Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (2 page)

The third element of the story is the operational one: the training, the embarkation, the landing, and the eventual mastery of the beaches, accomplished not only by the soldiers who won the battle and eventually the war but also by the men who swept the mines, carried the soldiers to the beach, cleared the beach obstacles, provided critical naval gunfire support, and of course kept the soldiers supplied with food and ammunition. A tendency to look back on historical events as inevitable encourages a belief that the outcome of the invasion was a foregone conclusion, that the Allied armada on D-Day was so enormous, and the planning so meticulous, that despite the horrors of Omaha Beach, success was a near certainty. It was not. The Allied armada was indeed large, but so, too, was the armada that left Spain in 1588 to conquer England. In studying Neptune-Overlord it is helpful, perhaps even essential, to confront the story as if the ending were unknown, as it certainly was for those who lived it.

In order to tell all of these stories, this book begins with the American entry into the war on December 7, 1941, and chronicles the strategic disputes, the logistical bottlenecks, and the all-too-human experiences of the soldiers and sailors themselves: the erstwhile civilians who found themselves herded aboard ships, sent across the Atlantic, trained in a variety of exotic specialties, and then thrown into a hurricane of violence. The goal is to follow the central thread of this Olympian event from the first tentative conversations by British and American officers in Washington in the winter of 1941 to the storming of the Normandy beaches in the summer of 1944.

In the belief that people are the driving force of history, this narrative highlights the particular contributions of key individuals whose actions and decisions determined the course of events. Some of them, such as Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, are obvious. Others who were household names at the time are too often overlooked or underappreciated today: George Marshall, Alan Brooke, Ernest King, Frederick Morgan, Bertram Ramsay, Harry Hopkins, and Louis Mountbatten, to name a few. Still others have become nearly anonymous some seventy years on: the junior officers, coxswains, gunners, demolition specialists, men of the Construction Battalion (CB, hence the name Seabees), and the ordinary sailors of the Navy and Coast Guard. The perspective here is that of the Anglo-American Allies, with a respectful nod to the Canadians, and because of that, the roles of the Russians, French, Italians, and even Germans are chronicled only insofar as they influenced Anglo-American decision making and operations.

One last note: in May 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of V-E Day in Europe, I was taking time away from my position at the U.S. Naval Academy to spend a year teaching in the Department of Strategic Studies at Britannia Royal Naval College, the British naval academy. As part of the curriculum there, I participated in what civilian colleges call a field trip, but which military organizations call a staff ride, to the Normandy beaches. Along with two score of my students—British midshipmen on the cusp of their commissions—and Evan Davies, my colleague in the Strategic Studies Department, we crossed the Channel to Normandy, peeked into the still-extant German pillboxes and gun emplacements, and climbed the bluff from the beach to the American cemetery. There, arrayed across a broad stretch of impossibly green grass, was a virtual sea of white marble crosses—9,387 of them, I later learned—with occasional Stars of David in their midst. My students sensed the emotional impact of that vista, and one of them whispered, “We know you need a moment, sir. We’ll be right over there.” I did indeed need a moment. It is in long-delayed acknowledgment of the debt that all of us owe to the men entombed in that cemetery, and to tens of thousands of others, British, Canadian, and American, that I offer this story of their arrival on that historic and iconic beach.

NEPTUNE

T
HE PHONE RANG AT 1:47 IN THE AFTERNOON
, Washington time, just after President Franklin D. Roosevelt had finished his lunch of soup and sandwiches in the Oval Study on the second floor of the White House. A lifelong collector of stamps from around the world, Roosevelt had a standing agreement with the State Department to send him the stamps from each day’s overseas mail, and he was just opening the most recent batch when the phone rang. Harry Hopkins, the former director of the Works Progress Administration who lived in the White House as Roosevelt’s close personal advisor, was there, too, but it was Roosevelt who reached across the desk to pick up the phone. The White House operator told him that Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox was on the line insisting that he talk with the president. “Put him on,” Roosevelt said.

Knox wasted no time on formalities. “Mr. President, it looks like the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.”

Roosevelt slammed the palm of his left hand down on the desk top with a loud bang. “No!” he shouted.
¹

For Roosevelt, the surprise was less that the Japanese had attacked than
where
they had attacked. After all, the State Department’s interminable negotiations with Japanese diplomats had ground to a stalemate in recent weeks, and he knew that significant elements of the Imperial Japanese Navy had recently left their ports in Japan’s home islands and had gone to sea, heading south. That had been sufficiently alarming that Roosevelt had authorized official “war warnings” to all U.S. Pacific commands eleven days earlier. He would not have been surprised to learn that Japan had struck at French Indochina, British Malaya, or the Dutch East Indies—even, perhaps, the American-held Philippines. But, Navy man that he was, he was stunned, and initially incredulous, that the Japanese had managed to steam a major striking force more than two thousand miles across the Pacific undetected to target the American base at Pearl Harbor.

Soon enough, however, shock and incredulity gave way to anger and determination. His advisors, urgently summoned to the Oval Office that afternoon, found him uncharacteristically quiet and grim-faced. There was no apparent panic or confusion; indeed, several of his visitors commented on the president’s outward calm. In a way, perhaps, the news was a relief from the ambiguity and uncertainty of the past several months. At least now he would no longer have to walk a precarious tightrope conducting stylized conversations with faultlessly polite but apparently untrustworthy Japanese diplomats. Nor would he have to parse the language of his public statements to avoid inflaming America’s powerful and suspicious isolationist lobby, which strenuously opposed his open support for Britain in its war with Hitler’s Germany. With the Japanese attack, all that was swept away. War would bring its own set of difficulties, sacrifice, and pain, but at least the die had been cast.
²

Or so it seemed. Pearl Harbor meant war with Japan without question, but legally as well as geographically the United States remained apart from the war in Europe, and that was a problem, or at least a conundrum. One of the reasons Roosevelt had tried so hard to avoid a break with Japan was his conviction that Hitler’s Germany was a far more serious threat—to the United States, to the West, and to mankind generally. Hitler’s megalomaniacal ideology was the main reason, but in addition to that, Germany was a
far more dangerous foe whose economy ($412 billion) was more than twice that of Japan’s ($196 billion).
*
As Roosevelt saw it, Japan’s ambitions in the Far East were worrying, but they could be dealt with later; Hitler was the immediate and existential problem. The German Wehrmacht had already subjugated more than a dozen European countries and was even then deep inside the Soviet Union. Great Britain clung to survival largely on the strength of the tenuous transatlantic supply line from America.
³

It was to protect that supply line that some months before, Roosevelt had authorized new and more elastic guidelines for U.S. naval forces in the Atlantic. American destroyers now protected convoys bound for Britain as far as Iceland, and they cooperated with the British even beyond that. In September, a German U-boat skipper, frustrated by the interference of American destroyers with his target, had fired a torpedo at the USS
Greer
, and a few weeks later, on October 17, a German torpedo actually struck the USS
Kearny
, resulting in the loss of eleven U.S. sailors with another twenty-two wounded. To be sure, the
Kearny
was hardly an innocent bystander since she had been engaged in depth-charging the sub at the time, but the confrontation resulted in the first loss of American lives in the undeclared naval war. Less than two weeks later, a German torpedo sank the USS
Reuben James
, sending it to the bottom with a loss of 115 American sailors out of a crew of 160. These incidents might have marked the onset of a full-scale war, but instead both sides had backed away: Hitler because he had his hands full in Russia, and Roosevelt because he was uncertain that the American public would support a belligerent response. When questioned about it at one of his regular news conferences, the president replied, strictly off the record, “We don’t want a declared war with Germany because we are acting in defense—self-defense.… And to break off diplomatic relations, why, that won’t do any good.” Then he changed the subject.
⁴

From the beginning, Roosevelt had crafted his foreign policy with a clear and calculating eye on what the Constitution would allow and what American public opinion would tolerate. He had tested the limits of both in trying
to forestall a British collapse, first by agreeing in September 1940 to give the hard-pressed Royal Navy fifty older American destroyers in exchange for long-term leases on British naval bases in the Caribbean and Newfoundland, and then, three months after that, by proposing and supporting passage of the Lend-Lease program. Those congressmen, newspaper editors, and clergymen who made up the vociferous and politically powerful isolationist movement in America were horrified by such policies, and they were absolutely apoplectic about the president’s naval war against German U-boats. They charged that Roosevelt was deliberately trying to provoke a war with Germany for the sake of Britain, or if not open war, an excuse to expand the convoy program. They were not entirely wrong. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes confided to his diary in April, “We are longing for an incident that would give us a justification for setting up a system of convoying ships to England.” Others, including Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, thought the president was too diffident, and complained to
his
diary that instead of leading public opinion, the president was waiting for public opinion to catch up with him so that he could follow it. Had he been able to read their diary entries, Roosevelt might have thought that he had calibrated his policy about right.
⁵

Now war had come, though it was a war against Japan, not Germany. To be sure, Japan was formally associated with Germany in the so-called Tripartite Pact, which also included Italy, but that agreement obligated the participants to support one another only when one of them was the
victim
of an attack, not when it inaugurated a war of choice, as Japan had done. Hitler was delighted that his American tormenters had been grievously wounded by the Japanese strike, but he was under no obligation to join the conflict it inaugurated. On the other hand, he might do it anyway. Thanks to the American code breakers, Roosevelt knew of a secret message from the German Foreign Office promising Japan that if she “became engaged in a war against the United States, Germany would of course join in the war immediately.” Such promises from Hitler’s government had meant little in the past, of course, though it was at least possible that this time he would fulfill his pledge and declare war on the United States.
⁶

Roosevelt might have preempted him and asked Congress for a declaration of war against
both
Japan and Germany, and several of those who showed up in the White House that night for the emergency cabinet meeting suggested that he should do exactly that. Uncertain that Congress or the country would support him if he did so, Roosevelt preferred to wait and see what action Hitler would take. That afternoon, when Winston Churchill called from his country estate at Chequers to confirm the news reports and offer his condolences for the American losses at Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt assured him, “We are all in the same boat now.” But that was not yet strictly true.
⁷

IT WOULD BE EXTRAORDINARILY AWKWARD
for the United States, and particularly for Roosevelt’s policy, if Hitler did
not
declare war, for during the preceding two years, the United States had dramatically reoriented its war planning from a focus on Japan and the Pacific to the possibility, even the likelihood, of a two-front war against both Germany and Japan. The key component in the new plan—indeed, its vital element—was that in such a war, it would be necessary to defeat Germany first. This assessment marked a virtual revolution in American strategic planning; until then, U.S. Navy planners had focused their attention almost exclusively on what was called War Plan Orange.