All Hell Let Loose (87 page)

Hitler received news of the Italian retreat with uncharacteristic fatalism. In the late spring of 1944 he knew that within weeks, his armies must face a major Russian offensive. It was vital first to repulse the Anglo-American invasion of France, which was plainly imminent. If this could be achieved, it was unlikely that the Western Allies could mount a new assault on the Channel coast before 1945; most of the German forces in the west could be shifted to the Russian front, dramatically improving the prospects of repelling Stalin’s offensive. If this was an implausible scenario, as Germany’s generals thought, it was by nurturing such hopes that Hitler rationalised his strategy. Everything hinged upon the outcome of Eisenhower’s invasion attempt.

On the Allied side, there was a matching awareness of the stakes. A comparison of paper strengths suggested that the Anglo-Americans must prevail, above all because of their overwhelming air power. But amphibious operations in the Mediterranean had done nothing to promote complacency: in Sicily, and again at Salerno and Anzio, forces had landed in chaos, and come within a hair’s breadth of disaster. The British had always been apprehensive about fighting a big battle in France: when Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan began his task as chief Allied planner for D-Day in 1943, he found it ‘evident that the project was not highly regarded by the War Office save as a high-grade training exploit … The British entered upon this expedition from the start with the utmost reluctance and that is to put the matter very mildly.’ In May 1944, Churchill and Brooke were still scarred by the shambles of Anzio.

American and British air chiefs were also hostile. Believing themselves close to achieving Germany’s defeat by strategic bombing, they bitterly resented the diversion of their aircraft to invasion support. Churchill had his own objections to bombing French rail links, because of the inevitable civilian casualties, displaying a sensitivity that disgusted Bomber Command’s C-in-C Sir Arthur Harris: ‘Personally I couldn’t have given a damn if I killed Frenchmen. They should have been fighting the war for themselves. But I was being bullied all the time by Winston.’ Roosevelt, Marshall and Eisenhower overruled the prime minister. In the course of the war, some 70,000 French people were killed by Allied bombs: ‘collateral damage’ in France thus included almost one-third more civilians accidentally killed than the British suffered from the Luftwaffe’s deliberate assault on their island. Bombing played a critical role in slowing the German build-up after D-Day, but the price was high.

If the peoples of the Allied nations were impatient for the invasion of France, some of those who had to carry it out displayed less eagerness: British soldiers who had served for years in North Africa and Italy resented the call to risk their lives again in Normandy. They felt that it was somebody else’s turn. ‘Who else is fighting this war?’ demanded bitter soldiers of 51st Highland Division, which was ‘softened, rather than hardened’ by six months’ training in England after its return from the Mediterranean, in the opinion of one of its senior officers. Among other Mediterranean veterans, ‘3rd Royal Tanks were virtually mutinous before D-Day,’ their brigade major Anthony Kershaw wrote later. ‘They painted the walls of their barracks in Aldershot with slogans such as “No Second Front”, and had it not been for their new commanding officer – the best CO of an armoured regiment that I met during the war – I really think they might have mutinied in fact.’

Few British units that had fought in the Mediterranean performed impressively during the north-west Europe campaign, and this seems unsurprising; they looked askance at millions of other British and American soldiers who had thus far escaped combat. On D-Day, thirty months after Pearl Harbor, half the US Army’s eight million men had yet to deploy overseas, and many more had still to see action. The 24th Infantry Division, for instance, spent nineteen months performing garrison duties in Hawaii, then a further seven months in Australia training for jungle warfare; some of its men were pre-war regular soldiers who became eligible for return to the United States before the formation had seen a single day of battle. While the Russians had been fighting continuously for three years, less than a dozen formations of the US Army had fought the Germans. Many British soldiers had likewise been training in England since 1940: statistically, in May 1944, less than half of Churchill’s army had fired a shot in anger, when account is taken of troops fulfilling support and garrison functions which did not involve combat. If the campaign Montgomery’s forces afterwards fought proved arduous and bloody, it was brief in comparison with the struggle on other fronts

Only relentless American pressure on Britain’s leadership enforced the D-Day commitment. This rendered it ironic that the British secured for themselves the initial invasion commands: Montgomery directed British and US ground forces, Ramsay the fleet and Leigh-Mallory the air armada. Although Dwight Eisenhower was Supreme Commander, Montgomery deluded himself that he might retain operational control of the Allied armies all the way to Berlin, with his American boss as a figurehead; the little general’s unfailing insensitivity caused him to cling to this ambition until the last months of the war.

Meticulous planning and immense armaments promised
Overlord
’s success, but the hazards of weather and the skill of the German army fed apprehension in many British and American breasts. The consequences of failure must be appalling: civilian morale would plummet on both sides of the Atlantic; senior commanders would have to be sacked and replaced; the prestige of the Western Allies, so long derided by Stalin for feebleness, would be grievously injured, likewise the authority of Roosevelt and Churchill. Even after three years’ attrition in the east, the German army remained a formidable fighting force. It was vital that Eisenhower should confront von Rundstedt’s sixty divisions in the west with superior combat power. Yet the invaders were supported by such a vast logistical and support ‘tail’ that, even when they reached their maximum strength in 1945, they would deploy only sixty American and twenty British and Canadian combat divisions. Air power, together with massive armoured and artillery strength, was called upon to compensate for inadequate infantry numbers.

Churchill and Roosevelt deserved their nations’ gratitude for delaying D-Day until 1944, when their own resources had become so large, and those of Hitler were so shrunken. Allied losses in the ensuing Continental campaign were a fraction of what they must have been had an invasion taken place earlier. For the young men who made the assault on 6 June 1944, however, such grand truths meant nothing: they recognised only the mortal peril each one must face, to breach Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. The invasion began with drops by one British and two American airborne divisions on the night of 5 June. The landings were chaotic but achieved their objectives, confusing the Germans and securing the flanks of the assault zone; paratroopers engaged enemy forces wherever they encountered them with an energy worthy of such elite formations.

Sgt. Mickey McCallum never forgot his first firefight, a few hours after landing. A German machine-gunner mortally wounded the man next to him, Private Bill Attlee. McCallum asked Attlee ‘if he was hit bad’. The soldier replied, ‘I’m dying Sergeant Mickey, but we are going to win this damn war, aren’t we? You damn well A we are.’ McCallum did not know where Attlee hailed from, but thought his choice of words suggested an east coast man. He was passionately moved that this soldier, in his last moments, thought of the cause rather than of himself. In the hours and days that followed, many other such young men displayed similar spirit and were obliged to make a matching sacrifice. At dawn on 6 June, six infantry divisions with supporting armour struck the beaches of Normandy across a thirty-mile front; one Canadian and two British formations landed on the left, three American divisions on the right.

Operation
Overlord
was the greatest combined operation in history. Some 5,300 ships carried 150,000 men and 1,500 tanks, scheduled to land in the first wave, supported by 12,000 aircraft. On the French coast that morning, a drama unfolded in three dimensions such as the world would never behold again. British and Canadian troops poured ashore at
Sword
,
Juno
and
Gold
beaches, exploiting innovative armoured technology to overwhelm the defences, many of them manned by
Osttruppen
of Hitler’s empire. ‘I was the first tank coming ashore and the Germans started opening up with machine-gun bullets,’ said Canadian Sgt. Leo Gariepy. ‘But when we came to a halt on the beach, it was only then that they realized we were a tank when we pulled down our canvas skirt, the flotation gear. Then they saw that we were Shermans.’ Private Jim Cartwright of the South Lancashires said, ‘As soon as I hit the beach I wanted to get away from the water. I think I went across the beach like a hare.’

The Americans seized
Utah
, the elbow of the Cherbourg peninsula, with only small loss. ‘You know, it sounds kind of dumb, but it was just like an exercise,’ said a private soldier wonderingly. ‘We waded ashore like kids in a crocodile and up the beach. A couple of shells came over but nowhere near us. I think I even felt somehow disappointed, a little let down.’ Further east at
Omaha
beach, however, Americans suffered the heaviest casualties of the day – more than eight hundred killed. The German defending unit, while no elite, was composed of better troops than those manning most of the Channel front, and kept up vigorous fire against the invaders. ‘No one was moving forward,’ wrote AP correspondent Don Whitehead. ‘Wounded men, drenched by cold water, lay in the gravel … “Oh God, lemme aboard the boat,” whimpered a youth in semi-delirium. Near him a shivering boy dug with bare fingers into the sand. Shells were bursting on all sides of us, some so close that they threw black water and dirt over us in showers.’

A private soldier wrote: ‘There were men crying with fear, men defecating themselves. I lay there with some others, too petrified to move. No one was doing anything except lay there. It was like a mass paralysis. I couldn’t see an officer. At one point something hit me on the arm. I thought I’d taken a bullet. It was somebody’s hand, taken clean off by something. It was too much.’ For half the morning, the
Omaha
assault hung on the edge of failure; only after several hours of apparent stalemate on the sands did small groups of determined men, Rangers notable among them, work their way up the bluffs above the sea, gradually overwhelming the defenders.

When news of the invasion was broadcast, across the Allied nations churches filled with unaccustomed worshippers, joining prayers for the men of the armies. On US radio channels commercial breaks were cancelled, as millions of anxious listeners hung on bulletins and live reports from the beachhead. Industrial strikes were abandoned and civilian blood donations soared. In Europe, millions of oppressed and threatened people experienced a thrill of emotion. As a Dresden Jew, Victor Klemperer had more cause than most to rejoice, but he had been rendered cautious by past disappointments. He compared his wife’s reaction with his own: ‘Eva was very excited, her knees were trembling. I myself remained quite cold, I am no longer or not yet able to hope … I can hardly imagine living to see the end of this torture, of these years of slavery.’

As for Hitler’s soldiers in France, ‘On the morning of 6 June, we saw the full might of the English and Americans,’ one man wrote in a letter to his wife which was later found on his corpse. ‘At sea close inshore the fleet was drawn up, limitless ships small and great assembled as if for a parade, a grandiose spectacle. No one who did not see it could have believed it. The whistling of the shells and shattering explosions around us created the worst kind of music. Our unit has suffered terribly – you and the children will be glad I survived. Only a tiny, tiny handful of our company remains.’ Luftwaffe paratrooper Lt. Martin Poppel, for so long an ardent Nazi, confident of victory, wrote on 6 June: ‘It turns out that this really is the Allies’ big day – which unfortunately means that it’s ours too.’ Geyr von Schweppenburg, commanding Panzergroup West, was convinced that Rommel, who directed the deployments behind Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, was wrong to stake everything on a ‘forward defence’. Von Schweppenburg had urged that the armoured divisions should be held back and massed for a counter-attack. Nonetheless, like most thoughtful German officers, he believed the outcome inevitable whatever deployments the defenders had made: ‘No landing or lodgement attempted by the Allies could ever have been defeated by us without an air force, and this we utterly lacked.’

Late in the afternoon of 6 June – much too late to have any realistic prospect of success – 21st Panzer Division staged a counter-attack on the British front, which was easily halted by anti-tank guns and 17-pounder Sherman ‘Fireflies’. At nightfall, Eisenhower’s forces were securely established, holding perimeters between half a mile and three miles inland which achieved linkage during the days that followed. In the German lines, Martin Poppel wrote: ‘We all reckon that [our] battalion has been thrown into battle alone and with few prospects of success … The men are damned jittery … Everybody is frankly shit-scared in this eerie night, and I have to curse and swear at them to get them to move.’

On the beaches, reinforcements poured ashore from shuttling landing craft, so that by the end of D+1 Montgomery deployed 450,000 men. The first Allied fighters began to fly from improvised local airstrips. The Luftwaffe was so shrunken by months of attrition over Germany that its planes scarcely troubled the invaders. Allied pilots marvelled at the contrast between their daylight view of the beachhead, where long columns of vehicles could be seen advancing with impunity, and the stillness in the enemy’s lines: the Germans knew that any visible movement they made would bring down fighter-bombers. Only during the brief hours of summer darkness were Rommel’s forces able to redeploy and bring up supplies; their commander was himself later wounded by a strafing fighter.