Eisenhower had reckoned without Churchill. No sooner was the strategic issue settled than the Prime Minister refused to sanction a campaign that might kill ‘100,000 Frenchmen’ and ‘smear the good name of the Royal Air Force around the world’. There was deadlock. By early May, only five weeks before invasion, no final decision had been taken; Churchill wanted attacks restricted to targets where fewer than a hundred Frenchmen would be killed. Only under pressure from Roosevelt did he concede on 11 May, with scarcely time to implement the air plan that Eisenhower regarded as critical to the whole success of Overlord. Fortunately the bombers had been at work since March attacking railway targets in the Ruhr and north-eastern France, killing Frenchmen without formal approval When the Free French General Koenig was asked for his view he replied laconically: ‘C’est la guerre.’ During May attacks were stepped up. By early June rail traffic was down to just over one-third of the amount in January.36 French casualties numbered at least ten thousand.
The results of the pre-invasion bombing campaign were mixed. Civilian rail traffic declined sharply, but German mobile repair teams were able to maintain the operation of rail transport for military priorities. Real success came in the final campaign of what was called interdiction, the destruction of bridges and tunnels connecting the invasion area with the east. There was even argument about this until, on 7 May, eight American P-47 fighter-bombers dropped two 1,000-pound bombs each on the railway bridge across the Seine at Vernon, proving beyond doubt that these targets could be destroyed with pin-point accuracy and few bombs. Over the next three weeks 74 bridges and tunnels were destroyed, effectively isolating the whole of north-western France, and fatally curtailing the prospects of rapid German reinforcement.37 There was in this a profound irony, for the most successful part of the whole transport plan was executed not by the heavy-bombers, which had plastered 72,000 tons of bombs on the hapless French railways, but by the small battlefield bombers under Leigh-Mallory’s command, whose 4,400 tons of bombs achieved all of what Eisenhower wanted, in a matter of days. The most important contribution of the heavy-bombers, as Spaatz maintained all along, was the progressive destruction of the German air force over the Reich, which gave the Allies overwhelming air supremacy throughout the invasion.38
None of these efforts would have availed a great deal if the German Supreme Command had known well in advance where and when the Allies would strike, and disposed their forces accordingly. The element of surprise was critical. And yet an operation designed to move 4,000 ships, 2 million men and 12,000 aircraft to France, from a base only a few minutes’ flying time from German airfields, appeared an impossible secret to keep for six long months. The fact that German leaders failed to guess the main invasion target and the date of invasion owed something to good fortune; but it also owed a good deal to an elaborate web of misinformation and deceit spun by Allied intelligence.
Deception was the instrument of surprise. The British had begun to use it extensively in the Middle East, with mounting success, and it was their growing experience in the techniques and tactics of deception that persuaded them, and eventually their sceptical American allies, that it could be used on a grand scale for Overlord. There was no chance that preparations for invasion could be disguised. Even the most casual intelligence would indicate a massive build-up of men and material in southern England during the first half of 1944. The intelligence staffs instead chose to mislead the Germans about the destination of the invasion forces, and to conceal the date of attack. By this stage of the war the initiative lay very much with the Allies. All German spies in Britain had been rounded up, and many of them acted as double agents, purveying to their credulous German controllers a diet of innocuous, but true, information, spiced with plausible falsehoods, all of it supplied by the British secret service. The effectiveness of the Double-Cross System, as it became known, relied on British access to the German Enigma cryptographic communications (Ultra), which confirmed the success or failure of the campaign of misinformation. By 1944 German secret service codes were routinely broken. By contrast, German intelligence on Britain was poor. The high level codes for Allied communication proved impenetrable; and air reconnaissance remained scrappy and unsystematic, thanks to a wall of radar and fighter defence.39
The deception plan, codenamed ‘Bodyguard’, was drawn up in December 1943 and finally approved by the Allied staffs late in January 1944. The core of the plot was to persuade the German leadership that the Allies intended to attack across the narrow neck of the English Channel, between Dover and Calais (codenamed ‘Fortitude South’), with a diversionary attack against Scandinavia (‘Fortitude North’). The object was to tie down German forces in northern Europe, and to keep the bulk of German troops in France and Belgium guarding the Pas de Calais and the Belgian and Dutch coastline. The Scandinavian deception had limited success. Hitler had been obsessed for years with the idea of an Allied landing in Norway. The mass of false information about a British ‘Fourth Army’ in Scotland played on this fear but did not succeed in enlarging it. Twelve divisions remained in Norway, but they were not supplemented by reinforcements taken from France. German radio operators were tuned in to the Soviet front, so that they missed the phantom radio traffic beamed from Scotland to sustain the illusion of a northern invasion.40 The Channel deception was far more successful. It hinged on persuading German intelligence that large Allied formations existed in south-east England for an invasion towards Calais, while concealing the size of the forces and shipping concentrated in the south-west. Credentials for an entire force, one million strong, christened First US Army Group (FUSAG) were fed, piece by piece, into the German intelligence system, where they lodged, until well past the real invasion, as actual fact. Nationally stationed across south-east England and East Anglia, FUSAG was from first to last a figment of the deceivers’ imagination.41
The creation of FUSAG was a work of artistic mendacity. Across the whole of south-eastern England sprang up dummy camps and supply depots, false headquarters, tanks made of rubber (fashioned by set designers from the Shepperton film studios), landing craft of wood and fabric, and airfields complete with concealed lighting to give an air of authenticity to the ruse. Lights blazed and camp stoves smoked, visible to any intruding enemy aircraft. But west of a line drawn from the south-coast city of Portsmouth every effort was made at concealment: tents were darkened, food was dispensed from smokeless stoves, army issue white towels were replaced with khaki.42 To confirm the visible falsehoods, the double agents radioed details of unit insignia and FUSAG organisation to their German contacts. Eisenhower chose one of his most successful commanders, the profanely outspoken General George S. Patton, to command FUSAG. Patton fumed at the inactivity this imposed upon him, but the appointment of a commander of this quality added inestimable weight to the whole FUSAG deception. Finally, every effort was made to get German intelligence to inflate their estimates of Allied forces in order to include the false divisions. In the United States the FBI rounded up an elderly Dutch spy recruited by the German secret service, who obligingly handed over the German codes and instructions, and was operated as a double agent. Under the codename ‘Albert van Loop’ he relayed regular information about units sailing for England, including those contributing to FUSAG. Such a ploy was made possible by the American system of numbering army divisions. The regular army was listed from 1 to 25; National Guard units absorbed into the army from 26 to 75; reserve units from 76 upwards. By 1943 only numbers 1 to 45 and 76 to 106 had been used, leaving ample room to feed false division numbers into the Allied order of battle without arousing suspicion.43 By January 1944 German military intelligence in the west believed there to be 55 divisions in Britain, when there were still only 37; by May 1944 they had identified 79, when in fact there were only 47.44 The German 15th army, facing the Calais coast, stayed put to fight thirty invisible divisions.
The success of the FUSAG deception, as its perpetrators always realised, relied on the extent to which it reinforced preconception
s in the mind of the enemy. Hitler was convinced that the Allies would land somewhere on the northern French coast; he was at one with his generals in assuming that the Allies would come by the shortest route, to provide better air cover, to make early detection of the invasion fleet more difficult, and to bring Allied forces quickly within striking distance of the Ruhr and the heart of German resistance. Hitler thought like an army commander; the possibilities open to a naval power were foreign to his outlook. The FUSAG deception fed a conviction already forming that the Allied plan was to invade the Pas de Calais. Nevertheless by the spring of 1944 there was unmistakable evidence of large troop concentrations and exercises in south-west England. Hitler came round to the view that a subsidiary or diversionary landing was planned for Normandy, and he instigated moves to strengthen the coastal defences there. The idea of Normandy as a secondary target actually strengthened the deception, by fixing German eyes on the Pas de Calais as the main invasion site long after the Normandy beaches had been stormed. The campaign of misinformation did just enough to prevent German sources ever discovering the focal point of invasion or the precise timing. Had they been able to do so the concentration of forces to oppose Allied landings would have made Overlord too dangerous to attempt.
By May of 1944 most of Eisenhower’s conditions had been met: German forces were dispersed along the whole northern and north-western coastline; reinforcement of Normandy by German armies was likely to be a lengthy and cumbersome process; behind the Mulberries and Gooseberries, the Allied rate of supply could more than match that of the enemy. He still regarded Overlord as hazardous, but now possible.45
* * *
Hitler had no illusions about what was at stake in 1944. Defeat of the Allied invasion would amount to ‘a turning-point of the war’, a psychological shock from which British and American opinion would not recover. Victory would free German forces for a renewed offensive on the eastern front.46 By the end of 1943 he was sure ‘the attack will come’ and that it would ‘decide the war’. On 3 November he published the last of his numbered war directives, No. 51, on the war in the west. His strategic solution was simple: once invasion started all German forces were to concentrate in one major counter-blow to throw the enemy ‘back into the sea’.47
This was a campaign long awaited. Work had begun in 1942 on strengthening the coastal defences of northern France, the so-called Atlantic Wall. Hitler himself designed the pill-boxes and concrete casements, which were faithfully reproduced by the Corps of Engineers. An army of conscript labour used up 17 million cubic yards of concrete and 1.5 million tons of iron building it. Along the coast Hitler planned fifteen thousand strongpoints, bristling with machine guns and flamethrowers; every port was to be defended by huge naval guns. But the project was too large for German resources. Most of the defensive wall was concentrated between the river Seine and the river Schelde, where the invasion was generally expected. The rest of the coastline took what was left over. The same went for the men defending it. In late 1943 the Commander-in-Chief West, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, had in all some 46 divisions under his command. They were spread thinly along the French coast: the area of north-eastern France had one division for each 50 miles, but the Normandy front had one for every 120 miles, and the rest of the coast one for every 217 miles. Many of these divisions were largely made up of older soldiers – a quarter of the German army was over 34 by 1944 – and some of the units manning the defences, composed of wounded from the eastern front and men of poorer physical condition, had low combat effectiveness. One whole division on the Normandy sector was made up of men with stomach complaints; other units were methodically constructed from men with lung or ear conditions. Most of the combat divisions had been reduced to eleven thousand men from the conventional 17,200 of the early campaigns.
Once it was clear that invasion could be expected at some time in the spring or summer of 1944, great efforts were made to make good these deficiencies. To keep up numbers large contingents of volunteer battalions from the occupied part of the Soviet Union – Tatars, Turcomen, Cossacks, Georgians – were drafted in. By the time of the invasion the German 7th army deployed in Normandy had a sixth of its numbers recruited from such units.48 On 15 January Hitler appointed Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, a flamboyant tank commander who grew into a popular legend with the success of the Afrika Corps in 1941–2, as commander of the forces facing the invasion threat, designated Army Group B. A man of great energy, impetuous, brave to the point of foolhardiness, Rommel was a particular favourite with Hitler. His choice as commander of the invasion front had a political edge to it. Hitler wanted to be able to exercise a close watch on the new campaign preparations, and saw his relationship with Rommel as a way of bypassing the Commander-in-Chief in Paris. Rommel shared his master’s view that the decisive moments in the invasion would be the first hours on the beach. Unusually for a man who had made his reputation as the master of mobile warfare, he favoured a waterline battle from static defences. This meant a considerable strengthening of the Atlantic Wall. He ordered the construction of armed concrete bunkers, or ‘resistance nests’, along the coast; he demanded fifty million mines along the shore, and heavy mining of the coastal seas; he accelerated the erection of obstacles of all kinds on the beaches to obstruct a landing at high tide. Some of this was certainly achieved, but mostly in the area already more strongly defended, in north-east France. The three new minefields laid at sea were all along this stretch of coast. The resistance nests were neglected farther west; only one out of a planned 42 was built on the Cotentin coast. And instead of fifty million mines, he got only one-tenth this number.49
To man these defences Rommel had two armies: in the Normandy and Brittany area 7th army under General Dollmann; from Le Havre to the Dutch border 15th army under General Hans von Salmuth. Between January and June 1944 the number of divisions in the whole of France and the Low Countries was raised from 46 to 58. A number of new divisions with younger manpower and enhanced weaponry were assembled to add striking power to the defences. The elite 3rd parachute division was sent to the western army, generously equipped and with a full complement of seventeen thousand men, but the bulk of new divisions, including the Panzer units, were well under strength in both troops and tanks. Even in May there were fewer tanks available than the German armies had mustered for the invasion of France four years before, and shortages of spare parts and repair facilities reduced operational effectiveness. The bulk of divisions made up the static formations, dug into bunkers and resistance nests in a long thin line along the coast. Because it proved impossible to get accurate intelligence on Allied intentions, Rommel had no choice but to spread his forces across the whole of northern France. By June, 7th army had fourteen divisions, six of them static; in the area where the main thrust of the invasion was expected there were twenty divisions, fourteen of them static. There were no reserves to speak of.50
Given the limited resources of manpower and equipment, a great deal rested upon how effectively they were deployed. Every military instinct demanded mobility and concentration of effort. These were the trademarks of German success. Rommel’s static defensive crust was foreign to the battlefield traditions he had previously helped to sustain. His insistence on a shoreline battle provoked a bitter strategic argument about how best to meet the invasion when it came. The Commander-in-Chief West, von Rundstedt, was convinced that the outer shell would be easily pierced whatever Rommel did, and he deplored the idea of scattering German forces in a ‘thin-water soup’ along the coast. He was strongly supported by the commander of the Panzer forces in France, General Geyr von Schweppenburg. Both men wanted to absorb the initial invasion and then counter-strike with a powerful mobile reserve that would smash the enemy beachhead on ground more suitable for armoured warfare. They feared that armoured divisions placed piecemeal along the coast would be obliterated by Allied naval fire and air power and would be a wasted asset as a result. Moreover both men were convinced that the Allies would land at Calais, where the
terrain favoured German tank armies. It made little strategic sense to them to place German divisions out of reach of the main battle when speed of response to the invasion was of the essence.51
Rommel was convinced that the invaders were at their most vulnerable at the very early stages of the operation. No mobile reserve would arrive at the beaches in time to have much impact, especially as the Allied bombers and the French Resistance between them made travel by rail a hazardous business. On the issue of air power he knew that the Allies would have air superiority, but having fought in Africa for months without effective air cover he was willing to run the risk in France.52
The argument could only be resolved by Hitler, who imposed a compromise solution that satisfied nobody. Hitler, like Rommel, arrived at the conclusion that a diversionary assault on Normandy or Cherbourg was a strong possibility, and agreed with Rommel’s distribution of forces along the whole coastline. But he could also see the force of the argument about reserves. In early May he divided the armoured divisions between the two protagonists. A reserve under his direct control was set up under von Schweppenburg consisting of four of the divisions, held well back from the coast. The remainder were placed at intervals at or near the coast; only one, 21st Panzer, was assigned to the Normandy front, while four were scattered in southern France. Hitler’s decision made a fragile defence yet feebler: there were too few mobile divisions in the reserve to have the punch effect Rundstedt wanted, and too few of them near the coast to fight the invaders on the beaches.53 The Allies could not have disposed German forces more favourably if they had done it themselves.
Why the Allies Won Page 23
