The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Despite their disagreement, Rommel and Rundstedt got on well together, and in any case they were agreed that the attack would most likely come at the Pas-de-Calais. Rundstedt recommended that Rommel’s Army Group B headquarters be given command of the Fifteenth and Seventh armies, stretching from Holland to the Loire River in southern Brittany. Hitler agreed. On January 15, 1944, Rommel took up his new command.

  • •

  At the end of November 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill and their staffs went to Teheran, Iran, for a meeting with Stalin. The Soviet leader wanted to know about the second front. Roosevelt assured him that the invasion was definitely on for the spring of 1944. It had a code name, selected by Churchill from a list kept by the British chiefs of staff—Overlord. Stalin demanded to know who was in command. Roosevelt replied that the appointment had not yet been made. Stalin said in that case he did not believe the Western Allies were serious about the operation. Roosevelt promised to make the selection in three or four days.

  Despite his promise, Roosevelt shrank from the distasteful task of making the decision. His preferred solution—Chief of Staff George Marshall for Overlord, with Eisenhower returning to Washington to become chief of staff of the Army—had little to recommend it. It would make Eisenhower Marshall’s boss, an absurd situation, and—worse—put Eisenhower in a position of giving orders to his old boss, MacArthur, now commander in the Southwest Pacific Theater. Nevertheless, Roosevelt desperately wanted to give Marshall his opportunity to command in the field the army he had raised, equipped, and trained. When the entourage arrived in Cairo, Egypt, in early December, Roosevelt asked Marshall to express his personal preference and thus, the president hoped, make the decision for him. But Marshall replied that while he would gladly serve wherever the president told him to, he would not be the judge in his own case.

  Roosevelt reluctantly made his decision. As the last meeting at Cairo was breaking up, Roosevelt asked Marshall to write a message to Stalin for him. As Roosevelt dictated, Marshall wrote, “The immediate appointment of General Eisenhower to command of Overlord operation has been decided upon.”14

  Eisenhower got the most coveted command in the war by default, or so it seemed. In explaining his reasoning afterward, Roosevelt said that he just could not sleep at night with Marshall out of the country. Since the commander had to be an American (because the Americans were contributing three-fourths of the total force committed to Overlord), a process of elimination brought it down to Eisenhower.

  But there were manifold positive reasons for Eisenhower’s selection. He had commanded three successful invasions, all of them joint operations involving the British and American air, sea, and land forces. He got on well with the British, and they with him. General Montgomery, already selected as commander of the ground forces committed to Overlord, said of Eisenhower, “His real strength lies in his human qualities. . . . He has the power of drawing the hearts of men towards him as a magnet attracts the bit of metal. He merely has to smile at you, and you trust him at once.”15

  Adm. Sir Andrew Cunningham, the first sea lord, told Eisenhower it had been a great experience to serve under him in the Mediterranean. He had watched Eisenhower bring together the forces of two nations, made up of men with different upbringings, conflicting ideas on staff work, and basic, “apparently irreconcilable ideas,” and forge them into a team. “I do not believe,” Cunningham said, “that any other man than yourself could have done it.”16

  The key word was “team.” Eisenhower’s emphasis on teamwork, his never-flagging insistence on working together, was the single most important reason for his selection.

  • •

  On December 7, 1943, Eisenhower met Roosevelt in Tunis, where the president was stopping on his way back to Washington. Roosevelt was taken off his plane and put in Eisenhower’s car. As the automobile began to drive off, the president turned to the general and said, almost casually, “Well, Ike, you are going to command Overlord.”17 His title was Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force.

  At Marshall’s insistence, Eisenhower returned to the States for a two-week furlough, followed by a series of briefings and meetings. He flew to Britain in mid-January, landing in Scotland and taking a train to London. On January 15, 1944, he took up his new command.

  • •

  When Eisenhower had first visited London, in June 1942, there was a suite waiting for him at Claridge’s, then London’s best and most expensive hotel. But the liveried footmen were not to his taste, nor was the ornate lobby, and he found his suite, with its black-and-gold sitting room and pink bedroom, appalling. He moved to a less elegant hotel and had aides secure for him a quiet place in the country where he could relax. It was a small, modest, two-bedroom house in Kingston, Surrey, called Telegraph Cottage.

  When Eisenhower returned to London in January 1944, he immediately complained that having Overlord headquarters in the city was distracting. Churchill, the American ambassador, and other VIPs felt free to call on him at any hour, and the staff found the temptations of London night life too much to pass up. Within two weeks he moved the headquarters to Bushy Park, outside the city. There the staff, with considerable grumbling, moved into tents. Aides found a nearby mansion in Kingston Hill for his residence; he found it much too grand. He asked about Telegraph Cottage and found that Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, his deputy supreme commander, was living there. He persuaded Tedder to switch residences. The supreme commander thus had the least pretentious home of any general officer in England.

  When Rommel went to Paris at the beginning of January 1944 to meet with Rundstedt (who was living in considerable splendor in the Hotel George V), the city seemed to him like a Babel. He wanted to establish his headquarters somewhere else. His naval aide, Vice Adm. Friedrich Ruge, said he had just the place. On a trip back to Paris from the coast, Ruge had stopped in at the Chateau La Roche-Guyon, located on the Seine River in a village of 543 residents some sixty kilometers downstream from Paris. The chateau had been the seat of the dukes de La Rochefoucauld for centuries. Thomas Jefferson had been a guest there in the late eighteenth century, when he was American ambassador to France and a friend of the most famous of the dukes, the writer François.

  Ruge was an avid reader of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims and had called on the duchess to pay his respects. Ruge told Rommel the location was perfect, out of Paris, within equal distance of the Seventh and Fifteenth armies’ headquarters, and the chateau was large enough to hold the staff. So the staff, with much grumbling, left Paris to set up headquarters in the sleepy village of La Roche-Guyon.

  Eisenhower wanted a dog for a companion. Aides found him a Scottie puppy. He named it Telek, a shortened form of Telegraph Cottage. Rommel wanted a dog for a companion. Aides found him a dachshund puppy. The dogs slept in their respective masters’ bedrooms.

  There were more meaningful comparisons. Each general jammed his feet into the stirrups, took hold of the reins, and galloped into action. Where there had been hesitation and drift, there was now conviction and movement. Their resolution was absolute. “I’m going to throw myself into this new job with everything I’ve got,” Rommel wrote his wife, “and I’m going to see it turns out a success.”18 Eisenhower said on arrival, “We are approaching a tremendous crisis with stakes incalculable.”19

  The generals set a pace that left other men in their early fifties panting and exhausted. They were typically on the road by 6:00 A.M. each day, inspecting, driving, training, preparing their men. They ate on the run, field rations or a sandwich and a cup of coffee. They did not return to their quarters until well after dark. Eisenhower averaged four hours sleep per night, Rommel hardly more. One difference: Eisenhower smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, while Rommel never smoked.

  • •

  There were other, significant differences. Although both men were full of resolve, the defender could not keep his doubts out of his mind, while the attacker refused to entertain any doubts. On January 17, Rommel wrote his wife, “I think we�
��re going to win the battle for the defense of the west for certain—provided we get enough time to set things up.”20 For Eisenhower, there were no “provideds,” only challenges. On January 23, he told his superiors on the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS), “Every obstacle must be overcome, every inconvenience suffered and every risk run to ensure that our blow is decisive. We cannot afford to fail.”21

  • •

  One factor in Rommel’s pessimism was the confused command structure. For all their prattling about the “führer” principle of “ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (one people, one state, one leader), the Nazis ran the armed services as they ran the government, by the principle of divide and rule. Hitler deliberately mixed the lines of authority so that no one ever knew precisely who was in command of what. This characteristic of the führer’s was exacerbated by the natural and universal tendency of air, sea, and ground forces to indulge in interservice rivalry. So, in Rommel’s case, he did not have control over the Luftwaffe in France, nor of the navy, nor of the administrative governors in the occupied territories. He did not have administrative control of the Waffen-SS units in France, nor of the paratroop or antiaircraft units (they belonged to the Luftwaffe).

  The fragmentation of command reached ridiculous proportions. For example, the naval coastal guns along the Channel would remain under naval control as the Allied fleets approached the coast. But the moment Allied troops began to land, command of the coastal batteries would revert to the Wehrmacht.

  Bad enough for Rommel, it was never clear whether he or Rundstedt would control the battle. Worst of all, Hitler wanted to command himself. Hitler kept control of the panzer divisions in his hands. They could be committed to the battle only on his orders—and his headquarters was a thousand kilometers from the scene, and those were the divisions Rommel was depending on for a first-day counterattack. It was madness.

  Eisenhower had no such problems. His command was clear-cut, absolute. Initially, he had not been given command of the Allied bomber forces (U.S. Eighth Air Force, British Bomber Command), but when he threatened to resign if not allowed to use the bombers as he saw fit, the CCS gave him what he wanted. Every soldier, every airman, every sailor, every unit in the United Kingdom in the spring of 1944 took orders from Eisenhower. Thus did the democracies put the lie to the Nazi claim that democracies are inherently inefficient, dictatorships inherently efficient.

  • •

  Thanks to the clear-cut command authority, a single-minded clarity of purpose pervaded Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), in contrast to the situation at OB West and Army Group B. A factor in creating unity at SHAEF was Eisenhower’s relationship with his immediate subordinates, which contrasted sharply with Rommel’s command structure. Eisenhower had worked with most of his team in the Mediterranean and had played a role in the selection of most of the army, corps, and division commanders, while Rommel hardly knew the generals commanding his armies, corps, and divisions.

  This is not to say that Eisenhower liked, or even wanted, all his subordinates. He did not like General Montgomery and feared that he would be too cautious in battle. But Eisenhower knew that Monty, Britain’s only hero thus far in the war, absolutely had to have a major role and so he was determined to work as effectively with Monty as possible—as he had done in the Mediterranean. He thought the tactical air commander, Air Vice Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, too cautious and pessimistic, but he determined to get the most out of him. He liked and admired his deputy, Air Marshal Tedder, enormously; so too the naval commander in chief, Adm. Bertram Ramsay. Eisenhower had worked closely and well with Tedder and Ramsay in the Mediterranean.

  His principal American ground commander, Gen. Omar N. Bradley, was a West Point classmate, an old and close friend, a man whose judgments Eisenhower trusted implicitly. His chief of staff, Gen. Walter B. Smith, had been with him since mid-1942. Eisenhower characterized Smith as “the perfect chief of staff,” a crutch to a one-legged man. “I wish I had a dozen like him,” Eisenhower told a friend. “If I did, I would simply buy a fishing rod and write home every week about my wonderful accomplishments in winning the war.”22

  Rommel had never worked with his army commanders, Gen. Hans von Salmuth of the Fifteenth and Gen. Friedrich Dollmann of the Seventh. With Salmuth, he would have shouting arguments. Dollmann had little field experience, was in poor health, and did not much like Rommel. Neither Salmuth nor Dollman were ardent Nazis. Gen. Baron Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg commanded the panzer group in the West. A veteran of the Eastern Front, Schweppenburg was horrified at Rommel’s proposal to use the tanks close up; in his view, that was to misuse the tanks as fixed artillery. Their controversy was never resolved, but it hardly mattered, as Rommel did not command the panzer group.

  Rommel fired his first chief of staff. The successor was Gen. Hans Speidel, a Swabian from the Württemberg district who had fought with Rommel in World War I and had served with him in the twenties. Speidel was an active plotter against Hitler, more politically adroit and aware than his chief. Eventually he was able to persuade Rommel to support the conspiracy against Hitler, which was growing through the early months of 1944.

  Here was a profound difference between Rommel and Eisenhower. Eisenhower believed with all his heart in the cause he was fighting for. To him, the invasion was a crusade designed to end the Nazi occupation of Europe and destroy the scourge of Nazism forever. He hated the Nazis and all they represented. Although a patriot, Rommel was no Nazi—even though at times he had been a toady to Hitler. To Rommel, the coming battle would be fought against an enemy he never hated and indeed respected. He approached that battle with professional competence rather than the zeal of a crusader.

  4

  WHERE AND WHEN?

  IN MID-MARCH 1943, shortly after the Battle of Kasserine Pass and nearly two months before the final victory in Tunisia, the CCS appointed British Lt. Gen. Frederick Morgan to the post of chief of staff to the supreme Allied commander (designate) and charged him with “co-ordinating and driving forward the plans for cross-Channel operations this year and next year.” Within a month the CCS decided that no such operation could be mounted in 1943; the final directive, issued in late April, ordered Morgan to begin planning for “a full-scale assault against the Continent in 1944, as early as possible.”1

  It would be hard to imagine a broader directive. “Where” could be anywhere between Holland and Brest; “as early as possible” could be anytime between March and September 1944. Morgan put together a staff of British and American officers, with Maj. Gen. Ray Barker of the U.S. Army as his deputy, called the group COSSAC after the initial letters of his title, and went to work.

  COSSAC operated under one particularly severe constraint—the number of landing craft allotted to the operation limited the planners to a three-division assault. Coupled with the presumption that the Germans were certain to improve the Atlantic Wall, that limitation removed all temptation to plan for widely dispersed attacks. From the first, COSSAC committed the Allies to the principle of concentration of force. There would be one invasion site, the divisions landing side by side.

  Where? There were many requirements. The site had to be within range of Allied fighter planes based in the United Kingdom. There had to be at least one major port close at hand that could be taken from the land side and put into operation as soon as possible. There was no thought of landing where the Atlantic Wall was complete, that is, around the French ports: the disastrous Dieppe raid by the Canadians in August 1942 convinced COSSAC that a direct frontal assault against a well-defended port could not succeed. Therefore the beaches selected had to be suitable for prolonged unloading operations directly from the LSTs and have exits for vehicles and adequate road nets behind them for rapid, massive deployment inland.

  Those were tactical requirements. Most of them could be met easily on the French Mediterranean coast or in Brittany. But the strategic requirement was to land as close to the ultimate objective, the Rhine-Ruhr region,
as possible, for the obvious reason that the farther away from the objective the landing took place, the greater would be the distance to be covered and the longer the supply line.

  Holland and Belgium had excellent ports, but they were too close to Germany and the Luftwaffe bases, the area inland too easily flooded, too well defended. The Pas-de-Calais coast in northernmost France was ideal in every way but one—it was the obvious place to come ashore and thus it was there that the Germans had built the strongest part of the Atlantic Wall.

  Le Havre, in upper Normandy on the north bank of the mouth of the Seine, was an excellent port, but it had numerous disadvantages. To take it the Allies would have to land on both sides of the river. The two forces could not be mutually supporting, which would allow the Germans to defeat them in detail. East of Le Havre the coastline is dominated by cliffs with only a few small beaches that had even fewer exits.

  With Brest as its main port, and with smaller but good ports along its north coast, Brittany had advantages, but they were overshadowed by the distance from the United Kingdom and from the objective. Cherbourg was closer to both, which made the Cotentin Peninsula tempting. But the west coast of the Cotentin was open to storms coming in off the Atlantic and was guarded by the German-held Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey. The east coast of the Cotentin was low-lying ground, easily flooded. Further, the narrow base of the Cotentin would make it relatively easy for the Germans to seal off the beachhead.

  A process of elimination brought the choice down to the Calvados coast of Normandy. The port of Caen, although small, could be captured quickly—probably in the initial assault. There was an airfield just outside Caen, called Carpiquet, that could be captured by airborne assault on the first day. The capture of Caen would cut the railroad and highway from Paris to Cherbourg, thus simultaneously isolating the Cotentin Peninsula and putting the invaders in a position to threaten Paris.