After everyone had spoken, Eisenhower sat quietly. Smith remembered the silence lasted for five full minutes. “I never realized before the loneliness and isolation of a commander at a time when such a momentous decision has to be taken, with the full knowledge that failure or success rests on his judgment alone.”113
When Ike looked up, he was somber but not troubled.
“OK, we’ll go.”114 With those words, Eisenhower launched the D-Day invasion of Europe, an enterprise without precedent in the history of warfare.
The decision to launch the invasion having been made, events passed from Eisenhower’s control. That afternoon he scribbled a note on a plain sheet of paper and tucked it into his wallet. It was reminiscent of the private note Lincoln penned anticipating defeat in the 1864 election.q Said Ike:
Eisenhower visits troops of the 101st Airborne on the eve of D-Day. (illustration credit 13.4)
Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air, and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.—June 5.115
Late on the evening of June 5, Eisenhower paid an emotional visit to the American airborne regiments near Newbury, Wiltshire, about twenty-five miles south of Oxford. They would be the last units to leave England and the first to land in France. “There was no military pomp about his visit,” Summersby remembered. “Ike got out and just started walking among the men. He went from group to group and shook hands with as many men as he could. He spoke a few words to every man and he looked the man in the eye as he wished him success. ‘It’s very hard really to look a soldier in the eye,’ he told me later, ‘when you fear you are sending him to his death.’ ”116
Eisenhower and Summersby returned to his camp outside Portsmouth.
We just sat in the trailer waiting for reports. Every once in a while, I would stand behind Ike and massage his shoulders, but in those predawn hours, no matter how much strength I used, I could not undo the knots at the base of his neck. His eyes were bloodshot, and he was so tired that his hand shook when he lit a cigarette.
It meant a lot to me that I was the person he chose to be with in those crucial hours. If Ike had wished, he could have been surrounded by top brass, by Churchill and de Gaulle, by any of the important personages who were gathered just a few miles away in Portsmouth. But he preferred to wait in solitude. And I was the one he permitted to share his solitude.117 r
* * *
a According to a Luftwaffe intelligence report: “Tedder is on good terms with Eisenhower to whom he is superior in both intelligence and energy. He regards the Air Force as a ‘spearhead artillery’ rendering the enemy vulnerable to an attack. His tactics in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, based on this theory, provided air support for the advance of even the smallest Army unit.” Luftwaffe Academy lecture, February 7, 1944, British Air Ministry files, quoted in Forrest C. Pogue, The Supreme Command 61 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1954).
b On March 12, 1943, the U.S. Army’s Services of Supply (commanded by Brehon Somervell) was rechristened Army Service Forces to parallel the Army Ground Forces (commanded by Leslie McNair) and Army Air Forces (commanded by H. H. Arnold).
c Pierre Boisson, Marcel Peyrouton, and Pierre-Étienne Flandin.
d Roosevelt believed the arrests had been triggered by de Gaulle’s desire for revenge. But according to British intelligence, the impetus came from newly chosen members of the FCNL who represented the Resistance movement in France. Kimball, 2 Churchill and Roosevelt 634.
e The brief note on plain paper was among those auctioned by Sotheby’s in New York on June 13, 1991. It was purchased by the Forbes Collection, which resold it in 2002. Its present provenance is unknown. See William Safire, “Indeed a Very Dear Friend,” The New York Times, June 6, 1991.
f With five sides, five floors, and five concentric rings, the Pentagon provides more than 3.6 million square feet of office space and has 17.5 miles of corridors. Construction began in September 1941 and was completed in sixteen months at a cost of $83 million. Colonel Leslie Groves, who later commanded the Manhattan Engineer District, which developed the atomic bomb, was in charge of construction. Because of the wartime shortage of steel, the building is primarily a reinforced concrete structure with a limestone façade. It spans 28.7 acres and houses a workforce of some 25,000. Steve Vogel, The Pentagon: A History (New York: Random House, 2007).
g “We had found by bitter experience that we could make successful landings if we had the appropriate number of landing craft to go in,” said General Lucius D. Clay, who was in charge of all military procurement. “It was almost mathematical. But the Navy didn’t believe in it. So Somervell became the prime pusher. It was his impetuosity and initiative that forced the program. And if he hadn’t I don’t know whether we would ever have landed in France.” Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay 110.
h When it was launched on August 15, 1944, DRAGOON was under the control of Seventh Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Alexander Patch. For the landing, Seventh Army was composed of the U.S. VI Corps, commanded by Lucian Truscott, and two French corps under General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. Once ashore, the two French corps, some 256,000 men, were formed into the First French Army.
i Giulio Douhet’s The Command of the Air (1921), which posed the possibility of victory through airpower alone, became the bible for many airmen during the interwar years. Douhet, a World War I Italian military pilot, argued that the infliction of heavy damage on civilian targets would shatter morale and unravel the social basis of resistance. Like Billy Mitchell, he was court-martialed for his advocacy of airpower and resigned from the service after the war.
Spaatz served with Mitchell, the patron saint of an independent air force, in France during World War I and afterward in Washington, and was one of the first defense witnesses called at Mitchell’s 1925 court-martial.
For the influence of Douhet and Mitchell on Spaatz, see Richard G. Davis, Carl A. Spaatz and the Air War in Europe 16–21 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Air Force History, 1993).
j “The President’s intentions seemed to me on the same order as Alice’s adventures in Wonderland,” wrote de Gaulle. “In North Africa, Roosevelt had already ventured on a political enterprise analogous to the one he was now contemplating for France. Yet of that attempt nothing remained. That the failure of his policy in Africa had not been able to dispel Roosevelt’s illusions was a situation I regretted for him and for our relations.” De Gaulle, 2 War Memoirs 240–41.
k Patton’s words have been variously quoted. Some writers render his remarks to include the Russians as well as the British and Americans. But there is no doubt that Patton did not include the Russians in his original statement. Commander Harry C. Butcher reports in his diary entry of April 28, 1944, that “our PRO [Public Relations Officer—Colonel R. Ernest Dupuy] has been busy on his own getting Russia included and to some extent has succeeded.”
Eisenhower, in his report to Marshall of April 29, quoted Patton as speaking of “the destiny of America, Britain, and Russia to rule the world,” but Forrest C. Pogue, George Marshall’s official biographer, states that Ike “appears to have been misled by staff members of his own headquarters.”
Pogue, Stephen Ambrose, John S. D. Eisenhower, and David Eisenhower agree that Patton did not include the Russians in his statement, and I have adopted their conclusion. Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower 531; Pogue, Marshall 384, 647; Stephen E. Ambrose, The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower 342 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970); John S. D. Eisenhower, General Ike 58; David Eisenhower, Eisenhower at War 219.
Cf. Blumenson, Patton Papers 441; Merle Miller, Ike the Soldier 593; D’Este, Patton 586; Mark Perry, Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eise
nhower in War and Peace 290 (New York: Penguin Press, 2007).
l On June 22, 1944 (D-Day plus sixteen), Smith wrote Montgomery that, “having spent my life with American soldiers, and knowing too well their innate distrust of everything foreign, I can appreciate far better than you can what a triumph of leadership you accomplished in inspiring such feeling and confidence.” Reprinted in Montgomery, Memoirs 201–2.
m Founded in 1509 by the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, St. Paul’s was one of nine original English public schools recognized by Parliament in 1868. The students were evacuated during the Blitz, and Montgomery, an Old Pauline, took it over as his headquarters in January 1944. “My office was located in the room of the High Master,” Monty wrote in his memoirs. “Although I had been a school prefect, captain of the 1st XV [rugby]; in the cricket XI and on the swimming team, I had never entered that room before.” Montgomery, Memoirs 192.
n “The supreme battle has been joined,” said de Gaulle in his broadcast on the morning of June 6, 1944. “It is, of course, the Battle of France, and the battle for France! For the sons of France, wherever they are, whatever they are, the simple and sacred duty is to fight the enemy by every means in their power. The orders given by the French government and by the leaders which it has recognized must be followed precisely. From behind the cloud so heavy with our blood and our tears, the sun of our greatness is now appearing.” De Gaulle, War Memoirs 256. (Emphasis added.)
o Of the 805 C-47s airlifting the 82nd and 101st, only 20 were lost, and all but 4 gliders made it through safely. Contrary to Leigh-Mallory’s fears there had been little flak and no fighter opposition. Chester Wilmot, The Struggle for Europe 244 (New York: Harper and Row, 1952). Also see S.L.A. Marshall, Night Drop: The American Airborne Invasion of Normandy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962).
p Churchill served simultaneously as prime minister and minister of defense in the war cabinet.
q On August 23, 1864, Lincoln wrote: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to cooperate with the President-elect to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterward.” Roy F. Basler, ed., 7 The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln 514 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955).
r “I was startled to learn,” wrote General James Gavin of the 82nd Airborne, “that after General Eisenhower’s visit to the airborne troops, before they took off for Normandy on the night of June 5, he chose to spend the night in a caravan with Miss Summersby.” James M. Gavin, On to Berlin: Battles of an Airborne Commander, 1943–1946 (New York: Viking, 1978) 142.
FOURTEEN
The Liberation of France
Make peace, you idiots!
—VON RUNDSTEDT TO KEITEL,
July 3, 1944
Shortly after midnight on June 6, 1944, paratroopers from three airborne divisions began dropping on the flanks of the invasion beaches to seize vital bridges and causeways. At 3 a.m. British and American planes commenced their bombing runs over German coastal defenses, the first of almost thirteen thousand sorties Allied aircraft would fly that day. When the preliminary air bombardment ceased, the guns of Admiral Ramsay’s combined fleet opened up. Of the 1,213 warships covering the landing, almost 80 percent were British or Canadian, the remainder from the United States (16 percent), the Netherlands, Norway, and France. Fifty-nine convoys, formed into five invasion fleets—a total of 6,483 ships—steamed toward the beaches. For Admiral Ramsay it was a remarkable achievement. Four years earlier, almost to the day, Ramsay had patched together the fleet of small ships that rescued the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. Now he was commanding the greatest naval armada ever assembled to return to the Continent.
At 0630 hours, the American First Army under Omar Bradley came ashore at Omaha and Utah beaches. An hour later, because of the tides, the British Second Army landed at Gold, Juno, and Sword. Of the 132,000 troops who came ashore on June 6, 1944, 75,000 were British and Canadian; 57,000 were American. The landings went according to plan at Utah, Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches, and by evening the lodgments were secure. But at Omaha, the American V Corps hung by a thread.1
Weather, bad luck, and a series of glaringly inept command decisions contributed to the crisis at Omaha. The sea was choppy, although not so rough as at the British beaches. But there was close-in cloud cover at Omaha that precluded low-level air support. Misfortune intervened to the extent that Allied intelligence failed to notice that the German 352nd Infantry Division, a veteran unit back from the Russian front, had taken up position directly athwart Omaha.a First Army planners had assumed V Corps would encounter a heavily fortified but lightly manned coastline. Instead they found it both heavily fortified and strongly garrisoned.
Aside from weather and bad luck, faulty command decisions ensured that the landing at Omaha would be difficult. Rather than order a preliminary naval bombardment of at least four hours with the heaviest guns in the fleet, as was customary in the Pacific, Bradley sent the troops ashore at Omaha with a “shoe string bombardment fleet” and allowed the ships only forty minutes to attack German fortifications that had been years in the making.2
Instead of lowering assault craft from their mother ships seven miles offshore, as was common practice in the Royal Navy, Bradley and Major General Gee Gerow, commanding V Corps, ordered the debarkation twelve miles out. While this minimized the possibility that any of the transports would be hit by coastal shelling, the three-hour passage not only increased the danger of swamping and the possibility of navigation errors, but guaranteed that the troops would be thoroughly groggy and seasick when they tumbled onto the beach.b To compound the problem, Gerow disregarded the lessons of North Africa, Sicily, and Salerno, and launched his attack frontally at German strong points rather than assaulting them from the flank or rear. That was the head-on doctrine preferred by General Marshall and which was taught in the Army’s advanced schools. Gallantry, it was believed, would carry the day. Finally, Gerow made no effort to equip his troops with the latest armored equipment developed by the British to breach minefields, neutralize fortifications, and surmount obstacles.c As a consequence, those troops who made it to shore found themselves pinned down and unable to move through the elaborate minefields the Germans had laid.3
By noon on June 6, the assault regiments were clinging to barely a hundred yards of beach. At midafternoon Bradley was ready to give up on Omaha, and asked Montgomery whether the remainder of V Corps could funnel through the British beaches. The answer was no: Gold, Sword, and Juno were crammed to capacity. As Bradley and Gerow sweated, the situation at Omaha stabilized. The veteran 1st Division took hold. “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach,” shouted Colonel George A. Taylor as he rallied his troops in the 18th Infantry Regiment, “the dead and those who are going to die. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”4 Eventually the line inched forward, and by nightfall the beachhead was almost a mile deep along a four-mile front. As one military historian put it, “The failures and errors of judgment of high command had been redeemed by the men on the sand.”5 Said another, “This success was principally due to the unquenchable spirit and drive of the 1st Division. Without ‘The Big Red One’ the battle would have been lost.”6
Gerow’s refusal to bend textbook tactics to the reality of amphibious warfare was a classic example of military hubris. Eisenhower is partially to blame. On December 23, 1943, Ike told Marshall that he wanted only generals with combat experience for OVERLORD. Yet he assigned V Corps to his old friend Gee Gerow despite the fact that Gerow had none. And Gerow proceeded to make the mistakes of a greenhorn.d Overall, Allied casualties on D-Day, including airborne losses, totaled about ten thousand, of whom six thousand were American, mostly at Omaha.7
The Germans were caught flatfooted. German meteorologists had observed the same weather front as Group Captain Stagg, but they did not notice the brief
window of opportunity that Stagg discovered. “There can be no invasion within the next fortnight,” chief meteorologist Major Heinz Lettau reported on June 4.8 On the strength of Lettau’s forecast, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commanding Army Group B, left Paris in the early morning of June 5 for his home near Ulm to celebrate his wife’s birthday. Before leaving, Rommel reported to Field Marshal von Rundstedt, the commander in chief west, that Allied preparations indicated an invasion would be forthcoming, and that the Schwerpunkt (main focus) would likely be between Dunkirk and Dieppe in the Pas-de-Calais. But in Rommel’s view it was not imminent. “Air reconnaissance showed no great increase of landing craft in Dover area. Other harbours on England’s south coast NOT visited by reconnaissance aircraft.” Rommel requested that reconnaissance planes be dispatched to cover the south coast, but the weather on June 5 kept the Luftwaffe grounded. The Kriegsmarine (German Navy) patrols of the Channel were also suspended on June 5 because of the weather. And on the evening of the fifth, the Allies jammed all German radar sites between Cherbourg and Le Havre. Miraculous as it appears in retrospect, Ramsay’s invasion fleet of more than six thousand ships went undetected by the Germans.
When airborne troops began landing shortly after midnight, both Rommel’s headquarters at Château de La Roche Guyon and von Rundstedt’s in Saint-Germain-en-Laye dismissed the landings as little more than local incursions. No alert was ordered. At 0230 hours, as the size of the airdrops became manifest, von Rundstedt notified the German high command (OKW) in Berlin, and also Hitler, who was at Berchtesgaden, but took no further action, waiting for the situation to develop. The commander in chief west was perplexed that the drops were to the south in Calvados, not the Pas-de-Calais.
By 0430, as the fighting intensified, von Rundstedt became convinced the airdrops were a prelude to a landing at dawn on the Calvados coast. The Germans held five panzer divisions in reserve, waiting for the Allied invasion. But they could not be deployed without Hitler’s express consent. On his own authority, von Rundstedt ordered two of the five divisions to move toward Caen, the midpoint between the American and British drops.9 Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, at sixty-eight, was not only the oldest, but the most senior commander in the Wehrmacht.e Known as the “Black Knight” (Schwarzer Ritter), he had led the invasion of Poland in 1939, the breakthrough in the Ardennes in 1940, and the capture of Kiev in 1941. Relieved by Hitler in November 1941 because of his insistence on withdrawing to a defensive line on the Russian front, he was nevertheless recalled four months later and entrusted with overall command in the west. As his former chief of staff Erich von Manstein noted, von Rundstedt never shied from accepting responsibility. In the early morning hours of June 6 he acted to meet the invasion threat, assumed Hitler’s approval, and reported his action to Berchtesgaden.
Eisenhower in War and Peace Page 40