Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (41 page)

There was also no repeat on D-Day itself of the Luftwaffe’s deadly attacks off Norway, Crete, Dieppe, or even Salerno. The odds were impossibly distorted. On June 6 itself, close to 12,000 Allied planes were in the air, from well before dawn right into the night. By contrast, only 170 aircraft fit enough to fly were available to the Luftwaffe’s Third Fleet, covering all of western Europe, so it was virtually impossible for them to get to the Normandy beaches against 5,600 Allied fighters. Both high-altitude and low-altitude attacks were anticipated in the aerial-defense plan. One aviation expert noted that “beachhead air-cover consisted of a continuous overlapping patrol of Spitfires at low level, with four P-47 Thunderbolt squadrons above them, and a squadron of P-38 Lightnings acting as cover for the ships off the five beachheads.”
³³

Along with command of the air came control of the sea. Here again the Allied forces were overwhelmingly strong, and the invasion was supported by 7 battleships, 23 cruisers, more than 100 destroyers, and upward of 1,000 other fighting ships. All the American and British battleships were of the older World War I and Washington Treaty types (USS
Nevada,
HMS
Rodney,
etc.); they were now judged incapable of keeping up with the newer
Iowa
-class and
King George V
–class fast battleships on the high seas but were eminently suitable for—and adapted very well to—the task of onshore bombardment. HMS
Warspite
(with one turret and one boiler still not working after the glider-bomb attack at Salerno), blasting away with great effect at Le Havre, then Cherbourg, then Walcheren, was in her final campaign of a career that had earned her more battle honors than any other ship in the Royal Navy. Old-fashioned coastal monitors with 15-inch guns came into their own
as fortification destroyers. Much closer to the shore, as many as fifty-seven of the Allied destroyers were to site themselves just behind the assault waves and fire at the beach defenses until the very last minute. The choreography of this bombardment, combined with the enormous and complicated landings themselves, was amazing.

Given all the difficulties of any amphibious landing, the Allies hoped to reduce the strength of the immediate German counterattack by convincing their foes that the invasion would take place elsewhere, or at least by making things so confused that the defending armies would be uncertain and split up across a very long front. To the British especially, strategic deception of the formidable German divisions was of the highest importance. Unable and unwilling to fight another Battle of the Somme, the British counted upon a stratagem that rested heavily upon diversion, confusion, indirect attacks, the recruitment of partisans, the use of airpower, faked intelligence, and the search for cracks in their enemy’s formidable defenses. It was a logical position for a small island nation to adopt, and a policy that seemed confirmed—despite some failures—in their successful deception warfare techniques in North Africa, Sicily, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The American military, while much more inclined psychologically to go straight at the Wehrmacht, was willing to play along. Hence Fortitude North and Fortitude South.

The plan called Fortitude North reflected a Churchill dream and a Hitler phobia—that the Allies would come upon Germany from the north, with an invasion of Norway, a push toward Denmark, and a linking with the Soviets. On the map, it actually looked rather appealing. Logistically, as the British chiefs kept pointing out to the prime minister, it would be very tough. To the Americans it probably looked as much of an “indirect approach” to Berlin as a landing in Greece. Still, it was left as a possibility, and commando raids and RAF bomber attacks on German lookout posts and air bases along the Norwegian coastline kept up the deception. It greatly helped to pin down lots of German garrison troops (twelve divisions in Norway, six in Denmark) that could have been better employed elsewhere, so it was also worth creating a phony invasion army in northeast Scotland for a while. As D-Day got closer, Allied intelligence could tell that the Wehrmacht high command was increasingly doubtful that any major attack (or any
attack at all) would occur in Scandinavia, so the deception techniques for Fortitude South were correspondingly increased.

The story of the complex Allied efforts to persuade Hitler and the Wehrmacht high command that the chief assault would come in Pas-de-Calais is entangled in myths, realities, and testy counterfactual arguments. What is undoubted is that Fortitude South was elaborate and cunning, and assumed many forms. The few German agents in Britain who were turned (the “double-cross” agents) fed suitable information back to Berlin. Bombing raids, resistance activity, beach reconnaissance teams, and BBC transmissions, along with another whole panoply of tricks, were deployed. American and British theatrical backroom staff, disguise artists, and set designers joined the war effort. Tens of thousands of inflatable full-sized tanks and trucks were openly arrayed across fields near Kentish ports, even while a stupendously effective and total blackout was imposed across the counties of Hampshire, Dorset, Devon, and farther west, where the real invasion armies lay. German aerial reconnaissance of the western ports and camps was effectively blocked. A not very happy General Patton, with a recognizable radio sign, was temporarily dispatched to take command of this mythic army. Allied intelligence would always want to know Rommel’s location, so it was sensible to assume that the Germans would desire to know where the hyperaggressive Patton had been stationed.

But how great a contribution to the D-Day victory did these deception measures make, as compared with the many other factors discussed here? It was considerable. Overestimating the number of Allied divisions bivouacked in Kent, the Wehrmacht kept no fewer than nineteen of its own divisions in the Pas-de-Calais region (four behind Dunkirk alone); by contrast, there were only eighteen divisions between the Seine and the Loire. Days
after
the Normandy landings, von Rundstedt and many other experienced generals still thought that those invasion forces, though growing in size each day, were a feint—the fact that they had occurred west of Caen was actually
proof
to them that the big onslaught would be near Calais. While releasing some German units to move forward to the beaches, the army high command held many more back; messages from double agents that the landings were a decoy caused Hitler and von Rundstedt to cancel an earlier order and send two divisions back to Pas-de-Calais as late as June 10. Before, during,
and after the real landings RAF Lancasters flew up and down the Channel between Dover and Calais, dropping continuous sheets of “window,” while a fleet of small ships steamed back and forth below; what could
that
portend?

The deception continued. As late as July 3, Hitler’s OKW chief Jodl told the Japanese naval attaché in Berlin that “Army Group Patton” was soon to lead eighteen infantry divisions, six armored divisions, and five airborne divisions across the Channel; this was, Jodl opined, “obvious,” an astounding misinterpretation. When the high command at last recognized (for some generals, it took until mid-July) that nothing was going to happen in the Narrow Seas, it was impossible to swing those critical divisions southward, partly because many of them were static units but chiefly because of the paralyzing effect of Allied tactical bombing of roads, railways, and bridges.
³⁴

But the history of intelligence is rarely straightforward. In June 1944, it certainly was not the case of the blind defender against the all-seeing invader. The Wehrmacht had detailed knowledge of Allied landing techniques, the role of specialist beach-clearing teams, the strong emphasis upon airborne forces, the relocation of RAF and USAAF squadrons, and the southward rumble of more and more divisions from the Clyde landing-wharfs toward the Channel. In addition, having carefully studied the pattern of their enemies’ naval bombardments and initial infantry landings in Mediterranean operations, Rommel and his staff made sure that most of their fortified bunkers and pillboxes were sited obliquely to the beaches. Thus obscured from Allied naval bombardment, they were still able to cover a large expanse of the shore as enemy troops staggered out of the water. Yet what the Germans did not know was the most important intelligence piece of all:
where
would the Allies land, and
when
? They had reports of landing craft assembling in the Essex ports, but also in the harbors of Devon; they detected new American divisions setting up camp behind Portsmouth, yet others arriving (next to the dummy units) close to Folkestone. Although the key Wehrmacht intelligence officers sometimes exaggerated the Allied numbers, it is not difficult to feel for them when they were being repeatedly pressed to answer the critical question—Pas-de-Calais or Normandy?—especially as it was known that Rommel and von Rundstedt held contrary views.

Allied intelligence about their German opponents was a mirror image of German intelligence about the Allies. To be sure, London wanted to know every detail regarding the Wehrmacht’s defenses, location of units, special obstacles, numbers of tanks, and so on. Given their absolute superiority of aerial photography in fine weather (an advantage the Abwehr and Luftwaffe could only lament), the flood of information from the French Resistance, and the almost total control through Ultra decrypts of German military and naval messages, it was relatively easy to achieve knowledge of the Wehrmacht’s defenses, location of units, special obstacles, numbers of tanks, and so on; they could also usually track the relocation of major army units. Being able to read the Japanese diplomatic and naval/military messages from Berlin to Tokyo also provided a general confirmation of German thinking. Yet, as the invading armies were to learn when hostilities commenced, the Germans could also create dummy bunkers, switch mobile coastal batteries from one cliff to another, and make rapid movements of tanks and trucks at night. Moreover, no simple counting of the enemy’s strength could answer the really important question: how hard would the defenders fight, even against heavy odds?

Allied intelligence had one further massive advantage: its capacity to intercept and swiftly decode radio traffic between German commanders in the field and their headquarters. Just as the teams at Bletchley Park had gained much from reading messages between Doenitz and his U-boat captains when the tide turned in the Atlantic campaign, so did the code breakers gain valuable information from the surge in Wehrmacht traffic once the landings had taken place: who was reporting to whom, what orders were given out, what information about the strength and whereabouts of the Allied forces was communicated back to Army Group West, what indications there were that the deception techniques had worked. Decrypting even a quarter of this valuable data made a vast difference. It was important, therefore, that the German army relied such a lot upon emergency radio communications.
³⁵

Having French Resistance networks on the ground was an additional bonus for the Allied planners. Not only was the Resistance a source of important intelligence about local German forces, but also the widespread acts of sabotage compelled the diversion of hundreds of thousands of troops to secondary military activities such as guarding
railway lines, searching houses, and the like. And because different Resistance cells were sent different special messages from London during the BBC’s radio broadcasts, the Allies could add to the deception by markedly increasing the wireless traffic to the Pas-de-Calais area. Finally, of course, when the landings actually occurred, these small French units—equipped and trained by the Special Operations Executive—mounted damaging attacks upon bridges, roads, and, above all, telegraph poles and wires, forcing the Germans to make more use of radio signals.
³⁶
There was, of course, no German equivalent in Britain to offer corresponding distractions.

All three of the above positive dimensions stand to the credit of the Western invaders. By contrast, Ramsay’s planners could claim no credit for the first of the two “just-didn’t-happen” aspects: the weather itself. The high tides, the storms coming out of the Atlantic, yet also the bouts of unusually placid weather that had so affected the outcomes of the cross-Channel invasions by Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror, Henry V, the Spanish Armada, and William of Orange had not changed their nature; transporting a large number of men and equipment across those unpredictable waters and landing successfully on the other side always contained risk.

So it was in early June 1944. There had been some fine days in late May, but by June 3–4 a large depression was sweeping in from the Atlantic. The meteorologists forecast low clouds, which would take away the air advantage, and rough seas, which would cause chaos on the beaches. On the fifth, miraculously, the storm abated a bit, the rains stopped, and a deeply torn Eisenhower gave the order to go (before retiring to write his letter). That night the enormous armada set out for France. Fortunately but understandably, this awful weather had caused the Germans to conclude that an invasion was not possible during the next few days; Rommel drove back to Germany for his wife’s birthday (June 6), and von Rundstedt’s headquarters in Paris dismissed warnings about coded BBC messages to the French Resistance that night as “foolish.”
³⁷
The six divisions of Army Group B, directly behind the landing area, received no alert signals at all.