11 miles from the mother vessel to the shore in rough seas. Seasick and cold, packed shoulder by shoulder, the soldiers gradually drew level with the beach defences, now lapped by the incoming tide. As the leading boats reached shallow water the loading ramps were dropped and the first troops slid and jumped down them. Some had 100 feet of water to stumble through; some just a few yards. Many radio operators, weighed down with additional equipment, sank beneath the water. Raked by small arms fire, a bewildering mêlée of floating tanks, landing craft and soldiers struggled shoreward. Unable to see the Allied wounded, tanks rolled on to the beaches over the bodies of soldiers too injured to move. From the mixture of noise, smoke and death it was impossible for each successive wave of troops to make out what progress had been made by the men in front. The beaches were consumed in the most literal sense by the fog of war.

  As the morning wore on it proved possible to form a clearer picture. At all except Omaha beach the Allies had achieved the initial foothold. The airborne troops on both flanks had secured the most vital roads and bridges. On the British sector German resistance was light after the shuddering bombardment from the sea. The static divisions put up little opposition. Sword beach was cleared by mid-morning; the Canadian 3rd division on Juno captured the beach by 10 a.m. and began to move inland towards Caen. On Gold beach there were more defences to neutralise, but by midday the British 50th division was on the move, and by the end of the day it had established a bridgehead 3 miles wide and 2½ miles deep. By the evening all three divisions were well inland, but failed to capture either Caen or Bayeux as Montgomery had hoped. Not until the late afternoon did they meet serious opposition, when Rommel was finally able to order 21st Panzer division to attack west of Caen to prevent British forces from capturing the city. The effort to move some of von Schweppenburg’s reserve Panzer forces towards Caen broke down, as Rommel had argued it would all along, when cloud lifted and Allied fighter-bombers attacked anything that moved on the roads.

  Farther to the west American forces had more mixed fortunes. At Utah beach the failure to land at the right area was a blessing in disguise. American forces streamed ashore against the lightest beach obstacles and negligible enemy fire. By the evening they had established a beachhead 6 miles wide and 6 miles deep; total casualties were 197 from all causes. At Omaha an unpredictable set of circumstances almost produced failure. The bombers missed the shore defences entirely; the naval bombardment was short and, against high bluffs, was difficult to direct with accuracy; the sea was rougher than expected, and losses of tanks and landing craft were correspondingly higher. German defences were stronger in this sector than in any other, and troops had recently been reinforced, unknown to Allied intelligence, by a fresh German division. The troops were pinned down on the beaches by a withering fire; ahead of them were cliffs broken by narrow defiles, easy to defend. American officers persuaded the men sheltering among the wreckage on the beach that there was little choice but to fight their way up the cliffs or be slaughtered where they lay. Yard by yard they battled forward until they reached higher ground, supported by accurate fire from destroyers lying close to shore. By the end of the day the American 5th corps had secured a narrow bridgehead but had been unable to clear all German resistance from the coast, or to make contact with the forces from Utah farther to the west.

  10 Battle for Normandy, 6 June to 24 July 1944

  The successful landings confounded Rommel’s shoreline strategy. Over the next four days Allied troops and supplies poured in to stiffen the bridgeheads. By 11 June 326,000 men, 54,000 vehicles and 104,000 tons of supplies had been landed across the beaches.68 British and Canadian forces pushed towards Caen to reach within a mile or two of the city. On 7 June Bayeux was captured and British and American forces linked up. That day Montgomery moved his headquarters to France. Eisenhower, increasingly heartened by the success ashore, crossed the Channel in a fast minelayer to see for himself the progress of battle. From the deck he watc
hed the trails of men and lorries wending their way from the beaches through the rich farmland to the front-line. Though still well short of the initial objectives, the lodgement was firm. After four more days of fighting a continuous front was established from the Orne river to Montebourg, 10 miles across the neck of the Cherbourg peninsula.

  The failure of the German shoreline battle had many causes. The German navy was swept aside by overwhelming Allied naval power. German torpedo boats and submarines inflicted only slight damage to the vast armada astride the Channel – three small ships in convoy, and a dozen minor naval vessels were lost – and of the 43 submarines sent to attack the invading naval force, twelve were forced to return to base damaged, and eighteen were sunk.69 German air power suffered the same fate. Thanks to the critical weakening of the German air force over Germany, the contribution of German aircraft to the invasion battle was negligible. On 6 June, against over twelve thousand Allied aircraft, including 5,600 fighters, the 3rd air fleet in northern France could muster only 170 serviceable aircraft. Attempts to reinforce the front further weakened the defence of the Reich, while contributing very little to the battle. Many of the aircraft sent were destroyed in transit as Allied aircraft smashed German airfields in France. Many German pilots were plunged into conflict before they were fully trained; inadequately prepared for the invasion, many lost their way. The reinforcements were shot out of the skies. This left Allied airmen with the freedom to attack other targets. Large groups of marauding fighters and fighter-bombers attacked anything that moved on the German side, making the transfer of German ground reinforcements and supplies almost impossible by day. The bombers were free to blast German defences, to terrifying effect. Allied air supremacy proved to be a vital factor in securing and holding on to the shallow lodgement.70