The Longest Day

by Cornelius Ryan

  It was on the black phone, to add to all his other worries, that Eisenhower heard of the erroneous “flash” concerning the “landings.” He said nothing when he was told the news. His naval aide, Captain Harry C. Butcher, recalls that the Supreme Commander merely grunted an acknowledgment. What was there to say or do now?

  Four months before, in the directive appointing him Supreme Commander, the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington had spelled out his assignment in one precise paragraph. It read: “You will enter the continent of Europe and, in conjunction with the other United Nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces …”

  There in one sentence was the aim and purpose of the assault. But to the entire Allied world this was to be more than a military operation. Eisenhower called it “a great crusade”—a crusade to end once and for all a monstrous tyranny that had plunged the world into its bloodiest war, shattered a continent and placed upwards of 300 million people in bondage. (Actually, nobody at this time could even imagine the full extent of the Nazi barbarism that had washed across Europe—the millions who had disappeared into the gas chambers and furnaces of Heinrich Himmler’s aseptic crematoria, the millions who had been herded out of their countries to work as slave laborers, a tremendous percentage of whom would never return, the millions more who had been tortured to death, executed as hostages or exterminated by the simple expedient of starvation.) The great crusade’s unalterable purpose was not only to win the war, but to destroy Nazism and bring to an end an era of savagery which had never been surpassed in the world’s history.

  But first the invasion had to succeed. If it failed, the final defeat of Germany might take years.

  To prepare for the all-out invasion on which so much depended, intensive military planning had been going on for more than a year. Long before anyone knew that Eisenhower would be named Supreme Commander, a small group of Anglo-American officers under Britain’s Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan had been laying the groundwork for the assault. Their problems were incredibly involved—there were few guideposts, few military precedents, but a plethora of question marks. Where should the attack be launched and when? How many divisions should be used? If X divisions were needed would they be available, trained and ready to go by Y date? How many transports would be required to carry them? What about naval bombardment, support ships and escorts? Where were all the landing craft going to come from—could some be diverted from the Pacific and Mediterranean theaters of war? How many airfields would be needed to accommodate the thousands of planes necessary for the air attack? How long would it take to stockpile all the supplies, the equipment, guns, ammunition, transport and food, and how much was needed not only for the attack but to follow it up?

  These were just a few of the staggering questions that Allied planners had to answer. There were thousands of others. Ultimately their studies, enlarged and modified into the final Overlord plan after Eisenhower took over, called for more men, more ships, more planes, more equipment and matériel than had ever been assembled before for a single military operation.

  The build-up was enormous. Even before the plan reached its final form an unprecedented flow of men and supplies began pouring into England. Soon there were so many Americans in the small towns and villages that the British who lived in them were often hopelessly outnumbered. Their movie theaters, hotels, restaurants, dance halls and favorite pubs were suddenly swamped by a flood of troops from every state in the Union.

  Airfields blossomed everywhere. For the great air offensive, 163 bases were constructed in addition to the scores already in existence, until at last there were so many that a standard gag among 8th and 9th Air Force crewmen was that they could taxi the length and breadth of the island without scratching a wing. Ports were jammed. A great supporting naval fleet of almost nine hundred ships, from battleships to PT boats, began to assemble. Convoys arrived in such great numbers that by spring they had delivered almost 2 million tons of goods and supplies—so much that 170 miles of new railroad lines had to be laid down to move it.

  By May southern England looked like a huge arsenal. Hidden in the forests were mountainous piles of ammunition. Stretching across the moors, bumper to bumper, were tanks, half-tracks, armored cars, trucks, jeeps and ambulances—more than fifty thousand of them. In the fields were long lines of howitzers and antiaircraft guns, great quantities of prefabricated materials from Nissen huts to airstrips, and huge stocks of earth-moving equipment from bulldozers to excavators. At central depots there were immense quantities of food, clothing and medical supplies, from pills for combating seasickness to 124,000 hospital beds. But the most staggering sight of all were the valleys filled with long lines of railroad rolling stock: almost one thousand brand-new locomotives, and nearly twenty thousand tanker cars and freight cars which would be used to replace the shattered French equipment after the beachhead had been established.

  There were also strange new devices of war. There were tanks that could swim, others that carried great rolls of lath to be used in antitank ditches or as stepping-stones over walls, and yet others equipped with great chain flails that beat the ground in front of them to explode mines. There were flat, block-long ships, each carrying a forest of pipes for the launching of warfare’s newest weapon, rockets. Perhaps strangest of all were two man-made harbors that were to be towed across to the Normandy beaches. They were engineering miracles and one of the big Overlord secrets; they assured the constant flow of men and supplies into the beachhead during the first critical weeks until a port could be captured. The harbors, called “Mulberries,” consisted first of an outer breakwater made up of great steel floats. Next came 145 huge concrete caissons in various sizes which were to be sunk butt to butt to make an inner breakwater. The largest of these caissons had crew quarters and antiaircraft guns and, when it was being towed, looked like a five-story apartment building lying on its side. Within these man-made harbors, freighters as large as Liberty ships could unload into barges ferrying back and forth to the beaches. Smaller ships, like coasters or landing craft, could dump their cargoes at massive steel pierheads where waiting trucks would run them to shore over floating pontoon-supported piers. Beyond the Mulberries a line of sixty concrete blockships was to be sunk as an additional breakwater. In position off the invasion beaches of Normandy, each harbor would be the size of the port of Dover.

  All through May men and supplies began to move down to the ports and the loading areas. Congestion was a major problem, but somehow the quartermasters, military police and British railroad authorities kept everything moving and on time.

  Trains loaded with troops and supplies backed and filled on every line as they waited to converge on the coast. Convoys jammed every road. Every little village and hamlet was covered with a fine dust, and throughout the quiet spring nights the whole of southern England resounded with the low whining sound of the trucks, the whirring and clacking of tanks and the unmistakable voices of Americans, all of whom seemed to be asking the same question: “How far away is this goddam place?”

  Almost overnight, cities of Nissen huts and tents sprang up in the coastal regions as troops began to pour into the embarkation areas. Men slept in bunks stacked three and four deep. Showers and latrines were usually several fields away and the men had to queue up to use them. Chow lines were sometimes a quarter of a mile long. There were so many troops that it took some 54,000 men, 4,500 of them newly trained cooks, just to service American installations. The last week in May troops and supplies began loading onto the transports and the landing ships. The time had finally come.

  The statistics staggered the imagination; the force seemed overwhelming. Now this great weapon—the youth of the free world, the resources of the free world—waited on the decision of one man: Eisenhower.

  Throughout most of June 4, Eishenhower remained alone in his trailer. He and his commanders had done everything to ensure that the invasion would have every possible chance of success at t
he lowest cost in lives. But now, after all the months of political and military planning, Operation Overlord lay at the mercy of the elements. Eisenhower was helpless; all he could do was to wait and hope that the weather would improve. But no matter what happened he would be forced to make a momentous decision by the end of the day—to go or to postpone the assault once again. Either way the success or failure of Operation Overlord might depend on that decision. And nobody could make that decision for him. The responsibility would be his and his alone.

  Eisenhower was faced with a dreadful dilemma. On May 17 he had decided that D Day would have to be one of three days in June—the fifth, sixth, or seventh. Meteorological studies had shown that two of the vital weather requirements for the invasion could be expected for Normandy on those days: a late-rising moon and, shortly after dawn, a low tide.

  The paratroopers and glider-borne infantry who would launch the assault, some eighteen thousand men of the U.S. 101st and 82nd divisions and the British 6th Division, needed the moonlight. But their surprise attack depended on darkness up to the time they arrived over the dropping zones. Thus their critical demand was for a late-rising moon.

  The seaborne landings had to take place when the tide was low enough to expose Rommel’s beach obstacles. On this tide the timing of the whole invasion would depend. And to complicate the meteorological calculations further, follow-up troops landing much later in the day would also need a low tide—and it had to come before darkness set in.

  These two critical factors of moonlight and tide shackled Eisenhower. Tide alone reduced the number of days for the attack in any one month to six, and three of those were moonless.

  But that was not all. There were many other considerations he had to take into account. First, all the services wanted long hours of daylight and good visibility—to identify the beaches, for the naval and air forces to spot their targets and to reduce the hazard of collision when five thousand ships began maneuvering almost side by side in the Bay of the Seine. Second, a calm sea was required. Apart from the havoc a rough sea might cause to the fleet, seasickness could leave the troops helpless long before they even set foot on the beaches. Third, low winds, blowing inshore, were needed to clear the beaches of smoke so that targets would not be obscured. And finally the Allies required three more quiet days after D Day to facilitate the quick build-up of men and supplies.

  Nobody at Supreme Headquarters expected perfect conditions on D Day, least of all Eisenhower. He had schooled himself, in countless dry runs with his meteorological staff, to recognize and weigh all the factors which would give him the bare minimum conditions acceptable for the attack. But according to his meteorologist the chances were about ten to one against Normandy having weather on any one day in June which would meet even the minimal requirements. On this stormy Sunday, as Eisenhower, alone in his trailer, considered every possibility, those odds appeared to have become astronomcial.

  Of the three possible days for the invasion he had chosen the fifth so that if there was a postponement he could launch the assault on the sixth. But if he ordered the landings for the sixth and then had to cancel them again, the problem of refueling the returning convoys might prevent him from attacking on the seventh. There would then be two alternatives: He could postpone D Day until the next period when the tides were right, June 19; but if he did that the airborne armies would be forced to attack in darkness—June 19 was moonless. The other alternative was to wait until July, and that long a postponement, as he was later to recall, “was too bitter to contemplate.”

  So terrifying was the thought of postponement that many of Eisenhower’s most cautious commanders were even prepared to risk attack instead on the eighth or ninth. They did not see how more than 200,000 men, most of them already briefed, could be kept isolated and bottled up for weeks on ships, in embarkation areas and on airfields without the secret of the invasion leaking out. Even if security remained intact during the period, surely Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft would spot the massed fleet (if they hadn’t done so already) or German agents would somehow learn of the plan. For everybody the prospect of a postponement was grim. But it was Eisenhower who would have to make the decision.

  In the fading light of the afternoon the Supreme Commander occasionally came to the door of his trailer and gazed up through the wind-swept treetops at the blanket of clouds that covered the sky. At other times he would pace up and down outside the trailer, chain-smoking, kicking at the cinders on the little pathway—a tall figure, shoulders slightly hunched, hands rammed deep into his pockets.

  On these solitary strolls Eisenhower scarcely seemed to notice anybody, but during the afternoon he spotted one of the four pool correspondents accredited to his advance headquarters—Merrill “Red” Mueller of NBC. “Let’s take a walk, Red,” said Ike abruptly, and without waiting for Mueller he strode off, hands in his pockets, at his usual brisk pace. The correspondent hurriedly caught up with him as he disappeared into the woods.

  It was a strange, silent walk. Eisenhower uttered hardly a word. “Ike seemed completely preoccupied with his own thoughts, completely immersed in all his problems,” Mueller remembers. “It was almost as though he had forgotten I was with him.” There were many questions that Mueller wanted to put to the Supreme Commander, but he didn’t ask them; he felt that he couldn’t intrude.

  When they returned to the encampment and Eisenhower had said goodbye, the correspondent watched him climb the little aluminum stairs leading to the trailer door. At that moment he appeared to Mueller to be “bowed down with worry… as though each of the four stars on either shoulder weighed a ton.”

  Shortly before nine-thirty that night, Eisenhower’s senior commanders and their chiefs of staff gathered in the library of Southwick House. It was a large, comfortable room with a table covered by a green baize cloth, several easy chairs and two sofas. Dark oak bookcases lined three of the walls, but there were few books on the shelves and the room had a bare look. Heavy double blackout curtains hung at the windows and on this night they muffled the drumming of the rain and the flat buckling sound of the wind.

  Standing about the room in little groups, the staff officers talked quietly. Near the fireplace Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith, conversed with the pipe-smoking Deputy Supreme Commander, Air Chief Marshal Tedder. Seated to one side was the fiery Allied naval commander, Admiral Ramsay, and close by the Allied air commander, Air Chief Marshal Leigh-Mallory. Only one officer was dressed informally, General Smith recalls. The peppery Montgomery, who would be in charge of the D-Day assault, wore his usual corduroy slacks and roll-necked sweater. These were the men who would translate the order for the attack when Eisenhower gave the word to go. Now they and their staff officers—altogether there were twelve senior officers in the room—waited for the arrival of the Supreme Commander and the decisive conference that would begin at nine-thirty. At that time they would hear the latest forecasts of the meteorologists.

  At exactly nine-thirty the door opened and Eisenhower, neat in his dark-green battle dress, strode in. There was just the faintest flicker of the old Eisenhower grin as he greeted his old friends, but the mask of worry quickly returned to his face as he opened the conference. There was no need for a preamble; everybody knew the seriousness of the decision that had to be made. So almost immediately the three senior Overlord meteorologists, led by their chief, Group Captain J. N. Stagg of the Royal Air Force, came into the room.

  There was a hushed silence as Stagg opened the briefing. Quickly he sketched the weather picture of the previous twenty-four hours and then he quietly said, “Gentlemen … there have been some rapid and unexpected developments in the situation …” All eyes were on Stagg now, as he presented the anxious-faced Eisenhower and his commanders with a slender ray of hope.

  A new weather front had been spotted which, he said, would move up the Channel within the next few hours and cause a gradual clearing over the assault areas. These improving conditions would last throu
ghout the next day and continue up to the morning of June 6. After that the weather would begin to deteriorate again. During this promised period of fair weather, the winds would drop appreciably and the skies would clear—enough at least for bombers to operate on the night of the fifth and throughout the morning of the sixth. By noon the cloud layer would thicken and the skies would become overcast again. In short, what Eisenhower was being told was that a barely tolerable period of fair conditions, far below the minimal requirements, would prevail for just a little more than twentyfour hours.

  The moment Stagg had finished, he and the other two meteorologists were subjected to a barrage of questions. Were all of them confident about the accuracy of their predictions? Could their forecasts be wrong—had they checked their reports with every available source? Was there any chance of the weather continuing to improve in the few days immediately after the sixth?

  Some of the questions were impossible for the weathermen to answer. Their report had been checked and double-checked and they were as optimistic as they could be about the forecast, but there was always the chance that the vagaries of the weather might prove them wrong. They answered as best they could, then they withdrew.

  For the next fifteen minutes Eisenhower and his commanders deliberated. The urgency of making a decision was stressed by Admiral Ramsay. The American task force for Omaha and Utah beaches under the command of Rear Admiral A. G. Kirk would have to get the order within a half hour if Overlord was to take place on Tuesday. Ramsay’s concern was prompted by the refueling problem; if those forces sailed later and were then recalled it would be impossible to get them ready again for a possible attack on Wednesday, the seventh.