by Jay Winik
But there was no unanimity. Eisenhower’s deputy, Arthur Tedder, dispensing with tact and ignoring the chain of command, had protested that an invasion on June 6 was “chancy.” He recommended postponement—again. Listening, Eisenhower cocked an eyebrow and then polled everyone in the room. Those present, shaken and fatigued by the gravity of the decision confronting them, split down the middle: seven for, seven against. Eisenhower again waved a hand and wandered around the conference table, which was surrounded by huge maps. His agony was visible. The decision was now his and his alone.
“I am a born optimist and I can’t change that,” he once said. But on this day, optimism was almost impossible. If the weather reports were wrong, his troops could be hurled back into the ocean from the start; moreover, stormy skies would delay or preclude the desperately needed air cover and hinder the naval bombardment that could offer some measure of protection. For his men who made it ashore, tired and bottled up on the beaches, this would mean disaster, a repeat of the bloody 1942 Dieppe raid, and on a far larger scale. But if the Allies waited, the risk magnified that the Germans would learn the secret of where Overlord was going to take place. This too would be fatal. As it was, the Allies had already had a bad scare at Slapton Sands. In either scenario, with the Germans dug in, gains and losses would be measured in terms of yards on the beaches of Normandy, rather than in terms of hundreds of miles on the road to Berlin. And if the Germans were waiting, fully prepared, his men could be cut to pieces.
The room felt silent, except for the sound of Eisenhower’s footsteps. Meanwhile, the mansion itself was shaking from the howling winds and withering rain. By almost every criterion, it seemed inconceivable that the Allies could initiate the assault in such conditions.
“I don’t like it, but there it is,” Eisenhower said almost inaudibly. There was a hush in the room. It was 9:45 p.m. He continued, “I am quite positive that the order must be given.” It was given, but in effect, only conditionally. Eisenhower decided to reconvene his men once more, around 4 a.m. When he gave his order, however, five thousand ships left port and began furiously streaming toward France. If they were to be recalled, the general could not wait until dawn.
Back in his trailer, Eisenhower slept poorly. He climbed out of bed at 3:30 a.m. and shaved hurriedly before driving through the muck and mud once again to Southwick House. By now, the rain was widespread; these late-spring thunderstorms stretched over a swath of hundreds of miles, extending as far as the Austrian Alps—where Hitler had been asleep for just half an hour. Nevertheless, the meteorologist reiterated his new predictions; the weather would clear shortly and the skies would stay clear for a day or two. Pacing once more in the mess, Eisenhower knew that a definitive decision had to be made.
He paused, finally stopping in his tracks, sat on a sofa for a full five minutes, then pronounced softly: “OK. We’ll go.” At these three words, cheers echoed through Southwick House. And with this simplest of antiphons, he initiated the most imposing amphibious assault in the annals of war. The invasion would be launched at dawn on June 6.
IN THE MEANTIME, AS the eve of the D-Day invasion neared, an increasingly confident, even cheery Roosevelt returned to Washington from Charlottesville.
Whenever Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, traveled, he carried lucky charms in a zippered purse that included a silver dollar, a French franc, and an English crown piece, each of which he would finger nervously. But Roosevelt needed no such things, for his lucky charm was now Eisenhower. Whatever doubts the president may have harbored about his commanding general earlier in the war—once prompting Eisenhower himself to mutter, “Tell Roosevelt I am the best damned lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army”—Eisenhower had grown on him. The president knew that Eisenhower, despite his temper, was fearless, pugnacious, and selfless. He knew that, like himself, Eisenhower was incurably optimistic. He also knew that Eisenhower was a realist, a master of the “sensible compromise,” able to navigate around the petty whims that threatened to divide general from general, commander from commander, ally from ally.
And all this had paid off. The Allies had prevailed in North Africa in 1942; had heroically slogged their way through Italy in the winter of 1943; and, in the final hours before the assault at Normandy, had seized Rome. True, Roosevelt knew that this victory had come at a price. For four months there had been a sullen test of wills: the Allies had pushed and prodded, but without success. The desperate fourteen Nazi divisions gave no ground, tenaciously pinning down 150,000 Allied troops at Anzio, until the Allies finally routed them on May 23. Rome was captured soon thereafter. Once the ancient symbol of Western civilization, it was now the symbol of the unstoppable Allied advances. After months of sleepless nights, of hovering between anxiety and exhilaration, Roosevelt finally sensed opportunity. He was ecstatic.
Speaking on the air from the sparsely furnished Diplomatic Reception Room in the White House, Roosevelt gave one of the most important fireside chats of his presidency. Exulting in this triumph, he saluted the capture of Rome. “The first of the Axis capitals is now in our hands,” he buoyantly told the American people. “One up and two to go!” But the ultimate prize remained Berlin. About the cross-Channel invasion itself, Roosevelt said nothing. After his speech, he stayed up late and relaxed by watching a movie before being lifted into bed shortly after eleven o’clock. He of course knew what would come next. Meanwhile, waves of Allied paratroopers had already begun jumping from their transport planes. And tens of thousands of soldiers were already crossing the choppy waters of the English Channel under a moonlit sky. South of the Isle of Wight, thousands of warships and transports were heading in never-ending streams toward the French coast.
It was Eisenhower who once scribbled in a note to himself, “We’ve got to go to Europe and fight.” As Roosevelt drifted off to a fitful sleep, this was finally what was about to happen.
THE PLANES WENT FIRST. In the dark of night, nearly nine hundred wide-bellied C47s were arrayed across the sky, wave upon wave in V formations, three hundred miles long, crossing the Channel at an altitude of five hundred feet, low enough to elude Nazi radar. Inside, the men of the 101st and Eighty-second airborne divisions smudged black streaks on their faces and hugged their parachutes. It was an awe-inspiring sight to be flying in a tight formation, nine planes wide, without lights, without radio activity; and the atmosphere felt almost tranquil. But that feeling was short-lived.
When the planes emerged from a bank of clouds at the coastline, machine-gun fire and tracers were arcing everywhere around them. Then came the explosions—deadly German 88-millimeter shells—that lit up the sky. The planes began to bounce from the enemy fire before they took evasive action, rolling and spinning, ascending and descending. Out of necessity, they quickly broke formation. For the first few moments, it was bedlam. In their planes, dumbfounded men slipped to the floor. Some men began to throw up. Everywhere there were shouts. While passengers and cargo tumbled in all directions, bullets tore through the planes’ wings and fuselages. Above and below, to the right and to the left, aircraft exploded or were cut in half; or cockpit windows shattered and pilots were killed by shrapnel, sending their planes helplessly spiraling to the ground. Virtually every plane was hit, but almost miraculously, a majority kept flying. As they approached the drop zone, the pilots flicked on the green lights.
Over the whine of gunfire and the screeching of the planes themselves, the jumpmasters began to give the signal for the men: go.
One by one, the paratroopers leaped out of the planes, pulled their rip cords, and began floating down in the darkness.
As they dropped like confetti from the sky, below them figures were running in all directions, shouting, gesturing, and aiming rifles. They were Germans.
ELSEWHERE, GERMAN ANTIAIRCRAFT BATTERIES received sporadic reports of separate, scattered paratrooper landings with no discernible pattern, from northwest of Caen to both sides of the Vire River, from the east coast of the Cotentin Peninsula to Montebourg, all th
e way into neighboring Belgium. Was this the long-awaited invasion? A Resistance operation? A diversion? The Germans were baffled, especially when they found that these drops were dummy parachutists, some of which, on landing, began playing recordings of firefights. For the Wehrmacht, the drop turned into a maddening exercise: eventually believing that up to 100,000 paratroopers might have landed, they spent hours combing the woods and beating the bushes in search of an enemy “that was not there.” But in fact the Allies were there.
Starting at one o’clock in the morning, under pale moonlight, small teams of Allied paratroopers began silently maneuvering through the outskirts of villages or in dense woods: wherever they could, they severed communication lines. Moving quickly, they then began to damage telephone poles with gammon bombs, as well as shred underground communication wires. Bit by bit, the Allied paratroopers were disrupting and confusing the Germans and hemming in Nazi patrols stretched across numerous northern French towns. When they had an opportunity, these paratroopers seized bridges or cleared fields in anticipation of the Allied reinforcements that would soon be following. To the extent that the nearby German units realized that enemy paratroopers were indeed landing, they believed this too was a ploy.
The full magnitude registered only when a German private looked up and saw that the sky was “filled with planes.”
By 3 a.m., the paratroopers were no longer alone. And now the Germans had to worry about far more than planes.
Like great birds, blackened gliders appeared overhead, winging their way on fierce crosswinds to reinforce the Americans. They carried bulldozers—to be used to create landing strips—jeeps, antitank guns, motorcycles, folding bicycles, more ammunition, and, just as important, troops. But then, in an instant, everything seemed to go wrong. On the ground, the Germans’ fire was withering. From a distance, the paratroopers began to hear earsplitting sounds: tortured scrapes, followed by deafening crashes and the crunch of tearing wood; some of the gliders were breaking into pieces. Then came the anguished cries of dying men. Gliders were built for abuse, but not this kind. After flying in circles, gliders now were bouncing off treetops or smashing into tree canopies. Other gliders plunged into rocky walls or nearby barns; the debris was scattered across acres of fields. Still others skidded into roads or each other. Some sank in marshes or in areas that Rommel had flooded. Then there were those that ended up in hedgerows.
Casualties were high, for both the gliders and the paratroopers. One of the most heartbreaking sights was of paratroopers, their chutes unfurled, dangling helplessly from trees, looking like “rag dolls shot full of holes.” And too often, things were little better on the ground. Whether they landed in apple orchards or weed-choked yards, men were scattered in small, isolated pockets. Communication between units was almost nonexistent. The crumpled field radios were dead. When the men blew whistles or bugles, these were drowned out by the staccato sounds of antiaircraft fire. And they had little in the way of physical protection. Their extra ammunition was soaked; they lacked bazookas or their machine guns jammed and their demolition equipment failed. They had no mortars, mine detectors, or antitank guns for larger-scale defense.
But there were isolated signs of hope. As one American paratrooper engaged in a firefight, there was a sudden, inexplicable lull in the action. The sound of enemy fire stopped and was followed by a loud crack echoing through the night—a lone gunshot. First one, then two, then eventually a dozen enemy troops emerged with their hands held high, grinning, laughing, and slapping each other’s backs. They were Poles who had been forcibly conscripted by the Nazis. Instead of engaging the Americans, they had executed their unit’s German sergeant and promptly surrendered. They would not be the last such fighters to do so.
By now, scattered across Normandy, about eighteen thousand Allied paratroopers and glider troops were gearing up for a fight. Before daylight they quickly destroyed bridges over the Dives River and, after a bitter battle, took the German gun battery at Merville. At Sainte-Mère-Église, the Eighty-second Airborne fought tenaciously, holding the village despite suffering heavy casualties. Confronted with stubborn German resistance, one soldier pugnaciously announced in his finest French: “Nous restons ici!”—“We are staying here!” Heroic victories had also been gained at Chef-du-Pont and Pegasus Bridge. And the units began securing their principal goals; they destroyed German cannons inland and held crossroads and bridges, controlling the precious exit routes from the beaches.
Meanwhile, Hitler was still asleep and the Wehrmacht remained disoriented. In a telling coda, one German officer concluded, “We are not confronted by a major action.”
IT WOULD BE HARD to imagine a worse delusion. Since midnight, the Allies’ seaborne armada had been crossing the choppy waters. First came the landing craft and cruisers, then the destroyers and great columns of minesweepers, then the bombardment ships and battleships. Then there were transports, Coast Guard rescue vessels, PT boats, and blockships, so many that they seemed to form a runway from the Isle of Wight to the Normandy shore. Many of the ships displayed a large O, for Omaha Beach, brightly painted on the hull; others had U, for Utah Beach. As they approached shore, a whistle began to sound and officers started to shout, “Report to your disembarkation areas!”—upon which the troops climbed down the waterlogged nets, scrambling to their Higgins boats.
What their airborne brethren had initiated, they were about to continue.
It was still dark, and the early morning hours remained cool. As the boats rocked madly in the water, the men huddling against each other started to vomit and the frigid spray stung their eyes and drenched their weapons. But it was their expectations that most consumed them: in their boats, these men were keyed up and ready to go. Around 5:20 a.m. dawn began to break. Soon thereafter, as the sun rose, they heard a roar, and the first waves of bombers flew overhead.
H-hour was to be 6:30 a.m.—an hour after the first fingers of daylight.
AT THE ATLANTIC WALL, the unsuspecting German defenders raised their binoculars. Suddenly, emerging out of the morning mist, just on the horizon, were the Allies’ landing craft, hundreds of them, jostling in the water. They were coming and coming fast. All along the bluffs, German soldiers aimed their mortars and raced to their communications radios. “Target Dora, all guns!” they shouted. “Target Dora, all guns!”
To their disbelief, this armada grew gigantic as it closed in. “We could not see the sea anymore,” one French witness recorded, “only ships all over.” By now, that was practically understatement. Out in the channel hundreds of guns in the battleships and destroyers were awaiting the order to fire. The air bombardment was scheduled first, unleashing a series of explosions that seemed to roll along the shore. Though terrified, the men in the Higgins boats began to cheer. Minutes later, they were clutching their ears: the line of battleships had opened fire. The first salvo alone was a series of thunderous explosions, as if the heavens and the sea had unleashed some primordial wrath. “This was the loudest thing I have ever heard,” one correspondent wrote in marvel. “Most of us felt this was the moment of our life.”
It was. The first salvo was followed by a chorus of guns from across the Allied fleet, enveloping the entire shoreline in flashes of explosions and a thick canopy of smoke. Dust and debris rose in billowing clouds. Windows shattered in nearby houses, and Germans scattered all along the bluffs, looking for safety. Then they fired back.
At 6 a.m., tanks started to swim ashore, negotiating the strong headwinds and swirling tidal currents. Rockets whistled above, while the big guns of the battleships continued to belch out fire. The Allies’ shells set off land mines along the shore in rapid succession and ignited crackling brushfires among patches of dry beach grass. The heat and noise were unparalleled. “Their roar,” one soldier recorded, “was like the final crescendo of a great symphony.” For many of the men about to spill out of the Higgins boats, it seemed like insanity, a prelude to certain death; no one could survive such an enfilade of fire. In front of th
em, the beaches shook from the fury of the bombardment.
Eisenhower was fond of the aphorism that plans are everything before the battle, and useless once it has begun.
Now the battle had begun.
The opening assault wave hit the Normandy beaches at 6:30 a.m. The U.S. First, Fourth, and Twenty-ninth divisions slogged their way toward Utah and Omaha beaches, while the British and Canadian troops disembarked an hour later onto Sword, Juno, and Gold beaches. It would be hard to imagine more thorough planning than what the Allied troops had been put through in advance of D-Day; it would be equally hard to imagine so many things going wrong. From the outset, basic elements of the plans quickly fell apart. No planners had anticipated that such large numbers of troops would become seasick even before the battle began; before the first shot was even fired, the men in the opening group were exhausted, cramped, and disoriented from bobbing up and down in the choppy seas for some four hours. Virtually no one had expected that some men would die senselessly when they barreled from their landing craft too soon and struggled through water that was chest-deep—even though it was low tide—and were weighed down by the sixty-eight pounds of waterlogged gear they were carrying. Others inadvertently plunged into water over their heads. Many were simply sucked into underwater shell craters and drowned before coming close to the shore—they never stood a chance. On landing, still others were barely able to move, too exhausted from using their helmets to bail out the water that kept rising and threatening to sink their landing craft after the boats’ pumps had failed.
Far too many tanks were outfitted with flotation devices that worked magnificently in trial runs but failed miserably in the dense, unruly waves breaking on the Normandy coastline. And along Omaha Beach, the Allies’ naval bombardment was fleeting and frequently misplaced; rarely did it adequately lay cover fire across the beach. Curiously, the Allies’ air bombing was little better; it was far off the mark and failed to dislodge the German beach defenses along the bluffs. As a consequence, the incessant enemy fire that hit the American troops was ghastly; some companies had a 90 percent casualty rate within a few minutes of landing.
