A World at Arms (133 page)

The air force leaders were still doubtful about the whole enterprise but their broader reservations had been silenced. Many of them were not well attuned to cooperating with the ground forces, but they would try. On one aspect opposition remained strong. Fearing enormous casualties to the American airborne landing on the right flank of the invasion, Leigh-Mallory urged first orally and then in writing that this project be dropped. Since it was held essential to the westernmost of the landings–and hence to the whole broad assault scheme-Eisenhower overruled him and kept to the original plan; it is not a coincidence that the famous picture of the Supreme Allied Commander on the night before D-Day shows him with some of the paratroopers about to emplane for their flight across the Channel.
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The basic commitment to the operation, with the President and eventually Churchill behind him, was very carefully orchestrated by Eisenhower himself. He had been in charge of the landings in Northwest Africa; his theater command had directed the invasions of Sicily and the mainland of Italy. Now it was his job to repeat the performance, hopefully successfully.
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There were certainly no doubts or hesitations in Montgomery’s thinking once the plan for the invasion had been altered in the way he as well as Eisenhower wanted. Montgomery had put his heart and soul into the enterprise, had exhorted, inspired, and cajoled the troops, had insisted on more training and more supplies, had supported the use of the new kinds of floating tanks and other devices
developed by the inspired General Sir Percy C.S. Hobart in his 79th Armored Division, and took a certain personal satisfaction out of once again facing his old enemy Rommel, now commanding the German Army Group B, about to be attacked by his own 21st Army Group. He had beaten Rommel once, and he was confident of doing so again.

The full backing of the United States and British governments for “Overlord” was dramatically illustrated by the enormous commitment of men–over a million–along with thousands of ships and planes to the enterprise. If this was clear to any observer of the English countryside then and in pictures now–pictures which suggest truth for the joke that only the barrage balloons kept the island from sinking into the ocean under the weight of stowed weapons and supplies–it is also evident both in retrospect from the then secret evidence and from any comparison with the German side by the command arrangement. All depended on the weather to go ahead and the fortunes of battle if the word were given. For the latter, the Chiefs of Staff of both powers were gathering; if the invasion faltered, they would make whatever decisions needed to be made to retrieve disaster. But the decision to go ahead was Eisenhower’s own; he was to consult his weather forecasters and his military subordinates, but he did not have to ask anyone for agreement to give the order for the invasion.

The full authority without the need to check with military or political superiors proved of even greater importance than anyone might have anticipated. The weather forecast for June 5 turned out to be horrendous, with strong winds and dark clouds the preceding night. The invasion had to be postponed. But the weather experts detected a coming short interval of good weather, and on this basis, Eisenhower decided, with his land, air and naval commanders concurring, that the invasion should go ahead rather than wait another two weeks. The Allied domination of the North Atlantic enabled them to detect this slight break in the weather; but the Germans, whose weather stations in Greenland and Canada had been destroyed, whose weather reporting ships had been swept out of the Atlantic, and who could no longer send out long-range airplanes for weather reconnaissance, were ignorant of it. All they saw was the wretched weather which had forced the postponement, and they concluded that there was no prospect of an invasion before the middle of June or early July. Air and sea reconnaissance over and in the Channel were called off, and the coastal radar stations had been knocked out by Allied air attacks. The German commanders were either on leave or at conferences away from their posts–they thought there was plenty of time when in fact thousands of Allied ships were heading for the French coast. German intelligence knew the Allied codes used to alert the
French underground and intercepted these messages, but the skeptics could not believe that the Allies were coming when the weather was so obviously unsuitable. The commitment which empowered Eisenhower to grasp the weather window of opportunity enabled the Allies to gain the enormous advantage of surprise.

The Germans had been working for years on their defenses and were very confident of their ability to crush an invasion attempt. If they could come close to foiling the Allies at Salerno and Anzio, they could certainly succeed where they already had in place large forces, extensive fortifications and the ability to mass very substantial reinforcements. They had, however, significant problems as well. The navy was small and could only send submarines and E-Boats against any invading armada; in the event these proved even less effective than the low expectations of the Germans. The coastal artillery was large in number, and often large in caliber, but much of it was in the Pas de Calais area and around the ports (and the large guns could not, of course, be moved. out of their enormous emplacements). The air force had just lost many of its bombers in the “Baby Blitz” and many of its fighters in “Big Week.” Again, in the event the Luftwaffe also could do even less than the little expected of it.

Even the army, always Germany’s strongest arm, had its difficulties. The long war in the East had drained the military of many of its best officers and men. The forces in the West included a number of fine armored and infantry divisions, but a large proportion of the 58 divisions under the Commander-in-Chief West were second-rate.
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Furthermore, in the fall of 1943 the Germans had transferred the bulk of the units recruited from Soviet prisoners of war and in the occupied U.S.S.R. to the West, out of fear that with the turning tide in the East, they might not be reliable there. That, however, meant that the majority of German divisions in France had at least one battalion of “Eastern troops” (Osttruppen), soldiers whose enthusiasm for fighting the Western Allies was not likely to be high. There were even stranger oddities in the among prisoners captured in North Africa and Italy and nominally a portion of Bose’s Indian National Army, was no more likely to succeed in helping hold up an invasion of France than their associates tied to the Japanese army had been in invading India from Burma.
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It is not likely that Bose’s sending Hitler his best wishes for defeating the American and British invaders provided much more than comic relief.
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The Germans suffered not only from shortages of troops and equipment but also from an excess of commanders who could neither agree on what to do nor had the authority to do whatever they preferred with
the speed required by circumstances. The expectation of invasion had led to the buildup of German headquarters as well as units. Nominally under the Commander-in-Chief West, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, Army Group B, led by Field Marshal Rommel, commanded the 7th and 15th Armies on the Channel coast; Army Group G of General Johannes Blaskowitz with the 1st and 19th Armies was to defend the Biscay and Mediterranean coasts.
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Directly under the Commander-in-Chief West was a Panzer Group West under General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg. Rommel and Geyr, however, did not agree on the best way to deal with an invasion. Rommel believed that the landing troops must be crushed quickly and wanted the armored divisions stationed close to the coast; Geyr believed that they ought to be held back in a substantial block to be employed against the beachhead once it was clear where the main landing had occurred. Rundstedt tried to work out a compromise, but the real effect of the squabbling was that the armored divisions were divided, with three assigned to each Army Group but susceptible of being switched to the other, while four were held back as a mobile reserve to be sent to the critical point–but in Panzer Group West at the orders of Hitler and the high command of the armed forces (OKW),
not
the Commander-in-Chief West.
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When this confusion in command was paired with successful strategic deception by the Allies, which left the Germans mistaken about the location of the main landing for weeks after the Normandy landing, and tactical surprise because of ignorance of the weather, the prospects for the German defenders were far less than they might have been–and the risks for the invaders in the face of overwhelming German numerical superiority in men, guns, and armor in the initial stages of invasion not as great as originally believed.
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INVASION IN THE WEST

In the night of June 5–6, while the huge convoys accompanied by six battleships, twenty–three cruisers and eighty destroyers assembled in the Channel for the initial landings, the three airborne divisions were being flown overhead to their drop zones. Dummy parachutists were dropped at several locations to confuse the Germans as the British 6th Airborne Division landed on the eastern flank to secure bridgeheads over the
Orne canal and river, while the American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions were coming down on the western flank to make sure the troops landing at “Utah” beach, the westernmost of the five, could break into the open rather than being contained easily on the coast. The airborne landings were on the whole successful; in spite of substantial casualties, the main objectives were reached on both flanks and without the disaster Leigh-Mallory had anticipated. The British seized a bridge–head east of the Orne river and took key bridges by landing gliders right at them. The American parachutists were somewhat scattered but contributed by that very scattering to the confusion among the Germans. The American soldiers who survived the descent and first hours quickly created points of control inland for the troops which had in the meantime landed on Utah beach.

On the beaches, everything went much better than hoped for on the three British and Canadian sites, Gold, Juno and Sword, and at Utah beach of the American landings. At none of these four could the Allies advance inland on the first day as far as they had hoped, but substantial gains were made with losses below what had been anticipated. The surprised Germans were overwhelmed by the combination of preliminary bombardment from air and sea and the force of the assault. Only at Omaha beach, where the Germans had just moved in an additional first–rate division at the last moment, was there serious trouble for the Americans. As casualties mounted and units at sea could not land, while the soldiers ashore had difficulties pushing off the beaches, the situation looked bad for several hours. By noon, however, brave men with strong naval gunfire support were pushing off the beaches at the same time as the Germans thought they had won and brought in no reinforcements. As at Gela and Salerno, the soldiers held and pushed on; by the end of June 6, the Allies were ashore and beginning a rapid buildup of troops, equipment and supplies.
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The key question that day and in the immediately following days was whether the Allies or the Germans could bring additional forces to the fighting more rapidly, and especially whether a coordinated German counter–attack could drive in at least one of the beachheads. Although the Allies fell short of their D-Day objectives and did not succeed in joining their five beachheads into an effective continuous front until June 12, they were steadily if slowly pushing the Germans back. By the time of the great storm of June 19 which destroyed one of the two Mulberry harbors, the Germans had lost their chance of driving the Allies into the sea and were instead obliged to try to contain them–ironically at the very moment that the Americans had already begun their own offensive to cut off the Cherbourg peninsula.

The Allied success in establishing themselves and holding off the German counter-attacks at a time when the Germans had overwhelming superiority in troops, guns, and tanks in the West was due to the combination of several factors. German reaction to the initial landing was slow and hesitant; unwilling to believe that the decisive moment was really at hand in spite of the bad weather, the Germans dithered for hours with the higher military leaders absent from their posts or unwilling to take chances, Hitler literally asleep and not to be woken up, and Jodl determined that the OKW would not allow Rundstedt and Rommel to commit the armored reserve under its control. All this changed by the afternoon of D-Day and thereafter, but by then it was too late. The reinforcements dribbled into the invasion front were never enough, and the Allied air forces as well as the sabotage efforts of the French resistance and Allied special teams slowed down whatever was sent.
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The German armored divisions, therefore, arrived one at a time and quite slowly, were never able to punch through, and ended up becoming mired in positional warfare because they continued to be needed at the front in the absence of infantry divisions to replace them on the spot. The pressure of the Allies was such as to keep the Germans constantly stretched–especially because the latter continued to believe that the main Allied landing was still to come in the Pas de Calais area. This successful deception kept the bulk of the 15th Army, the largest German army in the West, poised to ward off a landing which never came, while the 7th Army was trying to cope with the concentrated might of the Allies.

Once successfully ashore, the Allies had planned to strike across the Cotentin peninsula to isolate and then capture Cherbourg. This assignment went to the Americans while the British on the left flank, by their location at the edge of good open tank country to the south and east–and hence the threat of rapid exploitation–drew to themselves the majority of the German armored divisions and other reinforcements sent to the front. The attack westward by the American VII Corps began on June 10, gathered speed on the 14th, and had reached the coast on the 18th, thus cutting the peninsula and Cherbourg off from possible reinforcement. The first days of this fighting had been slow and bitter as the Germans held desperately to each hedgerow surrounding each little field, but, as the Americans pushed on, the Germans had not only heavier losses but no replacements. Confused orders, some from Hitler personally, as to whether the defending forces were to retreat north toward Cherbourg or south to retain contact with the rest of the German front, made it easier for the VII Corps, which immediately headed north, feeding newly arrived divisions into the push toward Cherbourg.