"Every Man Was a Hero"
By Otto Friedrich
"From this day to the ending of the world
... we in it shall be remembered,--
... we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother."
--King Henry V
The wind howled in the darkness as they went to the meeting. It was just before 4 a.m. on June 5,1944, and the rain slashed at them "in horizontal streaks," Dwight Eisenhower recalled later. The commanders of Operation Overlord were gathering around the fireplace in the library of Southwick House, outside Portsmouth, to hear a Scottish group captain named J.M. Stagg predict the next day's weather. On the basis of Stagg's calculations, Eisenhower would have to decide whether to give the attack order to the nearly 3 million troops assembled in southern Britain for the greatest seaborne invasion in history, the assault on Hitler's Atlantic Wall.
Just the previous day, Stagg had warned that a gale would strike on June 5, and Eisenhower had reluctantly ordered a 24-hour postponement of Dday. The first troopships, already at sea, had to be called back. But now that the storm was actually upon them, Stagg offered what he called "a gleam of hope for you, sir." The next day, June 6, there would be some clearing of the skies, a break of perhaps 36 hours, no more. The cloud ceiling over the Normandy beaches would be about 3,000 feet, the waves only about three feet high.
The risks were tremendous. Postponement would mean another month before the moon and tides would again be so favorable, yet a miscalculation now might end in enormous casualties, perhaps even a shattering defeat. "I ... sat silently reviewing these things, maybe, I'd say, 35 or 45 seconds ..." said Eisenhower, who had reviewed these same things many times before. "I just got up and said, 'O.K., we'll go.' "
It has been written that there is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Until Eisenhower made his decision, and until the highly uncertain outcome of D-day was assured, it was still theoretically possible that Hitler might yet win the war, or at least achieve a stalemate that would leave him the master of most of Europe.
The Allies had regained a great deal since the darkest days of 1941 and early 1942, when the Germans' panzer divisions swept to within 40 miles of Moscow and their Japanese allies struck at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Malaya. The hitherto invincible Japanese navy had been checked at the Battle of Midway in June 1942, the Soviets held fast at Stalingrad, and the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa that autumn inspired Churchill to say that although victory there might not be the beginning of the end, it was perhaps "the end of the beginning."
Now, two years later, the Soviets had smashed all the way to the Polish frontier; the Americans had pushed northward to the gates of Rome; fleets of Allied bombers were steadily pulverizing all the major cities of Germany. But Hitler's battle-hardened force of 7 million men still dominated an empire extending 1,300 miles from the Atlantic to the Dnieper, and his scientists were on the verge of unsheathing their promised victory weapons, the long-range V-1 buzz bomb and V-2 rocket.
When and where to attack Hitler's Festung Europa was a question that the Allies had been debating for years. After Pearl Harbor, many American military leaders were adamant that the fight against Japan receive top priority. But the Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, and Marshall's head planner, Brigadier General Eisenhower, argued for a strategy of throwing all possible resources into an invasion of France and the overthrow of Hitler. Their major reason: the Soviets in 1942 were in full retreat, suffering heavy casualties and warning that the whole eastern front might collapse. Roosevelt and Churchill promised Stalin that they would open a second front by 1943.
Despite that promise, however, the British were haunted by the debacle of 1940, when they barely escaped destruction by evacuating their defeated army from Dunkirk just before the fall of France. They were no less haunted by the enormous bloodletting of World War I. "Memories of the Somme and Passchendaele," as Churchill put it,"... were not to be blotted out by time or reflection." Churchill persuaded Roosevelt to delay a risky assault on France and strike an easier target: North Africa. When that proved a swift success, the British continued urging a "Mediterranean strategy": an invasion of Sicily, an advance up the Italian peninsula. But the Italian campaign turned slow and bloody, and the American generals in Europe re-emphasized their basic plan to invade northern France, Operation Overlord. Marshall passionately wanted to take command of the operation himself. When Roosevelt insisted that he could not spare him, Marshall assigned the task to Eisenhower, by then a four-star general. Eisenhower went to London in January 1944 to lead what he was to call, on D-day itself, "a great crusade."
The Germans knew an invasion was inevitable. "An Anglo-American landing in the West will and must come," Hitler told his key commanders that spring, but he added, "How and where it will come no one knows." The obvious place to attack was the coastal bulge known as the Pas de Calais, only 20 miles across the English Channel from Dover. That was where Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, whom Hitler had assigned to defend the Atlantic Wall, expected the landing to come. Rommel deployed his whole Fifteenth Army there, 208,000 men, to defend every mile of beach. "The first 24 hours will be decisive," he said.
The Allies went to great lengths to nourish this German illusion. They repeatedly bombed and shelled the Calais area as though to soften it up for an invasion. They even created an illusory docking area near Dover, complete with inflated rubber tanks, fake landing barges, dummy warehouses and barracks. Eisenhower assigned his friend, Lieut. General George S. Patton Jr., to command a largely phantom "First United States Army Group," which sent out messages about imaginary activities of the nonexistent troops. The British, meanwhile, created a fictitious "Fourth Army" in Edinburgh to threaten an invasion of Norway. The British were secretly monitoring the German response to the Allies' feints with ULTRA, the system by which the British had cracked the German code and could eavesdrop on all German military radio traffic.
The real goal, of course, was the crescent-shaped row of beaches along the northern coast of Normandy. They lay 100 miles from the great British ports of Southampton and Portsmouth, a span that no invader had successfully crossed in nearly three centuries. The Allies spent two years turning all of southern Britain into an arsenal and point of departure. They built 163 new airfields. They shipped in 2 million tons of weapons and supplies, 1,500 tanks, mountains of food and fuel. Since the targeted beachfront lacked harbors, Allied engineers built two enormous artificial harbors that could be towed across the Channel and moored in place once the beaches were won.
D-day was supposed to be early in May, but when British Field Marshal Sir Bernard L. Montgomery took up his post as Eisenhower's deputy for ground forces that January, he immediately balked at the preliminary plans for a 25-mile-wide invasion front. He told Eisenhower, who already had strong misgivings of his own, that the front must be much broader, about 50 miles, so that the Allies could land at least five divisions, instead of the planned three. The planners said they did not have enough landing craft for such an expansion. Get them, said Montgomery. That was impossible by the May deadline, said the planners. Then change the deadline, said Monty.
This was the final plan: 58,000 men from the U.S. First Army under General Omar Bradley would attack on the western section, at two strips code-named Omaha Beach and Utah Beach. To the east, a force of 75,000 men, drawn mostly from Lieut. General Sir Miles Dempsey's British Second Army but also including a Canadian division and an assortment of French, Polish and Dutch troops, would invade three adjoining beaches, Gold, Juno and Sword. Some 16,000 paratroopers from the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions would drop in first to guard the western flank against counterattacks, and 8,000 men of the British 6th Airborne would seize and guard the eastern flank.
On the German side, Rommel had some 500,000 men strung out along an 800-mile front from Holland to Brittany, and he knew only too well how vulnerable they were. Since the bulk of German power was committed to the Russian front, his 213,000-man Seventh Army, charged with defending Normandy, was an untested force, filled out with middle-aged conscripts and unreliable recruits from Eastern Europe. Only 70,000 of the defenders were stationed near the targeted beaches. The Luftwaffe's fighter defenses had been seriously depleted in two years of air battles, and the remnants were in the process of being pulled back to defend the Reich itself. Three crack panzer divisions stood ready as a reserve, but Rommel could not count on them, for Hitler insisted on retaining personal control over their movements. Only recently had Rommel succeeded in organizing a crash program to install 1 million mines a month along the heavily barricaded beaches.
The most serious German failure, though, was in military intelligence. Apparently because of the bad weather, neither naval patrols nor reconnaissance planes maintained surveillance of the invasion preparations on the crucial last day before the landing. German meteorologists assured their commanders that the storm would prevent any Allied attack, and that prediction prompted Rommel to take a quick trip home. His wife's birthday happened to fall on June 6. When Rommel heard the news from Normandy at his home near Ulm, he could only say, "How stupid of me! How stupid of me!"
German intelligence had managed to learn in advance that when the BBC broadcast a sequence of two well-known lines of Verlaine's poetry, it was announcing to the French underground that the invasion would begin within 48 hours. At 10:15 p.m. on June 5, a German radio monitor with the Fifteenth Army in Calais heard the second line, "Blessent mon coeur d'une langueur monotone " (Wound my heart with a monotonous languor). The monitor warned his superiors; they ordered an alert, but nobody ever passed the word to the Seventh Army. These German intelligence failures and Eisenhower's daring gamble on the weather combined to give the Allied commander the one great weapon that he absolutely had to have: surprise.
Unaware of the German lapses, the Allies agonized until the last moment about the tremendous risks they were taking. "I am very uneasy about the whole operation . . ." said Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, as late as June 5. "It may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war." In that same final week, Eisenhower's British deputy for air operations, Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, formally protested to Ike about the planned American parachute assault, which he said would result in the "futile slaughter" of two fine divisions.
Eisenhower could hardly help being troubled. "I went to my tent alone and sat down to think," he said. If he canceled the airdrop, that would leave the invaders of Utah Beach vulnerable to a German counterattack. He decided to stick to his plan. There is often, at such times, a sense of fatalism, of something preordained. General Matthew B. Ridgway, commander of the 82nd Airborne, felt it no less strongly. "Sometimes, at night," he recalled, "it was almost as if I could hear the assurance that God the Father gave to another soldier, named Joshua: 'I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.' "
Eisenhower spent that last night among the men of the 101st Airborne, who called themselves the Screaming Eagles. They had blackened their faces with burnt cork, and many had shaved their heads so that they looked like Indian warriors. They were tense and nervous, weighed down with not only rifles, pistols, knives and grenades but also cigarettes, first-aid kits, fresh socks, about 100 Ibs. in all. Eisenhower's talk was simple but encouraging: "Where are you from, Soldier? Did you get those shoulders working in a coal mine? Good luck to you tonight, Soldier."
As the long line of twin-engine C-47s began taking off at seven-second intervals from Welford shortly after 10 p.m., Eisenhower stood there watching, his hands sunk deep in his pockets. He went on watching until the last plane circled into the darkness overhead. A correspondent standing near him said the general's eyes were full of tears. That same afternoon, after he watched the first troop convoys preparing to depart, Eisenhower had scribbled a strange note for himself, a message that would be ready if everything ended in disaster: "Our landings ... have failed ... The troops, the Air and Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."
The 822 C-47s flew in tight, nine-plane V formations across the English Channel, an armada of shadows, only their lavender wing lights clearly visible in the thin moonlight. They took more than three hours to cross the Channel, then they dropped to 700 ft. to make their landing run. Suddenly they plunged into the turbulence of a thick bank of clouds. The pilots reflexively separated to avoid collision. As they emerged from the blinding clouds, sheets of flak began exploding all around them. Sergeant Louis Truax saw his plane's left wing hit, and then the paratroopers went sprawling. "One man dived out the door headfirst," he said. "I grabbed the ammo belt ... of the man I thought next and gave him a heave out nose first. The next man made it crawling . .. Then I dived."
Some men were dropped miles from their landing sites, some were dropped far out at sea, some were dropped so low that their parachutes never opened. Private Donald Burgett recalled that they "made a sound like large, ripe pumpkins being thrown down against the ground." The 101st's commander, Major General Maxwell Taylor, was dropped at 500 ft. and said later, "God must have opened the chute."
There was another unforeseen hazard. The Germans had permitted a number of rivers to flood the fields, and many paratroopers landed with their burden of supplies in three or four feet of water. Father Francis Sampson, a Catholic chaplain, sank into water over his head and just barely managed to cut himself free from his chute. Then he had to dive down five or six times to retrieve his equipment for saying Mass. Private John Steele had a different kind of religious problem: his parachute caught on the steeple of the church in Ste.-Mere-Eglise, so he played dead while German patrols prowled the streets below. A stray bullet hit him in the foot. He watched another ammunition-laden paratrooper land on a burning house and explode. Others were shot while hanging in trees. After two hours, a German finally spotted Steele, cut him down and took him prisoner. American forces later rescued him when they occupied the town, the first in France to be liberated.
All night long the scattered paratroopers worked to re-establish contact, snapping cricket noisemakers to locate each other. (Most of their radios had been lost, along with 60% of their other supplies.) Sometimes the cricket sound drew German gunfire, but more often it brought lonely stragglers together into makeshift units (others remained lost for days). "When I began to use my cricket," General Taylor recalled, "the first man I met in the darkness I thought was a German until he cricketed. He was the most beautiful soldier I'd ever seen, before or since. We threw our arms around each other, and from that moment I knew we had won the war."
Sometimes a single man could overcome absurd odds. Staff Sergeant Harrison Summers of the 101st was ordered to take 15 men and attack a German artillery barracks known only as WXYZ, actually a cluster of stone farm buildings. When the 15 showed signs of reluctance, Summers somewhat recklessly decided to goad them by leading the charge himself. He kicked in a door and sprayed the room with his submachine gun. Four Germans fell dead, and the rest ran out a back door. None of Summers' men had followed him, so he alone charged the second building; the Germans fled. By this time, one of Summers' men was providing covering fire as Summers burst into the third and fourth buildings, killed twelve Germans and chased out the rest. A private crept up and said to Summers, "Why are you doing it?" Said Summers: "I can't tell you." Said the private: "O.K., I'm with you." At the next building, the Americans killed 30 more Germans. Then they found 15 Germans inexplicably eating breakfast and shot them all. At the last building, the support gunner's tracers set the roof on fire, and an additional 30 Germans stumbled out to be shot down.
To the east, the British 6th Airborne had a somewhat easier time of it. Landing close to their targets just after midnight, the glider troops and parachutists caught the Germans by surprise. By dawn they had captured their main objectives, the bridges across the Orne and Dives rivers, securing the eastern flank of the British landing site.
The American assault from the Channel was set for 6:30 a.m. In the first gray and misty light, the sea suddenly appeared full of ships, some 5,000 vessels of every variety, and from the giant battleships came a deafening barrage. The Texas and Arkansas trained their 14-in. guns on German artillery batteries atop the cliffs towering over Omaha Beach; the Nevada and three cruisers pounded nearby Utah Beach. Twelve miles offshore, thousands of infantrymen scrambled down sheets of netting into the boxlike landing craft that began chugging toward the heavily mined and barricaded shore. Aboard the flagship Augusta, General Bradley stood with ears plugged by cotton and watched through binoculars as the vanguard of the 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions waded slowly into German machine-gun fire on Omaha Beach. "The commanders who are engaged report that everything is proceeding according to plan," Churchill was to announce proudly in the House of Commons at noon that day. "And what a plan!"
To the top commanders, everything is always part of a plan, but to the ordinary soldiers in the landing craft, the invasion seemed more like a series of fragments that added up to chaos. The storm that was supposed to have died down still churned up waves four and five feet high, and the landing craft wallowed through them. White-capped waves slurped over the sides. Seasickness became epidemic. Drenched, shivering, scared and loaded down with almost 70 Ibs. of wet battle gear, they had to keep bailing.
At least ten of the 1,500 small landing craft foundered. One lost 30 men out of 32 aboard. Others took shellbursts and a steady pinging of bullets against the steel sides. Still others collided with the jagged obstacles and barbed wire that the Germans had embedded along the beach. The heavily burdened invaders had to scramble out into neck-deep water, or worse. A number of amphibious craft loaded with artillery turned back. Armored units had an even harder time. Their Sherman DD tanks were outfitted with devices that were supposed to keep them afloat while they lurched ashore, but of the first 32 launched, 27 sank in the choppy waves and plunged to the bottom, taking most of their helpless five-man crews with them.
"Bullets tore holes in the water around me and I made for the nearest steel obstacle ..." said Robert Capa, the only photographer to go ashore with the first troops. "Fifty yards ahead of me, one of our half-burnt amphibious tanks stuck out of the water and offered me my next cover ... Between floating bodies I reached it, paused for a few more pictures and gathered my guts for the last jump to the beach..."
Lieut. Edward Tidrick was hit in the throat when he jumped into the water. Another bullet hit him as he lay on the beach. He gasped out a last command: "Advance with the wire cutters!" There were no wire cutters; they had been lost in the blood-streaked water.
Everywhere there were noise, explosions, gunfire and wrenching cries for help. "Medico! Medico! I'm hit! Help me!" Aboard one landing craft, a German shell struck a flamethrower strapped to one soldier's back. The explosion set the whole landing craft on fire, and it burned all day long, the fire punctuated by explosions from the craft's ammunition supply.
Captain Charles Cawthon of the 29th Division managed to reach cover under the embankment at the far end of Omaha Beach, and there he found that his gun was clogged with salt water and sand. "The embankment was strewn with rifles, Browning automatics and light machine guns, all similarly fouled," he recalled. "Except for one tank that was blasting away from the sand toward the exit road, the crusade in Europe at this point was disarmed and naked before its enemies."
Several officers desperately tried to move their pinned-down men off the beach. But there were only four heavily defended exit roads and the bluffs ahead. "They're murdering us here!" cried Colonel Charles D. Canham, commander of the 116th Regiment, a blood-soaked handkerchief around his wounded wrist. "Let's move inland and get murdered."
Brigadier General Norman ("Dutch") Cota, assistant commander of the 29th Division, waved his .45 pistol as he strode heedlessly through the gunfire. When he found a cluster of soldiers in the shelter of the embankment, he asked them who they were. They said they were Rangers. "Then, goddammit," said the general, "if you're Rangers, get up and lead the way." They did. Under the cover of a brushfire that had been started by the Navy shelling, 35 men managed to scale the bluffs and get behind the German gun positions.
Another unit of 225 Rangers under Lieut. Colonel James Rudder was dispatched to Pointe du Hoc, a 100-foot-high promontory four miles west of Omaha and ten miles east of Utah. Their assignment: to knock out six heavily defended German 155-mm guns that could command both beaches. They fired rocket-propelled grappling hooks up to the top of the cliff and then began the fearful climb up ropes and ladders. The Germans splattered the oncoming Rangers with machine-gun fire, grenades, even boulders, and they managed to cut several of the ropes on which the Rangers were inching upward. By the time Rudder's men had seized the cratered cliff (and radioed back, "Praise the Lord"), only 90 of the 225 could still bear arms. And the German guns they had fought to capture they found hidden in an orchard a mile away, apparently moved as a result of earlier air raids.
The ships, meanwhile, kept ferrying in more troops, more guns, more supplies. Major Stanley Bach of the 1st Infantry Division managed to scribble a few notes: he saw a landing craft hit three mines. "Navy men go flying through the air into the water. They never come up." He saw a shell hit a beached landing craft, "flames everywhere, men burning alive." And again: "Direct hit on 2 1/2-ton truck gasoline load; another catches fire ... men's clothes on fire ... attempt to roll in sand to put out flames."
And still the Navy kept bombarding the coast. "The destroyers had run in almost to the beach and were blowing every pillbox out of the ground with their five-inch guns," wrote Ernest Hemingway, who watched from one of the landing craft. "I saw a piece of German about three feet long with an arm on it sail high up into the air in the fountaining of one shellburst. It reminded me of a scene in Petrouchka."
When General Bradley first spotted the faint shapes of his soldiers' corpses scattered along the beach, he began to fear that "our forces had suffered an irreversible catastrophe." He even considered abandoning Omaha Beach and diverting the reinforcements to Utah. But at 1:30 that afternoon he finally got a radio message that said, "Troops formerly pinned down ... advancing up heights." Later, when the "nightmare" was all over, he could only say, "Every man who set foot on Omaha Beach that day was a hero."
By the end of Dday, the Americans held the ridge of cliffs overlooking Omaha Beach, and had pushed about a mile inland. They had landed two-thirds of their forces and suffered more than 90% of their casualties there. East and west of Omaha Beach, the landings had gone much more successfully. The U.S. 4th Division had seized Utah Beach with relatively little opposition and joined forces with the paratroopers who had been dropped near Ste.-Mere-Eglise. The British and Canadians had overwhelmed their three beaches and advanced about three miles inland toward the city of Caen. All told, the Allies had landed five divisions, some 154,000 men. It was a very precarious grip on the European mainland, but for this day, it would suffice.
Victory did not come cheap. The American losses reported for that day were grievous: 1,465 killed, 3,184 wounded, 1,928 missing. The British, who never announced their losses, were estimated to have suffered 2,500 to 3,000 casualties. Canadian casualties came to 946. Total Allied casualties: about 10,000. Estimates of German casualties: 4,000 to 9,000.
If there were mistakes and failures on the Allied side, they were insignificant compared with the blunders by the Germans. Not only did Rommel spend D-day speeding through the countryside, not only had the Luftwaffe withdrawn all the planes that were needed in Normandy, but the armored regiments that should have been thrown into the defense of Omaha Beach could not move without direct orders from Hitler, and Hitler's aides refused to wake him before 9:30 a.m.
When he did get up and hear the news, he persisted in believing that the Normandy invasion was just a feint, that he still had to guard against the real invasion that would occur at Calais. Not until ten hours after the Normandy landings did the first tanks of the 21st Panzer Division go into action against the British, and the British beat them back. When Rommel finally returned to his headquarters that night, he found his chief of staff, Lieut. General Hans Speidel, listening to Wagnerian opera records. One of Rommel's aides protested, but Speidel coolly answered, "You don't think that my playing a little music is going to stop the invasion now, do you?"
By then, nothing was likely to do that. The Americans kept pouring in; by the end of July, more than 800,000 had landed. With them came an almost unimaginable flood of equipment. Each day the average G.I. used up to 30 Ibs. of food, ammo, gasoline and other supplies. More than 80,000 trucks and other vehicles landed in the first eleven days after Dday. Sixty million packs of K rations arrived in the first three weeks. Then came ice-cream machines, filing cabinets, blankets.
After the beaches had been secured on Dday, the first order of business was to organize a breakout. It had been an important part of Montgomery's strategy that British forces should thrust inland some 20 miles on D-day itself, well beyond Caen, a commercial crossroads. Partly out of caution, partly out of weariness, the vanguard of the British I Corps halted for the night about halfway there, some four miles north of the city. Compared with the victory on the beachhead, the failure to reach Caen that first day seemed a minor shortcoming. Montgomery even invited Churchill on June 10 to visit his forward headquarters in a lake-studded Norman chateau, and Churchill admired "the prosperity of the countryside ... full of lovely red and white cows basking or parading in the sunshine."
The conquest of Caen was considered essential for Allied armor to break out of the checkerboard hedgerows of Normandy and move on to the plains leading to Paris. But Montgomery's British forces could not manage to rout the two panzer divisions that had quickly established themselves on the outskirts of Caen. In the first week, the British tried a direct assault; toward the end of June, they tried two encircling attacks. Each time they failed. On the night of July 7, some 450 heavy bombers pounded Caen, and only then did the Germans begin to evacuate the rubble.
Montgomery's failure aroused severe criticism. "Montgomery went to great lengths explaining why the British had done nothing," General Patton wrote bitterly in his diary. There was talk of removing the temperamental Montgomery, and Churchill almost urged it. Other critics* have faulted not only Montgomery but some of his commanders and troops, who seemed to have become cautious, unimaginative, war-weary.
If so, it was painfully understandable, for the British alone had been fighting courageously against Hitler ever since the war began. While France collapsed and the Soviets stood as temporary allies of Germany, Churchill told his people that he had "nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat," and for five long years they had proudly pledged themselves to that offer.
On June 27, Major General J. Lawton Collins' VII Corps captured Cherbourg (after the besieged Germans had destroyed most of the port facilities), but the Americans remained just as penned in as the British. More than 1 million men now appeared stalemated on a front of no more than 100 miles, and while neither side could win a decisive advantage in the swampy and hedgerowed terrain, both suffered heavy losses. "We were stuck," said Corporal Bill Preston of the 743rd Tank Battalion. "Something dreadful seemed to have happened in terms of the overall plan."
It was Bradley, working away with colored crayons on a set of maps in the seclusion of his tent, who figured out the solution that was to become known as Operation Cobra. "I said I didn't want to stand up and slug, but ... at one time we were going to have to," Bradley told an aide. "Afterward we can make the breakthrough and run deep."
The point Bradley chose for slugging was a road that ran westward from the gutted city of St.-Lo toward a town called Periers. He picked "Lightning Joe" Collins to seize that road. At a cost of 5,000 casualties, the 29th and 35th Divisions finally captured the heights just west of St.-Lo.
Collins had discovered a secret weapon to get his tanks by Normandy's dense hedgerows. A sergeant in the 2nd Armored Division devised a way to attach to the front of a tank a pair of saw-toothed tusks, made from the steel barricades that once obstructed the landing beaches. These tusks could hack through a hedgerow in a few minutes.
Once the breakthrough came, it came quickly. Within a week after Collins' men had seized the St.-Lo-Periers road, General Patton's newly organized Third Army started to push south and in one day advanced 40 miles into Brittany. "Whether the enemy can still be stopped at this point is questionable," German headquarters near Paris warned Hitler. "The enemy air superiority is terrific and smothers almost every one of our movements . . . Losses in men and equipment are extraordinary."
Hitler launched his "retaliation" against Britain scarcely a week after Dday: some 2,300 V-1s hit London that summer, killing 5,400 civilians more or less at random. But this new terror weapon failed to achieve Hitler's hope of somehow reversing Germany's military fortunes. On June 23, the Soviets launched a gigantic midsummer offensive across a 300-mile front east of Minsk and demolished 28 German divisions within a month. On July 20, Hitler's own Wehrmacht officers turned against him. Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg planted under Hitler's conference table a bomb that was supposed to kill the Fuehrer. A shaken and partly deafened Hitler survived to wreak vengeance on the conspirators (even Rommel, who was not directly involved, was forced to take poison) and to add a manic streak to his own supervision of the war.
Hitler's top generals urged him to pull back from Normandy and establish a new defensive line on the Seine. Hitler refused. He ordered Field Marshal Guenther von Kluge, his commander in the west, to launch an immediate counterattack against the American breakthrough force. Into this he flung not only the battered remnants of the Seventh Army but also the Fifteenth Army, which had been at the Pas de Calais awaiting the invasion that never came. Their mission: to cut through American lines to the port of Avranches and isolate the twelve American divisions that Patton had led south into Brittany.
Bradley was delighted at the prospect: "This is an opportunity that comes to a commander not more than once in a century," he gloated to a visitor from Washington. "We are about to destroy an entire hostile army." As the Germans plunged westward, Bradley began creating an enormous pincer to encircle them. Patton's tanks raced eastward toward Argentan while the British moved south from Caen toward Falaise. When Von Kluge's offensive hit the American lines near Mortain, it hit hard. But the Americans held until reinforcements could reach them. "What a sight they were, coming off the hill!" one lieutenant said, recalling that moment toward the end of the six-day battle when the relief troops arrived.
Then Bradley began to close his pincers. Patton's forces reached Argentan on Aug. 12, and Bradley ordered Patton to halt there and wait for the British to reach Falaise. But it took another week before Canadian forces finally closed the trap.
During that time, a sizable number of German troops managed to escape through the unclosed pincer, but a good many more failed. Within the trap, ten German divisions were taken prisoner, and bodies lay everywhere, some 10,000 in all. "It was literally possible," said Eisenhower, "to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh." Bulldozers were called in to sweep away the carnage.
And so the battle for Normandy was over, and when it was, the end of the war was in sight. "If by the coming winter you have freed beautiful Paris from the hands of the enemy," Churchill had said to Eisenhower shortly before Dday, "I will assert the victory to be the greatest of modern times." Said Eisenhower: "Prime Minister, I assure you that the coming winter will see the Allied forces on the borders of Germany itself." It took less than a week after the closing of the Falaise gap, until Aug. 24, for the Allies to reach the gates of Paris. There was lots of hard fighting ahead--the Battle of the Bulge, Arnhem, not to mention Iwo Jima and Okinawa--but the Allied victory was now inevitable.
But what if it had all gone differently back there on the beaches of Normandy? What if the Luftwaffe had been there to bomb and strafe the invaders? What if the panzers had moved in quickly for a counterattack? What if the storm had suddenly worsened? What if the whole landing force had been destroyed on the beach?
Hitler once indulged in some sanguine speculations. "Once the landing has been defeated, it will under no circumstances be repeated by the enemy," he told aides. Roosevelt would be defeated in the 1944 elections, "and, with luck, he would finish up somewhere in jail." Even Eisenhower, a natural optimist, thought a defeat on D-day "might mean the complete redeployment to other theaters (i.e., the Pacific) of all United States forces."
More probably, the consequences would have been somewhat less apocalyptic. The Allies were all deeply and emotionally committed to the destruction of Nazism, and American industrial power was already more than making up for the depletion of British and Soviet resources. The odds are that the Allies would have reorganized their forces and invaded all over again, perhaps aiming at southern France or the Balkans. And the atomic bomb was well under way. The war had to be won.
When the fighting ended, both victors and vanquished found themselves in a world that had been changed forever. Most important, perhaps, was that the U.S., long a second-rank power primarily concerned with its own affairs, was now the world's unique superpower. "The U.S. became conscious of its world role and of its duty toward the world," says former French Foreign Secretary Maurice Schumann, who waded ashore with a British unit on Dday. "That feeling remains."
Scarcely less important, though, was that the battered and backward Soviets had also won themselves a major role in the world. It was that prospect, in fact, that inspired some Western strategists to argue for a Normandy invasion as early as 1943, not only to help Stalin continue fighting but to prevent him from eventually dominating Central Europe. One such strategist was General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who helped draft the Overlord strategy later adopted by Eisenhower and Marshall. "The idea here," says Wedemeyer, now 87, "was to get ashore as early as we could, advance as fast as we could, and at war's end have Anglo-American troops in control." Churchill too had hopes of advancing into the Balkans and perhaps even reaching Vienna before the Soviets. The Big Three leaders agreed at the Yalta Conference of February 1945, however, that the advancing Allied armies should meet in central Germany, thus dividing the conquered land and consigning Eastern Europe to the Soviets.
To more idealistic observers, the Allied invasions demonstrated the power of international cooperation. It was the success of the wartime alliance that inspired the founders of the United Nations in 1945. The Marshall Plan was the victorious general's idea for international economic reconstruction. Even when the cold war destroyed all hope of global cooperation, memories of the wartime alliance inspired the birth of NATO and the Common Market.
Other changes that were inherent in the peace of 1945 took longer to become fully clear. When the Soviet army liberated Maidanek and Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps in Poland, the birth of Israel in 1948 became an inevitability. The Middle East would never be the same.
More broadly, the end of the war permanently altered the imperial relations that had governed much of the world for about four centuries. Churchill, who once said he had not become Prime Minister to oversee the liquidation of the British Empire, lived to see it liquidated by others. India, Malaya, Kenya and other imperial outposts demanded and won the right to govern themselves. France's General De Gaulle, who had simply been notified of D-day rather than invited to help lead the attack, imperiously reasserted French claims to rule Lebanon, West Africa and Indochina. The Dutch vainly tried to cling to Indonesia. But the days of such European empires were irrevocably ending. A Third World was struggling to be born.
These were among the long-range political consequences of Dday, but all this was largely unknown to the men who bled on Omaha Beach. D-day was first of all a battle between two great forces, and the lessons that it teaches, 40 years later, are fundamentally the lessons that all great battles teach, over and over:
That even the most carefully prepared plans often go wrong. That lucky breaks are very important. That a small number of brave and determined men can make an immense difference. That some men fight with incredible courage under fire, and that some do not. That men usually fight better in a good cause, but that some fight just as well in a bad cause. That morale is essential to victory, and that nothing improves morale so much as superior firepower. That war is cruel and wasteful but sometimes necessary. That a blundering victory is more to be valued than a heroic defeat. That might and right sometimes come to the same end.
All these things happened on June 6,1944.
--By Otto Friedrich
* For example, Max Hastings, author of a skillful new study, Overlord, due out next month.