D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (16 page)

In Bayeux, the action code for M. Mercader's unit was "It is hot in Suez," followed by "The dice are on the carpet." He recalled the day he heard them over the BBC: "In Bayeux, in my cellar, the radio was on. At 6:30 p.m., the first message said: 'It is hot in Suez. It is hot in Suez.' Twice. Then a definite silence. Then, 'The dice are on the carpet. The dice are on the carpet.' Twice again, as well as other messages which didn't concern us. Stunned by listening to these messages, an instant of emotion invaded me, but quickly enough, I came to myself and after having turned off the radio and climbing the steps from the cellar four at a time, I informed in the first place my wife of what I had heard. I then took my bicycle and went to contact my principal responsible people of an imminent landing. The night was going to be long."
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SHAEF considered limiting the sabotage activity on D-Day to lower Normandy. A strong argument for doing so was to wait in other regions until the destruction of bridges would be immediately helpful to the AEF. This applied especially to the south of France, where another landing was scheduled for mid-August. Further, if the Resistance went into action all across France, it would expose its members to identification and capture by the Germans, who meanwhile would have time to repair the damage. Those arguments gave way to the view that it was preferable to obtain the maximum amount of chaos behind enemy lines at the moment of landing, and anyway SHAEF figured that it would be impossible to keep the various Resistance groups quiet after the news of D-Day broke.

Anthony Brooks, a twenty-year-old Englishman who had grown up in French-speaking Switzerland and had been studying in France when the war began, was in 1944 an SOE agent in southern France, near Toulouse. He had been receiving airdrops of explosives, which he distributed to his Resistance people, who hid them in cesspools or even on locomotives when the drivers were Resistance. ("We would hide the explosives on an electric locomotive," he recalled, "and no German soldier is going to open up a thing that says 16,000 volts on it and it has got a key.") Some went

into lavatory water tanks; they would hold up to twenty kilos of explosive. Like most SOE agents, Brooks found that his recruits were impatient, eager for action, so "we had to let them blow up trains every now and again even if it was too soon and we had no orders. Every now and again we derailed the wrong one and we had some bad press you might say and one train we derailed was a Swiss Red Cross train and there were four enormous vans full of eggs and people were trying to scoop the yolks out of the river to make omelets and cursing us all the while."
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In April 1944, the 2nd SS Panzer Division (the
Das Reich)
moved into a town near Toulouse named Montauban. It was refitting after hard service on the Eastern Front, receiving brand new tanks, Tigers, the biggest and best Germany could produce. The tanks were gas-guzzlers (Tigers weighed sixty-three tons and got one-half mile to the gallon). They were subject to mechanical problems. They had only steel tracks, which wore out quickly on highway travel. Therefore the Germans always moved the Tigers for any distance on railroad cars. The Tigers were concentrated in Montauban and kept under heavy guard. The railway cars they rode on were hidden in village railway sidings round Montauban, each concealed by a couple of worn-out French trucks dumped on top. These transporter cars were unguarded.

Brooks put his subagents to work. One of them was a beautiful young sixteen-year-old girl named Tetty "who was the daughter of the local boss who ran a garage and she had long ringlets and her mother was always smacking her and telling her not to play with them." All through May, Tetty and her boyfriend, her fourteen-year-old sister, and others sallied out after dark by bicycle to the cars, where they siphoned off all the axle oil, replacing it with an abrasive powder parachuted in by SOE. Brooks told Tetty and the others to throw away the oil, but "of course the French said it was ludicrous to throw away this beautiful green oil so they salvaged it as it was real high quality motor oil" that fetched a fine price on the black market.

On D-Day, the
Das Reich
got orders to move out for Normandy. The Germans loaded their Tigers onto the railway cars. Every car seized up before they reached Montauban. The damage was so extensive to the cars' axles that they could not be repaired. It was a week before the division found alternative cars, in Peri-gueux, a hundred kilometers away—bad luck for the tanks' tracks and fuel supply. The Resistance harassed the division from Mon-

tauban to Perigueux. As a consequence the
Das Reich,
expected by Rommel in Normandy by D plus three or four, actually arrived on D plus seventeen. Furthermore, as Brooks notes with a certain satisfaction, "No train went north of Montauban after the night of the Fifth of June until it went out flying the French flag or the Union Jack."
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The contributions of the paratroops on the night before D-Day, and of the bombers and the Resistance in the weeks before D-Day, cannot be appraised with precision. But it is clear that while Eisenhower never had to worry about his rear, Rommel always did.

6

PLANNING AND PREPARING

According to General Eisenhower, before the battle is joined plans are everything.' As supreme commander, he directed a planning operation that seemed infinite in scope, was complex almost beyond description, and on which the outcome of the war depended. He insisted on and got an all-out effort from staff officers at SHAEF down through Twenty-first Army Group (Montgomery's headquarters), British Second and American First armies, the corps, divisions, battalions, and companies, and all levels of staff at the various air force, navy, and coast guard commands. As a result, Overlord was the most thoroughly planned amphibious operation in history.

When Eisenhower visited Bradley's headquarters, he told the officers, "This operation is not being planned with any alternatives. This operation is planned as a victory, and that's the way it's going to be. We're going down there, and we're throwing everything we have into it, and we're going to make it a success."

(In a 1964 interview with Walter Cronkite, Eisenhower repeated those words. He spoke with intensity, frowning a bit, giving some reminder of the power of his voice, body posture, attitude, and aura of certainty and command that he had displayed in 1944. Then he visibly relaxed, let that shy grin creep up the corner of his

mouth, and added, "But there's nothing certain in war. Unless you can put a battalion against a squad, nothing is certain."
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)

The job of the planners was to make certain of as much as possible. To do that they needed to be in constant touch with troops in the field, monitoring the results of exercises and training maneuvers to decide what would work, what might work, and what wouldn't work. They had to put all that information together with the input from the other services to come up with a comprehensive plan that everyone agreed to.

The process started at the top and worked down. Eisenhower decided where and when. To deal with the objection that adding the Cotentin (Utah Beach) would be too costly because of the flooded areas behind the beach, Eisenhower's chief of staff, General Smith, suggested using airborne divisions to seize the causeways leading inland over the flooded areas. There was intense opposition from the airborne commanders, but Eisenhower ruled for Smith.
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By late January, Eisenhower's basic decisions were in place. On February 25 Bradley's headquarters had an outline plan drawn up; British Second Army had one completed a month later. The process moved down to corps, division, regiment, battalion levels.

Gen. Freddie de Guingand, Montgomery's chief of staff, recalled that right along the chain of command "nothing was ever proposed that didn't meet with heated opposition." If corps wanted it, division didn't. If the army proposed something and the navy agreed, the air force was sure to object.

De Guingand reported that it was Monty's Twenty-first Army Group staff that made the decision to send the DD tanks (the swimming tanks) in on the first wave, with naval guns firing over their heads. "Our reasons for using DD tanks in the van were to achieve an element of surprise which might be effective in demoralizing the enemy; also they would provide rallying points for the infantry."
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At the higher levels, the temptation to reach down to solve lower echelons' problems was great, but it was overcome. General de Guingand explained, "At first we all tried to discover a school solution to the composition of the assault waves—guns, engineers, tanks, infantry, in what order, where, etc., but after the first training rehearsal we decided the notion of a single formula was nonsense and we let the particular assault section solve its own problem."
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"Its own problem" depended on the nature of the defensive works facing the particular corps, division, regiment, battalion. Each had a different problem, depending on the shape of the beach it would assault, and even more on Rommel's defensive works. But Rommel could not plan, only prepare. Planning made possible a concentration of energy and force, but it required a knowledge of where and when that Rommel did not have. Preparation for an attack anywhere required a dispersal of energy and force.

On every beach that was remotely suitable for an amphibious landing, Rommel built defenses. Offshore, the Germans' first line of defense consisted of mines anchored in the Channel, not enough to satisfy Rommel but enough to cause a major problem for the Allied navies. Onshore, the defenses differed to suit local terrain conditions, but the beach obstacles on the tidal flat between the high- and low-water marks were similar on Omaha, Utah, and the British beaches.

The tidal-flat obstacles began with so-called Belgian gates, which were gatelike structures built of iron frames ten feet high. These sat in belts running parallel to the coastline, about 150 meters out from the high-water line. Teller mines (antitank mines carrying twelve pounds of TNT) were attached to the structures, or old French artillery shells, brought in from the Maginot Line, pointed out to sea and primed to fire. Admiral Ruge had no faith in land mines and artillery shells stuck underwater, as they had no waterproofing, but the marine mines he preferred were not available in sufficient quantity.
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Next, at about 100 meters out from the high-water mark, a band of heavy logs were driven into the water at an angle pointed seaward, with Teller mines lashed to the tips of some of the logs. At about seventy meters from shore, the main belt of obstacles featured hedgehogs (three or four steel rails cut in two-meter lengths and welded together at their centers) that could rip out the bottom of any landing craft.

Rommel bestrode France like a colossus. He could, and did, flood the countryside by damming rivers or letting in the sea. He could and did uproot and evacuate French civilians, tear down vacation homes and buildings to give his artillery a better field of fire, cut down forests to get the trees he needed for his beach obstacles.

The obstacles forced the Allies to choose between risking

their landing craft on a full tide or coming in on a rising tide and thus giving the German soldiers an opportunity to cut down the first waves of attackers as they struggled through the tidal flat and up to the first feature of the beach, which at Omaha was a bank of shingle (small, smooth rocks),* or a line of sand dunes at Utah that could provide some cover. To make full use of the killing zone, Rommel had his static divisions (many of whose battalions were
Ost
units; in some divisions the men were 50 percent Polish or Russian) right up close.

At each of the beach exits at Omaha, for example, riflemen and machine gunners were in fire trenches on the lower part of the bluff, halfway up the bluff, and at the top. Scattered along the slopes of the draws, and on the plateau above, were hundreds of "Tobruks," circular concrete-lined holes big enough for a mortar team, a machine gun, or even the turret of a tank. The Tobruks were connected by underground tunnels. Beside and around them, the Germans had fixed fortifications of reinforced concrete looking straight down onto the beach. In them, as in the Tobruks, there were panoramic sketches of the ground features in front of them, giving range and deflection for specific targets. In other words, they were zeroed in.

Back down on Omaha Beach proper, the Germans had twelve strong points built to provide enfilade fire the length of the beach. Big guns, 88mm and even 105mm, were put into casemates with embrasures that opened down the beach, not out to sea. The casemates had an extra wing on the seaward side to hide the muzzle blast from the Allied navies.

Up on the bluff there were eight concrete casemates and four open field positions, for 75mm to 88mm guns, all sited for both grazing and plunging fire on every yard of beach. The guns came from all over the Nazi empire, French 75s, big Russian guns, 105s from Czechoslovakia, others from Poland.

The big casemates could take any shell the Allied navies could throw against them and still protect the guns; to protect the casemates from the real threat, an infantry assault with grenades and flamethrowers, the Germans surrounded them with land mines and barbed wire.

So the GI hitting the beach in the first wave at Omaha

* The beach that visitors see today is considerably different from what it was in 1944. U.S. Army engineers tore down most of the seawall and entirely removed the shingle embankment during unloading operations in the summer of 1944.

would have to get through the minefields in the Channel without his LST blowing up, then get from ship to shore in a Higgins boat taking fire from inland batteries, then work his way through an obstacle-studded tidal flat of some 150 meters crisscrossed by machine-gun and rifle fire, with big shells whistling by and mortars exploding all around, to find his first protection behind the shingle. There he would be caught in a triple crossfire—machine guns and heavy artillery from the sides, small arms from the front, mortars coming down from above.