The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Those were heavy commitments. To take them on required confidence and optimism. The optimism especially ran high. In late May intelligence reported the presence of the 21st Panzer Division around Caen, with a regiment on each side of the Orne. Montgomery’s headquarters decided to keep the information from the troops (John Howard and his men were not informed, nor were they given adequate antitank weapons).

  Not only did British headquarters suppress information that could have been invaluable to men going into battle for fear of dampening their morale—shades of World War I—headquarters made no positive use of the quite accurate intelligence about the position of 21st Panzer. The official historian of British intelligence in World War II wrote, “There is no indication in the surviving evidence that it [the information] prompted any consideration of the need to revise and strengthen the British plans for the capture of Caen. . . . despite strong warnings from the intelligence authorities, they proceeded without bargaining for the possibility that 21st Panzer might be widely deployed around Caen.”8

  The reason given was that it was too late to change the plans. But during those same final days, the U.S. 82nd Airborne changed its drop zones on the basis of the latest intelligence on German positions in the Cotentin.

  British intelligence had a similar break in September 1944, just before the airborne landings at Arnhem in Operation Market Garden, and again was frustrated when Montgomery refused to use the intelligence. The British were outstanding in gathering intelligence, lousy in using it.

  • •

  The obstacles on the British beaches were similar to those at Utah. The inland defenses varied considerably because the battlefield was so different. At Gold, Juno, and Sword, once men and vehicles were over the seawall and across the antitank ditch, they were in paved village streets. Once through two or three blocks, they were out in the wheat fields. Large fields—the terrain between Ouistreham and Caen is flat and mainly free of hedgerows.

  To prevent a British breakout into the open ground, the Germans had built some formidable defenses. At Riva Bella, a village just west of Ouistreham, there was an emplacement that had twenty-two pieces of all types, including twelve 155mm cannon. At Houlgate, about ten kilometers from Sword’s left flank, there was a battery with six 155mm guns. Even closer, at Merville, there were four 75mm guns. At Longues, halfway between Omaha and Gold beaches, the German battery consisted of four 155mm Czech guns, set back about a kilometer from the coast, with a steel-reinforced concrete observation post right on the edge of the cliff (and able to communicate with the batteries by underground telephone line).

  Scattered along the beach were extensive emplacements, holding 75s, 88s, mortars, and machine guns. As always, the embrasures opened along the beach, not out to sea, and the concrete was much too thick and too well reinforced to be vulnerable to even the largest naval shell. Such positions would have to be taken by infantry. In the dunes, the Germans had some Tobruks, but not nearly so many as at Omaha; nor were the infantry trenches so extensive.

  • •

  The commander of the German 716th Infantry Division was Generalleutnant Wilhelm Richter. He was responsible for the defense of the British beaches, and he was pessimistic about his chances to hold against a serious invasion. More than a third of his men were from Ost battalions, primarily from Soviet Georgia and Russia. One general staff officer remarked in a May report, “We are asking rather a lot if we expect Russians to fight in France for Germany against the Americans.”9

  Richter’s strong points and resistance nests were spaced about 800 meters apart, in some places more than a kilometer apart. Richter commented that they were beaded along the coast like a string of pearls. There was no depth to the position whatsoever. For reinforcement, Richter had to rely on 21st Panzer; twelve kilometers away and paralyzed by Hitler’s orders, or the 12th Panzer Division, which had one regiment north of Caen, some twenty kilometers away.

  • •

  The British attack on General Richter’s 716th Division began shortly after midnight with a bombing raid along the coast. In this part of the Calvados coast, the population was considerably denser than at Omaha or Utah, and French civilians suffered badly. Mlle Genget, who lived in the seaside village of St.-Côme-de-Fresne, at the western tip of the British invasion, kept a diary: “Awakened this morning at 1 a.m. by a distant bombardment, we got dressed . . . We heard the big bombers coming in and constantly passing over our heads.” She and her parents stayed in the corner where the walls were thickest.

  At dawn, “Suddenly a big gun is fired from the sea and the smaller cannon of the Boches were answering. . . . Everything in the house—doors, windows, and everything in the loft seem to be dancing. We had the impression that all sorts of things were falling in the court-yard. We were not feeling very brave!”10

  Mme d’Anselm lived in Asnelles, a village off Gold Beach. The Germans had a gun emplacement at the bottom of her garden. Mme d’Anselm had seven children. She had dug a trench in her garden, “just big enough to shelter the eight of us and a couple of others,” she said.

  When the bombing began, Mme d’Anselm hurried her little troop into the trench. They stayed until dawn. One of the boys seized the opportunity of a lull when the bombing lifted to climb the garden wall to see what was happening.

  “Mummy, Mummy!” he called out. “Look—the sea—it’s black with boats!”11

  28

  “EVERYTHING WAS WELL ORDERED”

  The 50th Division at Gold Beach

  THE UDT (UNDERWATER DEMOLITION TEAM) MEN and the Royal Engineers began to touch down on Gold Beach at 0735, followed immediately by the first wave of LCTs carrying tanks and LCAs bringing in infantry assault teams. It was an hour later than the American landings because the tide moved from west to east and low tide came later on the British beaches. But the wind at Gold was coming almost straight in from the northwest, piling up the water to such a depth that the outer line of obstacles was underwater before the UDT men could get to them.

  The later time of the attack was fortunate in that it gave the bombers and battleships longer to work over the beach defenses. Many of the Germans were in the resort houses that dotted the coast, concentrated at Le Hamel (right-center of Gold Beach) and La Rivière (left flank boundary with Juno Beach). Unlike the concrete emplacements, the houses could be set on fire by naval shells and air-dropped bombs.

  The official British observer described the initial action: “Just as it was getting light, a tremendous bombing attack was delivered inland and fires which appeared to come from Ver-sur-Mer and La Rivière could be clearly seen. Apart from some flak, there was no enemy opposition of any sort, although it was broad daylight and the ships must have been clearly visible from the beaches. It was not until the first flight of assaulting troops were away and the cruiser H.M.S. Belfast opened fire that the enemy appeared to realize that something out of the ordinary was afoot. For some time after this the anchorage was ineffectually shelled by the enemy coastal battery situated about three-quarters of a mile inland. Shooting was very desultory, and inaccurate, and the guns of only 6- to 8-inch calibre.”1

  As Lt. Pat Blamey’s LCT moved toward shore, shells from naval guns ranging from 5-inch to 14-inch whistled overhead. Blamey commanded a Sherman tank with a twenty-five-pounder cannon mounted on it; behind him in the LCT were four twenty-five-pounder field-artillery pieces that he would be towing ashore. The battery commenced firing when it was twelve kilometers from shore, and continued to fire a steady three rounds per minute until down to three kilometers.

  “This was a period of furious activity,” Blamey remembered. “Ammo boxes and shell cases jettisoned overboard as I called out the ranges received from the control craft. The noise was terrific, but nothing compared with the blast from the rocket ships when they opened up as our assault craft closed the beach.”2

  The beach obstacles proved to be more dangerous than German infantry or artillery. German snipers concentrated their fire on UDT teams, so that almost
no clearing of lanes had been completed. LCTs landed first, near Asnelles, where they disgorged two companies of Hobart’s Funnies. Twenty of the LCTs hit mined obstacles, suffering moderate to severe damage, losing some tanks and some men.

  This “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” approach by the LCTs was in accord with the rules for guidance handed out to the coxswains by the Royal Navy. “Hedgehogs, stakes or tetraheda will not prevent your beaching provided you go flat out,” those instructions read. “Your craft will crunch over them, bend them and squash them into the sand and the damage to your outer bottom can be accepted. So drive on.

  “Element C, however, is an obstacle to LCTs [but] at full speed you can bend them and pass partially over them.

  “Therefore, avoid Element C if you can. If you cannot, try and hit it a glancing blow, preferably near the end of a ‘bay.’ This will probably turn it, or drive its supports into the sand. A second blow may enable you to squeeze through or past it.

  “Do not worry too much about how you are to get out again. The first and primary object is to get in and land without drowning the vehicles.”3

  Once the ramp went down, the men and vehicles rushed off the craft. A commando explained why: “The reason we stormed Normandy like we did was because the soldiers would rather have fought the whole German Army than go back on the ships and be as seasick as they were going over. My God! Those soldiers couldn’t wait to get on dry land. Nothing would have got in their way . . . they would have torn tanks to pieces with their bare hands.”4

  They didn’t have to, because there were no German tanks on the beach. Even the infantry resistance was ineffective. When Blamey drove off his LCT, towing the artillery pieces, he found that “local strong points had been neutralized by the bombardment. Shelling and mortaring from inland was slight and inaccurate. Except for some dozen Jerries, the beach was deserted of enemy. The ones I saw were completely shattered by the bombardment. They appeared to be Mongolians.”

  To Blamey, it seemed like “an ordinary exercise. The only difference that there was were the LCTs blowing up on the beach obstacles and swinging about.” He went to work, laying out the line for his guns, putting up flags where he wanted the twenty-five-pounders to position themselves (the British landed some 200 of these excellent antitank guns on D-Day, a much better record than the American artillery achieved).

  “One wasn’t conscious of being in the middle of a hurly-burly,” Blamey said. “Everything was very well ordered. Things were arriving, being unloaded. All those nice little French villas just inland had been set on fire and almost all were destroyed. I was more frightened of making a cock-off of my job and letting the side down than anything else.”

  Asked if the organization was better than he had expected, Blamey replied, “It was absolutely like clockwork. We knew it would be. We had every confidence. We had rehearsed it so often, we knew our equipment, we knew it worked, we knew given reasonable conditions we would get off the craft.” He gave the credit to the Navy and the RAF; in his opinion, “they made our landing a pushover.”

  As the second wave began to arrive and the tide reduced the width of the beach, Blamey had his gunners cease fire and prepare to move inland. He hooked the pieces up to his tank and drove to the outskirts of Asnelles, where he stopped to brew up some tea before proceeding on to just west of Meuvaines, where he began to take fire from German 88s on a ridge ahead. Blamey lined up his cannon and replied; soon enough the German fire was silenced.5

  • •

  The sectors at Gold were, from west to east, Item, Jig, King, and Love. The attackers from the Northumbrian (50th) Division were the Devonshire, Hampshire, Dorsetshire, and East Yorkshire regiments, accompanied by the Green Howards and Durham Light Infantry, plus engineer, communication, and artillery units, followed by the 7th Armoured Division, the famous “Desert Rats.”

  Blamey had landed at Jig; Seaman Ronald Seaborne, a forward observer for the Belfast, landed to his left at Love. Everyone on Seaborne’s LCM was seasick: “We had had a fried egg breakfast, washed down by a tot of rum (not my choice but mandatory for all those going ashore.)”

  The LCM ran aground 200 meters or more from the water-line, but Seaborne—carrying his radio—was as eager as everyone else to “run down the ramp and into the water—anything to abandon that instrument of torture.”

  LCAs passed Seaborne as he struggled through the chest-deep water. “By the time I was on the beach there were 200 or so troops already there effectively dealing with the straggling rifle fire coming from the defenses of La Rivière.” After the bombardment the Germans had taken, Seaborne was surprised that any of them were still alive, much less firing back.

  Seaborne’s party consisted of a Royal Artillery captain, a bombardier, and a leading telegraphist. They crossed the seawall and the coastal road. The captain told Seaborne to report to Belfast that the beachhead was secure and that the party was going inland, then begin hiking toward Crepon.

  Seaborne was unable to raise Belfast. After a quarter of an hour of frustration, he decided to follow the captain. “As I walked along a lane in the direction of Crepon, I could not see another person.

  “Suddenly, from a field ahead, three men in German uniforms emerged. I thought this was the end of the war for me, but they raised their hands about their heads and by a mixture of French, German and English, I learned that they were Russians. I pointed the way to the beach and proceeded on. Before long I came to a small church. After halfway through the graveyard a shot whistled by me. I dropped to the ground amid a mass of poppies, then moved slowly toward a stone tombstone for safer shelter. Another shot rang out. I hid behind the tombstone, peered round it, and spotted a German helmet. I fired back and for the next few minutes it was real cowboys and Indians stuff. With the last of my ammunition, I got a lucky ricochet on my enemy, who slumped from his hiding place into my full view. I went over and looked at him and found I was gazing at a young boy, presumably one of the Hitler Jugend. I felt sick—sicker even than I had done on the LCM an hour or so previously.”6

  • •

  Lt. Comdr. Brian T. Whinney, RN, was beachmaster for Item and Jig sectors. He landed at 0745, some 150 meters from the waterline. On the way in, “considerable fire developed on the beaches and offshore from enemy batteries inland and mortars. Many near misses were observed among the LCAs of the assault wave.”

  Whinney made his way to the seawall, where “I became aware of a group of about a dozen men sitting quite quietly, apparently gazing out to sea. It took a few seconds for me to realize that they were the Germans who had been manning the beach defenses.” They were waiting to surrender.

  Further east, at Le Hamel, the German troops were sticking to their guns. One machine gun in a pillbox was firing with great effect, supported by mortar rounds dropping onto the shrinking beach. All tanks on the beach had been put out of action, either by mined obstacles or mortar shells. Without tanks, the engineers had been unable to clear any exits in the sector.

  The Germans in Le Hamel (from the 1st Battalion, 916th Regiment, part of the 352nd Division) were somewhat protected in brick houses and hotels and they maintained a steady fire onto the beach. Whinney decided to suspend landings opposite Le Hamel and diverted follow-up waves to his right and left, where the opposition was less and exits had been opened. “I also stopped the clearance of beach obstacles in front of Le Hamel as no landing craft were beaching and with the heavy surf and enemy fire it was too great a risk for the personnel concerned.”

  Whinney went to the top of the seawall, where he was driven to take cover behind a disabled tank. Other men joined him. “The disabled tank was a great boon to us,” Whinney remembered, “as it gave a narrow cone of shelter from the fire from the pillbox. Without it we would have been in much worse trouble. The only tank to get off our beach successfully was a flail tank which succeeded in deafening the lot of us by blowing off his waterproofing before proceeding inland to support the marine commandos.”

  Wh
inney and his little party were soon joined by an improbable comrade. A Fleet Air Arm small plane, piloted by a Royal Navy lieutenant commander, was shot down by his own ship while reporting to it. The pilot managed to eject and come down safely by parachute, landing in the surf.

  “We met him as he staggered ashore. He was almost speechless with rage, demanding a boat forthwith. The crossest man I’ve ever seen and I didn’t envy the gun crew responsible for his ditching.”7

  (The next day there was a somewhat similar incident at Omaha. Pvt. Joseph Barrett was in the 474th AAA. A P-51 came out of the clouds, down low; the 474th shot it down. The pilot, a lieutenant, dropped by parachute onto the beach. He was wearing his class-A uniform and carrying a bottle of whiskey. He said he had a date in London that night and was only supposed to make a single pass over the beach. “He was mad as hell,” Barrett recalled, “but in our defense we had been told to shoot at anything lower than 1,000 feet.”8)

  • •

  Except at La Rivière, which held out until 1000, and Le Hamel, which held out until midafternoon, the German defenses on Gold were incapable of stopping the onrush of men and vehicles from the 50th Division. Nor were there hedgerows inland to check their momentum. What the Germans counted on was their counterattack capability. Kampfgruppe Meyer was stationed near Bayeux and it had often practiced maneuvers for getting to the beach in a hurry.

  But at 0400, June 6, the regiment had gone off on a wild-goose chase to attack reported large-scale enemy airborne landings near Isigny. At 0800 General Kraiss realized his mistake and ordered a countermarch back to the Bayeux area, for a counterattack toward Crepon. But it took an hour for the order to reach the regiment, which then had to march some thirty kilometers to reach its start point. The march was made partly on foot, partly by bicycle, partly by French trucks that kept breaking down. It consumed another five hours before the lead elements were approaching the assembly position. Thus did Kraiss’s main reserve spend the critical hours of D-Day marching across the countryside, first this way, then that.