The World at War (66 page)

CHAPTER 26
D-DAY IN NORMANDY

Thanks to the all-star 1962 film of Cornelius Ryan's great reportage
The Longest Day
and, more recently, Steven Spielberg's
Saving Private Ryan.,
the Allied landings on the Normandy coast on 6 June 1944 may well be the most celebrated episode of the Second World War. The planning of Operation Overlord and Eisenhower's bold decision to accept the advice of his chief meteorologist and launch the invasion in the sole window of opportunity provided by fickle English Channel weather was dealt with well by the episode entitled
Morning: June–August 1944.
However, the programme used only anonymous voice-overs to describe the landings themselves: one of the great pleasures of this project has been to put names to some of those voices. The interviews unfortunately did not cover the left flank, so this introduction must suffice as the only mention of the British 3rd Division's landing on Sword Beach and the drop of the British 6th Airborne Division, which silenced the gun battery at Merville and captured the bridges over the River Orne and the Caen canal, the latter still known as 'Pegasus Bridge'. In military history attention inevitably goes to the places where things go badly wrong and on D-Day that was Omaha Beach, where a combination of terrain well-suited for defence, the best German troops on the attack front and the requirement to land with only minimal time for bombardment led initially to a bloody stalemate. One of the first break-outs from the beach was accomplished by a company commanded by Captain Wozenski, interviewed below. General Collins, whose VII Corps had a relatively easy landing at Utah Beach, mentions in passing that the US 82nd Airborne Division was scattered like confetti inland from his beachhead but managed to capture the bridge over the Mederet river, the inspiration for the climax of
Saving Private Ryan.
The character portrayed in the film by
Tom Hanks gets in a jibe against the 'over-rated' Montgomery. Montgomery was in operational command of Overlord from start to finish, and, whatever his personal flaws, its success owed much to his practical good sense.

MAJOR GORONWY REES

Combined Operations Staff Officer

I got involved in the [August 1942] Dieppe operation really by accident and found myself deeply involved in the planning of it, and it was a most appalling disaster. I think everything that could go wrong went wrong with that operation and the result of it was that by the end we were most powerfully impressed by the dangers and the hazards of any kind of combined operation on that kind of scale – we'd never attempted to do a combined operation on that scale before, and really nobody knew how to do it. And this was why, in fact, it was worth doing because if we hadn't done that operation then I'm quite sure thousands of lives would have been wasted in the D-Day operation. We learned so much from Dieppe that I think it was quite invaluable as far as the final invasion was concerned.

ANDRÉ SENATOR

Mayor of Asnelles, Normandy, inland from Juno Beach

We had waited for four years for that day to come and we never thought that the landing would be done here on our coast, although we thought that would happen in the north of France because you know there's a hundred miles between our coast and the southern coast of England. So we never thought the reason of the landing here is the condition of our beach, which is a beach of sand, but hard sand. You remember the failure of Dieppe was because the tanks couldn't get out of the beach, the beach is made of stones and stones were rolling under the caterpillars of the tanks, while here you can drive cars and of course tanks on the beach, and the soil of the beach is good.

ADMIRAL LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN

Chief of Combined Operations

To prevent the enemy from building up reinforcements so quickly that he could push you back in the sea, you had to do two things. First, you have to have a
deception plan, to make him think you're going to land quite somewhere else and make him build up all his reinforcements and his defences there. That was easy in our case, because it was obviously Pas-de-Calais, the Straits of Dover, the shortest way across. Secondly, having got them all concentrated in the wrong place you have to then prevent them from being moved to the right place when they discover their mistake. And for that purpose you wanted weeks of interdiction bombing, destroying roads, bridges, railways, tunnels and everything, and for that purpose the whole of the main British and American Bomber Commands had to be turned on to the job way ahead of the actual
D-Day.

JOHN McCLOY

US Assistant Secretary of War

Eisenhower had already been rather separated out as a potential High Command leader, he had been Chief of Staff to General MacArthur in the Philippines. Already he had a very good record as a highly confident Staff Officer. He had not served abroad in World War One but his record since then had been very good. He was brought in to replace the Chief of War Plans Division after the Pearl Harbor disaster and anyone who filled that job at that time was bound to be thought of in terms of future capacities and employment in High Command. When it turned out that we were going to go ashore it had already been pretty well determined that Eisenhower was to be the figure to take over the command, and not the least of his qualities was the impression that he had created an ability to compose differences, to get along with people and direct combined efforts whether they be in the Army, Navy or Air Force.

MAJOR GENERAL J LAWTON COLLINS

Commander US VII Corps

I had come back from the South Pacific at Christmas of 1943 and happened to be in Washington at a time when General Eisenhower came over for a visit. As I understand it, initially only one of our Corps was to have gone in, on Omaha, and at Field Marshal Montgomery's suggestion a second Corps was brought in for the Cherbourg operation. The man who had been sent to England in command of VII Corps had no combat experience, although he was a very able man. But Monty insisted that he wanted someone who had combat experience in this war and also preferably someone who had some amphibious experience. I just happened to fill that bill, fortunately for me at the right moment, and was picked then to take command of VII Corps for the Normandy show.

MAJOR GENERAL KENNETH STRONG

Eisenhower's Chief of Intelligence

The British had memories of the First World War when we'd had these tremendous casualties in France and moreover the
Dieppe raid had shown how tremendously strong the German defences were. The Americans held exactly the opposite view, and by the Americans I mean the Chiefs of Staff, Roosevelt and General Eisenhower. They felt the only way that you could defeat Germany was to take the shortest way into the centre of Germany, across the Channel and advance into the areas of the Ruhr and Saar, the great industrial areas, and then destroy the German forces by that means. Now Churchill never said there won't be a Channel-crossing campaign. What he said was it'll come later, when the Germans had been weakened there by our oppositions in Italy and through the Balkans. The Americans were going to supply the great bulk of forces for both operations and to them it seemed the quickest way into Germany was to come across the Channel and land there, not to come right through the Mediterranean. This argument went on and on, right to the end almost.

GROUP CAPTAIN JAMES STAGG

Eisenhower's Chief Meteorological Officer

In 1943 when I joined the planning staff for Overlord my job at first was to go through the
weather statistics of many past years to try to advise on a suitable period in the early summer months of the next year for the Overlord operation. Now the three services, the Army, Navy and the Air Force, had all made up their lists of what they needed for success in their part of the operation. The Navy had to have onshore winds not more than force three or four, and they needed good visibility for bombarding the coastal defences, and the Air Force had to have very special conditions of cloud amount and heights, so that when I come to put them together I found they might have to sit about for one hundred and twenty or one hundred and fifty years before they got the operation launched. I found that in one year the chances of them getting those conditions was going to be about sixty to one against.

BRIGADIER RONALD BELCHEM

Twenty-First Army Group Staff

It was accepted by all that Normandy was the best compromise location for this invasion. The disquieting tiling that happened between the beginning of what we might call combat planning in January 1944 and the invasion in June was that after Rommel assumed command of this sector in France he began to build up the strength of the defences in Normandy, on the beaches, from the point of view of pillboxes, guns and the like. The discrepancies in relative strength between the German defences in, shall we say, the Pas-de-Calais and upper Normandy in January–February were very apparent, but there was an enormous acceleration in the strengthening of the defences in the Normandy peninsula going on right up to the time of the landing.

SERGEANT LEO GARIEPY

Canadian Tank Commander, Juno Beach

We knew exactly, we had known for months, what the beach defences were like, what the town was like; we had a photograph of the town, we knew the town, not by a map, we knew the town by photography where each crew commander had a photograph of the town that had been divided in twelve rectangles, we knew the streets by their names. I broke forty walls to get to the German headquarters, I knew it was going beyond each house, I knew where there was potatoes, I knew where there was cabbage, I knew where there was turnips – I knew where I was every inch of the way. We were so well informed about the defence. We had been trained about Juno for a long, long time. The only thing we didn't know about Juno prior to D-Day was that Juno could have been in Greece, Italy, Spain. We had no idea where Juno was, we only learned on the night prior to D-Day where Juno was, in Normandy.

PRIVATE ARNOLD LEVIN

16th Regiment, US 1st Division, Omaha Beach

You can get so scared that you're not scared any more and I think that's what happened to me. We were psychologically trained as well as militarily trained, which is probably more important, really, because we were trained to such a point that you do everything by instinct. We give the British a lot of credit for that because we did spend some time at a British assault centre, I think it was a place called Barnsley. We spent a lot of time there. Miserable place but the training was good – and after it was all over the food was awful.

SAPPER JOE MINOGUE

Royal Engineer in a flail tank with 50th Division, Gold Beach

We began to suspect that this business of rendezvousing at Le Hamel twenty minutes after the actual landing was only a blind and they really thought we'd all be killed. To some degree this was heightened when the Divisional Commander – he was [Major] General
Percy Hobart, who must have been about seventy – one day when we were waterproofing near Southampton Water, popped his head under the tank and said, 'We're expecting seventy per cent casualties, you know, but if any of you chaps get there I'll see you the day after D-Day.' And indeed he did.
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SERGEANT GARIEPY

The DD Tank is an ordinary Sherman, modified and called DD because it stood for duplex drive; you could drive it at sea as well as on the land. They were modified in Birmingham by adding a shelf, which we call the deck, around the circumference of the tank at the upper-track level. The shelf was about fourteen or eighteen inches in width, on which was riveted a rubberised canvas that rose nine feet in height all round the circumference of the
tank. This canvas was held rigid by thirty-two inner tubes and when the inner tubes were inflated the canvas was rigid. We displaced more than thirty-two tons of water, the weight of the tank, which gave us buoyancy. Two propellers were synchronised with the tracks and when the tracks turned so did the propellers. This gave us propulsion; to give us direction the propellers were mobile fifteen degrees to the right, fifteen degrees to the left, steered by the crew commander standing on top of the tank because someone had to see over the screen to direct the tank.

MAJOR GENERAL COLLINS

The 4th Division had never participated in an amphibious operation before and a very important part of their training was some exercises at
Slapton Sands in southern England. To me it was highly profitable because one of the things I was concerned with was whether we were going to be able to get these amphibious tanks ashore without them being swamped. This was a British design; the tanks had a canvas body around them but when they went off the LST [Landing Ship, Tanks] were inevitably going to scoop up some water as they went down the ramp, particularly if the weather was bad. So I went personally in with those tanks and watched this performance and in consequence I decided to put them as close to shore as the Navy would do it. There was always the danger that ships would be hit by gunfire, but I made them put off about four to six thousand yards offshore and despite the rough water we were able to get practically all of our tanks ashore, whereas on Omaha Beach they were put way offshore and most of the tanks foundered.

SAPPER MINOGUE

For tank men I think there were two main fears, one is the danger of being trapped inside a tank that's on fire and the second one, because we were soldiers and because we were used to being on the land all the time, was our fear of water. Really, I think we were more terrified of being drowned in that damned tank than anything else. One thing we did do to pass the time was to get a hacksaw and cut about thirty pounds of valuable metal from inside the turret of the Sherman tank that we had, so that if there were any fear of drowning two of us in the turret could grab the driver and co-driver and pull them into what we thought might be some kind of safe haven, in which they could just shoot through the turret top.