America's Greatest 20th Century Presidents (17 page)

Churchill was not alone. Many of the British military planners had felt a cross channel invasion “smacked of a seaborne Somme”. Churchill had, however, persuaded the U.S. to give priority to the war in Europe, a position which caused many difficulties for Roosevelt. Pearl Harbor had outraged America and inflamed popular opinion against Japan, yet American attitudes towards Germany and Italy were far more ambivalent, due to the large proportion of American citizens with German or Italian heritage.
However, at the somewhat bizarre Rattle Conference, described as a combination of intensive study and a 1920s themed house party, organised by Lord Louis Mountbatten, the assembled company settled upon Normandy as the invasion destination. Although further from Germany, it offered the Allies the chance to capture two major ports, Cherbourg and Le Harve.

Operation Bodyguard and Misinformation

Britain, due to its limited size and manpower, had relied upon deception as a force multiplier. Churchill particularly understood the importance of deception, when at the “Big Three” Conference he said, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” The resulting
Operation Bodyguard
was the deception plan created for use with the Normandy invasion. The plan was to trick the Germans into thinking the expected invasion would come in late summer 1944, and would be accompanied by an invasion in Norway, Greece and elsewhere in Europe. The goal was to trick the Germans into defending areas away from the invasion, thus posing less threat to the success of
Overlord.
On an operational level it hoped to disguise the strength, timing and objectives of the invasion.

A further element of
Bodyguard
was
Operation Fortitude. Fortitude
marked one of the most ambitious, successful deception plans in the history of warfare.
Fortitude
was divided into two parts, North and South. Both parts involved the creation of fake armies, one based in Edinburgh in the north and one on the south east coast of England which threatened Pas de Calais, the most obvious area of France for invasion. The Allies went to remarkable lengths to ensure the success of the operation. A fictional U.S. Army group under George Patton was created in the south. Every effort was made to ensure operational security while also allowing the Germans to see the dummy war material and supporting infrastructure to add weight to the ruse. Dummy invasion craft were constructed at ports, inflatable trucks and tanks lined the roads in Scotland and around Patton’s fictional army group. Luftwaffe aircraft were allowed fly over the inflatable army while being kept far from the actual invasion preparations. The deception was reinforced by frantic radio signals emanating from
Fortitude
north and south to the amount expected from a large size invasion group.

Inflatable British tank as part of
Operation Bodyguard.

A crucial factor to the success of Allied deception was the use of double agents. Successful espionage by Mi-5 had turned all German agents in Britain to the Allied side by the launch of
Overlord.
By the beginning of 1944, Mi-5 had 15 agents feeding false information to the Germans, with just enough reliable information to maintain their credibility. The most celebrated was ‘Garbo’, a Spanish agent who created a fictitious network of 24 spies while working as a double agent for the British. The benefits of having such a fictitious network of sub agents was Garbo could create an identity for his sub agents to best fit the information given to the Germans.

Ensuring the Germans took the bait was a far more difficult prospect than creating the misinformation in the first instance. By 1944, the Allies had a massive advantage in terms of intelligence with the cracking of German enigma codes. Allied deciphering of German codes was so successful by 1944 that those responsible literally could not keep up with the overflow of information. What the intelligence was showing was that the Germans, in the days preceding the invasion of Europe, still had no real idea when or where the invasion was to take place. To complement the allied deception effort, the Royal Air Force dropped twice as many bombs on the Pas de Calais than it did in Normandy in preparation for the invasion. The operation’s
success can be seen in the length of time it took the Germans to realize it was deception, even after the landings of June 6. It was not until mid-July that the German High Command realized Patton’s threat to Calais from southern England was over. Without
Fortitude
,
the Germans would have had free reign to maximise its forces at the point of attack in Normandy and with it, it is unclear whether the Allied invasion would have succeeded. Against such a formidable foe, however, the Allies needed to rely on every trick in the book.

The Final Planning

Upon his appointment as Supreme Allied Commander in January 1944, Eisenhower wasted little time in demanding the scale of the landings be increased from three divisions to five. This step had far reaching ramifications in terms of resources and transport. Extra landing craft, support vessels, mine sweepers and bombardment vessels would be needed in a hurry to match the expansion of the invasion plans. Luckily, the U.S. forces were able to muster the extra ships needed.

In the early spring of 1944, the final stages of the planning took shape. Landings would occur at five separate beaches in divisional strength. Prior to this, Beach Reconnaissance Parties were covertly landed at the five sites on dark nights to ascertain the nature, defences and gradients of the beaches. The day before the invasion, D-Day -1, Allied minesweepers would have to be visible to the German defenses in order to complete their duties successfully. Either due to bad weather, German withdrawals or poor patrolling, the minesweepers were not detected.

In the early hours of the morning of June 4, the decision of which day to launch the invasion was made upon the advice of meteorologists. In the days before the decision to launch, the weather approaching the Normandy beaches had been the worst for years, so bad that a landing would be all but impossible. Landings could be undertaken for just 10 days per month due to the tides and the need for a full moon to aid navigation. Delaying the landings in the early part of June would have meant that another attempt could not have been made for at least two weeks, and with well over 150,000 troops already on their ships waiting to go, that situation was not acceptable. Luckily for the Allies, chief meteorologist, Captain Stagg, with the aid of a meteorological station on the west coast of Ireland, was able to inform the assembled commanders that a brief clearing in the weather for a number of hours looked likely.

Ramsay, head of Naval affairs, informed Eisenhower that the Royal Navy would do whatever was asked of it, Montgomery, commander of the ground forces favored immediate action, while Leigh-Mallory, commander of the air-fleet was hesitant, worried that the bad weather would limit the support his air force could give to the landing troops. After a brief pause of no more than a few seconds, Eisenhower simply said “Let’s go”. With that, the largest invasion fleet ever assembled began its journey towards the Normandy coast.
On June 5, 1944, an armada of some 7,000 ships began to cross the Channel towards the Normandy peninsula. Above it, 1,400 troop transports and 11,590 military aircraft of various types (along with 3,700 fighters) supported the landings. The following day, 175,000 soldiers would attempt to land on French beaches.

Even with that horde, to say the Allies faced a daunting task would be an understatement. On the morning of June 6, 1944, General Eisenhower was carrying a letter in his coat that apologized for the failure of the operation. Found years after D-Day, Eisenhower’s letter read,
“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 on 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.”

Eisenhower addressing paratroopers on June 5, 1944

D-Day

Storming Omaha Beach

From the very beginning of June 6, 1944, events did not go as the Allies had planned. In the first operations of the day, a cloud of Allied aircraft flew overhead, targeting German troop concentrations, infrastructure and fortifications throughout the Normandy countryside. On D-Day alone, Allied air forces flew over 14,000 sorties, compared to just 100 for the Luftwaffe, a clear sign of the total superiority the Allies enjoyed.

The Allied airborne assault in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944 proved to be as full of complexity, drama, heroism, confusion, loss and effort as the beach landings that followed. However, despite the heroism, the airborne assaults did not go to plan. The Allies’ planes mostly missed German fortifications on their bombing runs, and tens of thousands of paratroopers who were to land directly behind German lines were dropped out of place due to poor visibility. The only true advantage the paratrooper drops had for the Allies was that the scattered nature of the paratroopers confused the German defenders.

Meanwhile, the span of the amphibious landings that morning covered an area of 55 miles, a length large enough for the Allies to ensure a funnel of resupply could be held. The British had been eyeing up France’s coastline and had prepared ingenius armored vehicles to assist the landings. Under the command of Major-General Percy Hobart, flame-throwing tanks, flail tanks to clear mines and bridging equipment, mockingly known as Hobart’s “funnies”, proved to be a monumental success on the British landing beaches. Omar Bradley, the U.S. commander of ground forces was, unfortunately for his troops, uninterested in such machines. American troops were forced to cross the killing zones and minefields unaided by the new inventions.

Due to the reinforced German positions and heavy artillery pieces with which the Allies faced, the British laid on a two hour bombardment before attempting a landing. Unfortunately for the U.S. forces, particularly on Omaha, Bradley felt a 20 minute bombardment would be sufficient, relying on the Army Air Force to launch a massive attack. But such an attack had been made impossible for the Air Force due to the low cloud cover that had resulted in bombers entirely missing the German positions below. Bradley further compounded the impending misery and torment for his ground troops by completely disregarding the advice of Major-General Pete Corlett, a veteran of successful Pacific amphibious landings. Bradley’s attitude was far from open minded and dismissed Corlett’s advice by saying “anything that happened in the Pacific was strictly bush-league stuff.”

Bradley’s decision not to employ adequate naval bombardment robbed his troops of crucial support. For example, a Brooklyn type cruiser, as was available to Bradley on D-Day, could fire 1,500 five inch shells in ten minutes, and when directed by spotter aircraft, its fire was deadly accurate. Yet Bradley, with his deep suspicion and prejudices against the U.S. Navy, remained ignorant. Nevertheless, and to the relief of the U.S. troops at Omaha, when it became obvious the landings there were teetering on failure, a number of destroyer skippers moved their vessels so close to the shore that they risked beaching to support the hard-pressed troops.