by Neil Oliver
Robert Capa would later become the most famous of the official photographers of World War II. He was armed that day, on “Easy Red” sector of Omaha Beach in Normandy, with nothing more than a couple of cameras. His only ammunition for the “shots” he had taken had been black-and-white photographic film. He’d also been the only man on the beach for whom getting the hell out of there and back onto a boat had been a realistic option. The rest of the thousands of men, of course, had had no choice but to struggle forward into the lethal hail of lead and steel, or die where they stood or crawled or lay. Capa later handed his rolls of exposed film to a technician in a photographic studio in London. But the hapless soul was too keen to see the images of that unimaginable scene and dried the film too quickly. Of the 106 exposures Capa had taken, fewer than a dozen survived the botched process. Nonetheless, the prints that resulted from that rush-job became some of the most telling images of 20th century warfare. The unintentional contribution of the dark-room technician—the addition of murk and fog, of blurring and confusion—had helped create photographs that convey to us, the lucky ones who only have to look upon the evidence from the safety of our armchairs, a mere glimpse of the chaos, terror and desperate suffering that was Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, June 6, 1944—D-Day.
By 1944 Adolf Hitler had known for years that an Allied invasion of Europe was a matter not of “if” but of “when.” So certain was he of the inevitability of one day hearing that little boats in their tens of thousands were approaching some shore of his vast, conquered territory, that he had turned his entire strategy—indeed the very ethos of his military being—on its head.
Active service in World War I had taught the young Hitler that a long drawn out conflict fought from behind fortified positions was a slow death for all concerned. In 1939 therefore, he had launched his Blitzkrieg—“lightning war”—with the intention of sweeping all opposition before him in a matter of weeks. The war would be over before the rest of the world had the chance to rub the sleep from its eyes. It was all about being highly mobile, using fast-moving air and land forces to rise up and sweep across the continent of Europe like a great wave—and at first it worked like a charm.
Britain was in no condition to fight when war was declared on Germany in 1939. The horrors of World War I had persuaded the great and the good that they should all disarm and leave bodies like the League of Nations to find peaceful ways to settle disputes. It was a noble thought. Britain proved spectacularly good at disarming—and energetic in persuading others, like France, to do likewise. Sometimes noble thoughts alone are not enough.
Hitler came to power in 1933 and ordered the rearming of his country. He was determined the Fatherland would regain a dominant position in the world—while leaving the business of diplomacy to those with the stomach for it. Britain and the rest stood by for years as Hitler amassed the stuff of war and menaced his neighbors.
By the time the German armies began to move in 1939, Britain was still drowsy after years of slumber. Toward the end of May 1940 the allied British, French and Belgian armies in France had seemed about to be swallowed whole by unstoppable German forces. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were in fighting retreat, making for the coast at Dunkirk and the only hope of evacuation. This was the real wake-up call—the realization that only the few miles of the English Channel were keeping a terrible foe at bay.
The British forces were saved—miraculously, most would say—by “the little boats” of Operation Dynamo and were now safe in port towns along the south of England. The French, with nowhere to run, were left to face the German army alone. The enemy entered Paris on June 14 and accepted the surrender on the 22nd. The British were now, finally, wide-awake, and caught up in a panicky scramble to get ready for work before it was too late.
Though he would become the embodiment of British will long before the end, Winston Churchill didn’t command the adoration of the British people at the start. His colleagues in government thought him a heavy drinker and believed his defiance in the face of Hitler was empty bravado. But if nothing else in those early days and weeks, he was right to fear the Führer—and to call upon every British citizen to stand up and be counted.
There are also good reasons, in any case, for believing Hitler never planned for a long, drawn-out war. Germany’s economy was unprepared for such an effort and in any case it seems he was sure a short-lived, massive assault across Europe would bring speedy victory. By the time his men arrived at Dunkirk, they say, Hitler was on the last page of his own prepared script. Britain was supposed to give up without a fight and settle for a negotiated peace.
But of course, the British didn’t give up. Hitler’s plan to cross the English Channel and invade Britain was thwarted by a combination of undisputed Royal Navy command of the sea and the courage and panache of the fighter pilots who triumphed over the German Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. (The fight remembered as the Battle of Britain was also fought by pilots from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Ireland, France, Jamaica, New Zealand, Palestine, Poland, Rhodesia and South Africa. Some joined the fight from Britain’s overseas territories, pulled in by a sense of duty to the mother country. Others were from among the dispossessed of Europe and elsewhere—men whose homelands had been invaded by the common enemy and who were desperate for any chance to strike back. So many young pilots from the United States of America came to lend a hand that by September 1940 there were enough to form the first American Eagle squadron. Nobody forced those American boys and men to cross the safety of the Atlantic Ocean and put themselves in harm’s way. Heroes every one, they came because something in their hearts made it impossible for them to stay safe a moment longer while others were fighting and dying. In time, they too would write their own part in the legend.)
Irritated but undaunted by the defiance of the West, Hitler turned his back on it and pursued his plans for domination elsewhere. But at the end of 1941 his unstoppable force finally collided head-on with the immovable object of the Soviet Union. The Russian bear turned to wield her teeth and claws upon the Wehrmacht outside Moscow in the December of that year. Within a week, Hitler had added immeasurably to his woes by declaring war on the United States.
As early as the spring of 1942 he had ordered the fortification of the French Atlantic coastline and his commitment to the project only grew stronger as the weeks and months went by. Thus the architect and skilled exponent of lightning war had changed his mind. From now on he would stand behind a wall. But while the Führer was convinced it was possible—with enough men and steel and concrete—to create a defensive barrier that would hold back any invader, not all of his advisers agreed with him. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, his aging commander in the West, cautioned against placing so many men and so much hardware behind a wall on the Atlantic coast, at the mercy of the Allied navies’ big guns. Better, he said, to hold some of Germany’s fighting men and machines at a distance inland, safe from the warships and ready to counterattack if and when an invasion landed and began to try to make its way off the beaches. Hitler would have none of it. Any landing had to be stopped on the sand and shingle of the coastline, he said, and he wanted his Atlantic Wall completed by May 1, 1943. Rundstedt was initially tasked with the job—but in the fall of 1943 it was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, sometime hero of the tank battles in the North African deserts, who was personally entrusted by Hitler with ensuring the European Coast could not and would not be breached.
If Hitler knew the time for invasion must come, so too did the Americans and the British. With the inevitability of re-invasion of Europe weighing heavily on their minds, the Allied commanders and strategists faced the same obstacle that had thwarted not just Hitler and his Nazis, but many warriors before them—the sea. The English Channel may be narrow—little more than 20 miles across at the narrowest point between English Dover and French Calais—but it’s the sea nonetheless. The Spanish Armada had been defeated by it in 1588; Emperor Napoleon of France never quite found the nerve even
to try crossing it. And in any case, it’s not just the English Channel that poses a challenge to would-be invaders: amphibious assaults against fortified positions anywhere are the most difficult of all. But cross the sea they must—and take enough men and machines of war to defeat a terrible, remorseless enemy when they got there.
In October 1941 Churchill had appointed Lord Louis Mountbatten as Head of Combined Operations and told him, “You are to prepare for the invasion of Europe, for unless we can go and land and fight Hitler and beat his forces on land, we shall never win this war…. You must devise and design the appliances, the landing craft, and the technique…. The whole of the South Coast of England is a bastion of defense against the invasion of Hitler; you’ve got to turn it into the springboard for our attack.”
By late 1942, US Army Chief of Staff George Marshall was pushing the British for a deadline (he was well on the way toward completing one of the most remarkable transformations in the history of warfare—that of increasing the US Army from a force numbering fewer than 200,000 men in 1940, to an awe-inspiring leviathan of over 7 million by 1944. He was all dressed up and he wanted somewhere to go). By the end of 1943, after incessant coaxing from across the Atlantic, Britain backed the decision to take the fight to the enemy and settle the matter once and for all.
Field Marshal Rommel was the man behind the Atlantic Wall, waiting for the hammer to fall. At a meeting of the Allied commanders in Cairo, Egypt, in December of that year, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that General Dwight Eisenhower, 54-year-old commander of the Allied forces in North Africa in 1942 and leader of assaults on Sicily and Italy in 1943, would have overall charge of finding a way through that wall and re-invading Europe. The codename for the most important job in the history of the free world was Operation Overlord.
So it was and so it began. An entire civilization began to move in the name of freedom. To ensure maximum impact, every step was cloaked in total secrecy. All manner of subterfuge, bluff and double bluff, was used in the hope of drawing German attention away from Normandy and luring it toward other possible invasion sites: Norway in the north, the Pas de Calais and the Bay of Biscay, Marseilles in the Mediterranean, and the Balkans.
In fact, a 40-to 50-mile stretch of the Calvados Coast of Normandy, with the small but useful port of Caen near its eastern end, had been identified as the best toehold for starting the assault on occupied France. On New Year’s Eve 1943, a five-man reconnaissance team used a midget submarine to make a nighttime landing on a beach known to the French as Luc-sur-Mer (later it would have the codename Sword). It was the first of a series of missions to collect samples and study the terrain—and the results of their daring reassured Overlord’s planners that the chosen stretch of coastline would bear the weight of men and vehicles landing by the tens of thousands.
Eisenhower and his staff decided on a five-division assault between the towns of Cabourg in the east and Quineville in the west. The British and Canadians would land on three beaches on the left-hand, eastern side of the invasion wave—codenamed Sword, Juno and Gold. The Americans would take the right and west—at Omaha and Utah.
The planning was an exercise in logistics without equal—before or since. From overview down to the second-by-second actions required of each and every division, regiment, battalion, company, platoon, squad and man, nothing was left to chance. Every conceivable eventuality was considered and worked through. From the start of May 1944, men and equipment began to move toward the final assembly points along the south coast of England. Nearly 2 million men and the nearly half a million vehicles were in place by the end of it—the greatest and most complicated movement of military men and hardware the world has seen. By the first week in June the time for planning was over, and the time for waiting had begun, waiting for the signal to unleash the will of the free peoples of the world.
Eisenhower had it made it clear from the start that there was no alternative to Overlord, no Plan B. The objective was victory, and nothing less was going to be allowed; nothing else could even be countenanced. But he knew as well as anybody and better than almost any other man alive in 1944, that while plans are everything before battle is joined, once the shooting starts they matter hardly at all. In the event, it would come down to the power of the will—an engine made of the fortitude of the many and the sheer guts of every single fighting man.
D-day was originally scheduled for June 5, but bad weather forced a last-minute delay. Then, on the evening of June 4, Eisenhower made the loneliest decision in the history of the 20th Century. Having heard from the weathermen that a 36-hour window of good weather was expected he—as only he could at that precise moment—gave the green light for the 6. He had committed the greatest fighting force in the history of the world to unstoppable action.
Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay issued the following order of the day to the Allied Naval Expeditionary Force, tasked with transporting the invasion forces across the Channel:
This is the opportunity which we have long awaited, and which must be seized and pursued with relentless determination: the hopes and prayers of the free world and of the enslaved peoples of Europe will be with us and we cannot fail them…. Let no one underestimate the magnitude of this work…. The Germans are desperate and will resist fiercely until we out-maneuver and out-fight them, which we can, and we will do. To every one of you will be given the opportunity to show by his determination and resource that dauntless spirit of resolution which individually strengthens and inspires and which collectively is irresistible. I count on every man to do his utmost to ensure the success of this great enterprise…Good luck to you all, and God speed.
In advance of the sea crossing by the multitude, airborne forces—American and British—were first into France and encountered their own troubles. Low clouds confused the pilots of the Dakotas and other aircraft charged with carrying the paratroopers to their drop zones. Hundreds of men were dropped in the wrong places. Tall hedgerows on the ground—missed or overlooked by the reconnaissance teams—blighted the job of the glider pilots and would cause countless disasters on the ground as fragile aircraft loaded with men and machinery collided with hedges and trees during landing. During the long, dark night of June 5th/6th uncounted numbers of men—all of them at peak physical fitness after months and years of training, filled with hopes, dreams, fears and pride and ready to give their all for comrades, cause and country—would die before they even set foot on the field of battle.
Elsewhere the clouds were absent and the sky was filled with stars. Beneath those distant suns—that for five years had looked down upon a broken land but now bore witness to the arrival of a host of liberators—there were successes that would burn briefly, but brighter still. The six gliders carrying the 180 men of Major John Howard’s D Company, the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry Regiment, and the British 6th Airborne Division, were the first into action that night of all nights, landing on target close to the strategically vital bridges across the Orne River and the Orne Canal, near Benouville, at just after a quarter past midnight. Their tug aircraft had released them at 5,000 feet in total darkness. The navigators had only maps and stopwatches with which to time the parting. The impact of their crash landing had briefly knocked unconscious the men in Howard’s glider—but seconds later they were up and out.
The Allies had secured both objectives—both bridges taken intact—by just 21 minutes past midnight. But the triumph was not won without tragedy. Lieutenant Danny Brotheridge, 26 years old and loved by his men like the best and bravest big brother in all the world, had led the first platoon, D Company, across “Pegasus Bridge” over the canal. Running full tilt and firing from the hip like the hero he was, he’d unloaded a full clip from his submachine gun and hurled a hand grenade toward an enemy machine gun nest before he took a bullet in the throat. He died a few minutes later, lying on his back with his bright eyes open toward heaven above. He was the first Allied soldier killed by a German bullet on D-Day. The first of so very many.<
br />
