D-Day: History in an Hour

by Rupert Colley

  In the morning of 1 June, the Daily Telegraph inadvertently caused alarm at SHAEF when its crossword included a clue to which the solution was ‘Neptune’. It wasn’t the first time – within the previous month, the crossword had included the answers ‘Utah’, ‘Omaha’, ‘Juno’, ‘Sword’, ‘Gold’, ‘Overlord’ and ‘Mulberry’. Surely, someone was sending messages back to Germany? MI5 tracked down the crossword compiler, Leonard Dawe, to his Surrey home and, to use Dawe’s phrase, ‘turned inside out’ until they were satisfied it was purely a fluke.

  That evening, the BBC broadcast into France the opening three lines (‘The long sobs / of the violins / of autumn’) of a poem entitled ‘Autumn Song’ by popular French poet Paul Verlaine (originally published in 1866) as the prearranged call to action to cells of the French resistance. The Abwehr, intercepting it, knew it had to be significant, but knew not how.

  2 June

  Eisenhower’s Order of the Day

  On 2 June, the first Allied warships set sail from their ports at Belfast, Scapa Flow and the Clyde. Elsewhere, in twenty-two ports across southern England from Falmouth in the west to Newhaven in the east, troops prepared to embark. Among them were specially assigned reporters and photographers, including Life magazine’s most famous photographer, Robert Capa. Each man was issued with Eisenhower’s Order of the Day. The 243-word missive began:

  Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world. Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.

  The Allies’ highly effective ‘Transportation Plan’, the strategic bombing of France that had begun in early March, continued, including a number of ‘deception sorties’. On the night of 3/4 June, ninety-six Lancaster bombers attacked and totally destroyed the radar station at Urville-Hague near Cherbourg, the Germans’ primary listening station in Normandy. Ten days later, on 13 June, a German report conceded that their ‘coast defences have been cut off from the supply bases in the interior… large scale strategic movement of German troops by rail is practically impossible at the present time’.

  3 June

  Rommel, also believing the poor weather would rule out an invasion, decided to return home to Germany, first to visit his wife, Lucie, on the occasion of her fiftieth birthday (a devoted husband, Rommel wrote daily to her while away on duty), followed by a trip to see Hitler at the Berghof to argue his case for moving more panzer divisions to the beaches. He planned to be back in France on 8 June.

  4 June

  Meeting at 4.15 a.m. at Southwick House, Eisenhower and colleagues listened as Group Captain Stagg offered his latest update. The forecast for 5 June was still not good – poor weather threatened to disrupt Allied plans. Heavy cloud would impede bombing, while low cloud would hinder airborne operations. Stagg, relying on forecasts from three different and sometimes contradictory sources, still reckoned that there would be a respite in the foul weather blowing in from the Atlantic to the west, and therefore 6 June might provide a twenty-four-hour lull and acceptable visibility between two bouts of depression. D-Day, Eisenhower decided, was to be set back by a day. Ships already out at sea had to be recalled. Troops geared up for action had to endure an agonizing extra twenty-four hours of waiting.

  Just as worrying now for Eisenhower was news that the Germans had moved one of their crack divisions into the area facing Omaha beach. It was too late to change plans or even to warn the American troops heading for Omaha.

  Eisenhower knew that 6 June would provide the last opportunity. After that the high tides of the new moon period would cease and delay an invasion by at least a whole two weeks.

  By now, Churchill decided that Charles de Gaulle needed to know what was happening. The leader of the Free French, who, in May 1943, had relocated to Algiers, was called back to England. Initially, de Gaulle refused, still angry that Roosevelt was refusing to acknowledge him as the president of a liberated France. But come back de Gaulle did. On the evening of 4 June, near Portsmouth, Eisenhower and Churchill met with de Gaulle and informed him of the impending invasion. Eisenhower informed the Frenchman that he himself would be broadcasting a proclamation soon after the landings, exhorting the French nation to play their part. Inflamed, de Gaulle demanded to know ‘by what right?… What will you tell them?’

  At 9.30 p.m., Eisenhower chaired another meeting. Captain Stagg confirmed his earlier forecast – although far from ideal, the weather on the 6th would be favourable. The fact that Eisenhower knew the enemy had effectively ruled out an invasion during these early days of June countered the less than ideal weather conditions. Conditions were as good as they were going to get. The time had come. At 9.45 p.m., 4 June, Eisenhower issued his order: ‘OK, we’ll go.’ The largest amphibious invasion in history was launched.

  5 June

  Dwight D. Eisenhower addresses US paratroopers prior to D-Day.

  A brief early morning meeting at Southwick House confirmed Eisenhower’s order the previous evening. There were to be no more delays. All along the south coast, British troops listened as their commanders read aloud a message from Montgomery, starting with the words, ‘The time has come to deal the enemy a terrific blow in Western Europe’; and finishing with, ‘Good hunting on the mainland of Europe.’

  Commanders issued their orders; officers were permitted to open sealed envelopes that contained the location of the landings; troops, while still kept in the dark as to their precise destination, were issued with French money and phrase books, so they knew, at least, what country they were heading for. Among the vital supplies issued were self-inflating life jackets and twenty-four-hour ration packs that included pouches of self-warming meals.

  During the course of the evening, Eisenhower, unannounced, visited three airfields starting at Newbury in Berkshire where the first US airborne troops were due to depart. He shook many hands and wished his men good luck. ‘Don’t worry, General, we’ll take care of this thing for you,’ one typically upbeat soldier told him. He watched as they boarded their planes. With tears in his eyes, Eisenhower saluted as each of the hundreds of planes took off. ‘Well, it’s on,’ he said to his driver, as he walked glumly back to his car. ‘No one can stop it now.’ Knowing that the casualty rates among these men would be high, he added, ‘It’s very hard to look a soldier in the eye when you fear that you are sending him to his death.’

  Message drafted by Eisenhower in event of the D-Day invasion failing.

  At some point on 5 June, Eisenhower wrote a short dispatch, mistakenly dated 5 July, to be read in the event of failure:

  Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air, and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

  Later that evening, at 9.30 p.m., the BBC broadcast the next lines from Verlaine’s poem: ‘Wound my heart / with a monotonous / languor.’ Again, the Germans, realizing some hidden meaning, issued an invasion alert. But their field commanders, suffering from ‘alert fatigue’, failed to act; anyway, surely the BBC would not be daft enough to announce the invasion over the airwaves? Meanwhile, on the night of 5 June, the resistance managed to carry out almost a thousand acts of sabotage.

  In Italy, late on 5 June, American troops led by General Mark Clark liberated the city of Rome, the first Axis capital to fall. It was a significant occasion, but Clark was thoroughly put out that his moment of fame had be
en eclipsed by D-Day.

  That night, Churchill, as he got ready for bed and having informed Stalin that the invasion was about to take place, said to his wife, Clementine, ‘Do you realize that by the time you wake up in the morning, twenty thousand men may have been killed?’

  Meanwhile, back in Germany, Rommel was wrapping his wife’s presents for her birthday in the morning.

  6 JUNE: D-DAY (the 1,738th day of the war)

  Even as H-Hour approached, ingenious and precisely executed deceptions continued. Under Operations Taxable and Glimmer, a squadron of Lancaster bombers released strips of tin foil by the thousand to give the impression on the German radar screens of a large convoy approaching Calais at a rate of eight knots per hour. To create the illusion, the bombers had to fly very low and release the exact amount of strips at precisely the right time and location. In Operation Moonshine, a small flotilla of gunboats sailing towards Calais, armed with twenty-eight radar reflective balloons, received German radar pulses and returned them magnified many times over to give the impression of a large fleet of ships heading at them. Again, the deception worked, and the Germans brought their big guns into action, firing at strips of aluminium fluttering through the night sky.

  Pegasus Bridge

  Pegasus Bridge three days after its capture by British paratroopers.

  Sixteen minutes past midnight on Tuesday, 6 June 1944, a British Horsa glider crash-landed at exactly its intended spot – within fifty yards of a 200-foot-long road bridge crossing the Caen Canal, codenamed Pegasus Bridge, five miles from the coast. (Built in 1934, the bridge had a motorized hinge to allow shipping traffic to pass by beneath.) Within two minutes, another two gliders, each containing thirty soldiers, had also landed. The gliders, having been towed across the Channel by bombers, had released themselves three miles from their target from a height of 8,000 feet. The obstacles planted by the Germans, ‘Rommel’s asparagus’, were not as dangerous as feared and the gliders merely sliced through them. If anything, the wooden stakes helped bring the gliders, flying down at ninety miles per hour, to a quicker, if rather abrupt, landing, mostly causing the men inside nothing more than bruising (although there was one fatality).

  The ninety soldiers of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, led by one Major John Howard, were the first to go into action in Occupied France. Five hundred yards further on from Pegasus Bridge was the 350-foot-long bridge over the River Orne (codenamed Horsa Bridge). Both bridges were of vital importance – German reinforcements intending to reach the coast would have to cross the canal and river via these bridges and, likewise, Allied forces would need them if, assuming they had got that far, they were to advance further inland. Howard’s men needed to take the bridges intact. The Germans, totally taken by surprise, offered little resistance as the infantrymen stormed the bridges, securing them within fifteen minutes. As Howard would later say, ‘We had caught old Jerry with his pants down.’

  The infantrymen then held the bridges against counterattacks until reinforcements reached them almost thirteen hours later – a group of commandos accompanied by the rousing sound of bagpipes. The nearby café, the Café Gondrée, became perhaps the first dwelling in Occupied France to be liberated. Its owner, Georges Gondrée, overcome with joyful emotion, dug up ninety-eight bottles of champagne he had buried in June 1940 to hide them from the Germans, and invited the soldiers to join him in a toast to freedom.

  Merville Battery

  Another immediate target for the Allies was the fortified German Merville Battery. Its heavy guns, if allowed to be operational, would pose a serious threat to troops landing on Sword beach. But most of the paratroopers assigned to the task had been dropped too far away, together with much vitally needed equipment, including lights to guide in supporting gliders. Without the lights to guide them in, the three gliders, expected to crash land on the battery, missed their target. Although limited to a mere 150 men out of the planned 600, the commander, Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway, knew he could not wait. Despite desperate odds, Otway led his men into the attack and, following hand-to-hand fighting, succeeded in neutralizing the battery. The price was heavy – half his 150 men were killed.

  Across the Channel advanced the first wave of the huge armada that made up Operation Neptune, the naval element of Overlord – the first of the 5,500 ships that sailed on 6 June, carrying the first of the 156,000 men to go into combat on D-Day. In front of them, clearing the way through the aquatic minefields off the Normandy coast, were 255 wooden-hulled minesweepers. Patrol planes combed the western approach to the Channel, searching for and sinking German U-boats.

  Aircraft carrying paratroopers of the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions skirted the edges of the armada lest they should accidentally be shot at. At 1.30 a.m., as they approached the French coast, they came under attack from anti-aircraft fire. Many troops were dropped far from their intended drop zones, in some cases up to thirty miles away, and had to navigate through the dark in a foreign country to find their colleagues. Some of those unfortunate enough to land in marshland or rivers drowned, weighed down by their heavy equipment. Others were shot at and killed by Germans as they landed. In an operation codenamed Titanic, 500 dummy parachutists were also dropped. Known as ‘Ruperts’, they were designed to explode on landing, while soldiers accompanying the Ruperts played sound recordings of gunfire, shouting and explosions. The Germans were certainly under the impression they were being swamped from all sides, greatly overestimating the number of airborne troops that had landed, committing troops away from the beaches.

  With Rommel away from the scene, his deputy, Hans Speidel, failed to take the threat seriously, still believing the main invasion would not come for days and, when it did, it would be focused on Calais. The grand deception was still working.

  At 3 a.m., Britain’s double agent Garbo issued his message to German intelligence, warning them that the invasion was coming. By the time they received it they had been left with no time to prevent the attack from advancing.

  FIVE BEACHES

  At 5.50, forty minutes before H-Hour, 138 Allied ships, positioned between three and thirteen miles out, began their tremendous bombardment of the German coastal defences. Above them, 1,000 RAF bombers attacked, followed in turn by 1,000 planes of the USAAF. Between them, the aircrews flew 13,688 sorties over the course of D-Day alone.

  From their ships, soldiers, weighed down with weapons and seventy pounds of equipment, scaled down scramble nets and into their landing craft. It took over three hours for the vessels to cross the eleven or so miles to the coast. The men, trembling with abject fear, shivering from the cold and suffering from severe seasickness, endured and held on as their tightly packed vessels were buffeted by six-foot high waves and eighteen miles per hour winds. At 6.30, H-Hour, the first US troops landed on Omaha and Utah beaches.

  On all five landing spots, the most dangerous task fell to the men whose job it was to explode and neutralize the German mines littered across the beaches in order to clear a path for the first full wave of troops coming up directly behind them. The courage to attempt such a task is beyond imagination. The fatality rate among these courageous select was horrendously high, reaching 75 per cent.

  Omaha

  US troops landing at Omaha beach on D-Day.

  The defences around Omaha were formidable. Rommel’s men had placed thousands of ‘dragon’s teeth’ (small concrete pyramids) on the beach, designed to take out the base of landing craft, and topped with mines. Gun emplacements had the entire length of beach within their range. The naval bombardment and the subsequent aerial one, although effective elsewhere, had made little impact on Omaha. Ten landing craft were sunk. Men, leaping into water too deep, drowned, weighed down by their equipment. The US soldiers, led by General Omar Bradley, facing the strongest and most experienced German troops from the 352nd Infantry Division, jumped from their landing craft into a barrage of gunfire. All but two of the DD amphibious tanks were sunk, their crews trapped inside, de
priving the advancing Americans of covering fire. With Omaha beach offering little in the way of shelter or protection, casualties among the Americans were appallingly high. Many returned to the freezing waters and floated on their backs, keeping their noses above the waterline.

  Among the second wave, landing an hour later, was photographer Robert Capa. Under relentless fire Capa managed to take 106 pictures. (On returning to the Life offices in London with the unprocessed films, a laboratory assistant accidentally destroyed all but eleven of Capa’s photographs.)

  The congested beach at Omaha had become a killing field, littered with bodies, burning tanks and equipment. The noise of screams, gunfire and bombardment filled the air. Terrified men, sprinting as best they could across the expanse of beach, found a degree of cover at the base of the cliffs – if they managed to get that far. Many did not. At 8 a.m., as destroyers came close enough to pound and weaken the German defences, sufficient numbers had congregated to begin the climb up the cliffs. By 11 a.m. a contingent broke out and captured the village of Vierville. Their colleagues, still pinned down on the beach and with the tide now coming in, were in danger of being pushed back to the sea. But the German soldiers, in maintaining their constant barrage, were close to exhaustion. Finally, at 2 p.m., the first beach exit was cleared. By 4 p.m., tanks and vehicles were able to move off the beach. By the end of the day, 34,000 troops had been landed on Omaha beach at the cost of 2,400 killed or wounded.