Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (43 page)

Setting to sea from Belgian ports was also the choice of the remaining German destroyers. The brave assault by the four destroyers of the 8th German Destroyer Flotilla on the night of June 8–9—detected by
decrypts, and smashed by an Anglo-Canadian-Polish destroyer force twice its size—was essentially the last formal sortie of the Kriegsmarine against the navies of the West. When the war had broken out almost five years earlier, a grim Admiral Raeder remarked that his underdeveloped navy at least knew how “to die gallantly.” So they had done.

The U-boat flotillas ordered to attack the Allied landings were (as noted in
chapter 1
) also dispatched to a suicidal mission. By this stage Ultra was at last at full effectiveness, and because the submarines reached the Channel waters only after the landings had occurred, a colossal force of aircraft and surface escorts was waiting for them, all of them now equipped with advanced detection systems and horribly effective weaponry. The skies were full of Allied aircraft, the horizons full of frigates. Even the new schnorkel-equipped boats, although sinking a half dozen escorts in initial attacks, had no chance against such odds and, after heavy losses, all the U-boats were ordered out of the area.
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Because of such complete Allied preponderance in the air and near-total dominance of the sea, therefore, the only real question to be decided—as each side had recognized long before—was the battle on land: the fight on the beaches, and the further fight by the invaders to move deeper into France and toward Germany. A neutral observer might already have concluded that, given all the trump cards possessed by the Allies (airpower, sea power, logistics, Resistance, etc.), the odds were already heavily stacked in their favor. And that is surely correct. But it was precisely the challenge of landing and then moving on that Eisenhower and his senior officers worried about most. And it was upon the crushing of those Allied moves that the Germans pinned all their hopes, all their resources, and their sole strategy. As the events of June 6 unfolded, both sides were proven right, perhaps Rommel most of all, in seeing the first three days of fighting as being decisive.

There are in essence three different amphibious-landing parts to the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944. The best, at least from the Allied perspective, was that regarding the westernmost assault, on Utah Beach, by the 4th U.S. Infantry Division. Here was a case of victory being snatched from the jaws of potential disaster. Clouds were already obscuring the coastline before the explosions from the naval bombardment produced massive smoke; the guide vessels could no longer be seen. If there were beach directors (the Americans did not have named
beach masters), they were in the mists. As the landing craft chugged toward the murky shore, they found themselves pushed by the tides to a mile south of their target zone and, helpfully, into much less strongly defended territory. Here the landings went extremely well, the rocket ships firing away, the amphibious tanks closing to the shore, the infantry platoons wading waist-high with rifles aloft in the face of very little opposition, and the B-26 bombers flying below the clouds to deliver their assaults. In rare and classic style (compare with Anzio), the 4th Division brushed aside the local opposition, pushed strongly inland, and, with much more wading through swampy land, gained 5 miles of ground by the end of the day. With about 21,000 troops and 1,800 vehicles ashore by that stage, Utah was not going to be dislodged easily, whoever came at it. The 8th and 27th Infantry Regiments lost, in total, twelve men. This was the smoothest amphibious operation the Allies ever made.

It was behind the Utah beaches that the 82nd and 101st U.S. Airborne Divisions made their early morning landings, the intention being to seize and hold inland towns such as Ste. Mère-Eglise until the main force arrived from the sea. Much has been made of the way in which the perverse winds carried the paratroopers in all directions, dropped them into the marshes, scattered and chiefly ruined their heavier equipment, and prevented them from supporting the glider-borne follow-up, resulting in high casualties for the latter. The 82nd Airborne’s troops were indeed so widely strewn across the wetlands of the Merderet River that two-thirds of them were still missing three days later. But being “missing” was not the same as being ineffective. In fact, chaos became an unexpected advantage: the widespread and sporadic nature of the paratroops’ landings caused immense confusion among the German forces behind Utah Beach and crimped any attempts to reinforce the beachhead defenders. In the course of all this localized fighting, a small group of paratroops ambushed a German staff car and killed (as it turned out) the commander of the German 91st Division, the chief reserve division for the Cotentin Peninsula. By the end of the day, elements of the 82nd Airborne were as far inland as the crossroads town of Pont l’Abbé, and this particular battle had been won.

All this was critically important because Ramsay’s master plan had had to assume that the U.S. 4th Division would indeed get ashore and
then clear of the beaches. The blunt fact was that the 90th Division was coming in close behind it, to be landed between June 6 and 9; then the 9th Division, to be landed between June 10 and 13; then the 79th Division, to pass through by June 30. (Similar buildups were planned for the other four beaches as well.) With four full army divisions put ashore, plus the two airborne divisions ahead, the American VII Corps (under General Joseph Collins) could conquer western Normandy. Had they been held on the beaches, the very size of their invasion force would have produced mass havoc and chaos; but it was not to be so.

The biggest part of Operation Overlord concerned the three landings by British and Canadian troops at the Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches. Perhaps the best words to describe these strikes from the sea would be adjectives such as
thorough, careful, fastidious,
and
well-orchestrated
—apart from the airborne operation, not very bold, showing again the British Army’s deep respect for its old foe. Should the June 1944 Normandy campaign end in a disaster, the Americans could come again; there were four million more GIs waiting back home to cross the Atlantic if needed. The British could not afford another and bigger Dunkirk, Crete, Dakar, or Dieppe. Their manpower reserves were horribly overstretched as it was; this was their last big war. As a result, they were massively invested in deception, intelligence, command and control, signals, beach masters, mine clearance, specially designed tanks—whatever it took not to be pinned down on the shingle and suffer unsustainable losses.

Hence the attention the British gave to specialized armored units and unusual vehicles that would help them overcome Rommel’s intricate and deadly beach defenses. The driving force here was an acerbic, determined visionary, Major General Percy Hobart, creator of the 7th Armoured Brigade (which would become known as the “Desert Rats”) in the late 1930s, then demoted and retired, then rescued from obscurity by an angered Churchill,
^g
and finally given the 79th (Experimental)
Armoured Division and the necessary material resources to develop what his own troops fondly referred to as “Hobart’s Funnies” precisely to deal with beach and field obstacles, a need that became even more obvious after Dieppe.
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The basic instrument for Hobart was the sturdy, reliable Sherman tank or its later British counterpart, the Churchill. The tanks were then converted in all manner of ways: amphibious tanks with inflatable skirts that drove toward the shore, flail tanks whose gigantic metal chains beat the sand and exploded enemy mines, tanks with massive wire cutters or bulldozer blades, fascine tanks that carried their own rolled-up metal or wooden bridges to allow the crossing of ditches and tank traps, flamethrower tanks just like those the U.S. Marines were using in the Pacific, tanks that simply became ramps for other tanks, and so on. Hobart was a genius, and the history of armored warfare had seen nothing like this. (In the same spirit, and frustrated by the slow movement of Bradley’s forces along the narrow lanes and high hedgerows of the ambush-prone Normandy bocage, an American sergeant named Curtis Culin produced another variant, the “Rhinoceros,” with giant front teeth that could rip right through the hedge’s base and allow the regular tanks to race across open fields.)

Hobart’s Funnies had their baptism by fire on the British-Canadian beaches. It was by no means the case that they worked marvelously on each and every occasion. How could they? No rehearsals off the Scottish coast or Bristol Channel could match the murderous reality of landing on an obstacle-strewn beach and being shot at from all directions. All along the coast, those duplex-drive tanks (with the inflatable skirts) found the heavy tides slowing their progress, so they were often overtaken by many of the landing craft carrying infantry and other sorts of tanks. The British and the Free French at Sword Beach probably had the best of it, since the 6th Airborne Division had already seized the Merville battery while the enormous 155 mm guns at Le Havre (which could have decimated any landing ship or close-in destroyer) spent the morning in a rather foolish duel with HMS
Warspite
offshore. With the Royal Marine frogmen having dismantled the beach obstacles, Hobart’s obsessive search for problem-solving weaponry came into its own. As one British Army major at Sword recalled in awe:

These amazing machines, which would later assist the British-Canadian drive into the Low Countries and northern Germany, certainly contributed a great deal in getting the first amphibious units across the beaches and through the cramped and treacherous streets of the small villages that lined the Gold-Juno-Sword beaches. With a few exceptions, such as at Le Hamel, the opposition withered quickly; the “static” divisions consisted of some anti-Communist Russians, together with Lithuanians, Poles, First World War veterans, and sixteen-year-old boys. The safest thing for them to do, after token firing, was to surrender. Fighting from the concrete bunkers was no longer safe, for the advance commandos were dropping grenades through the apertures even as the naval support continued (and in one of the most spectacular naval shots of all time, the cruiser HMS
Ajax
got a 6-inch shell through the forward slit of a massive emplacement on Gold Beach and exploded the entire magazine). Here, at least, Rommel’s “outer crust” crumpled swiftly. By day’s end, the British had put 29,000 men ashore at Sword, suffered only 630 casualties, and taken thousands of prisoners. At Gold they put 25,000 men ashore at the cost of 400 casualties. These were well below all planning estimates of likely losses.

At Juno Beach the Canadians and British invaders had it much harder. The objectives were farther away, the defensive fire greater, the beach obstacles more intricate, and naval support much less. Still,
21,400 men were put ashore that day, with 1,200 casualties. This was the beach where the inflatable-skirted tanks came into their own, amazing Canadians and Germans alike as they arrived on the shingle, retracted their skirts, and then advanced and started firing. The seawall at Juno was considerably higher than at Omaha, but the Funnies went over it, cut through the barbed wire behind, and flailed through the minefields, with exhausted and overladen infantrymen trying to keep up. Then, perhaps as a natural reaction, most units slowed down, bivouacked, made tea, and fell fast asleep. Montgomery had planned for a very fast postinvasion move against Caen and right down the Orne River valley, but it didn’t happen like that. The 6th British Parachute Division had made a stunningly successful capture of the Orne bridges, the three beachheads had held, and many more troops and tanks were pouring in. But within a week much tougher German opposition was being sent to the area, and there was to be no fast, expanding exploitation, as had happened in North Africa and Sicily. There was no second Dieppe, either, to the deep satisfaction of a now vastly grown Canadian Army.

The third D-Day tale was a far less happy one for the Allies: it was the dreadful, grinding slaughter of the American infantry units who landed (or sought to land) on Omaha Beach. The amphibious assault faltered horribly, with tanks, trucks, and overladen men tumbling to the ocean’s bottom. The casualty list is dismal. Only five of the thirty-two amphibious tanks launched way out at sea came ashore, and thirty-two of the fifty howitzers sank with the flat barges that were transporting them. Most soldiers found themselves on the sand with only the weapons they carried, and pushed forward because it was impossible to return into the maelstrom at the water’s edge. They then found the beach obstacles were virtually intact, and the crossfire from the gullies was obliterating. With most of their tanks sunk, the craft carrying their howitzers and cannon washed away, and many of the engineer teams drowned in the overlong watery crossing, the infantry and the Ranger platoons pressed on. The tanks that did land were hit within minutes, although a few bulldozer tanks hacked gaps in the defenses. American destroyers came in as close as 1,000 yards offshore—way too close to possible shore minefields—to fire at the German defenders.

By late morning the rising Atlantic tide cruelly narrowed the strip
of beach still further, crushing new vehicles onto the damaged ones already ashore. The situation was so desperate that when Montgomery learned of it later in the day, he—like Clark at Anzio—briefly considered moving the American follow-on units from Omaha to the British-Canadian beaches; Bradley thought the same, and also wondered about moving the fresh waves of troops onto Utah Beach instead, though one suspects that either change would have led to unimaginable confusion offshore. In fact, the sheer press of numbers (Omaha had 34,000 men and 3,300 vehicles for the initial landing, with a similar total in reserve), the desperate daylong shellings by the U.S. Navy and bombings by the USAAF, and the remarkable work of junior officers and NCOs in reestablishing order eventually cracked the German coastal defenses. The troops got off the bloodied beaches and up to the bluffs, to hold a lodgement only a mile deep. Unless Rommel’s panzers attacked (which they were not permitted to do), the 1st and 29th U.S. Infantry Divisions had made it, at bitter cost. They had not been thrown back into the sea. Still, when Eisenhower and Ramsay anxiously surveyed the beach from their warship later the next day, they were clearly much disturbed at how close it had been, and how confused and precarious things still seemed.