Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  The major considerations that would influence the planning for Overlord were: where should it be; when should it be; and how many men and ships would be available? The where presented a choice of 2,000 miles of coastline in German-occupied Europe, from northern Norway to the Franco-Spanish border. Apart from the difficulties of geography, invading Norway would put the troops too far away from Germany, and in any case the Germans had always feared a British landing in Norway and maintained a large army there to counter it. A landing in the Biarritz area with its scantily clad young ladies on the beaches, even in wartime, might have been attractive to the younger soldiers but again was too far away from the main target. What was needed was a beach or beaches long enough to land three divisions (the maximum that Morgan then thought could be transported), reasonably sheltered from the weather, with good routes leading inland, within fighter aircraft cover from the UK and near a port that could be captured very shortly after landing. The Pas de Calais was the shortest distance from the UK, but that was also the most obvious; it was where the Germans expected a landing and where the defences of their Atlantic Wall were strongest. Eventually, Morgan came up with the bay of the Seine, between Cherbourg and Caen in Normandy. It was, just, within fighter cover, had three beaches long enough to take a division apiece, had good roads leading inland and lay between two ports, Cherbourg and Caen, which could be captured on or shortly after the first day.

  The when would depend on tides and weather. The construction of the Atlantic Wall, begun by the Germans in 1942, had included the placing of obstacles on all beaches that might be used for a landing and these included mines, steel spikes designed to tear the bottom out of a landing craft and concrete blocks intended to obstruct the movement of tanks. If the landings took place at high tide, the troops would have less open beach to cover once leaving the landing craft, but the obstacles would be covered by the sea and so could not be seen. If the landings were at low tide, the opposite applied and the troops would be unloaded short of the obstacles which could then be neutralized by engineers, and naval gunfire could perhaps keep the defenders’ heads down for long enough to get the troops off the beach. Added to this were the wishes of the army to land at first light, having the cover of darkness for the run-in to the shore; of the parachute elements for a full moon; of the air forces for clear and calm weather; and of both the navy and the air forces for two hours of daylight before the landings to be sure that their final bombardments actually hit their designated targets. Taking all these factors into consideration, the decision was made to land at the time of the full moon when low tide was two hours after first light, with the flanks of the landing being secured by the insertion of airborne troops the previous night.

  The number of troops that could be landed would depend upon the number of landing craft available, and, when Morgan was drawing up his plan, which was then approved in principle by the Quadrant Conference in Quebec in August 1943 that laid down a target date of 1 May 1944, it appeared that the most that could be transported in one lift was three divisions, with the craft then returning and bringing in a second lift. When, in January 1944, Generals Eisenhower and Montgomery began to look at Morgan’s plan, they both felt that three divisions in the first lift would not be sufficient to ensure that the lodgement could be held against all-comers while preparing to capture a port and break out at the earliest possible moment. It was therefore decided to land five divisions on the first lift and to increase the airborne element from one division to three. This meant finding another two beaches, as the nominated three to the west of Caen – codenamed, from east to west, Sword, Juno and Gold – were only large enough for one division apiece, and more landing craft. Two more beaches – codenamed, from east to west, Omaha and Utah – were found, albeit with a sizeable gap of twenty miles between Omaha and Gold, and the date of 1 May was put back to June to allow more landing craft to be built. The Americans would land on the two westernmost beaches, Utah and Omaha, as it was intended that they would eventually be supplied direct from the United States, and the British on the three easterly ones. When all the variables of weather and tide were factored in, the only suitable dates were 4, 5 and 6 June 1944 and the target date was now set at 5 June.

  A disinformation and obfuscation scheme was put into operation to disguise from the Germans where the landing was to be. The largely British (the Americans thought that the British, being a devious people, were rather better at this sort of thing than they were) Operation Fortitude involved double agents, dummy ships, blow-up rubber tanks and guns, wireless operators pretending to be the divisional, corps and army headquarters of a non-existent United States 1st Army Group commanded by Patton (who was paraded ostentatiously around England) ready to invade Boulogne, and a British army in Scotland waiting to invade Norway. The RAF and the USAAF were directed to destroy the French road and rail system and to attack the fortifications of the Atlantic Wall, but, for every bomb dropped in Normandy, three were dropped elsewhere. Concurrent British arrangements to preserve secrecy included banning all embassies apart from those of the USA, the USSR and Free Poland from using their national ciphers to communicate;* imposing restrictions on envoys entering and leaving the country; stopping all visitors from entering a ten-mile-deep coastal strip; landing small beach recce parties by submarine on beaches far from Normandy, some of whom were in fact captured and interrogated;†and the stopping of all traffic between Britain and Eire.

  The Germans were convinced, except possibly for Hitler, who thought it was all some sort of gigantic bluff and remarked at a conference in Berlin in April 1944: ‘The whole thing the British are performing looks like theatre to me. The news about blockade measures, the defensive movements and so on, normally one doesn’t do that when planning an operation like that… I can’t help feeling that the whole thing is an impudent charade.’76 While OKW were convinced that the landing would be across the Pas de Calais, Hitler was not and he instructed Rommel, now commanding Army Group B in the west, to check the beach defences and fortifications in other areas, including Normandy, which resulted in an armoured division (12 SS) being sent to Caen, some improvement in the beach defences and a hastening of the erection of anti-glider poles.

  At the beginning of 1944 the German army fielded 304 divisions, of which 187 were on the Eastern Front, twenty-two were in Italy, twenty-six in the Balkans including Greece, sixteen in Norway and Denmark and fifty-three in the west – Germany, France, Belgium and Holland. The Commander-in-Chief West was Field Marshal von Rundstedt, recalled (again) from retirement in March 1942 and now sixty-eight years old. Under him were two army groups (A commanded by Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz and B under Rommel), Panzer Group West and Colonel-General Kurt Student’s First Parachute Army. The command arrangements for the panzer group (equivalent to an army) were unnecessarily complicated and in the event did not work. General of Panzer Troops Geyr Freiherr von Schweppenburg was responsible for their training and administration but OKW insisted that Rundstedt retained operational control with Schweppenburg as his adviser. In March 1944, after a disagreeable conference with OKW in Berlin, Rommel was given command of three panzer divisions, while the remaining three panzer divisions and one panzer grenadier division were held in a central reserve under OKW – actually Hitler’s – control. Responsibility for the Normandy area was vested in Army Group B with Seventh Army (Colonel-General Friedrich Dollmann) and Fifteenth Army (Colonel-General Hans von Salmuth). In the immediate area of the landings, the coast was originally held by three static coastal defence divisions, and according to Major-General Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff, who commanded XXV Corps in Brittany, these divisions were largely made up of men who were unfit for service on the Russian front, fathers of large families, unreliable foreigners or individuals who were medically downgraded. In many cases, they were equipped with out-of-date or foreign weapons, and, as the pick of the staff officers were on the Russian front or in Italy, the staff in the west was composed of older or less talented officer
s.77 If Gersdorff is right, one shudders to imagine what might have happened had the landing been opposed by first-rate German troops.

  Rommel and Rundstedt held diametrically opposed views as to how a landing, if it came, should be opposed. Rundstedt, supported by Schweppenburg, had no faith in the Atlantic Wall – and, in that it presented a formidable appearance but had little depth behind it, he was right – and was convinced that the armour should be held well back out of the range of naval gunfire until the Allies were ashore and had begun to move inland and then, when the Allied thrust line had been identified, launched in a concentrated counter-attack. Rommel, with his North African experience, insisted that, as the Allies would have total air superiority, armour could not move by day and must be held well forward so that an invasion could be met and destroyed on the beaches. In a sense, they were both right: armour forward would have permitted instant reaction, whereas holding back would have allowed the Germans to fight the sort of battle – one of mobility and manoeuvre – they were good at and the Allies bad.

  As it turned out, Allied air power was not going to destroy the German armour in Normandy and subsequent claims that it did are not borne out by squadron war diaries: indeed, bad weather, the difficulty of telling friend from foe and the lack of guided weapons all made it very difficult to knock out armoured vehicles from the air. What air power did do was to hinder armoured movement by demolishing bridges and rendering roads and railways unusable, although in general German tanks seem to have been able to move relatively safely,unless caught in convoy on a road or in a defile where they could not spread out. And, anyway, by the time the armour was eventually deployed against the landings, it was too late.

  Overlord was the most complex operation of war ever carried out, and the planning to get every man and every ship to the right place and at the right time and with the right kit was nothing short of extraordinary, far harder than the actual fighting when it came and much larger and more complicated than anything attempted before or since. The credit should have gone to Morgan and his staff, but of course they got little recognition once Montgomery bagged the plaudits for himself. On the days and nights leading up to 4 June, infantrymen filed aboard troopships and paratroopers made final adjustments to their equipment while the Royal Navy, which provided most of the shipping, prepared to escort the convoys and batter the German coastal defences. Then the unreliable Channel weather intervened. It was too windy for the gliders and the paratroopers and too cloudy for the aircraft, and the sea was too rough for the amphibious tanks and the flat-bottomed landing craft. Eisenhower took a considerable gamble, based on the opinion of one junior meteorological officer of the RAF, who thought things would improve in the early hours of 6 June, and postponed the invasion for twenty-four hours. If the weather was still bad, the invasion would be in serious trouble as the next suitable combination of moon and tides would not be for several weeks and it would be almost impossible to conceal what was happening from neutral Swedes in London, who would tell the Germans, or the Free French, who would talk about it in pubs; nor could the troops be expected to maintain their edge if they were confined aboard ship for much longer. The gamble paid off: during the afternoon and evening of 5 June things began to improve, and from midnight men began to drop from the sky or land in gliders over Normandy.

  The role of the three airborne divisions inserted during the night of 5/6 June 1944 was to secure the flanks of the landing from interference, to capture bridges over the rivers to allow the Allies to break out once they had landed, and to deal with particularly difficult shore batteries that the air forces or the navy could not reach. Although the weather had improved markedly from the day before, it was still cloudy and windy, and, although the German navy had stayed in port on the grounds that the weather was still so bad that nobody would attempt an invasion, and although many of the coastal defence units were caught napping, the anti-aircraft batteries were not, and, as the Allied aircraft crossed the coast of France, they were fired upon and this, combined with the difficulty of seeing anything in the cloud, caused the aircraft to lose formation and drift off course. Of all the airborne troops dropped or launched by glider that night, over three quarters took no part in the fighting; they were dropped in the wrong places and landed miles away from their objectives or, if they were really unlucky, in flooded meadows or even in the sea. Extraordinarily enough, this did not matter too much: airborne operations are always planned to use far more troops than are actually necessary, on the assumption that some will always end up in the wrong place or injure themselves on landing. Furthermore, as in Sicily, the appearance in all sorts of unlikely locations of parachutists and dummies with firecrackers attached made it extremely difficult for the Germans to work out just what their objectives were. In the event, nearly all the objectives were secured, albeit often by people other than those who were supposed to be securing them. Men in airborne units were specially selected and were supposed to have more initiative and drive than the average, so, once those – not many of them, but enough – dropped in the wrong place had managed to work out where they were, they simply headed for the nearest objective and attacked that.

  As the Germans had not expected a landing in Normandy, nor indeed a landing anywhere that night, many of the commanders were not at their posts. Rommel was on leave for his wife’s birthday and Seventh Army staff were at Rennes on a study day to review anti-invasion measures. As the tide flows from west to east up the Channel, low tide on the American beaches was earlier than on those of the British, and H-hour for them was to be 0630 hours. On Utah Beach the US 4 Division landed virtually unopposed: they had in fact drifted east and landed in the wrong place, where the Germans had only scanty defences on the grounds that the area was flooded and had only one route off the beach, so no one would land there. Accepting that they were where they were, the division got on with it and by evening had all its men and vehicles ashore and was pressing inland. It was a different story on Omaha. This was always going to be a difficult beach: it was longer than any of the others, it was more exposed to the weather and it was overlooked by a long low ridge,* but the planners thought this would be compensated for by its being defended by 716 Division, a static formation that included conscripted Poles of German origin and Russian volunteers who, it was assumed, would not fight with great enthusiasm for their masters at this stage of the war. How wrong the planners were.

  On 15 March 1944 the German 352 Division, commanded by Lieutenant-General Dieter Krais, had moved into the area to bolster up 716. Although described by Lieutenant-General Omar N. Bradley, commanding the American landings, as ‘one of Rommel’s crack field divisions’,78 352 was hardly that: it had been formed in 1943 from cadres of units destroyed on the Eastern Front in the Battle of Kursk and brought up to strength with men born in 1926 and conscripted at the age of seventeen, and 50 per cent of its officers had no combat experience; 30 per cent of its NCO positions were unfilled; its troop-carrying transport drivers were French; it had only two infantry battalions per regiment rather than the normal three; training had been hasty; and its non-combat support elements contained 1,500 Russians. Nevertheless, it had a hard, tough commander, a highly competent chief of staff and a leavening of veterans of the Eastern Front. Allied intelligence had failed to spot its move until the last minute, still putting it at St Lô, twelve miles inland, and not placing it on the beaches until after the invasion force had sailed. When the American 1 Division and its follow-up 29 Division, the Virginia National Guard, landed at 0630, they met fierce resistance, not helped by most of their amphibious tanks being launched too far out and going straight to the bottom. At first it looked as if the landing might have to be aborted, but at last, thanks largely to suppressive fire from two destroyers of the Royal Navy, the Americans had their beachhead and an exit from it, although the area they held was very narrow and well short of what had been planned.

  On the British beaches the landings at 0730 hours went more or less as planned, except for the cen
tre beach, Juno, where the landing flotilla was late because of an offshore reef and 3 Canadian Division lost ninety of its 306 landing craft to beach obstacles or German artillery. That excepted, up to now all had gone well, but the plan to capture Caen – never a realistic proposition anyway – came unstuck owing to over-caution on the part of the British infantry units sent to probe towards it. Once the opportunity on that first day was lost, it would be another month before Caen was taken, but by last light on 6 June 83,115 British and 73,000 American troops had been landed and the Allies were firmly ashore and preparing to enlarge the bridgehead. Allied casualties had been remarkably light – far less than expected. Estimates vary but calculations by the Museum and Record Office in Portsmouth, from where many of the troops sailed, show a total of 10,000 killed, wounded, missing or taken prisoner. Of these, the Americans lost 1,465 dead, 238 in the two airborne divisions and most of the remainder on Omaha, while the British lost 1,326 dead, including Canadians and airborne troops.* So far, although individual units on the ground had resisted strongly, German reaction had been muted: Berlin did not accept that this was anything more than a diversion and only released the armour piecemeal and after long delays. Had a panzer division been in the St Lô area, as Rommel and Dollmann wanted, then it might well have been able to tip the balance at Omaha, and, had that beach not held, Utah could have been isolated and eliminated, and the remaining three British beaches may well not have been a large enough lodgement to hold. All this is speculation, but political interference in what was more properly the business of the German generals was to increase as the campaign went on. When the German armour finally moved, on 7 June, it inflicted a very bloody nose on the Canadian 3 Division trying to take Carpiquet airfield, west of Caen, but it failed to reach the beaches. By 9 June all the British beaches had been joined up, and on 12 June Omaha and Utah had joined with each other and with the British: now the Allies could set about capturing a port, Caen for the British and Cherbourg for the Americans. But by this stage the Germans had finally accepted that the landings in Normandy really were the main cross-Channel invasion and resistance hardened, and, although the Allies had total air superiority, this was often offset by bad weather and limited time over targets until airstrips in Normandy could be captured. Several British attempts to capture Caen failed, including a quite disgraceful performance at Villers Bocage when a weak tank company of the Waffen SS brought an entire British armoured division to a halt and forced its withdrawal. Despite local successes, however, the Germans were prevented from fighting their sort of war by Hitler, who refused to countenance the giving up of ground. When Rundstedt, exasperated by OKW and Hitler’s constant interference, told Field Marshal Keitel on 1 July that the only thing they could do now was to make peace, he was awarded the oak leaves to his Knight’s Cross and sacked yet again, to be replaced by Field Marshal Kluge, who had been recovering from wounds received on the Eastern Front. When it was obvious that the Cotentin peninsula was about to be nipped off by the Americans, the defenders were refused permission to withdraw to fight another day, instead being told pointlessly that Cherbourg was a fortress to be held to the last. The Americans took Cherbourg between 28 and 30 June and the British finally took Caen on 9 July. The facilities in both ports were so badly damaged by Allied shelling and bombing that they could not be used and the Allies had to continue to relay on Mulberry, two floating harbours brought across from England and established off Omaha and Gold beaches, although after fierce storms in late June only Mulberry B off Gold was still operational.