The Second World War

by John Keegan

  The Westheer, OKW and Hitler were thus denied any useful foreknowledge of Overlord in the weeks before its launching; last-minute intelligence was distorted by the jamming of selected German coastal radar stations and the simulation of a bogus invasion fleet and air armada in the Channel narrows opposite the Pas de Calais during the night of 5/6 June itself. In the weeks before D-Day, however, Hitler and the Westheer did succeed in materially reinforcing the anti-invasion forces, including those in Normandy. Between April and June the excellent Panzer Lehr Division was returned from Hungary to Chartres, only a day’s drive from the beaches, and the 21st Panzer Division was brought from Brittany to Caen; while the 352nd and 91st Infantry Divisions, both of good quality, were put in coastal positions, the 352nd above Omaha beach, where it would inflict heavy casualties on the American 1st Division on D-Day. When these redispositions were complete, the chosen beaches were defended by three instead of two infantry divisions, with another in close support; four instead of three Panzer divisions stood at close hand, one almost directly behind the British beaches themselves. It was prudence, not prescience, that dictated these new deployments, but the effect was to strengthen the Westheer’s capacity to resist at the key point, precisely as if correct intelligence had guided their new location.

  By the first week of June, however, there was no more SHAEF could do to soften enemy resistance until the commitment of the invading troops. Throughout that week they were confined to camp, isolated from civilian contact and entertained by cinema shows and record concerts. The belief was that D-Day casualties would be high – the troops’ commanders believed very high indeed. Most of the Americans and some of the British had no battle experience and contemplated the coming ordeal with sang-froid; those British divisions which had been brought home from three years of fighting in the desert and Italy were altogether less insouciant. They knew the ferocity with which the Wehrmacht fought and did not relish meeting it in the defence of the approaches to the Reich. Lieutenant Edwin Bramall, a new subaltern with the veteran 2nd King’s Royal Rifle Corps (and a future British chief of staff), thought the battalion ‘worn out’: ‘They had shot their bolt. Everybody who was any good had been promoted or become a casualty.’ By contrast, Eisenhower’s naval aide found the young American officers who had not seen action ‘as green as growing corn’, and asked himself, ‘How will they act in battle and how will they look in three months’ time?’ Commander Butcher’s and Lieutenant Bramall’s anxieties were to prove equally unfounded. Most British troops, however battle-weary, rose to the challenge of Normandy; the Americans grew into it almost overnight, once again demonstrating that three minutes of combat exceeds in value three years of training in making a soldier. No military formation, moreover, was to win a more ferocious reputation in Normandy than the 12th SS Panzer Division ‘Hitler Jugend’, whose soldiers had been recruited direct from the Nazi youth movement at the age of sixteen in 1943.

  Sea and sky turned stormy in the Channel at the end of the first week of June. The good weather on which Eisenhower and Montgomery had counted to coincide with favourable mid-month tides failed them; 4 June, the day chosen to launch the invasion, produced winds and waves which made landing by sea or air impossible. The airborne divisions stood down, the seaborne divisions which had sailed from the further ports turned back, the main armada kept to harbour. It was not until the evening of 5 June that the weather was judged to have abated enough for D-Day to be set for the following morning.

  When it dawned, the spectacle that confronted those embarked – and those ashore – was perhaps more dramatic than any soldiers, sailors or airmen had ever seen at the beginning of any battle. On the Normandy coast the sea from east to west and as far north as the seaward horizon was filled with ships, literally by the thousand; the sky thundered with the passage of aircraft; and the coastline had begun to disappear in gouts of smoke and dust as the bombardment bit into it. ‘The villages of La Breche and Lion-sur-Mer’, reported Captain Hendrie Bruce of the Royal Artillery, ‘are smothered with bursts, and enormous dirty clouds of smoke and brick dust rise from the target area and drift out to sea, completely obscuring our target for a time.’ Under these angry clouds the British, Canadian and American infantry were debarking from their landing craft, picking their way between the shore obstacles, diving to cover from enemy fire and struggling to reach the shelter of the cliffs and dunes at the head of the beaches.

  The time (H-Hour), depending on the set of the tide from beach to beach, was between 6.00 and 7.30, and the early minutes of the landing, for all except the Americans doomed to the agony of Omaha beach, were the worst. However, the wet and frightened infantrymen struggling through the surf along sixty miles of Normandy coastline were not the first Allied soldiers to have landed in France that day. In the darkness of the early morning the parachute units of the three airborne divisions, spearheads of the glider battalions that were to follow, had already dropped across the lower reaches of the two rivers, Vire and Orne, that demarcated the bridgehead’s outer flanks. The British 6th Airborne Division, compactly released by experienced pilots on to open pasture, had made a good drop, rallied quickly and moved rapidly to their objectives. These were the bridges of the Orne and its eastward neighbour, the Dives, which were to be respectively held and blown, in the latter case to prevent German armour ‘rolling up’ the British seaborne bridgehead by a drive along the coast. The American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions had been less lucky. Their pilots were inexperienced, the narrow neck of the Cotentin peninsula was easy to overshoot and the valley of the Vire was heavily flooded by deliberate defensive inundation. Some American parachutists fell into the sea, many drowned in the floods, many others, scattered by bad navigation and fear of flak, dropped miles from their objectives; the 101st Division’s ‘spread’ was ‘twenty-five miles by fifteen, with stray “sticks” even further afield’. Twenty-four hours later only 3000 men of the ‘Screaming Eagles’ had rallied, and some were to roam for days behind enemy lines, refusing to surrender while rations and ammunition lasted.

  Confusion in the German camp

  The scattering of the American parachutists was thought a calamity at the time, most of all by their tidy-minded commanders. In retrospect it can be seen materially to have added to the confusion and disorientation the invasion was inflicting on their German opposite numbers. The general commanding 91st Division, for example, was ambushed and killed by wandering American parachutists while returning from an anti-invasion conference in the early hours of 6 June, before he had even grasped that the event had begun. Elsewhere it sometimes took hours for German commanders to comprehend that the reports they were receiving from units actually under attack by Overlord forces were different from the bombardments and commando raids that had disturbed their occupation of France during the previous three years. On the day before, Luftwaffe meteorologists had discounted the possibility of an imminent invasion because of bad weather forecasts. By ill luck, Rommel was temporarily absent in Germany on leave, Rundstedt was sleeping the sleep of the old campaigner at Saint-Germain (he had been chief of staff of one of the divisions sent to invade France in 1914 and had a thick skin for alarms and excursions), while Hitler was preparing for bed at his holiday house at Berchtesgaden on the Obersalzberg and would not be presented with the firm evidence that the invasion had begun until his noon conference six hours after the assault waves had touched down.

  Local commanders nevertheless made such reactions as their authority allowed when they got firm indication that a landing had begun. Such indications were too soon to arrive. Because only eighteen out of ninety-two radar stations were working – those the Allied electronic-warfare teams had left unjammed in the Pas de Calais region – the pitifully small number of German night-fighters available (most were permanently defending the Reich) were scrambled to deal with the bogus air armada approaching from the Channel narrows. The real parachute fly-in was not attacked at all, since it was out of range of any working radar stations. And the
seaborne armada was eventually detected by sound at two in the morning, twelve miles off the Cotentin. At 4 am Blumentritt telephoned Jodl at Berchtesgaden for permission to move Panzer Lehr Division towards the beaches but was told to wait until daylight reconnaissance clarified the situation. As late at 6 am, when the naval bombardment was already devastating the beaches, LXXXIV Corps, which commanded the threatened sector, reported to the Seventh Army that it ‘appears to be a covering action in conjunction with attacks to be made at other points later’.

  Three German divisions, the 709th, 352nd and 716th, were thus to undergo attack by eight Allied divisions without any immediate support from their higher headquarters. The 709th and 716th Divisions found themselves in particularly desperate straits. Neither was of good quality and both lacked any means of manoeuvre. The first was defending the area on which the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions were dropping as well as Utah beach, where the US 4th Division was assaulting from the sea. It was an almost impossible mission. The US 4th Division was an excellent formation which put nine good infantry battalions on to the beach in the first wave. The 82nd and 101st were the cream of the American army, trained to a knife-edge and prepared for battle; their eighteen battalions, though scattered, were the equal of an ordinary force twice their size. The 709th Division was very ordinary indeed; its six battalions, finding themselves surrounded and outnumbered, put up scarcely any resistance. The three battalions on the beach surrendered after firing a few shots. Allied casualties at Utah numbered 197, the lowest of D-Day, and insignificant when set against the total of 23,000 men landed on that beach.

  The 716th Division, confronting the British 50th, Canadian 3rd and British 3rd Divisions on Gold, Juno and Sword beaches at the eastern end of the bridgehead, was of no better quality than 709th and was also disorientated by the descent of the 6th Airborne Division in its rear area. The British had additionally brought two commando brigades to the landing and three brigades of assault armour; their swimming Sherman tanks were briefed to leave their landing craft as close to the beaches as possible, so that the infantry would have covering fire from the moment of touchdown. The effect of launching such large numbers of well-supported infantry against the scattered German defenders was notable. At Sword and Juno the British and Canadians got ashore with little loss and quickly pressed inland; the British 3rd Division joined up with the 6th Airborne later that morning. On Gold the 50th Division had mixed fortunes: one of its two landing brigades debarked in front of dunes and crossed with little difficulty; the other was confronted by a fortified beach village which the naval bombardment had spared. By bad luck its swimming Shermans were late arriving, and in the meantime the two leading battalions, the 1st Hampshires and 1st Dorsets (which 185 years earlier had been the first British regiment to set foot in India), suffered heavy casualties.

  One of the brigade’s supporting artillerymen, Gunner Charles Wilson, supplies a picture of the extraordinary confusion of the last moments of ‘run-in’ and first moments of ‘touchdown’ which, in its mixture of dreadful fatality and hair’s breadth survival at a few yards’ distance, holds good for the incidents of D-Day from one end of the bridgehead to the other. His Landing Craft Tank (LCT) was carrying four self-propelled 25-pounder guns which were firing at targets ashore throughout the approach:

  We hit two mines going in – bottle mines on stakes. They didn’t stop us, although our ramp was damaged and an officer standing on it was killed. We grounded on a sandbank. The first man off was a commando sergeant in full kit. He disappeared like a stone in six feet of water. We grasped the ropes of the net over which the guns were to drive ashore and plunged down the ramp into icy water. The net was quite unmanageable in the rough water and dragged us away towards some mines. We let go the ropes and scrambled ashore. I lost my shoes and vest in the struggle and had only my shorts. Somebody offered cigarettes but they were soaking wet. George in the bren carrier was first vehicle off the LCT. It floated for a moment, drifted on to a mine and sank. George dived overboard and swam ashore. The battery command-post half-track got off with one running behind. The beach was strewn with wreckage, a blazing tank, bundles of blankets and kit, bodies and bits of bodies. One bloke near me was blown in half by a shell and his lower part collapsed in a bloody heap in the sand. The half-track stopped and I managed to struggle into my clothes.

  The 50th Division overcame its initial difficulties by mid-morning and by nightfall had advanced almost to the outskirts of Bayeux, closer to its prescribed objectives than any other Allied formation on D-Day. Closer by far than the US 1st Infantry Division, which on Omaha beach had undergone the worst of the invasion ordeals, one nearly as costly in lives as the planners had feared would be the lot of all divisions landing on the morning of the invasion. The 1st Division had been opposed by the 352nd, the best German formation in coastal positions on 6 June. Moreover, it defended beaches backed in places by steep shingle banks and overlooked at either end by steep cliffs. Exit from the beaches was difficult, while the cliffs provided commanding positions from which fire was directed on to the seaborne infantry below as the landing craft neared the shore and even as they touched ground. Their swimming Shermans, launched too far from shore in rough seas, had foundered. They had no direct fire support. The results were lamentable. The ordeal of the 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment, conveys the experience:

  Within ten minutes of the ramps being lowered, [the leading] company had become inert, leaderless and almost incapable of action. Every officer and sergeant had been killed or wounded. . . . It had become a struggle for survival and rescue. The men in the water pushed wounded men ashore ahead of them, and those who had reached the sands crawled back into the water pulling others to land to save them from drowning. Within 20 minutes of striking the beach A Company had ceased to be an assault company and had become a forlorn little rescue party bent upon survival and the saving of lives.

  Had all the German defenders of Normandy been as well trained and resolute as those of the 352nd Division and had accident overtaken more of the swimming Shermans, the débâcle at Omaha might have been repeated up and down all five beaches, with catastrophic results. Luckily, the fate of the 1st/116th Infantry was extreme. The Omaha landing as a whole was costly. Most of the 4649 casualties suffered by the American army on D-Day occurred there. Yet some of the Omaha battalions got ashore unscathed and even those worst afflicted eventually gathered their survivors and got away from the water’s edge. By the end of D-Day all chosen landing places were in Allied hands, even if the bridgehead was in places less than a mile deep. The question which loomed as evening drew in was whether the separate footholds could be united and in what strength the Germans would counter-attack.

  The battle of the build-up

  Because of the immobility of all the German infantry divisions, it was the handling of the Panzer divisions by Army Group B and OKW which alone threatened the invaders with riposte. Of the four within or close to the invasion area, only the 21st Panzer Division, positioned near Caen on the eastern flank of the British Sword beach and ‘airborne bridgehead’, was close enough to the scene of action to exert a decisive effect. Its commander, like Rommel, was absent on the morning of D-Day (Rommel, by furious driving from Ulm, would arrive at Army Group B headquarters at 10.30 in the evening). Rommel’s chief of staff, Hans Speidel, succeeded in extracting permission from OKW for the 21st Panzer Division to intervene at 6.45 am, but it was two hours before General Erich Marcks, next in the chain of command, passed on an operational order. That order required the tanks to probe into the gap between Sword and Juno beaches, to halt the British advance on Caen, which was only eight miles from the sea, and ‘roll up’ the bridgehead.

  Advancing on Caen from Sword beach was a brigade of British infantry led by the 2nd Battalion of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. It should have been accompanied by the tanks of the Staffordshire Yeomanry but they were trapped in a giant traffic jam on the beach. The Shropshires had therefore to take each German
defensive position as they came to it by orthodox fire and movement. Progress was slow. In the afternoon the tanks caught them up, but at six o’clock the column ran into the vanguards of the 21st Panzer Division, which had been delayed by one time-wasting mission after another on its way to the front. Its guns at once forced the Shropshires to go to ground, three miles short of Caen, and its 22nd Panzer Regiment moved forward to attack the bridgehead. ‘If you don’t succeed in throwing the British into the sea’, Marcks warned the regimental commander with all too exact foresight, ‘we shall have lost the war.’ However, its Mark IV tanks ran into the Staffordshire Yeomanry’s anti-tank Fireflies (Shermans armed with the long 17-pounder) and suffered heavy losses. A few made contact with the infantry of the 716th Division still holding out at Lion-sur-Mer; but, when they were overflown by the 250 gliders of 6th Airborne Division bringing reinforcements to the parachutists across the Orne, they concluded that they risked being cut off and withdrew. By nightfall, though Caen remained in German hands, the Sword bridgehead perimeter was intact and the crisis of D-Day had passed.