Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (42 page)

Thus the ever-fickle weather gave Eisenhower’s forces an absolutely crucial window of opportunity: by June 9 the artificial Mulberry harbors (to be discussed shortly) were in place and receiving enormous
numbers of fresh troops, tanks, and trucks. Yet ten days later (the morning of the nineteenth, following a lovely calm day on the eighteenth), the whole Channel region was suddenly hit by one of the worst storms of the twentieth century, bringing all traffic to a halt, paralyzing aerial patrols and attacks, throwing eight hundred smaller craft onto the beaches, and eventually ripping apart the gigantic American Mulberry harbor off St. Laurent. The setback to the Allied timetable was colossal, and the boost to Rommel’s chances of a counterattack considerable, until the gale moved on. Then the waters calmed, Allied aerial surveillance was restored, and the massive trans-Channel traffic resumed. But it had been a tense experience. Had that storm come on, say, June 10, the Royal Navy’s Operation Neptune would have been a washed-out disaster, the Allied forces looking like beached crabs.

The weather was a natural force, not to be controlled by man. The other negative element in allowing Overlord to succeed was due purely to human decision—or in this case indecision by the defenders. The German failure to sweep the first Allied landing units off the beaches was due not just to the latter’s clever deception techniques or heavy tactical airpower, though both were important. It was also due to an unusual indecisiveness among the Wehrmacht high command as to how best to respond to the inevitable Allied opening of the second front. Some of Germany’s most experienced generals, including many who had faced Allied invasions before, were seriously divided, each camp offering genuine military reasons. There was an additional “spoil” factor here, namely, Hitler’s own capacity to disrupt rational military-operational actions, either through his prejudice against tactical retreats or, as the war unfolded, through his increasingly drug-affected daily routine. General Guenther Blumentritt’s bitter observation that Germany was going to lose the war “weil der Fuehrer schlaeft” (while the Fuehrer sleeps)—a reference to Hitler’s not being disturbed on June 6 to authorize the release of the critical panzer reserve—was not the full story.
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When and in what strength should the Wehrmacht unleash its riposte to the amphibious assault, wherever it took place along France’s lengthy, difficult Atlantic shoreline?

In the whole of France and the Low Countries, the Wehrmacht possessed fifty-eight divisions by the summer of 1944, a significant rise from a year earlier. But the majority of those were static divisions, dug
into places that they could (and would) defend very well, but lacking the trucks or even horses to be moved swiftly to another position. The key elements, therefore, were the dozen or so panzer or panzer-grenadier divisions, each with the battle experience to destroy any equivalent unit on the Allied side. Rommel, appointed by Hitler in January 1944 to defend this front, came to advocate a forward deployment. Throwing his immense energies into the further massive fortification of the Atlantic Wall, he wanted, as a corollary of that, his German armor to crush the invaders just as they were moving out of their beachheads. To him, the first three days would be vital: he felt it was too risky to rely upon a later, calibrated response from a distance, since Allied airpower might stop all such blows in their tracks. Army against army, he was sure, the Germans would win; army against army
plus
massive airpower, they would lose.

Much of the rest of the high command disagreed with Rommel’s strong “outer crust” approach (including some, ironically, who had thought him too bold and reckless in his earlier campaigns, and now judged him too cautious). They—including not just von Rundstedt but also tank commanders such as Guderian and Geyr von Schweppenburg—were more confident in the Wehrmacht’s tradition of launching massive and devastating counterattacks after an enemy’s operation began to slow; one supposes that Anzio was an encouragement here. They also didn’t like the idea of the panzer divisions being scattered along the coastline and so likely to be subjected to 15-inch warship shells and a very large number of 500-pound bombs from Marauders, Lancasters, and B-17s. Better to wait, they thought; let the invaders come in, and then drive them back to the wire-tangled beaches. Both arguments were about the threat from Allied firepower: would it be worse to take hits along the immediate shoreline from battleships or from an inland aerial offensive?

Hitler’s compromise between his generals was the worst of all worlds: some mobile divisions to be allocated individually to the coastline, four to be held well back (and only released by direct order of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht—essentially, himself), and four sent to the south of France. Weak everywhere, strong nowhere—just the opposite of what his hero Frederick the Great had always recommended. Had von Schweppenburg’s four reserve armored divisions been positioned
around St. Lô on June 6, right to the south of the Normandy beaches, they might well have pushed the American invaders and possibly also the British and Canadians farther to the east, back into the sea, under cloud-filled skies.

The Anglo-American-Canadian invaders were, clearly, very lucky. But they were also very smart. They were well orchestrated, they had command of the air and the sea, and they used deception and intelligence to a fine degree. In addition, they had both the weather and enemy indecisiveness on their side. But they also needed to be operationally competent, much more so than they had been in previous amphibious landings. And here, in the story of the assaults upon the Normandy shoreline, lay the second part of the challenge: getting up to 1 million men and 100,000 vehicles on
and off
the landing zones and then heading to Berlin.

Answering the million-men-landing question explains the Allied planners’ choice of Normandy. Since Brittany was too far to the west and the Belgian/Dutch estuaries were too treacherous—and too close to a counterattack from Germany—the choice narrowed down to either the Pas-de-Calais region or Normandy, both of which could be given strong aerial coverage from English bases. While the German staffs were genuinely torn regarding each option, to the Allies a Normandy landing made more sense for several reasons: it was almost equidistant from all the large southern English and Welsh invasion ports, whereas a major landing near Calais would really pile up the successive waves of landing craft. Normandy gave space for Montgomery’s insistence on landing at five beaches, not the original three; it gave the Allied navies more room for maneuver than in the Narrows; and it offered a promising chance to send an army westward from Normandy into the Cotentin Peninsula, take Cherbourg, and create a major link from France back to the millions of men and masses of munitions that could sail directly from America. All that was needed was to seize a part of western Europe and then move east into Germany. But that was much easier said than done.

The orchestration of the approach to the beaches, and the organization of the initial landings, still staggers the historical imagination. It would fill the rest of this book, and several more, to describe the landing plan in detail.
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For example, the 171 squadrons of Allied fighters
that would be aloft as the invasion unfolded all had their own patrol zones; they would be directed by RAF Fighter Command initially, and then for the first time ever air traffic control would switch to special units in the HQ ships offshore. The bombing of the German rear echelon was timed for around 2:00 to 4:00 a.m., just before the intensive bombing of the immediate coastal defenses, then a reversion by the heavy bombers to interdiction of the roads leading toward the Normandy beaches. As the vast armada came to its launching point, the troops also could not fail to notice the enormous bombardment of the German coastal emplacements by battleships, cruisers, and monitors. Ramsay wanted two full hours of heavy, shattering fire on the beaches before the destroyers and rocket-firing landing craft moved closer in, and they were to continue firing until shortly before the hordes of smaller landing craft, some carrying specialized tanks, most carrying platoons of nervous infantrymen and the specialized assault tools, approached the beaches. Even before them, there went the demolition teams, the bravest of the brave. How exactly does one demolish a spiky tetrahedron with wire and mines dangling off it? Along with those early units went another group of specialists, the naval “spotters,” to scramble onshore to a nearby hill and control the fire from the warships.

As the troops and amphibious tanks came ashore (or drowned in the effort), their beach master was waiting. This was an obvious, necessary, extraordinary position, one confirmed by the experiences on the beaches of Sicily and Salerno: a Royal Navy captain became supreme director of the landing beach, moving the troops forward, ordering disabled vehicles to be pushed out of the way, sending the landing craft back to sea as soon as they had disembarked their contents. He functioned in a way like an old-fashioned traffic cop at a busy intersection, imposing order on impending chaos, heading off the potential gridlock. One of them, the redoubtable Captain William Tennant of the Royal Navy, had been in charge of getting 340,000 British, French, and Belgian troops off the beaches at Dunkirk in 1940; now, four years later, he was bringing even larger numbers back to the Normandy coasts.

A few hours before even the beach master and the obstacle-clearing crews had landed, the first units of the Allied airborne divisions had already been parachuted to their positions a few miles inland. Employing
paratroops as a key component in a large-scale operation—as distinct from sending them on small special-ops raids—was an unusual and extraordinarily risky step: there was nothing (not artillery, not air support, not naval bombardment) that could be deployed to cover their exposed downward glide in the face of enemy resistance—as even the ultra-competent German paratroops had found when they landed in Crete in 1941. Yet despite the grave risks, Eisenhower’s planners could see that the reward of a successful parachute strike would be enormous: the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions’ capture of small towns a few miles inland from Utah Beach would have a great dislocating effect, and it was even more vital for the British 6th Airborne Division to seize the Orne River bridge and thus outflank Caen from the east.

Behind the landing force, stood out at sea and occupying different lanes from the amphibious craft and from each other, were the five Allied naval bombardment squadrons. They had, following the schedule mentioned above, begun firing on German coastal fortifications before the first craft reached the shore, then moved to fire at targets farther inland. From zone to zone, there was a marked difference of tactics. Hewitt went for a somewhat later, briefer bombardment (actually, only thirty to forty minutes), rather than Ramsay’s solid two hours of preinvasion fire. Whichever system was preferred, it has to be said that the results were mixed. Solidly built and obliquely aligned concrete bunkers were not easy to destroy, even when fire control directors directed large salvoes onto their roofs. Testimony from captured Germans on the receiving end suggests that the greatest effect was caused by the earsplitting noise, choking dust, and confusion that the great shells brought with them; or, a little later, by the surprise of being caught by a battleship’s salvoes while in a truck convoy 10 miles inland. It took a while for Wehrmacht field commanders to appreciate what those unarmed little spotter planes overhead were up to.

Above the beaches, as the full day came up, patrolled the Allied air squadrons. It was almost four years to the week that a small number of RAF Hurricane and Fairy Battle squadrons had tried to protect the retreating British and French military from Luftwaffe bombings and strafings as they streamed into the little boats off Dunkirk, just 120 miles northward upon the very same coast. Now the odds were totally reversed. Apart from the famous madcap run over the Allied beaches at
10:00 a.m. on June 6 by the Luftwaffe ace “Pips” Priller and his wingman Heinz Wodarczyk in their Fw 190s, what German interference could come from the air? Farther afield, Allied heavy bombers continued to plaster the enemy’s communications networks running from the Rhineland into France and the Low Countries, while enormous numbers of Coastal Command aircraft patrolled the Channel, the Western Approaches, and the Bay of Biscay. If the Allies had a problem in the air, it was most likely to be confusion and misidentification of other aircraft (at a mile away, a Fw 190 and a Mustang looked very similar) and thus the risk of friendly fire; hence the painting of three parallel white stripes on all Allied aircraft likely to operate over the D-Day beaches. No other air commanders ever enjoyed such a luxury of surplus power.

The most effective German defensive weapon was, curiously, their new “oyster” mine, which exploded when the waves created by an approaching ship changed the water pressure. These were laid in large numbers by low-flying aircraft and small vessels. Despite the constant work of dozens and dozens of Allied minesweepers, those mines sank considerable numbers of warships and merchantmen and damaged many more, including Admiral Vian’s flagship for the Eastern Task Force, the cruiser HMS
Scylla
. Many Allied vessels had to be towed slowly back to Portsmouth, crews waving at the reinforcing flotillas heading toward Normandy. By contrast, the German E-boats sent out to contest Operation Neptune were really the equivalent of kamikaze vessels, attacked at every opportunity by Beaufighters and Wellingtons, checked by massive destroyer screens (Canadian, Polish, and French as well as Royal Navy), and having their home bases torn apart by RAF Lancasters. Bomber Command might have had a mixed record over Berlin at night, but their 12,000-pound Tallboy bombs completely wrecked German-held harbors, bridges, and railway lines; when hit by 325 Lancasters on June 14, the concrete roofs of the naval station at Le Havre crashed down upon the fourteen hapless E-boats below. Low-flying Beaufighters terrorized every German-held port from the Channel to Denmark.
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At night, specially equipped Mosquitos took over.