A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (125 page)

Nevertheless, Nazi successes led Stalin’s diplomats to press the British and Americans for immediate relief through an invasion of Europe. As of 1942, neither the United States nor Britain (nor, certainly, the limited Free French or Polish forces that had retreated to England) had nearly enough men or matériel in place to achieve a successful invasion of France from the English Channel. In August 1942 the British tried a mini-invasion, called a reconnaissance-in-force, at Dieppe, which proved a disaster. The debacle did, however, alert Eisenhower to the difficulties of breaching Hitler’s defenses, called the Atlantic Wall, which was a gigantic series of concrete barriers, pillboxes, barbed wire, minefields, and tank traps built by tens of thousands of slave laborers and prisoners of war.

Between January 1942 and July 1943, the war continued on another hidden, but absolutely vital, front. Germany’s U-boats had conducted a devastating undersea war against shipping from America to Britain and the Soviet Union. Whatever industrial might the United States had was meaningless if it was unable to get war materials and food to England and Russia. In January 1942 a German submarine force of only six vessels unleashed a ferocious series of attacks on ships leaving U.S. ports. Many were sunk within sight of the coast, their silhouettes having marked them as easy targets against the lights of the cities. During a six-month period, a handful of U-boats sank 568 Allied ships. Carefully moving his forces around, German Admiral Karl Doenitz kept the Allies off balance, returning to the North Atlantic in November 1942, when many escorts had been diverted to support the landings in Africa. That month, Doenitz’s U-boats sank 117 ships. This rate of sinking exceeded even Henry Kaiser’s incredible capacity to build Liberty Ships.

Finally, under the direction of Admiral Ernest King, a combination of air cover, added escorts (including small carrier escorts that could launch antisubmarine aircraft quickly), and the convoy system, the United States slowly turned the U-boat war around. New location devices—sonar and radar—aided in the search for subs. By May 1943, when thirty U-boats were sunk, the Allies had made the sea-lanes relatively safe. Again, however, only a narrow margin separated victory from defeat: a handful of subs had come close to winning the war in the Atlantic. Had Hitler shifted even a minimal amount of resources to building additional subs in 1941–42, there could have been disastrous consequences for the Allies.

In the meantime, Germany’s success in Africa under General Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox,” had convinced General Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower, commander of the Allied forces in Northwest Africa, that the British plan for retaking North Africa was both necessary and feasible. Ike commanded a multinational force, with the November 1942 landings in Casablanca (French Morocco), Algiers, and Oran (French Algeria) now opening a true second front in Africa. American and British forces now closed in on Rommel from the west, while British general Bernard Montgomery’s Desert Rats of the Eighth Army pushed out from Egypt through Libya in the east. Superior American and British naval power pounded the Germans and Italians from the sea, and Allied control of the air soon left the Axis forces in Africa reeling, leaving them holding only Tunisia. Operation Torch ended any hopes Germany had of extending eastward to link up with the Japanese. In May 1943 more than a quarter of a million German and Italian soldiers surrendered, dealing Hitler his first serious defeat and securing the Mediterranean for Allied navies once and for all. But Allied forces failed to bag the Desert Fox, who escaped to supervise construction of the Atlantic Wall that the Allies would have to breach in June 1944.

Germany’s defeat in North Africa technically opened for Stalin his much-desired second front, but to little avail. Hitler had dedicated no more than a small portion of Germany’s resources to Africa. However, Sicily, and later mainland Italy, now lay open for invasion. In July 1943, after deceiving the Germans with an elaborate hoax involving a corpse that washed ashore in Spain with information that the invasion would occur in Greece, Patton and Montgomery invaded Sicily at different spots on the island. The ruse worked: Hitler had reinforced Greece, and advancing American troops encountered enthusiastic Italian citizens who greeted the liberators with cries of “Down with Mussolini!” and “Long live America!” Italian soldiers surrendered by the thousands, and townspeople threw flowers at GIs and gave them wine and bread. If the Italian army no longer posed a threat to the invaders, the German troops that remained proved far more determined and skillful, mining roads, blowing up bridges, and otherwise successfully delaying the Allied advances long enough to escape back to the Italian mainland.

The defeat on Sicily coincided with increased Italian dissatisfaction with Mussolini and his unpopular war, and it occurred at a pivotal moment during the struggle in the East. Hitler, weighing whether to continue the offensive at Kursk with reinforcements or to divert them to Italy, chose the latter. His concerns about Italian allegiance were well founded. While the forces were en route, Allied aircraft dropped propaganda leaflets urging the Italian people to abandon the regime, and on July 24, 1943, even the Fascist ministers in the Grand Council agreed to hand control of the Italian army back to the king, Victor Emmanuel III, who accepted Mussolini’s resignation. Marshal Pietro Badoglio, Il Duce’s successor, signed an unconditional surrender in September 1943. Germany reacted before the Allies could actually occupy the mainland of Italy or before Mussolini himself could be captured, but the second front had in fact helped ensure Soviet victory at Kursk.

The Nazis’ thirteen divisions—more than 100,000 men—arrived, seized Rome and other major cities, and freed Mussolini from his house arrest, reinstalling him as a puppet dictator. That meant, of course, that Hitler was then calling the shots for all of Italy. German general Albert Kesselring, who directed the German defense, instructed his troops to dig in across the rocky northern part of the country and fortify every pass. Patton’s open-field tank tactics would have been useless even if he had remained in command, but an incident in which he slapped soldiers for cowardice on two separate occasions prompted Eisenhower to discipline him. Patton’s temper tantrum (which his biographer suggests may have been caused by the general’s own battle fatigue) was a blessing in disguise because it saved him from a slow and bloody slog up the Italian coast. Murderous fire and dogged resistance by the Germans delayed the American conquest of Italy, which had other unintended effects. A rapid Italian campaign would have enabled the Anglo-American forces to invade the Balkans, preventing Eastern Europe from falling into the grasp of the Red Army. Instead, Naples fell on September 30, 1943, after which Allied troops plodded inch by inch up the coast, covering less than a hundred miles by June 1944, when Rome was liberated, only two days before the D-Day invasion.

The Longest Day

Thanks to Admiral King’s effective anti-U-boat campaign, and air superiority, by 1943 the United States had turned a trickle of supplies, maintained by a tenuous lifeline through the submarine packs, into a flood that poured through open-ocean pipelines. On any given day, more than thirty convoys were at sea with more than 650 merchant ships and 140 escorts. After midyear, virtually none of the troopships were lost to torpedoes. This stream of materials and men had made possible the invasion of Sicily and Italy, and now it opened the door for the invasion of France.

All along, Roosevelt and Churchill, despite their hopes for a quick surge up the coast of Italy, knew that talk of the “soft underbelly of Europe” was just that, and an invasion of France by sea was necessary. Planners had concluded that an invasion could only occur during summer months, given the tides along the beaches at Normandy where the Allies wanted to land and the weather that would permit air cover. In December 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill appointed General Eisenhower commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), headquartered in London. As a masterful diversion, Patton, who had been languishing in Eisenhower’s doghouse because of his Sicilian slaps, was ordered to set up a vast—and completely phony—“army” poised to attack the Pasde-Calais, exactly where Hitler had determined the Allies would strike. But Ike had other ideas. The real invasion was to occur two hundred miles away, on the beaches of Normandy, where there was more room and fewer German ports or defenses. Operation Overlord involved more than 1.6 million American soldiers as well as British, Canadians, Poles, and Free French.

In retrospect, the invasion seemed destined for success from the outset: the Allies owned the air and sea-lanes; they vastly outnumbered the defenders—some of whom were the unlikeliest of conscripts (including a handful of Korean POWs)—and they had the French and Belgian resistance movements to assist behind the lines. At the time, however, the invasion presented countless dangers and could have collapsed at any of a number of points. Lingering in the minds of Allied planners was the Canadian disaster at Dieppe and the ill-fated landing at Anzio. Churchill worried about another potential catastrophe, perhaps a new Dunkirk, and Ike’s own advisers estimated the odds of success at no better than even.
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Nevertheless, the Allies possessed overwhelming air and sea superiority, large numbers of fresh troops, and the element of surprise. They read the German secret Enigma codes, which provided crucial, often pinpoint, intelligence. The bombing campaign had already severely winnowed not only the Luftwaffe, but the regular army and defensive positions. Both the British and American forces had good field commanders like General Montgomery, General Omar Bradley, and Lieutenant General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the son of President Teddy Roosevelt. Facing them, the German commander was no less than the famed Desert Fox, Rommel himself, who had organized a thorough network of coastal defenses including mines, barbed wire, tank traps, bunkers, and pillboxes—all topped off with a series of trenches running along the high ground above the beaches. Rommel had strenuously argued for concentrating his forces—including the reserves of Panzers—close to the beaches and fighting at the water’s edge. His superior, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, favored allowing the enemy to land, then striking before they could consolidate. As a result, the Germans had infantry at the beaches, tanks in the rear, and little coordination between them. Rommel appreciated the difficulty of the situation and prophesied that there would only be one chance to defeat the invasion, and perhaps, decide the entire war: “The war will be won or lost on the beaches…. We’ll have only one chance to stop the enemy and that’s while he’s in the water.” It would be, he observed, “the longest day” of the war.
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Eisenhower had to consider another enemy: the weather, which could do as much damage to the invasion fleet as the Germans. On June fourth, when he had originally planned to launch Overlord, strong winds, rain, and waves scuttled the landings. Weather forecasts suggested that they had a thirty-six-hour window to invade, or risk delaying another month, and that, in turn, could hang up Allied troops on the Siegfried line in winter.

More than 2,700 ships headed across the Channel, and on the night of June fifth, thousands of airborne and glider troops of the 101st Airborne and 82nd Airborne dropped in behind the beaches to disrupt communications and transportation, and to hold key bridges. Although some units were blown as far as thirty-five miles off course by high winds, most of them secured the important causeways and bridges, aided by thousands of human-looking one-third-scale dummy paratroopers that fell from the sky along with the real soldiers. The dummies contributed to the confusion and chaos of German forces holding key towns. Next, at dawn on D-Day, June 6, 1944, came more than 11,000 aircraft, pounding targets and raining bombs onto the German positions. Unfortunately, clouds and smoke obscured the targets, and the air cover contributed little to relieving the hell on the beaches when the first units went ashore.

Fighting on parts of Omaha Beach proved particularly gruesome. Hundreds of men drowned in the choppy Channel water; German gunners peppered the ramps of the landing boats with machine-gun and sniper fire even before they dropped, pinning the helpless men behind the dead and wounded in front of them; and a murderous cross fire slaughtered 197 out of 205 men in a single rifle company. Even if the men leaped over the side of the Higgins boats, the rain of fire from the bluffs raked the water mercilessly—if the weight of their own packs and equipment did not drown them first. All the troops could do was frantically run or crawl to the sand dunes at the base of the Atlantic Wall, where they were temporarily immune from fire, but where they also remained helpless to strike back. One heroic tank group, whose Higgins boat was unable to get any closer than three miles from shore, insisted on plunging into the water. All the tankers drowned trying to reach land.

Meanwhile, those trapped ashore had to attack or die. Rising as if one, thousands of Americans on the beaches rose at the urging of brave captains, lieutenants, and sergeants and assaulted the defenses. One colonel urged his men on, screaming, “There are only two kinds of people on this beach. Those who are dead and those who will be. Move in!”
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Slowly, the enemy positions collapsed, and as each fell, the overlapping fields of fire vanished, allowing still more GIs to pour ashore. By the end of the day, Allied beachheads penetrated as far inland as seven miles. What Rommel had predicted would be the longest day of the war was over, and the Allies held the field, but more than 10,000 Allied soldiers were dead or wounded. Despite the carnage on Omaha, however, the inability of the Atlantic Wall to contain the invaders had to be considered one of the greatest military failures of the war.

Churchill hailed the invasion. “What a plan!” he said to Parliament, and even Stalin called the invasion unprecedented in history, with its “vast conception and its orderly execution.”
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All along, though, Ike had known that the Normandy invasion contained enormous risks for potential disaster. He had therefore drafted a statement in the afternoon of June fifth, hours before the first airborne troops would touch European soil: “Our landings…have failed and I have withdrawn the troops…. Any blame…is mine alone.”
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In failure Eisenhower was willing to shoulder all the blame, yet in victory he gladly shared credit with his commanders and his troops. “It just shows what free men will do rather than be slaves,” he told reporter Walter Cronkite in 1964.
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