Divided on D-Day

by Edward E. Gordon

  Fig. 5.4. Bombproof artillery bunker on the German Atlantic Wall. (Wikimedia Creative Commons, author: Jebulon)

  The Germans erected anti-paratroop defenses behind the fortified zone. “Rommel's asparagus” were anti-glider poles that were combined with other obstructions and minefields to disrupt landing sites. Rommel ordered these stakes to be fitted with artillery shells and interconnected by trip wires. A few days before D-Day he obtained a million captured shells, but they were not installed at the time of the invasion.

  Rommel used deception to confuse the Allies about his real strength. False orders regarding troop dispositions were passed on to French railway officials. The Germans established dummy headquarters and moved advance personnel around the countryside. Fake gun positions and dummy railheads were built. Motor transport was moved around by day and night to confuse the enemy.

  Rommel also flooded the low tidal marshlands behind Utah Beach. German engineers dammed rivers and streams, thus turning river valleys into lakes and swamps. Though most of these water obstacles were shallow, paratroopers overloaded with equipment could easily drown.

  Even though shortages of manpower and equipment prevented Rommel from completing all the planned components of the Atlantic Wall, the Allied invasion forces faced a formidable combination of defenses. However, Hitler's vaunted Festung Europa or Fortress Europe was not impregnable.30

  INVASION CONFUSION

  By the end of May 1944, the Allied FORTITUDE deception plan had succeeded in convincing the intelligence service of German high command West that the Allies had eighty-nine divisions in the British Isles and there were enough landing craft for twenty divisions to land in the invasion's first wave. The real numbers were forty-seven and six, respectively.31

  FORTITUDE also had succeeded in deceiving the German high command into believing that Pas-de-Calais was the probable invasion site. Because of this Rommel concentrated more of his available units around Calais, though he also wanted to reinforce Normandy.

  In late May, Hiroski Oshina, imperial Japan's ambassador to Germany, visited Hitler at the Eagle's Nest in Berchtesgaden. He asked Hitler where the Allies would attempt their invasion. The führer told the ambassador that the Allies had assembled “about 80 divisions in the British Isles.” First they would invade in Normandy and Brittany. Then having attracted the German forces, “they will come forward with an all-out second front across the straits of Dover.”32 The Japanese radioed Hitler's predictions back to Tokyo. The Americans intercepted and decrypted the information.

  By D-Day German troop strength in the most threatened sectors revealed the degree of FORTITUDE's overall success. The Fifteenth Army at Pas-de-Calais had grown to eighteen infantry and two panzer divisions. It had an interlocking fixed defense system, making it a true fortified zone. In contrast, the Seventh Army in Normandy and Brittany had fourteen infantry divisions and a single panzer division. Normandy was defended by a limited network of isolated, weakly manned strongpoints. The Twenty-First Panzer Division was its sole mobile reserve partially equipped with the French tanks captured in 1940.33

  THE PIGEON SHOOT

  Carrier pigeons played an important role in Allied intelligence. They were fitted with tiny metal capsules in which coded messages on tiny pieces of ultra-thin rice paper were inserted. They carried French underground messages disclosing the locations of German fortifications and army units to the British Intelligence Service.34

  The Germans knew that these pigeons were used for communications. Pigeon shooting was a favorite sport of German military personnel along the entire length of northern France in 1944. While thousands of Allied homing pigeons made it safely back to their roosts along the English coast, some did not. In the spring of 1944 sharpshooters in the 352nd Infantry Division bagged twenty-seven carrier pigeons in April and May before D-Day. As a result, Allied intelligence failed to learn about the 352nd Division's relocation to the coast. Thus when the Americans landed on Omaha Beach, they were surprised to find that the original second-rate defenders of the 716th Division had been reinforced by the battle-hardened veterans of the 352nd.35

  JUNE 4–5, THE ULTIMATE DECEPTION

  On June 4 and June 5, a strong storm blew in over the English Channel and northern France. Unlike the Allies, the Germans had no meteorological stations in the western Atlantic. Their attempts to establish such facilities along the coast of southern Greenland had been terminated by Allied naval force raids in 1943.

  Allied air and naval superiority frustrated German attempts to penetrate invasion preparations. During the first five days of June, the Germans gained no information from their reconnaissance sources. On June 4 German naval headquarters reported, “The enemy has [not] yet assembled his invasion fleet in the required strength” for landings.36

  On June 5 a total of five German reconnaissance flights searched the English Channel. They found nothing. German Navy Group West reported, “Rough sea, poor visibility, Force 5–6 wind, rain likely to get heavier…. There is little prospect of short-term changes in the weather during the next few days.”37 The navy canceled its channel patrols for the night of June 5.

  On that day Rundstedt's Paris headquarters told all German field commands, “There is no immediate prospect of the invasion.”38 As a result many German officers were not in Normandy on D-Day. Instead they had left their posts for army war games scheduled on June 6, 1944.39

  ROMMEL'S BIRTHDAY SURPRISE

  By early June the strain of endless daily inspections and anticipation of a battle that could break out at any moment was taking its toll on the Desert Fox. Rommel wrote his wife that he was thinking about a surprise visit for her fiftieth birthday on June 6. The field marshal was even more focused on an important meeting with Hitler to ask for panzer reinforcements in Normandy.

  Rommel noted in his diary that “fears of an invasion” between June 5 and June 8 were rendered less because the tides were “very unfavorable” (he expected the Allies at high tide) and that Germany's reconnaissance had not given “the slightest indication that a landing was imminent.” After getting Rundstedt's approval for the trip, he telephoned Hitler's assistant for an appointment on June 7.40

  At 7:00 a.m. on June 5, Rommel headed for his hometown of Herrlingen near Ulm in southwestern Germany (an eight- to ten-hour trip by car) to celebrate his wife's birthday on June 6, bringing a pair of fine leather shoes he bought in Paris for her. The next day he would drive to Berchtesgaden and press his requests for two panzer divisions, the Second SS and the Ninth Panzer, to be moved south and west of Caen where they could readily intervene in the first twenty-four hours of a landing in Normandy. Rommel was confident he would get them.

  On May 1, Hitler's headquarters (OKW) had called Rommel at Chateau de La Roche-Guyon and spoken to General Speidel, his chief of staff. They wanted to know if the forces in Normandy could definitely defeat an Allied attack. Without waiting for a reply, the next day Hitler moved the Ninety-First Luftwaffe Airborne Division and several anti-tank and armored battalions into the Normandy region as reinforcements.41

  A week later Hitler sent Rommel an urgent telex warning him to expect an Allied landing “in the middle May…point of concentration: first and foremost, Normandy.”42 On the evening of May 15, a skeptical Rommel called General Alfred Jodl, Hitler's chief of staff, to find out the source of Hitler's invasion warning. Jodl did not know. After the war, a search of German archives and German staff interrogations failed to reveal the source of Hitler's accurate invasion assessment.

  Because Rommel's query was not answered, on May 17 he decided to make another inspection of the Cotentin Peninsula with his naval aide, Admiral Friederich Oskar Ruge. Ruge recalled that Rommel stood for a long time on what would soon be Utah Beach staring out to sea.

  “So,” he asked Ruge, “this is where you think they’ll land?”

  Ruge as a sailor told Rommel that the Cotentin land mass helped shelter those waters from the Channel's winds.

  “No,” Rommel insisted, �
�they will come where their fighter planes will be closest to their bases.”43

  But Rommel took no chances. It was then he decided to make his June 5 to June 7 trip. Hitler recently had once again declined his pleas for more panzers in Normandy. But now Normandy had become Hitler's new invasion fixation. As the führer's favorite field marshal, Rommel was confident that a private meeting with Hitler would net him the two panzer divisions for Normandy. He had telephoned Hitler nearly every day.

  By June 20 Rommel planned to position this armor behind what soon became the five Allied invasion beaches. With the additional tank divisions and the Twenty-First Panzer near Caen, Rommel believed that in two more weeks Normandy would be impregnable. Unfortunately for Germany, they would be two weeks too late.44

  In yet another uncanny invasion prediction, Rommel was proven correct. On one of his numerous inspection tours, he told a group of his soldiers in Normandy, “Do not look for the enemy by daylight when the sun is shining. They will come at night in cloud and storm.”45

  HITLER'S LUCK ENDS

  The Germans were unlucky in Normandy. They were tricked by Operation Fortitude, deceived by the weather, and handicapped by the führer's inane command system. Even though the Germans had years to prepare, they lacked the well-equipped and well-trained army, navy, and air force units needed to decisively defeat an Allied invasion. Hitler also subverted any unified defensive/offensive strategy, thus adding confusion to Germany's preparations. Unlike the earlier days of World War II, Hitler's luck had ended. D-Day would take the Germans completely by surprise. The time, day, and place were almost totally unexpected.46

  We have examined both the offensive and defensive preparations for the invasion of northwestern Europe. Yet the actual battlefield operations seldom take place as planned. June 6, 1944, proved to be no exception.

  “The challenge is not to fight to survive, but to fight to win the final victory.”

  —George VI1

  After Eisenhower issued the go-ahead invasion order on June 5 at 5:00 a.m., four hours later Rear Admiral A. G. Talbot pulled the cork out of the D-Day invasion bottle when he had his ship's flag signal “Good luck: drive on.”2 Admiral Ramsay issued his “Special Order of the Day” as commander in chief of the world's largest expeditionary force: “I count on every man to do his utmost to ensure the success of this great enterprise which is the climax of the European war. Good luck to you all and God speed.”3

  For the rest of that day a teeming mass of assorted shipping in the rivers and bays of southern England gradually formed into the NEPTUNE armada. All five lead invasion forces rendezvoused slightly south of the Isle of Wight (Area ZEBRA). This congested mass of ships became known as “Piccadilly Circus,” after London's perpetually snarled traffic crossroad. Each flotilla split off to its landing beach preceded by minesweepers and flanked by destroyers. Ships of all classes stretched from horizon to horizon. The different assault and bombarding units sorted themselves out and sailed in due course according to Ramsay's detailed NEPTUNE orders. Follow-up waves and reinforcements sailed afterward.

  The storm that had almost canceled the June 6 D-Day became a blessing in disguise. The Allies had always believed that the invasion fleet would be discovered by the Germans midway to its destination. Instead the bad weather covered the fleet's presence from detection. Ramsay's greatest concern, a mass attack on the NEPTUNE fleet, never happened. Allied naval and air support effectively protected the fleet.

  A few ships’ mechanicals failed; others had engine problems. Some experienced fuel problems or water leaks. These returned to England. But only one D-Day ship was lost crossing the channel that night.

  While the NEPTUNE invasion fleet peacefully proceeded into position off the Normandy coast, Operation FORTITUDE launched its own diversionary fleet toward Pas-de-Calais. Two small flotillas of British motor boats headed across the channel. Each boat towed two twenty-nine-foot-long balloons as part of a massive Allied electronic conjuring trick. One balloon sailed overhead while the other one was tethered to a raft. The nine-foot reflector attached to each of these balloons sent out a misleading radar echo of a ten-thousand-ton troop ship. In the skies overhead, Royal Air Force (RAF) bomber squadrons dropped thousands of aluminum foil strips to simulate hundreds of aircraft on German radar screens.4

  The subterfuge worked as German radar stations began reporting a massive air and sea armada heading for Pas-de-Calais. Most of the small number of Luftwaffe fighters available headed northward, clearing the air space over Normandy for the Allies.

  “SAY HELLO TO FRANCE!”

  Around 1:00 a.m. on June 6 thousands of soldiers on troop transports looked skyward at the more than 1,200 aircraft on their way to Normandy. These C-47 transport planes, many towing gliders, were filled with over twenty thousand British and American paratroopers. It was their first combat-mission drop for most of the C-47 pilots based in England. The Eighty-Second and 101st US Airborne Divisions dropped their men on the west end of the invasion zone behind Utah Beach; the British Sixth Airborne Division parachuted behind Sword Beach on the east end. (See Map 5.) These troops were to isolate the beach landings and prevent German reinforcements from launching a successful counterattack. June 6, 1944, was the 1,453rd day of the German occupation of France.5

  Soon after 1:00 a.m. an American captain standing in an open air transport door saw the surf hitting the Normandy beaches. He shouted to his paratroopers, “Say hello to France!”6 This was the start of the most carefully chronicled day in the history of warfare.

  Low clouds swallowed the incoming airborne fleet, and German antiaircraft fire scrambled the formations. Only 4 percent of the Eighty-Second landed in their target zones. They would fail to secure all the causeway bridges leading to the beaches. Only 1,000 men out of 6,400 of the 101st landed near their objectives. Many parachutists landed in flooded fields. Encumbered by their heavy equipment, they sank in the mud and water, and many drowned. However the 101st was able to stop the Germans from counterattacking during the beach landing.7

  Brigadier General James M. Gavin, assistant division commander of the Eighty-Second, successfully mustered one thousand troops near the target of St. Mère-Église. Unfortunately one of his regiments (505th) landed right on top of the village. They were shot out of the sky by the Germans. Garvin rallied his remaining forces for the attack that by dawn made St. Mère-Église the first town in France to be liberated by the Allies. The Germans, however, still shelled the town for two days, killing many inhabitants.

  Gliders with additional men and heavy equipment made crash landings that were more chaotic than the initial paratroop drops. However despite the scattering of these units, the US airborne achieved most of their night and early D-Day morning objectives. At dawn 816 planes and 100 gliders had placed 13,000 Americans into Normandy. Only twenty-one aircraft were shot down, so few that Leigh-Mallory sent a written apology to Eisenhower for his earlier prediction of disaster.8

  Meanwhile to the east, the British Sixth Airborne Division was hampered by landing at night in the wind and rain. The fact that most succeeded is in itself a miracle. The British paratroopers’ objectives were to either seize or destroy bridges over the Orne and Dives Rivers in a five-mile area in order to shield the beach landings from German panzer attacks emanating from around the city of Caen. (See Map 5.)

  High winds blew a number of these gliders off course and landed many parachutists up to seven miles from their targets. They were the lucky ones. The tow ropes of some gliders snapped in the gale, causing them to founder in the channel.

  An important objective was the Caen Canal Bridge—code-named Pegasus Bridge. One of the British gliders landed with its nose inside the bridge's barbed wire defenses due to poor visibility. The single German sentry on duty thought it was a bomber crash landing. Paratroopers jumped out of the wreck, and in three minutes the British had taken the vital bridge. Five other bridges were also taken or blown up, thereby stopping effective German counterattacks.

&nb
sp; The Sixth Airborne also targeted the Merville coastal battery. Its two artillery pieces and ten heavy machine guns threatened the British invasion beaches and Allied fleet. One hundred Lancaster heavy bombers attacked the battery on the night of June 5, causing little damage. A naval bombardment was scheduled for 5:15 a.m. on June 6 in a forlorn hope to silence the guns.

  The Ninth Parachute Battalion commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway was to be dropped nearby at 12:50 a.m. If these troops succeeded in silencing the battery, he was to signal the fleet. His men were badly scattered by heavy antiaircraft fire. By 2:30 a.m. he had only 150 out of 650 men at the assembly point. With only one hour to spare, Otway's men infiltrated the German defenses and poured machine-gun fire through the artillery embrasures. The Germans surrendered only fifteen minutes before the fleet bombardment was to begin.9

  At the same time that the Anglo-American paratroops hit the ground, a pair of RAF Stirling bombers began Operation TITANIC, dropping two hundred dummy paratroopers at St. Valéry in the upper Normandy toward Pas-de-Calais and other locations. These rubber “Rupert” dolls were intended to simulate large-scale parachute drops, thus deflecting German forces away from the genuine airborne operations in Normandy. When the Ruperts’ parachutes opened, firecrackers began exploding in midair like gunfire. Also Special Air Service Brigades of the British army, equipped with special gramophones that played bursts of small-arms fire mixed with soldiers giving orders and battle cries, were dropped along with the Ruperts.10