D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (8 page)

Hastings's judgment has become popular among military historians a half-century after the war. The German soldier in World War II has assumed a mythical quality as the best fighting man not only in that war but in almost any war ever fought.

The judgment is wrong. The Wehrmacht had many fine units, and many outstanding soldiers, but they were not supermen. Not even the Waffen-SS elite troops of 1944—45 were much, if any, better than ordinary Allied troops. And the Allied elite units, the airborne and Rangers and Commandos, were better than anything the Germans put into the field.

What made the Germans look so good, what so impressed Hastings and others, was the kill ratio. It was almost two-to-one in favor of the Wehrmacht, sometimes higher. But that criterion ignores a basic fact: the Wehrmacht vs. the Anglo-American armies was almost always fighting on the defensive behind prepared positions or fixed fortifications, such as the Mareth Line in Tunisia, the Winter Line in Italy, the Atlantic Wall in France, the West Wall in the final defense of Germany's borders. Even then, the Germans never did manage to hold a position—they were always driven back. Of course, the argument is that they were driven back by overwhelming firepower, that the Allies won because they outproduced the Germans, not because they outfought them. There is truth to that.

But the only time in World War II that the Wehrmacht undertook a genuine offensive against American troops, it was soundly whipped. In the Ardennes, in December 1944, the Germans had the manpower and firepower advantage. At Bastogne, where the 101st Airborne was encircled, it was almost a ten-to-one advantage. Allied control of the air was useless for the first week of the battle, due to miserable weather. The Germans were close to their supply dumps, even to their manufacturing sites— tanks rolling out of factories in the Rhine-Ruhr region could start

firing almost as they left the factory gate. The Germans had some of their best Waffen-SS and panzer divisions in the attack. They had ample artillery support. But the lightly armed 101st, cut off from its supplies, cold, hungry, unable to properly care for its wounded, running low on or even out of ammunition, with little artillery support, held off desperate German attacks for more than a week.

The American elite unit prevailed over the elite German units. Elsewhere in the Ardennes the same pattern prevailed. Once they had recovered from their surprise, the American regular infantry units gave an excellent account of themselves.

In 1980,
Time
magazine columnist Hugh Sidey asked Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the wartime commander of the 101st Airborne, to assess the performance of the American soldiers under his command in World War II. There were many problems at first, Taylor said, but by December 1944 there were companies in his division "that were better than anything anywhere. The men were hardened, the officers tested, their equipment upgraded and they had that wonderful flexibility and self-confidence imparted by a democratic society. No other system could produce soldiers like that, but it did take some time."
¹⁶

So although the German army contained some very good units, it just won't do to call that army as a whole the best in the war. It would be more accurate to say that after 1941 the side on the defensive almost always gave a better account of itself.

Neither were the Germans superior to the Allies on the technological front. True, their infantry weapons tended to be better, and they had some innovative gadgets, such as the V-l pilotless bomber, and some genuine breakthroughs, such as the snorkel submarine and the V-2 ballistic missile. But they had fallen badly behind in the quality and design of fighter and bomber aircraft (except for the too-late ME 262), they were not even in the atomic-bomb race, their encoding system, the Enigma machine, had been hopelessly compromised, and—strangely enough for a country that had Mercedes and Volkswagen—they were badly outclassed in motor transport.

The British were outstanding in science and technology.
The
proximity
fuse,
radar,
and
sonar
were
British
innovations,
as was penicillin. Much of the basic work on the atomic bomb was done by British physicists. The British were inventive. For exam-

pie, they were working on special tanks, called "Hobart's Funnies" after Gen. Percy Hobart of the 79th Armoured Division. In March 1943, Hobart had been given the job of figuring out how to get armored support onto and over the beaches, to breach the concrete and minefields of the Atlantic Wall. He came up with swimming tanks. Duplex drive (DD), they were called, after their twin propellers working off the main engine. They had a waterproof, air-filled canvas screen all round the hull, giving the DD the appearance of a baby carriage. The inflatable screen was dropped when the tank reached the shore.

Another of Hobart's Funnies carried a forty-foot box-girder bridge for crossing antitank ditches. The "Crab" had a rotating drum in front of the tank; as it turned it thrashed the ground in front with steel chains, safely detonating mines in its path. There were others.

Even more astonishing than swimming tanks was the idea of towing prefabricated ports across the Channel. By the end of 1943 thousands of British workers were helping to construct the artificial ports (code name Mulberries) and the breakwaters to shelter them. The "docks" consisted of floating piers connected by treadway to the beach. The piers were devised so that the platform, or roadway, could slide up and down with the tide on four posts that rested on the sea bottom. The breakwater (code name Phoenix) combined hollow, floating concrete caissons about six stories high with old merchant ships. Lined up end to end off the French coast, the ships and Phoenixes were sunk by opening their sea cocks. The result: an instant breakwater protecting instant port facilities, in place and ready to go on D-Day plus one.*

There were many other British triumphs. One of the most important was Ultra. Ultra was the code name for the system of breaking the German Enigma encoding machine. From 1941 onward, the British were reading significant portions of German radio

* The Mulberries were not in operation long; a great storm two weeks after D-Day knocked out the American Mulberry and badly damaged the British one. But the great LST fleet more than made up the difference, raising the question: Was the expenditure of so much material and manpower on building the Mulberries wise? Russell Weigley's answer is yes. He writes: "Without the prospect of the Mulberries to permit the beaches to function as ports, Churchill and his government would probably have backed away from Overlord after all" (Russell Weigley,
Eisenhower's Lieutenants: The Campaigns of France and Germany, 1944-45
[Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981], p. 103).

traffic, giving the Allies a generally accurate, and occasionally exact and total, picture of the enemy order of battle. As that is the most basic and priceless of all intelligence in war—where are the enemy units? in what strength? with what capabilities?—Ultra gave the Allies an immense advantage.

When the Ultra secret was finally revealed in the early 1970s, people asked, "If we were reading German radio traffic right through the war, how come we didn't win the war sooner?" The answer is, we did.

The intelligence advantage was even greater thanks to the British Double Cross System and to German conceit. In 1940, the British had managed to arrest all German spies in the United Kingdom. They were "turned," persuaded at the point of a gun to operate as double agents. For the next three years they sent information to their controllers in Hamburg via Morse code, information carefully selected by the British. It was always accurate, as the aim of the operation was to build Abwehr (the German security service) trust in the agents, but was always either insignificant or too late to be of any use.
¹⁷

Sometimes the information passed on could prove disconcerting to the Allied forces preparing for the invasion. Sgt. Gordon Carson of the U.S. 101st was stationed in Aldbourne, west of London, late in 1943. He liked to listen to "Axis Sally" on the radio. Sally, known to the men as the "Bitch of Berlin," was Midge Gillars, an Ohio girl who had wanted to be an actress but had become a Parisian fashion model. There she met Max Otto Koisch-witz, married him, and moved to Berlin. When the war came, she became a disc jockey. She was popular with the American troops because of her accent and her sweet, sexy voice and because she played the latest hits, interspersed with crude propaganda (Why fight for the communists? Why fight for the Jews? etc.) that gave the men a laugh.

But they did not laugh when Sally interspersed her commentary with remarks that sent chills up the spines of her listeners, such as: "Hello to the men of Company E, 506th PIR, 101st A/B in Aldbourne. Hope you boys enjoyed your passes to London last weekend. Oh, by the way, please tell the town officials that the clock on the church is three minutes slow."
¹⁸

Axis Sally had her facts straight and hundreds of GIs and Tommies tell stories similar to Carson's about the clock. Fifty years later, the veterans still shake their heads and wonder, "How the hell

did she know that?" She knew because the Double Cross System had given her the information.*

The receipt of so much information from their agents reinforced the German conceit that they had the best set of spies in the world. That added to their conviction that Enigma was the best encoding machine, absolutely unbreakable, and made them think that they had the best intelligence and counterintelligence systems in the world.

Fooling the Germans about Allied capabilities and intentions was the negative side of the espionage struggle. The positive side was gathering information on the German order of battle. Of course, Ultra was making a priceless contribution here; to supplement Ultra, the Allies had two sources that, at the end of 1943, they were ready to put into full action. The first was air reconnaissance. With the Luftwaffe fighting on the defensive, mostly inside Germany, the Americans and British were free to fly over France and take all the photographs they wished.

But tank and artillery parks could be hidden in woods, field emplacements camouflaged, which brought into play the second Allied source, the French Resistance. Partly to keep the economy producing at full capacity, partly because in France the German occupiers tried to act in a decent fashion in order to make friends, French civilians were not evacuated from the coastal areas. They could see where the Germans were positioning their guns, hiding their tanks, placing their mines. When the time came, they had ways of getting that information over to England, primarily by working with the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a part of the vast British intelligence gathering/covert operations network that was one of the great British accomplishments in the war.

It is far too simple to say that the marriage of British brains and American brawn sealed the fate of Nazi Germany in the West. The British contributed considerable brawn, for one thing, and the Americans contributed considerable brains. Still, there is some truth in it. If the British miracles of World War II included Hobart's Funnies, Mulberries, Ultra, and the Double Cross System, the American miracles included production of war materiel such as the world had never seen.

* After the war, Ms. Gillars was tried and convicted of treason. She served a dozen years in a federal reformatory. Released in 1961, she taught music in Columbus, Ohio. She died at age eighty-seven in 1988.

At the beginning of 1939, American industry was still flat on its back. Factory output was less than one-half of capacity. Unemployment was above 20 percent. Five years later unemployment was 1 percent while factory capacity had doubled, then doubled again and yet again. In 1939, the United States produced 800 military airplanes. When President Franklin Roosevelt called for the production of 4,000 airplanes
per month,
people thought he was crazy. But in 1942, the United States was producing 4,000 a month, and by the end of 1943 8,000 per month. There were similar, all-but-unbelievable great leaps forward in the production of tanks, ships, landing craft, rifles, and other weapons. And all this took place while the United States put a major effort into the greatest industrial feat to that time, the production of atomic weapons (hardly begun in 1942, completed by mid-1945).

That a cross-Channel attack against the Atlantic Wall could even be contemplated was a tribute to what Dwight Eisenhower called "the fury of an aroused democracy." What made D-Day possible was the never-ending flow of weapons from American factories, the Ultra and the Double Cross System, victory in the Battle of the Atlantic, control of the air and sea, British inventiveness, the French Resistance, the creation of citizen armies in the Western democracies, the persistence and genius of Andrew Hig-gins and other inventors and entrepreneurs, the cooperation of business, government, and labor in the United States and the United Kingdom, and more—all summed up in the single word "teamwork."

3

THE COMMANDERS

The two men had much in common. Born in 1890, Dwight Eisenhower was one year older than Erwin Rommel. They grew up in small towns, Eisenhower in Abilene, Kansas; Rommel in Gmund, Swabia. Eisenhower's father was a mechanic, Rommel's a schoolteacher. Both fathers were classic Germanic parents who imposed a harsh discipline on their sons, enforced by physical punishment. Both boys were avid athletes. Eisenhower's sports were football and baseball, Rommel's cycling, tennis, skating, rowing, and skiing. Although neither family had a military tradition, each boy went off to military school; in 1910 Rommel entered the Royal Officer Cadet School in Danzig, while Eisenhower in 1911 went to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.