How Hitler Could Have Won World War II

by Bevin Alexander

  Eisenhower also ordered a massive bombing offensive against transportation centers in Belgium and France to reduce German ability to reinforce Normandy and to carry on a war in France. To minimize casualities among French and Belgian civilians, the Allies warned inhabitants in advance to move away from specific targets. The Allied aircraft did not target rail and road lines to Normandy alone, but bombed other sites, especially the Pas de Calais.

  Sir Arthur Harris, chief of RAF Bomber Command, wanted to continue area or terror nighttime bombing of German cities, while Carl Spaatz, U.S. Strategic Air Forces commander, urged concentration on destroying synthetic fuel plants and refineries to immobilize German panzers, vehicles, and aircraft. However, Eisenhower overruled them.

  Nevertheless, Spaatz’s attacks on oil production facilities—which continued in the spring of 1944, and accelerated thereafter—slowed German motorized movements. By September 1944, German aircraft fuel production was only 10,000 tons, while the Luftwaffe’s minimum monthly demand was 160,000 tons. These deficiencies reduced the menace of new German jet-engine fighters, now being introduced.

  General Morgan had come up with a limited plan for invading Normandy: an attack by only three divisions on a relatively narrow front. To Eisenhower this was fatally weak, and on January 21, 1944, at his first conference in London, he decided on a five-division assault on as wide a front as possible—60 miles—to reduce congestion when reinforcements came ashore.

  The Americans were to land on the right, or west, on Utah and Omaha beaches, and go for Cherbourg, Brest, and the ports around the Loire estuary. In the final version, two U.S. airborne divisions (82nd and 101st) were to land at the base of the Cotentin peninsula to assist in securing it quickly. Also, because a lagoon was directly behind Utah beach, the paratroops were to prevent Germans from blocking the few causeways leading from the beach.

  The British and Canadians were to land on the left in the vicinity of Caen, on Sword, Gold, and Juno beaches, and confront the main enemy body approaching from the east and southeast. The British 6th Parachute Division was to secure the high ground just east of Caen and the Orne River. The first objective, Caen, ten miles inland, was to be seized on the first day. All major roads funneled through this town. Then armored forces were to push southward to gain territory—especially around Falaise, 22 miles south of Caen—to make it difficult for German reserves to get past. Eisenhower set June 5, 1944, as D-Day.

  The key to Normandy was Caen. Most German reserves would have to arrive from the south and southeast and go through Caen, even those headed for the American beachheads to the west.

  Allied commanders knew from intelligence sources that the panzer divisions were being held in reserve, though they thought Rundstedt had control of them, not Hitler. Even so, they expected a delay before they were released to Rommel. This opened the window of opportunity the Allies needed to build strong beachheads. If they could hold on to the fifth day they would have fifteen divisions on shore, Bernard Montgomery, 21st Army Group commander and chief of land forces, told senior commanders on April 7, 1944. Even though he estimated the Germans could bring in six panzer divisions by that time, they would be unable to break up the lodgments. From that point on, Allied power would rise inexorably, making the outcome—the destruction of the German army in the west—inevitable.

  Selection of June 5, 1944, as D-Day was based on combinations of the moon, tide, and the time of sunrise. The Allies wanted to cross the Channel at night so darkness would conceal direction and strength of the attacks. They wanted a moon for the airborne drops, and they needed forty minutes of daylight ahead of the ground assault to complete bombing runs and preparatory naval bombardments. But the actual day of the attack would depend upon weather forecasts. Nevertheless, postponing the invasion beyond June 6 or 7 would involve rescheduling the entire operation and problems of enormous magnitude.

  As the date approached, authorities cut off all of southern England from the rest of the country. No unauthorized person could go in either direction. Logistical officers charted every encampment, barracks, vehicle park, and unit. They scheduled movements of every unit to reach its embarkation point at the exact time the vessels were ready to receive it. The assault troops—the first wave of the invasion—went into cantonments surrounded by barbed wire to prevent any soldier from leaving once he’d learned his part in the attack.

  As Eisenhower wrote, “The mighty host was tense as a coiled spring,” ready to vault across the Channel in the greatest amphibious assault ever attempted.

  On the morning of June 4, Eisenhower and his commanders met with the meteorologic committee, headed by RAF Group Captain J. M. Stagg. The news was not good. Stagg predicted low clouds, high winds, and strong waves on June 5. The naval commander, British Admiral Sir Bertram H. Ramsey, was neutral. Montgomery urged going on with the invasion on schedule. Tedder disagreed.

  Eisenhower decided to postpone the invasion for one day. Since some vessels already had set out to sea, they had to be called back. Some in the Irish Sea had trouble gaining ports, refueling, and readying to move a day later.

  At 3:30 A.M., June 5, a wind of almost hurricane force, along with sheets of rain, pounded Eisenhower’s operational headquarters at Portsmouth on the south coast. At the naval center a mile away Captain Stagg had surprisingly good news: by the morning of June 6 a period of relative calm would ensue for about thirty-six hours. After that, the prospects were for more bad weather. The consequences of delay were so great that Eisenhower quickly announced his decision to go ahead with the invasion on June 6.

  Orders went out at once. From the ports, 5,000 vessels put out to sea.

  Winston Churchill informed Eisenhower that he was going to observe the invasion from a ship immediately off the Normandy shore. Eisenhower told him he could not do so. Churchill responded that he could name himself as a member of a ship’s company, and Eisenhower couldn’t stop him. King George VI heard about Churchill’s scheme, and announced that if the prime minister felt it necessary to go, he, the king, felt it equally his duty to participate at the head of his troops. With that, Churchill backed down.

  On each of the five beaches—two American, two British, one Canadian— forces equivalent to one division were to land on D-Day. On each of the beaches, save Omaha, the defenders were static or garrison divisions, made up of older men or non-German volunteers, with no great enthusiasm and little or no battle experience.

  Omaha was the sole exception. There on guard was the 352nd Infantry Division, a combat-toughened field force that had moved in three months before from service in Russia, a fact that had escaped Allied intelligence. One regiment of the 352nd was guarding the four miles of steep bluffs that rose behind the Omaha landing sectors. The other two regiments were a few miles inland at Bayeux. But one regiment of the 716th Division (a static force) had been incorporated into the command structure of the 352nd. Therefore, two full regiments were in place and waiting at Omaha.

  The plan was for bombers to shatter the defensive positions on all five beaches in the first few minutes of daylight on June 6. Meanwhile, naval guns would bombard the beaches, while the landing craft approached.

  Before any of this happened, however, the paratroops landed—16,000 Americans behind the Utah beaches at the base of the Cotentin peninsula; 8,000 British east of Caen.

  The first paratroops came in by parachute and glider in the early hours in the dark. The foul weather and the inexperience of some transport pilots caused most of the Americans and British to be scattered far and wide of their objectives.

  The British 6th Parachute Division, though suffering extreme losses in landings or because pilots veered from their assigned targets because of antiaircraft fire, nevertheless secured the area east of the Orne River, including the “Pegasus bridge” over the Caen canal, vital for linking traffic on the main coast road.

  The job of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division was to take the four causeways leading to Utah beach; the task of the 82nd Airborne Divisio
n was to seize bridges inland. The assignments required the paratroops to land at precise drop zones. It didn’t happen. Many of the aircraft were too high or too far off course, or were flying too fast to see the drop zones. Many pilots banked away to avoid antiaircraft fire, forcing the troopers to jump blind.

  The result was chaos. Three-quarters of the paratroopers dropped so wide of their targets they never took any part in the attacks. Scattered through the countryside, they formed small groups, wandering for days, skirmishing occasionally with German patrols. Oddly the confusion helped. The Germans could not figure out Allied intentions and launched no strong attacks on the scattered men.

  Major General Maxwell Taylor, commander of the 101st, could assemble only 1,000 men by the night of June 6, but was able to secure the exits to the causeways. The 82nd Division was unable to seize bridges to the west because much of the land was under water. However, the main objective was the village of St.-Mère-Eglise, five miles west of Utah beach, on a road leading northward into the Cotentin and southward to the town of Carentan and connection with Omaha beach.

  Thirty men fell into the village itself, twenty of them right on the central square into the midst of the German garrison of a hundred men. Within a few minutes all the paratroops had been killed or captured. Private John Steele’s parachute caught on the church steeple, where he dangled for hours, playing dead, before finally being taken prisoner.

  Other 82nd Airborne men assembled outside the village, and drove the Germans out by dawn.

  In the British sector, Montgomery held up the landing for an hour and a half after the Americans landed in order to bombard the landing sites for two hours, four times as long as at Omaha. Large numbers of American B-17s and B-24s dropped their bomb loads on the targets, protected by some of the nearly 5,000 fighters the Allies had committed to the D-Day landings.

  The land behind the flat beaches was low, and offered no great challenges to the British. The sector was defended largely by the 716th Division, containing many Poles and Ukrainians, and it put up a lackluster defense. The only threat from the air was from two FW-190 fighters based at Lille that made a single bold sweep along the beaches, guns blazing, before banking away and returning to base. On a cliff west of Le Hamel on Gold beach on the west a unit of the 352nd Division mounted an 88-millimeter antiaircraft gun with a clear field of fire. A round struck a landing ship, wrecking its engine room and turning it broadside up on the beach. Eventually a tank carrying a heavy mortar lobbed a forty-pound “flying dustbin” into the 88’s position and destroyed it. The British 50th Division, which landed at Gold, pushed four miles inland, but failed to capture the D-Day objective, Bayeux.

  All across the British sector tanks fitted with flails moved up from the beaches, blowing up mines in their path. The tanks created lanes through which the infantry and vehicles could advance.

  On Juno, the Canadian beach in the center, the Germans were waiting. Mines and shells sank many of the 306 landing craft. At Bernières, the 8th Canadian Brigade arrived ahead of its flail tanks. The assault regiment, the Queen’s Own Rifles, lost half of one company killed in the 100 yards it had to traverse from sea to sea wall. The Canadians broke through by point-blank fire from a gunship and a quick assault through one point of the defenses, and the Germans withdrew. The Canadians penetrated about four miles inland.

  At Sword, on the east, the British 3rd Division lost 28 of 40 tanks in pitching seas, but the remaining 12 knocked out German gun positions. The division overran the enemy, pushed four miles inland, and linked up with the 6th Parachute Division along the Orne River, but failed to take the D-Day objective, Caen.

  General Miles Dempsey, commander of 2nd Army, landed 75,000 men on D-Day at all three beaches, plus 8,000 paratroopers, and suffered about 3,000 casualties, one-third of them Canadian.

  Meanwhile, nearly forty miles to the west, the U.S. 4th Infantry Division landed on Utah beach. The advance bombing by the air force had achieved little because a heavy overcast obscured the target, and most of the bombs landed far to the rear. An hour-long naval bombardment, however, was highly effective.

  Utah was defended by one regiment of the 709th Division, another nonmobile outfit made up of older men and volunteers from the Soviet Georgian republic. The defenders raked the landing craft that came within their field of fire, but quickly surrendered.

  By the end of the day, 23,000 Americans had landed on Utah, and the division had pushed six miles inland. Total casualties were only 197.

  Omaha was utterly different. In the words of Omar Bradley, it was a nightmare. Before daylight, the invasion fleet, fearing shore batteries, anchored twelve miles off the coast. One of these batteries, at Pointe du Hoc, four miles west of the beaches, was reported to have six 155-millimeter guns with a range of 25,000 yards. Bradley had assigned two Ranger battalions to scale the high cliffs and destroy the guns.

  Waves three to six feet high slapped the ships. Launching landing craft in darkness was difficult and dangerous. The “secret weapon” upon which the Americans were relying was the DD (for dual-drive) Sherman tank, equipped with canvas flotation gear and a boat screw. DDs were to be launched at sea and “swim” ashore to provide the troops instant artillery fire. Twenty-nine of the thirty-two DDs for the east sector were launched two and a half miles off the coast. All but two foundered, taking nearly all the crews to the bottom of the sea with them. Three others were landed directly on the beach. The seamen in charge of landing the thirty-two DDs on the western sector, horrified at what was happening, called off the sea launch and landed twenty-eight DDs directly on the beach, though only later—just two of the DDs intended to support the infantry made it ashore with the troops. Most of the amphibious DUKWs transporting 105-millimeter howitzers also foundered.

  At 5:50 A.M. terrific salvos burst from the warships onto Omaha. The bombardment went on for thirty-five minutes. Meanwhile, beginning at 6 A.M., waves of B-24s dropped nearly 1,300 tons of bombs. The naval bombardment was partially effective, but the aerial bombardment was useless, falling well inland and missing the beach entirely.

  The Omaha beach fortifications were formidable: three rows of underwater steel or concrete obstacles, most mined. The beach was two hundred yards wide with no cover. Beyond a low seawall were sand dunes and bluffs, cut by five draws the Americans intended to use as exits. All the draws were covered by German gun emplacements and the area between the seawall and cliffs was sown with mines.

  At 6:30 A.M. the first waves of infantry, 1,500 men in 36 landing craft, hit Omaha: members of the 116th Regiment of the 29th Division and the 16th Regiment of the 1st Division, plus engineers to blow up underwater obstacles.

  The Germans held their fire until the first wave of infantry hit the beaches. The initial burst of machine-gun fire came from a strongpoint only a quarter of a mile away from the lead craft. Others followed, creating a hurricane of fire. First out were men of the 116th on the west. As the ramps went down, they saw the shallows ahead whipped white by bullets. Men dropped dead or wounded as they lumbered forward in waist-deep water, creating a bloody surf that horrified everyone from the first moments. Other soldiers, seeing what was happening, tried to dive into deeper water and swim clear of the boats. But their heavy equipment dragged them down. Some drowned, others fought back to the surface. The survivors who dragged themselves ashore found no shelter, and some crawled back into the water for its scant protection. Within ten minutes every officer and sergeant had been killed or wounded. In Company A of the 116th, 22 men from one town—Bedford, Virginia—died, among them three sets of brothers.

  The engineers were supposed to clear sixteen 50-yard-wide paths through the obstacles. But half the engineers were dead or wounded, and they managed to clear just one path in the first half hour. The landing craft bringing in the succeeding waves of troops crowded into this single corridor. As the ramps dropped, the men faced almost certain death or wounding. All along the beach landing craft sank or exploded as they hit mines or were struck b
y artillery.

  Ashore, dead and wounded were scattered across the sand and shallows. The survivors lay in the sand or shallow water or crouched behind landing craft, hearing bullets clanging against the steel hulls. Howitzer shells blasted the beach and sent shrapnel flying. The DDs were knocked out, and the Americans had nothing to stop the murderous fire.

  Four miles to the west, 225 men of the 2nd Ranger Battalion began scaling the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc to destroy the guns reported there. The Rangers shot rope ladders and rope-bearing grapnels onto the clifftop and started climbing, in the face of withering fire from above. A number of Rangers died, others blasted shelters and hand-holds in the cliff with their grenades. Meanwhile an American and a British destroyer moved in close and drove the enemy away from the top of the cliff with heavy fire. The Rangers hauled themselves up and discovered that the guns were not there. They had been moved back to an orchard. There the Rangers destroyed them.

  DD tanks now began to come ashore. The novelist Ernest Hemingway, observing from a landing craft, saw two tanks start burning: “The first, second, third, fourth, and fifth waves [of infantry] lay where they had fallen, looking like so many heavily laden bundles on the flat, pebbly stretch between the sea and the first cover.” Hemingway also witnessed the Germans hitting another tank: “I saw two men dive out of the turret and land on their hands and knees on the stones of the beach,” he reported. “But no more men came out as the tank started to blaze up and burn furiously.”