The Royal Navy’s trigger-happy gunners had failed to recognize the Dakotas; they blamed the aircraft for failing to identify themselves soon enough, adding the excuse that a lone enemy night fighter had attacked them not long before.18
• •
Capt. John Tillett of the Air Landing Brigade had spent the bulk of D-Day at the airfield at Tarrant Rushton in England, waiting for word that the landing zones in Normandy had been cleared. Tillett had charge of some homing pigeons that were to be used to bring back news should the radios fail. A squadron leader in the RAF had trained the pigeons “and he was so proud of them. They were all in baskets. Unfortunately, during the waiting period, some of the chaps fell for this temptation and killed, roasted, and ate the pigeons.”
Finally at 1830 the bombers towing the gliders began to take off, with some 900 Spitfires providing cover. As the fleet approached the French coast, Tillett recalled, “The sky was full of aircraft for miles in all directions and they were all ours. There was the mass of shipping off the beaches, thousands of ships of every shape and size.” At 2130 his glider pilot cast off and the Horsa began to spiral down to land.
“We hit the ground with a splintering crash and our glider came to a shuddering halt. Other gliders were landing around us, some hitting one another, they were landing from all different directions.
“We leapt out of the glider and took our position all around for defense. To my astonishment, there in front of me was a German in a trench, a real live German. We had been training for three years to fight Germans but I wasn’t prepared for this. We got ready to shoot him but then looking at him I could see that he was absolutely terrified and there was no question of him shooting us. He couldn’t move. We made him prisoner.”
Tillett and his platoon set off at a trot for the ridge. “Just as we got to it we could hear tank noises and two tanks came up and to my horror I saw the leading tank had a swastika painted on its side so we turned tail and disappeared over this cornfield in ‘Jesse Owens’ speed, looking for some sort of hole to get into as this tank swung its turret toward us.
“So within two minutes of landing we had a.) taken a prisoner, b.) advanced boldly, and c.) pulled full flight.”
The tanks turned out to be British. The lead tank had knocked out a German tank earlier in the day and chalked a swastika on its side. Tillett got his men back on the ridge and dug in for the night.19
One major in the Air Landing Brigade had noticed a paperboy selling the afternoon London Evening Standard outside his airfield before taking off. The headline was “SKYMEN LAND IN EUROPE.” The major bought the entire stock, loaded them into his glider, and distributed them in Normandy that night, so that at least some of the paratroopers were able to read about themselves in a London paper the same day they had been dropped.20
• •
As darkness fell the 6th Airborne Division was in place. The airborne chaps were, in Huw Wheldon’s words, “safely on dry land, and what is more, many of us, probably most of us, were where we were supposed to be.” But the British army as a whole had not achieved its goal of taking Caen and Carpiquet.
Something like a paralysis had crept over the men. The British airborne troops going into battle shortly after midnight, and those who had arrived in the morning and afternoon, had been engaged in bold and aggressive offensive operations. Less than twenty-four hours later they were on the defensive, digging in, waiting for counterattacks.
They would soon regret not pushing on into Caen while the Germans were still in a state of shock and disorganization. They have been strongly criticized by the Americans for losing their momentum. But the fact is that with the exception of some paratroopers and units of the U.S. 4th Division at Utah, none of the Americans reached their D-Day objectives either. The Americans too tended to feel after they had cleared the beaches that they had done enough for one day.
Major Taylor put it best. Sitting outside the Gondrée cafe as it grew full dark, he sipped his champagne and felt good. “And at that moment I can remember thinking to myself, My God, we’ve done it!”21
* * *
I. Feuchtinger later claimed that he was in his headquarters, issuing orders, but according to Colonel Luck and others who were in a position to know, that claim was a cover-up.
II. “Is that a code name, sir?” Pvt. Wally Parr asked Howard when told that Pine Coffin’s battalion would be the first to reinforce the Ox and Bucks at Pegasus Bridge.
32
“WHEN CAN THEIR GLORY FADE?”
The End of the Day
AS FULL DARKNESS came to Normandy, about 2200, unloading at the beaches ceased. Nearly 175,000 American, Canadian, and British troops had entered Normandy, either by air or sea, at a cost of some 4,900 casualties.I From the American airborne on the far right to the British airborne on the far left, the invasion front stretched over ninety kilometers. There was an eighteen-kilometer gap between the left flank at Utah and the right flank at Omaha (with Rudder’s rangers holding a small piece of territory in between at Pointe-du-Hoc), an eleven-kilometer gap between Omaha and Gold, and a five-kilometer gap between Juno and Sword. These gaps were inconsequential because the Germans had no troops in them capable of exploiting the opportunity.
For the Germans, the battlefield was isolated. Rommel had been right about that at least; Allied command of the air had made it difficult to impossible for the Germans to rush men, tanks, and guns to the scene of the action. For the Allies, virtually unlimited men, tanks, guns, and supplies were waiting offshore for first light on June 7 to begin unloading, and behind them were even more men, tanks, guns, and supplies in England waiting to cross the Channel.
There was little depth to the penetration, nowhere more than ten kilometers (Juno) and at Omaha less than two kilometers. But everywhere the Allies had gone through the Atlantic Wall. The Germans still had the advantage of fighting on the defensive, and the hedgerows, especially in the Cotentin, gave them excellent ready-made positions. But their fixed fortifications on the invasion front, their pillboxes and bunkers, their trench system, their communications system, their emplacements for the heavy artillery, were with only a few exceptions kaput.
The Germans had taken four years to build the Atlantic Wall. They had poured thousands of tons of concrete, reinforced by hundreds of thousands of steel rods. They had dug hundreds of kilometers of trenches. They had placed millions of mines and laid down thousands of kilometers of barbed wire. They had erected tens of thousands of beach obstacles. It was a colossal construction feat that had absorbed a large percentage of Germany’s material, manpower, and building capacity in Western Europe.
At Utah, the Atlantic Wall had held up the U.S. 4th Division for less than one hour. At Omaha, it had held up the U.S. 29th and 1st divisions for less than one day. At Gold, Juno, and Sword, it had held up the British 50th, the Canadian 3rd, and the British 3rd divisions for about an hour. As there was absolutely no depth to the Atlantic Wall, once it had been penetrated, even if only by a kilometer, it was useless. Worse than useless, because the Wehrmacht troops manning the Atlantic Wall east and west of the invasion area were immobile, incapable of rushing to the sound of the guns.
The Atlantic Wall must therefore be regarded as one of the greatest blunders in military history.II
• •
The Allies had made mistakes. Dropping the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne in the middle of the night was one. Almost surely it would have been better to send them in at first light. The great assets of the Allied bomber and warship fleets were not used to full effect in the too-short and too-inaccurate preinvasion bombardment. The single-minded concentration on getting ashore and cracking the Atlantic Wall was, probably, inevitable, so formidable did those fixed fortifications appear, but it was costly once the assault teams had penetrated. It led to a tendency on the part of the men to feel that, once through the Wall, the job had been done. Just when they should have been exerting every human effort possible to get inland while the Germans were still stunn
ed, they stopped to congratulate themselves, to brew up a bit of tea, to dig in.
The failure to prepare men and equipment for the challenge of offensive action in the hedgerow country was an egregious error. Allied intelligence had done a superb job of locating the German fixed defenses and a solid if not perfect job of locating the German units in Normandy, but intelligence had failed completely to recognize the difficulties of fighting in the hedgerows.
• •
Allied errors pale beside those of the Germans. In trying to defend everywhere they were incapable of defending anywhere. Their command structure was a hindrance rather than a help. Rommel’s idea of stopping the invasion on the beach vs. Rundstedt’s idea of counterattacking inland vs. Hitler’s compromise between the two prevented an effective use of their assets. Using Polish, Russian, and other POWs for construction work made sense; putting them in Wehrmacht uniforms and placing them in trenches, hoping that they would put up a stiff resistance, did not.
The Wehrmacht’s many mistakes were exceeded by those of the Luftwaffe, which was quite simply just not there. Goering called for an all-out effort by the Luftwaffe on D-Day, but he got virtually none at all. The Allies’ greatest fear was a massive air bombardment against the mass of shipping and the congestion on the beaches, with Goering putting every German plane that could fly into the attack. But Goering was in Berchtesgaden, agreeing with Hitler’s self-serving, ridiculous assertion that the Allies had launched the invasion exactly where he had expected them, while the Luftwaffe was either in Germany or redeploying or grounded due to administrative and fuel problems. Once the terror of the world, the Luftwaffe on June 6, 1944, was a joke.III
The Kriegsmarine was no better. Its submarines and cruisers were either in their pens or out in the North Atlantic, hunting merchant shipping. Except for one minor action by three E-boats, the Kriegsmarine made not a single attack on the greatest armada ever gathered.
The V-1s, on which Hitler had placed such high hopes and to which he had devoted so much of Germany’s technological and construction capacity, were not ready. When they were, a week after D-Day, he launched them against the wrong target.
The German’s tactical and strategic mistakes were serious, but their political blunders were the greatest of all. Their occupation policies in Poland and Russia precluded any enthusiasm whatsoever by their Ost battalions for their cause—even though nearly every one of the conscripted Ost troops hated the communists. Although German behavior in France was immeasurably better than in Poland and Russia, even in France the Germans failed to generate enthusiasm for their cause, and thus the Germans were unable to profit from the great potential of conquered France. What should have been an asset for Germany, the young men of France, became an asset for the Allies, either as saboteurs in the factories or as members of the Resistance.
What Hitler regarded as the greatest German assets—the leadership principle in the Third Reich, the unquestioning obedience expected of Wehrmacht personnel from field marshal down to private—all worked against the Germans on D-Day.
The truth is that despite individual acts of great bravery and the fanaticism of some Wehrmacht troops, the performance of the Wehrmacht’s high command, middle-ranking officers, and junior officers was just pathetic. The cause is simply put: they were afraid to take the initiative. They allowed themselves to be paralyzed by stupid orders coming from far away that bore no relation to the situation on the battlefield. Tank commanders who knew where the enemy was and how and when he should be attacked sat in their headquarters through the day, waiting for the high command in Berchtesgaden to tell them what to do.
The contrast between men like Generals Roosevelt and Cota, Colonels Canham and Otway, Major Howard, Captain Dawson, Lieutenants Spaulding and Winters, in adjusting and reacting to unexpected situations, and their German counterparts could not have been greater. The men fighting for democracy were able to make quick, on-site decisions and act on them; the men fighting for the totalitarian regime were not. Except for Colonel Heydte and a captain here, a lieutenant there, not one German officer reacted appropriately to the challenge of D-Day.
• •
As darkness came on, the Allied troops ashore dug in, while the Allied air forces returned to England and the Allied armada prepared for the possibility of a Luftwaffe night attack. It came at 2300 and it typified the Luftwaffe’s total ineffectiveness.
Josh Honan remembered and described it: “Suddenly everything started banging and we all went to see what it was, and it was a German reconnaissance plane. He wasn’t all that high and he wasn’t going all that fast. And he did a complete circle over the bay and every ship had every gun going and you never saw such a wall of tracer and flak and colored lights going up in your life and the German quite calmly flew all around over the bay, made another circle, and went home.”1, IV
Pvt. John Slaughter of the 116th Regiment, U.S. 29th Division, also described the scene: “After dark an enemy ME-109 fighter plane flew over the entire Allied fleet, from right to left and just above the barrage balloons. Every ship in the English Channel opened fire on that single airplane, illuminating the sky with millions of tracer bullets. The heroic Luftwaffe pilot defied all of them—not even taking evasive action. I wondered how he ever got through that curtain of fire.”2
• •
All along the invasion front, men dug in. Capt. John Raaen of the 5th Ranger Battalion was outside Vierville, off Omaha Beach. “By now it was getting dark and it was necessary to organize ourselves for nighttime counterattacks and infiltration from the Germans,” he said in his oral history. “Headquarters Company was in a small farmyard, located to the south of the road. At this point I learned my next mistake—I had not brought an entrenching tool.
“A French farmyard is more like brick than it is like dirt. For centuries animals have been pounding it down. The sun has been baking it. There was just no way that I could dig a hole to protect myself. The enlisted men had their entrenching tools and a couple of them offered to dig me a hole but I said, ‘No. You go take care of yourselves. Dig your own holes and after you are safe and secure then you can give me your shovel and I will dig me a hole.’
“It was cold as the darkness came on us. I mean really cold. There was a haystack in the farmyard.” Raaen decided to lie down in it. “I’m just a city boy. I learned a little bit about haystacks in French barnyards that night because it wasn’t a haystack, it was a manure pile. I hardly had lain down in the warmth of that manure pile when I was covered with every kind of bug you could think of. I came out of that thing slapping and swinging and pinching, doing all I could to rid me of all those vermin and biting bugs.
“I went to the farmhouse. Inside an old French woman was putting fagots on a fire. It was a very tiny fire.” Lieutenant Van Riper, a platoon leader in Raaen’s company, was there. “Van Riper and I spent the rest of the night warming our hands over that little tiny fire of fagots alongside that little old French woman. It was sort of an ignominious ending to a rather exciting day.”3
Pvt. Harry Parley, 116th Regiment, 29th Division, said in his oral history that “the last hours of June 6 are quite vivid in my memory. As darkness came, we found ourselves in a hedgerow-enclosed field. Dirty, hungry, and dog tired, with no idea as to where we were, we decided to dig in for the night. We could hear the far off sound of artillery and see the path of tracer fire arcing in the distance.
“As we spread out around the field, I found myself paired off with my sergeant. We started to dig a foxhole, but the ground was rock hard and we were both totally exhausted by the time the hole was about three inches deep. Finally, standing there in the dark, aware that it was useless to continue, my sergeant said, ‘Fuck it, Parley. Let’s just get down and get some rest.’ And so, D-Day came to an end with both of us sitting back to back in the shallow trench throughout the night.”4
• •
At Pegasus Bridge, the Ox and Bucks handed over to the Warwickshire Regiment. John Howard led his men t
hrough the dark toward Ranville. Jack Bailey found it hard to leave. “You see,” he explained, “we had been there a full day and night. We rather felt that this was our bit of territory.”5
• •
Lt. John Reville of F Company, 5th Ranger Battalion, was on top of the bluff at Omaha. As the light faded, he called his runner, Pvt. Rex Low, pointed out to the 6,000 vessels in the Channel, and said, “Rex, take a look at this. You’ll never see a sight like this again in your life.”6
Pvt. Robert Zafft, a twenty-year-old infantryman in the 115th Regiment, 29th Division, Omaha Beach, put his feelings and experience this way: “I made it up the hill, I made it all the way to where the Germans had stopped us for the night, and I guess I made it up the hill of manhood.”7
Pvt. Felix Branham was a member of K Company, 116th Infantry, the regiment that took the heaviest casualties of all the Allied regiments on D-Day. “I have gone through lots of tragedies since D-Day,” he concluded his oral history. “But to me, D-Day will live with me till the day I die, and I’ll take it to heaven with me. It was the longest, most miserable, horrible day that I or anyone else ever went through.
“I would not take a million dollars for my experiences, but I surely wouldn’t want to go through that again for a million dollars.”8
Sgt. John Ellery, 16th Regiment, 1st Division, Easy Red sector of Omaha, recalled: “The first night in France I spent in a ditch beside a hedgerow wrapped in a damp shelter-half and thoroughly exhausted. But I felt elated. It had been the greatest experience of my life. I was ten feet tall. No matter what happened, I had made it off the beach and reached the high ground. I was king of the hill at least in my own mind, for a moment. My contribution to the heroic tradition of the United States Army might have been the smallest achievement in the history of courage, but at least, for a time, I had walked in the company of very brave men.”9
The Men of World War II Page 107
