A World at Arms (132 page)

In the process of advancing from their positions of May to the end of their offensives in early November, the Allies captured the airfields north of Rome, which had been one of their key objectives. They also released the American and French divisions needed for the invasion of southern France at American insistence and over vehement objections from the British. Whether driving the Germans out of central Italy was worth the cost is at least open to argument; that the alternative to “Anvil,” a push into northern Italy and into the Alps toward Austria would have gotten anywhere, is beyond belief. As Stalin had tried to point out to Churchill at Teheran, there were some very high mountains barring that route into Central Europe. Nothing suggests that the armies which had encountered such obstacles in the rugged terrain of Italy, perfectly suited to the needs of the defending Germans, would have found it easy to fight their way up the Alps. The spring offensive in Italy had, however, made it impossible for the Germans to move units from their 10th and 14th Armies out of Italy to meet the dangers looming in France, and in this fashion contributed to the general strain on their military resources as the latter faced the cross-Channel threat.

There the leaders, the soldiers, and the people on both sides looked toward the great invasion which was expected to take place in 1944.
The British and Americans had originally committed themselves to one landing on the Channel coast in May to be accompanied or followed soon after by another on the Mediterranean coast of France. A number of major issues had to be solved to convert these hopes and plans into reality. The staff under General Morgan (COSSAC) had been gathering detailed information and developing plans for months; whatever changes were made later, these provided the basis for all subsequent work. Eisenhower had been made the overall commander with Montgomery to lead the ground forces in the assault,
²⁴
while Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay headed the naval and Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory the air contingents. The British Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder was made Eisenhower’s deputy. Though in the end working together, these individuals often clashed; Montgomery and Leigh-Mallory were evidently very difficult men who had troubles cooperating effectively with high ranking officers of any service or nationality. Fortunately Montgomery’s Chief of Staff, General Francis (Freddie) de Guingand, was superb at working with everybody, and Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal, the Chief of the Air Staff, managed to control Leigh-Mallory. He also helped solve one of the most contentious issues, that of the role of the strategic air forces in relation to the invasion. Hoping to win the war on their own and skeptical of the likely success of the invasion, the British Bomber Command and the American 8th and 15th Air Forces preferred to operate independently against targets they considered of strategic importance–industrial cities for Bomber Command and the aircraft industry, later the synthetic oil industry, for the Americans. After endless bickering, the strategic air forces were temporarily subordinated to Eisenhower, especially for the bombing of transportation targets.
²⁵

The issue of transportation was tied closely to the basic needs of a successful invasion. On the one hand, the Allied landing force had to be large enough and strong enough to seize a substantial beachhead against what was certain to be energetic resistance. This had led to the expansion of the anticipated assault force from three to five divisions supported by three rather than one or two airborne divisions.
^c
The greater shipping needs for such an assault and the patent difficulties of the Anzio landing had led to a postponement of the planned invasion from May to June, with dates at the beginning and the middle of the month feasible in view of tides and other technical considerations. But an even larger assault would be launched against an enemy whose forces in the West, over fifty divisions, were certain to be vastly greater than
those which could be landed in the initial phase of the invasion. Any hopes of success–and it is too often forgotten how many doubted that these were great–rested on keeping down the rate at which the Germans could reinforce the point at which the landing had taken place; and systematic attacks on the transportation system of France were an obvious way to assist with this objective. As already mentioned, the transportation bombing plan was approved and implemented; it proved more effective than its opponents had expected and caused fewer French civilian casualties than an anxious British government had feared. Even while that bombing operation was under way, the American air force began a systematic effort to disrupt Germany’s petroleum supplies through massive and repeated attacks on her synthetic oil installations; over time this program would have a major effect on German air operations, pilot training, and mobility in general.

A second key factor in making an invasion feasible by keeping German reinforcements away was, of course, the existence of other fronts at which Germany had to keep substantial forces or deliberately run great risks. Some German divisions were in Italy and some in the Balkans, but in the middle of 1944 about half were on the Eastern Front. The maintenance of Soviet pressure in the East was a prerequisite for any landing in the West in 1944, and the promised Soviet summer offensive was expected to keep the Germans from moving any large units from the Eastern Front to the West once the battle there was joined–as in fact happened.
²⁶
Whatever some of his generals thought and whatever he had himself said, Hitler was simply not prepared to make a major sacrifice of territory deliberately in the East in order to send to the West the massive reinforcements which would have been needed for a successful defense.
²⁷

The third essential factor in keeping the Germans from concentrating overwhelming forces against the invaders was to deceive them into believing that more than one landing on the Channel coast was planned. The Allies had decided very early that Normandy was the correct place to land; it was more difficult for the Germans to concentrate their troops there, it was within land-based fighter range, it could be reached by over–night shipping runs, and it offered a way of coping with the harbor issue that would also fool the Germans and is reviewed subsequently. But one very important way to protect a beachhead landing there from being overwhelmed was to encourage the Germans to believe that this landing was only the first of two, with the main one yet to come in the Pas de Calais area, the narrowest part of the Channel and the closest to Germany. Any landing at the latter point would not only run into the strongest German defenses but could not possibly be portrayed as a feint
to shield the major landing elsewhere. What the Allies therefore had to do and did was to create over time a whole series of notional divisions, corps, armies and one Army Group; with one army, the British 4th, being ostensibly slated to invade Norway, while the fake 1st United States Army Group (FUSAG) would invade France near Calais.
^d

The deception operation (“Bodyguard”) was conducted on a very large scale with the direct operational parts under the code–names “Fortitude North” (Norway) and “South” (Calais). The project was carefully worked out, continually monitored, and almost unbelievably successful.
²⁸
In brief outline, it involved the slow buildup of a complex of imaginary headquarters with both radio traffic for the Germans to locate and attempt to analyze and commanders who really existed. Of the latter, Lt. General Patton of FUSAG was by far the best known; and when he was sent to Normandy to command the 3rd Army, he was replaced at FUSAG by the commanding general of the Army Ground Forces, Lt. General Leslie J. McNair. When McNair was killed by an Allied bomb dropped short on July 25, the highest ranking American officer killed in World War II was in turn replaced by Lt. General John L. De Witt, until then head of the Western Defense Command.
²⁹

The effectiveness of the deception was reinforced by the fact that every German spy in the United Kingdom had been captured by the British and, if not executed, had been turned around so that a stream of erroneous information was fed to the Germans both before and after the day of the invasion, with special emphasis on the concept that the Normandy landing was a diversion before the main invasion yet to come in the Calais area, thereby keeping units of the German 15th Army there from being sent to reinforce the 7th Army fighting for its life in Normandy. The Allies were able to monitor the effectiveness of the deception and to time the messages from the agents who worked for them but were believed by the Germans to be their own, because of the earlier break into the enigma code systems.
^e
Allied ability to decrypt had more than kept up with the German refinements in encrypting, so that at critical times during the “Overlord” operation -when the Germans were especially pressed for time and hence resorted to radio communications–the Allies could determine whether or not the deception was working.

While the pretended project to invade Norway did not look entirely
convincing (though no divisions were for a long time removed from there and a special force of German submarines was collected and stationed off the Norwegian coast), the deception worked well because the Germans were prepared to believe it. They readily accepted the existence and location of the extra units in southeast England and were therefore certain that an attack in the Calais area was corning: there were simply too many divisions in England and on the way from the United States to be accounted for. Furthermore, the Germans had an excessively high estimate of the assault shipping available to the Allies, so that the five division assault in Normandy did not look like the main invasion to them. Finally, the Dieppe experience led the two sides to very different conclusions. The Germans decided that their key task was to defend the ports, which the Allies would obviously need to supply their invasion forces. The emphasis in the massive program of fortifying the coast of France and Belgium was therefore on the ports; this is where the mass of artillery and fortifications was located.
³⁰
The hope was that an Allied effort to seize a major port could be foiled, and that without a port to bring in supplies and reinforcements any beachhead could be destroyed.

The Allies had drawn a rather different conclusion from the Dieppe fiasco. Instead of assaulting a heavily defended port, they would land on beaches, bring their own harbors with them and seize a port
after
consolidating their beachhead. Enormous segments of breakwaters were built of concrete in English ports to be towed across the Channel and sunk in place, together with a large number of old ships, to build two artificial harbors, called “Mulberries,” on the French coast, one for the British and Canadian forces, one for the Americans. Floating causeways inside these harbors would facilitate unloading. Once a major lodgement had been secured, the Allied forces would strike out to obtain ports, first Cherbourg and then the Brittany harbors; but for a long time the Mulberries would provide adequate facilities. By the time the Germans began to get an inkling of this extraordinary development, it was far too late to alter their defense arrangements even if they had fully understood the import of the new device.
³¹
As for the other new supply scheme of the Allies, the pipeline to be laid under the ocean (“Pluto”) for pumping gasoline to the beachhead, the Germans did not have even an inkling.
³²

With these misunderstandings and delusions, the Germans expected one or more diversionary attacks, most likely including one in Normandy, followed by the main assault in the Calais area. Even after the Normandy landing, this continued to be the German belief all during June and July; it was only at the end of July that it began to dawn on them that no landing in the Pas de Calais area was planned at all. By that time, it was
too late to move reinforcements from there to the invasion front, which was about to be ruptured by the American breakout at its western end.
³³

Both sides faced added problems. On the Allied side, there were those of security, de Gaulle, and broader dedication to the whole project. The strictest rules were developed and rigidly enforced to protect the plans and intentions of the invasion; although causing some hardships and frictions, the security measures proved effective. Even the disaster costing hundreds of lives when German E-Boats ripped into an unescorted landing exercise in Lyme Bay on April 26 did not give the Germans any solid information.
³⁴
What bits of accurate information leaked out were drowned in an ocean of rumors and deliberate misinformation.

There was considerable friction with Charles de Gaulle who, unlike Montgomery, was not blessed with a Chief of Staff capable of working with a variety of British and American leaders. In the preparations for the invasion, the very magnitude of the effort that others had to make to rescue France from German domination made the French leader all the more determined to be as stubborn and difficult as possible, while the enormous risk they were running made the British and Americans especially reluctant to defer to his wishes or to endanger the secrecy of their intentions. Even as de Gaulle successfully consolidated his hold on French North Africa, the relationship with London and Washington remained strained. The Americans, however, were now coming around to a tacit recognition of de Gaulle’s effective control of the French resistance which could assist the invasion. In practice Eisenhower was empowered by Roosevelt to deal with de Gaulle’s newly established French Committee of National Liberation as the de facto regime; and while this in no way smoothed dealings with it or him, it both facilitated some practical cooperation and greatly helped de Gaulle take over control of the country as it was liberated from the Germans.
³⁵

The basic commitment of the Allies to the invasion was perhaps more at risk than often realized. Churchill, with nightmares of the Channel running red with blood, a new Dunkirk, and the end of Britain’s role in the war as well as his own role as its Prime Minister, had been doubtful for a long time. In April he was still complaining about an operation “forced upon us by the Russians and by the United States Military authorities”;
³⁶
it was only at the final review of the invasion plans on May 15, in which Montgomery played a major role, that he described himself as “hardening toward this enterprise.”
³⁷
He continued to oppose the planned landing in southern France, as did Brooke and Montgomery, and that project was postponed until August to assure adequate landing ships for Overlord. But for the Americans who saw the need for port facilities to supply the assault into Germany itself as well as the need to
feed into France the French divisions being formed in Italy and North Africa, there could be no abandonment of that project. For them, and especially for Roosevelt and Marshall, there was in addition the combined pressure of MacArthur and King for expanding operations in the Pacific and the preference of large segments of the American public for a Pacific First strategy. If in a Presidential election year the United States did not mount a truly major offensive in Europe, the push for deployment elsewhere would become overwhelming. It remains curious that the British, who were so certain that the Europe First strategy was correct, never did appreciate that for the Americans this strategic priority necessarily meant a massive invasion, not puttering around the edges. And if Churchill ever had the forebodings about the Soviet Union which have often been attributed to him, could he really conceive of slogging up the Italian peninsula–to say nothing of climbing over every mountain ridge in the Balkans-while the Red Army liberated Central and Western Europe?