Schwerpunkt: From D-Day to the Fall of the Third Reich (3 page)

Love,

Your brother Harold

So now it’s official. My baby brother is now a man. A man and a soldier.

Japan attacked the United States on December 7, 1941 and a week later, Germany declared war on America. By Christmas of 1941, America had decided that priority would be given to defeating Hitler’s Germany rather than Hirohito’s Japan. As the war progressed, plans for an invasion of northern Europe were prepared. Recognizing that slogging through Italy was not the best way to defeat Germany, those plans centered on Northern France. A seaborne and aerial assault would take place over a 50 mile front on five beaches in Normandy. Which landing site would be used for the invasion was one of the greatest secrets of the War. One masterful plan of deception, code-named Operation Fortitude, lulled the Germans into thinking that General George Patton’s First United States Army Group would lead the invasion at Pas de Calais or that the invasion would come through the coast of Norway.

Operation Overlord was the British name of the Plan to invade and conquer Hitler’s Fortress Europe. The target date for this unbelievable undertaking was the spring of 1944. The main objective as ordered by the Combined Chiefs of Staff was pretty goddamn simple. The order said, “You will enter the continent of Europe and, in conjunction with the other Allied Nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her Armed Forces.” What could be simpler, right? What came out of that “simple” order was to be the destruction of Hitler’s Nazi Germany and the end of the war. But what led up to entering the continent of Europe was a symphony all right...a symphony of egos, logistics, plans and contingency plans, egos, politics and did I mention egos?

Ike was the Supreme Commander over the Allied Expeditionary Forces who would invade continental Europe. The Deputy Supreme Commander was Air Chief Tedder. Ike’s Chief of Staff was Lt. General “Beetle” Smith. Given the three spheres of operations, land, sea and air, it was decided that command of the land troops should be partitioned from the other two. It was also decided that the commander of the land troops would be British. HRA (“His Royal Arrogance”) Bernard Montgomery was chosen for that job even though he had hoped to be named Supreme Commander instead of Eisenhower. Monty was to be in charge of all land troops but only during the assault phase of the landings. Then an American Army Group was to be formed and led by General Bradley. At this point, Montgomery and Bradley were to be equals, each second only to General Eisenhower. Air Chief Marshal Leigh-Mallory was in overall command of all allied air troops. Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay was in charge of all allied naval personnel. These seven men, together with an overall staff of approximately 20,000, planned to the last possible detail, the largest invading force in the history of armed warfare.

Before you send hundreds of thousands of men, thousands of aircraft and thousands of boats across the English Channel, and before you rally thousands of members of the French Resistance into action, you plan. You consider, you reject, you reconsider and you plan some more. That’s what we did from December, 1943 until June 4, 1944. The nuts and bolts of getting men and materiel over the English Channel was monumental. It involved getting something like 170,000 men ashore in one day and bringing in hundreds of thousands more in successive waves. Once they were ashore, these men would need supporting equipment, supplies and material. This all had to be considered and moved up either at or pretty damn close to the time of the actual landings.

Before our landings, we also had to knock out as many German defensive positions as we could. We bombed the major bridges across the Seine River in the east and the Loire River to the south to isolate them. Bridges and railroad tracks and equipment depots were key targets because without these, the Jerries would be hard pressed to bring up their reinforcements. We used the French Resistance to cut communication cables, to destroy railroad lines, and to generally impede German transportation and communication in whatever ways they could. But we couldn’t limit ourselves to wreaking havoc on the Normandy area only or the Krauts could have figured out pretty damn fast just where the invasion would take place. So we bombed almost all of northern France. In fact, we bombed the shit out of northern France, the poor bastards.

The Combined Chiefs of Staff initially planned Operation Overlord for three Allied divisions (to be followed quickly by 12 more) to storm 25 miles of open beaches in the Normandy section of coastal France on May 1, 1944. On December 27, 1943, right after Ike’s appointment as Supreme Commander, Eisenhower, “Beetle” Smith and Montgomery, all met in Algiers and reviewed some of the plan’s shortcomings, not the least of which was the relatively paltry number of soldiers being contemplated for such a huge objective. All three Generals agreed that in order for this plan to have any chance of success, at least five or seven or better yet, up to 10 or 12 divisions would be needed. Eisenhower told Monty to tell the British planners that the three divisions they initially contemplated was far too little and that the planners needed to broaden the base of the attack, even if it meant delaying the initial invasion date of May 1944. Montgomery met with Prime Minister Winston Churchill and eventually the London planners. But in what would become an incredibly annoying habit of his, he had to grab 100% of the spotlight so he told them that HE had first seen the plan on January 1, 1944 and that to HIS way of thinking, the number of men being contemplated was too small. In fairness, Monty did sharpen the initial plan into what was essentially the blueprint for the Operation, but his taking full credit for every change was misleading and disrespectful. Christ on a cross, he can get my goat!

Once Montgomery was appointed to the role of land troop commander, he developed battle plans and stressed the need for us to take and hold cities and positions in order to drive the Germans from France and allow us to move into Germany for the final kill of the Madman’s Third Reich. I have to give him credit. He was good at organizing battle plans and the plan as he finally revised it, called for four or five Corps over a 50 mile wide front spread along the Normandy beaches. It called for one British and one American Army consisting of over 150,000 men to land on five beachheads. Prior to them landing, though, he insisted that Airborne divisions drop behind the defending Germans to draw as much attention away from the beaches as possible. Monty thought, and I know Ike and Bradley agreed, that the landing infantry would be most susceptible to annihilation when they were coming off the boats, making their way to the beaches and while they were fighting to get off the beaches and up the bluffs. It was eventually decided that there would be one British and two U.S. Airborne divisions to tackle the airborne aspect of the plan.

Each one of the divisions and units assigned to each Army had specific tasks to achieve at the earliest possible moment but the first and foremost was to gain control of the roads so further German reinforcements couldn’t get through. I heard it said that our men were to move to their objectives like bats out of hell. It seemed like every few seconds during these planning stages, the commanding generals looked at and studied maps of the Normandy coast. By looking at the maps, even a private could see that if the troops could link up, if the rivers could be secured, and if a couple of principle cities could be taken immediately, the Allieds would definitely be on the right track. We needed a port city so it was planned that the Americans would take Cherbourg and cut off the Cotentin Peninsula to the west of the beaches. Monty planned it so that the Americans would take the section west from the smaller city of Bayeux, including the Peninsula, while the British would take the section east of the larger city of Caen and move towards the Orne River. Inherent in this plan, obviously, was the taking of those cities but here’s yet another example of the world according to Montgomery, as we shall see.

The objectives as set out by Monty were first, to defeat German reserves; second, to capture Caen and its crucial airfields; and third, to take the Cotentin Peninsula and especially the port city of Cherbourg. The big issue with Monty’s plan was that it called for three simultaneous objectives and it split the strength of his British forces in order to accomplish these objectives. Immediate link ups were therefore critical so that the Jerries couldn’t drive a wedge between the split in our forces. There was mass consternation concerning whether this third objective was critical at the initial stage of the landings and several counter plans were floated and considered. Ultimately, however, Monty prevailed in selling his strategy and his three objective plan was accepted. The Go date was set for sometime during the beginning of May 1944 in order to allow for weather related flexibility.

Normandy was chosen as the site of the invasion primarily for three reasons. One was that we did not want to land close to where we knew the Kraut reinforcements were located since we wanted as little initial opposition as possible and Normandy beaches were not nearly as heavily defended as some other possible landing sites. The second reason it was chosen was because the Normandy area was within the range of our aircraft cover and the third was because it was felt that the Normandy location could be kept secret better and longer than the only other real option which was the Pas de Calais area of France across from Dover, England. An extra bonus was that the Normandy beaches were strong enough to support our tanks and half tracks without them sinking into the surf.

Normandy was more than 400 miles from the borders of Germany, so logistically, it would not appear to be a prime place to land given the miles that would then have to be covered and fought over. Calais would have been perfect since we would have been close to our airfields in England, the ships and naval craft we needed for landing our troops and equipment would have less distance to travel on the open waterways, and we would have been closer to the German border which obviously would mean less distance to fight our way through once we landed. But precisely for the reason that Calais was perfect for us, the Krauts had it fortified six ways to Tuesday. Landing there would have been even more suicidal than landing anywhere else. And since the Calais area was thick with Krauts, it would have been impossible to keep our landing plans secret from their prying eyes and ears. Therefore, in what really was a pretty ingenious attempt to outsmart the enemy, we made as much quiet noise as we could about the landing site being at Calais. This “quiet noise” was part of a whole operation in and of itself.

We had been tricking the Jerries into thinking our landing was going to be around Calais for months. We had a plan code named “Operation Fortitude.” The goal of this plan was to misdirect German intelligence about where the landings would take place and to mislead and confuse them on as many of the associated aspects of the invasion as possible. I’m certain we had the Germans convinced that our Allied troop strength was twice as big as it was and I’m pretty certain we had deluded them into thinking the invasion site would be Calais. Our thinking was that the less the Jerries knew about where the actual landing sites would be, the less time they’d have to reinforce those sites which would mean there’d be less of our soldiers who would end up as casualties.

But about a week before the scheduled DDay landing date, we received reports that the Kraut General Rommel had reinforced Caen with the 21
^st
Panzer Division and moved infantry troops into Cherbourg. We were frantically trying to figure out why. Did he know something was afoot? Was it just a lucky guess? The more we discussed it though, the less agitated headquarters became. The Krauts really weren’t fortifying any one area more than another and they did keep two whole divisions by Calais. By moving infantry to one part of northern France and not massing them along with the Panzer division by Caen meant they probably were just hedging their bets. That’s what was decided and though sleep was uneasy that night, no major changes to Overlord were made. We continued our nightly ritual of sending off Allied bombers to do as much damage to the German coastal defenses as we could in the short time remaining before our invading forces landed in Normandy. Oh, and we also listened in on almost all German communications. Nobody, and I mean nobody, knows this but we have a little secret up our sleeve. Well maybe “little” isn’t exactly the best way to describe it since this is probably the most important advantage we have in this whole goddamn war. We get word for word transmission reports from a whole bunch of Kraut commanders.

The Germans are oblivious to the fact that we have been intercepting and cracking their supposedly unbreakable Enigma codes. From earlier in the war we had Enigma machines taken from captured U-Boats as well as code books captured by British and Polish spies. Working with these critical materials, code breakers at England’s Bletchley Park were able to decipher most German Naval orders and transmits and many land and aerial communications as well. Virtually all of the messages sent by the Luftwaffe were Enigma coded. Defensively, it allowed us to take evasive action and not send a convoy of ships where we knew a “Wolf Pack” of German U Boats was waiting. The obvious problem offensively, though, was what to do with the intercepted information. If we reacted to each cracked Enigma message, it would not have taken long for the Germans to know their code had been compromised. It caused a lot of heartbreak, let me tell you, when we knew those Kraut bastards were going to drop bombs or launch attacks and we couldn’t intercept and stop them first. It was an issue that gave every one of us nightmares but it couldn’t be helped for the greater good. Try telling that to some young widow or devastated mother though.