by Mark Zuehlke
While Rommel could draw on the French populace to enable him to plant more defensive obstacles, he could do little to alter the fact that there were too few troops to adequately guard the entire coast-line—something he was forced to do because the invasion could fall anywhere. He inclined to agree with von Rundstedt and OKW that the Allies would either come at Pas de Calais to seize Calais or the stretch of beaches between the Somme and Seine estuaries, with the intention of capturing le Havre. German reasoning here was logical. An invasion in either region would entail a short crossing for the invasion fleet, seek the capture of a major port, and establish the invaders dangerously close to Germany’s industrialized Ruhr valley.17
As for the Seventh Army’s zone, the only rational objective was Cherbourg on the Cotentin Peninsula, with the probable landing site being the relatively calm waters of the peninsula’s eastern coast. While there was some fear of a landing in Normandy, the beach region between “the Orne and Vire rivers was declared unsuitable for landing operations by both the navy and Fifteenth Army.”18 This area was therefore initially given no special priority for fortification.
That all changed, however, on May 2 when Hitler suddenly read a series of intelligence reports indicating major concentrations of British and Canadian troops in southeast England and of U.S. troops in Wales. Although OKW was dubious, Hitler ordered that the divisions defending Normandy and Brittany be immediately reinforced with anti-aircraft and antitank weapons. OKW Operations Staff Officer General der Artillerie Walter Warlimont was among the officers disinclined to credit Hitler’s instinct “but he kept harping on it and demanded more and more reinforcements for that sector.”19
Not only the intelligence reports guided Hitler’s thinking. He assumed the Allies must seek to establish a stable front while they massed troops and supplies for a major breakout offensive, which necessitated their capturing intact a major port. With Cherbourg on its northern shore, Hitler believed “there was no better place on the whole coast than the Cotentin peninsula for this purpose.” To capture Cherbourg, the Allies would have to use both Cotentin’s relatively few suitable eastern beaches and those close by in Normandy if they were to put sufficient force on the ground quickly enough to transform the peninsula into a fortress before the Germans counterattacked.20
On May 8, von Rundstedt learned from German agents in Britain that the Allies were ready to launch their invasion and would commit an astonishing twenty divisions to the first wave.21 German estimates of Allied divisions available for the invasion and immediate exploitation inland were ever more wildly exaggerated. Speidel believed there were sixty to sixty-five divisions available, all “armoured, mechanized, and motorized.”22 The appointment in March of Lieutenant General Harry Crerar to command First Canadian Army had been noted. German intelligence postulated that he commanded a total of five infantry and three armoured divisions. These “highly-rated Canadian formations are to play a role in the forthcoming operations,” one report warned. That there were only three Canadian divisions in Britain evidenced how badly German intelligence gathering capability had gone awry.23
Intelligence staff could only suggest that the landings would fall somewhere “between Boulogne and Normandy.”24 On May 8, however, Luftlotte 3 concluded a photo-analysis based on spotty reconnaissance flights over the southern coast of England and reported that troop concentrations indicated the invaders would attack between le Havre and Cherbourg. Intercepted and decoded immediately by Ultra, the report sent a shiver through SHAEF. There came a collective sigh of relief shortly thereafter when Luftlotte 3 extended the possible landing zone all the way east to Dieppe.25
With Hitler hectoring him at every turn, Rommel raced to harden the Normandy defences. But neither he nor von Rundstedt would divert all resources and reinforcements in that direction on the basis of a hunch. Although more beach and Asparagus obstacles were installed, progress was slow due to shortages of manpower and material. Three infantry divisions defended the Normandy beaches. From Cherbourg east down the Cotentin coast to the Vire estuary stood the 709th Infantry, with the 352nd Infantry holding the beaches east of here to the village of Asnelles-sur-Mer, beyond which the 716th Infantry’s line extended to Franceville-Plage on the immediate east side of the Orne.
These divisions were deemed incapable of repelling a determined invasion force, but Rommel hoped they might delay it until nearby Panzer divisions could launch a decisive counterattack that would throw the enemy into the sea. To position such divisions close to the threatened Normandy coast, he moved the 12th SS Panzer (Hitlerjugend) Division to a point fifty miles inland between Elbeuf and Argentan. The Panzer Lehr Division was farther back again to the east in the vicinity of Seventh Army’s headquarters at le Mans. On May 6, the 21st Panzer Division moved close to Caen with some of its highly mobile and elite regiments spread out across a sector about five miles inland from the beaches.26
These dispositions were the best Rommel could put in position in May. Lacking definite proof that the invasion would fall here, OKW and von Rundstedt resisted any further requests for additional divisions. The Allies enjoyed such mastery of the English Channel’s skies and waters that reconnaissance flights were limited to quick dashes along the coast to photograph “possible points of embarkation” and German naval vessels seldom approached the British coastline at all. Left guessing, the Germans could only remain thinly spread, trying to defend the entire French coastline. It was a strategy that prompted Rommel’s chief of staff, Generalleutnant Hans Speidel, to remember Frederick the Great’s admonition that “He who will defend everything defends nothing.”27
IF THE GERMANS SUFFERED from a paucity of adequate intelligence, the Allies wallowed amid riches. Between April 1 and June 5, the Allied Expeditionary Air Force (AEAF) photo-reconnaissance units flew 3,215 missions in an attempt to meet what Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory described as each particular service’s “own requirements and individual problems” that “only photographic reconnaissance could hope to solve… The variety, complexity and moreover, the detailed accuracy of the information gathered and assiduously collated was of great importance in the preparatory phase of the operation.”28
To prevent the Germans from predicting where the Allied interest truly lay, the entire coast from Holland to Spain was subjected to equal numbers of reconnaissance intrusion flights. This entailed gathering vertical and oblique photos of “beach gradients, beach obstacles, coastal defences and batteries… Obliques were taken at wave top height, three to four miles out from the coast, in order to provide the assault coxswains with a landing craft view of the particular area to be assaulted or likely to be their allotted landing spots. Then obliques were flown 1,500 yards from the coast at zero feet, to provide platoon assault commanders with recognition landing points. Further obliques were taken again at 1,500 yards from the shore, but at 2,000 feet to provide, for those who were planning the infantry assault, views of the immediate hinterland.”29
Inland terrain was similarly treated “so that infantry commanders could pinpoint themselves after they had advanced. Again, it was necessary to photograph hidden land behind assault areas, so that the infantry commanders would know the type of terrain behind such obstructions as hills or woods.”30 The bridges over waterways and banks they stood upon were photographed from every angle so engineering units could prepare proper bridging materials to replace these crossings if the Germans destroyed them. Prospective drop zones for airborne landings were similarly scrutinized in meticulous detail. And, of course, enemy troop dispositions were constantly monitored.
It was a terrifically tasking operation. The RCAF’s 400, 414, and 430 fighter-reconnaissance squadrons of the 39 Reconnaissance Wing flew seven hundred of the total missions—many directly over the Normandy beaches and around the cities of Caen and Bayeux. Often a Mosquito or Spitfire returned empty-handed because the plane developed mechanical trouble and had to abort, or problems with the cameras produced no usable photos, or, more often, cloud or fo
g obscured the targets. Of 142 missions flown in May by 414 Squadron, only 90 were deemed successful and 8 partially so.31
As May progressed, the photos updating the Normandy beaches caused concern. General Dwight D. Eisenhower noted that these “pictures were studied and one of the disturbing things these continued to show was the growing profusion of beach obstacles, most of them under water at high tide.”32
Further down the command chain at 3rd Canadian Infantry Division Headquarters, Major General Rod Keller and his staff waded through an endless flow of intelligence reports, appreciations, and organizational instructions from above to weed out what was useful. The same process went on at the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion HQ and that of Force J. From these headquarters, relevant information funnelled down the pipeline and was filtered into ever smaller packets. Never had a military operation of such enormous scale been so meticulously scripted.
Keller never let the swarm of information detract his troops from the central goal. The division and the naval crews responsible for landing them were a team, he said. Every step was to be taken to ensure “the highest team spirit was engendered in the assault force, not, repeat not, in water-tight compartments, such as infantry, artillery, naval crews.” Instead they were to follow “the principle that all teams assist other teams, with the objective first, that every fighting soldier be landed with his arms, ammunition, and equipment on the enemy’s shores, and secondly, that he get across the beaches quickly to the designated objective or objectives.”33
In early April, the Canadians established a special HQ on the Isle of Wight to precisely plan the landings. This necessitated Keller and his staff being joined by two senior staff officers and the intelligence officer from the three infantry brigades and 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade. Over a five-week period, these officers finalized the details for the Canadian D-Day landing and subsequent push inland.34
More than one Canadian staff officer was driven into a fury when he reported a major weakness in Second British Army’s overall plan to the headquarters staff of Second Army Commander General Miles Dempsey only to have the concern dismissed as unwarranted. The division’s General Staff Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Don Mingay, soon realized that “all their senior planning staff were regular Sand-hurst trained officers, who didn’t really have too much confidence in the judgement and capabilities of the Canadian volunteer planning officers.”35
Generally, though, Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Côté, who controlled the division’s administrative arm, believed the planning and training directly benefited from the British Second Army hierarchy and above that of SHAEF staff. “There was always,” he recalled, “lots of directions and regulations. What we had to furnish in paperwork, plans and action was, though new to most of us, very clear in our minds for we received our orders from above and they were clear. Sometimes we didn’t obey all the orders we received or produce all the paper our superiors wanted to read, but the hierarchy worked well to keep us at our level on the straight and narrow. So it’s not surprising that we developed quickly. We developed expertise quickly for we were young, energetic and adaptable and because when we made a mistake or forgot something our higher headquarters and to some degree our brigades would point this out to us. I never remember our headquarters being at a loss as to what to do in a given situation. We were young and relatively new to the game of war, but we did our best.”36
The supporting fire promised for D-Day particularly troubled Lieutenant-Colonel John Craig of the divisional staff. He felt it was far too weak and overlooked a number of concrete bunkers that were certain strongpoints from which the Germans could bring fire to bear on the landing force. Craig took his concerns to Mingay, who managed to get the fire plan strengthened by haranguing as many British staff officers as he could for as long as possible. It was at moments such as these that the steel in Mingay’s character exhibited itself to best advantage. Côté noted often how, whether it was in his dealings with Keller or superiors at Second Army HQ, the operations staff officer “always held his ground and never took guff.”37 Finally, Mingay was promised more naval guns to bring fire to bear on these targets.
In fact, he won such a major reallocation of guns that instead of the original scheme to allocate just sixteen four-inch guns to support the Canadians, they would go ashore after a barrage by 198 guns firing from destroyers, cruisers, and battleships. There would also, of course, be the 105-millimetre Priests of the four Canadian artillery regiments and some of the tanks from 2 CAB firing off the decks of their landing craft.38
The quantity of detail these staff officers waded through sometimes drove them to distraction and various spoofs circulated that reflected in tone, if not conclusions, the legitimate briefing papers. One such document landed on Mingay’s desk. Awash in official paper, he found the hefty “Operation ‘Overboard’ Appreciation” allegedly produced by the offices of U.S. Stupid and British Most Stupid amusing enough to pass on to Craig and some other HQ staff officers. The prime objective of this operation, the document stated, was “to provide some employment for a very great number of officers.”
Of the forthcoming assault, it pronounced that “any length of beach is too short to take the number of vehicles belonging to the number of divisions that will be necessary to assault such a length of beach.” That said: “Unless immediate steps are taken to construct sufficient beaches in this country which can be towed across the channel already assaulted, no assault can take place.”39
But, of course, the assault was to happen and it was increasingly difficult to balance the requirement to keep the landing sites secret against the need to provide sufficient intelligence to enable junior officers to successfully carry out specific missions. Time was needed for each unit commander to develop a thorough operational plan, so vital information had to be released at a rate sufficient to ensure the invasion forces were not left groping through an intelligence fog of their own making.
Despite the codenames and other attempts to keep the landing site a secret, many young officers who were not supposed to be in the know had accurately pinpointed where they were going. Navy Lieutenant Russell Choat twigged to the truth after two beach landing exercises on the English coast near Poole. Born in Maple Bay on Vancouver Island, Choat had been a teenager attending school in England when the war broke out. An attempt to return to Canada in 1940 aboard the liner City of Benares ended tragically when a German U-boat sank the ship shortly after it sailed. He was one of the few survivors. Stuck back in Britain, the seventeen-year-old joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in early 1943 as an ordinary seaman. He was soon selected for officer training and in April 1944 was posted to the Landing Ship, Infantry Llandovery Castle as the navigator and boats officer of a flotilla of eighteen Landing Craft, Assault crewed by Royal Marines. This ship was part of Force J and would be landing Canadian infantry on D-Day.
As the Marines had little experience in boat navigation, Choat was to be in the lead LCA in the centre of the line to make sure the flotilla landed in the right place. During practice landings near Poole, he decided there must be a reason they landed on the same beach in two separate exercises. Fetching an atlas of the French coast, Choat and another flotilla officer carefully studied the coastline and determined they would be landing in Normandy very close to Caen. Shortly after mentioning his hunch to some of the Marines, Choat was summoned before the Marine captain commanding the flotilla and accused of having somehow acquired restricted intelligence documents. He told the captain that his conclusion was nothing more than an educated guess. The captain told him to keep his guesses to himself.
Choat was certain he was right and hoped the Germans were not similarly astute. It seemed a pretty easy deduction. Soon, however, he had even more confirming evidence. As the flotilla navigator, Choat was given a mosaic of photos taken at sea level that showed the beach just as it would appear from the deck on an LCA on the run to shore. The clarity of the photos and the detail they captured stunned the young naval lieutenant.
Pointing to a large two-storey house that seemed to stand directly behind a seawall, the briefing officer said that was Choat’s aiming point. He was to put his LCA on the sand directly in front of the building.40
Each extended briefing of officers was parsed out only as the intelligence staff decided knowledge was critical to unit preparations. So it was not until late May that Choat received the photos needed to familiarize himself with the landing point. But 3 CID’s battalion commanders and their second-in-commands had received very similar intelligence three months earlier because they had to work out assault plans at the company, platoon, and even section levels. Even here, the intelligence materials provided “existed in a vacuum, divorced from identifiable localities” with names of towns replaced by codenames.41
Nearly every evening after dinner, Canadian Scottish Regiment commander Lieutenant Colonel Fred Cabeldu and Major Cyril Wightman slipped off to a closely guarded tent to study the bogus maps of their assigned beach by candlelight. Drawn to a scale of 1:25,000, the maps were “complete with tinted contours and an overprint of enemy defences.”42 Every road, track, copse of wood, hedgerow, and building extending from the beach inland to the final objectives was represented. Supporting the maps were an ever growing number of photographs. But the intelligence tool Wightman found most useful was one whose appearance had solved a mystery that had teased his thoughts for almost two years.
In 1942, Wightman had received orders to round up all the carpenters in the battalion for a special assignment. As the CSR hailed from Victoria, a good number of men had worked in the building trades erecting houses of wooden construction. So he quickly gathered in just under fifty men and off they went, never to be seen again. Then an intelligence officer showed up in April with a carefully constructed model of the beach with precise wooden replicas of all the buildings behind it that would be attacked on D-Day. The intelligence officer confided that the CSR carpenters had been involved in constructing these models. To ensure the carpenters had no idea what they worked on, they had been widely scattered. Some had remained in Britain, while others returned to Canada. One man might have been working in a little room in Vancouver and another in a shop area near Tofino. They received photos and drawings of a specific building and made a model of it that was then sent to the intelligence officers, who painstakingly situated each structure correctly on the overall model.