OVERLORD

THE ATLANTIC WALL AND D-DAY

Since 1940, on Rommel's evidence, Hitler had predicted that an Anglo- American invasion of the Channel coast of France would one day come. Since he had failed, before tackling Russia in the East, to conquer Britain in the West, his forecast did not require great perception. But by the end of 1943 and the beginning of 1944, as the Allied bombing offensive bit deep into German sources of production, and as the Allies advanced slowly but inexorably in Italy, it was clear that the landings could not long be delayed. For years, Hitler had stubbornly, in considering where the Allies would strike, favoured the beaches of Normandy. His subordinates, particularly Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, now his Supreme Commander in the West, were convinced that he was wrong, and that the Allied attack would be made across the narrowest part of the English Channel to the Pas de Calais. Only in the summer of 1944 did Hitler change his mind, and come round to believing in the invasion via the Straits of Dover.

His change of heart was in part due to some inventive Allied deceptions. An Army Pay Corps officer who in civilian life was an actor, Clifton James, who looked remarkably like Bernard Law Montgomery, was sent to make a much publicised tour of the Mediterranean theatre to direct German attention to the possibility of increased activity in the South. A bogus British Army was deployed with rubber tanks around the South-East corner of England to give German reconnaissance aircraft evidence of a build up around the Straits of Dover. Fake radio traffic was assiduously inserted into the normal transmissions for German monitors to hear. It all pointed to the Pas de Calais, and while it would exaggerate the effect of these devices to claim that the Germans were totally deceived, they were sufficiently unsure of the Allies' intentions to maintain a significant part of their forces in the Calais area, far from the Normandy beaches where the assault would actually come.

To guard against the expected invasion, wherever it was launched, Germany had during her years of occupation of France and the Low Countries progressively built and armed fortifications along the coast which were known, somewhat inaccurately, as the "Atlantic Wall". These fortifications, which extended from Holland to the Bay of Biscay, were for most of their length only well-protected gun emplacements with quite modest armament - 3-inch guns were typical. But in the vicinity of the Pas de Calais the guns were bigger and the defences more formidable. The British coastal towns of Dover, Deal and Ramsgate knew to their cost the range and power of the fourteen guns of calibres from 16-inch to 11-inch at Cap Gris Nez. During the spring of 1944, the state of readiness of these and the other armaments along the Atlantic Wall was to be increased sharply, but von Rundstedt had little faith in the capacity of the Wall to contain an Allied invasion, and believed that his Army Groups "A" and "B", held with their armour to the rear of the front line, would have the task of destroying the beach-head. As ever in the German High Command, there was sharp disagreement as to the use and dispersal of forces.

Field-Marshal Erwin Rommel, now in command of Army Group B, had been given by Hitler at the end of 1943 the task of inspecting and improving the defences of the Atlantic Wall, and had not been impressed by what he found. Under his direction, half a million men of the Todt Organisation were put to work on a massive programme of improvement and additional fortification. Rommel, while agreeing with von Rundstedt that the invasion would not be repulsed by static defences alone, believed strongly that the combined effect of the Wall and a mobile Panzer force immediately behind it could destroy the invasion force during what he saw as the critical first twenty-four hours.

As Army Group B commander, Rommel had the 7th and 15th Armies plus LXXXVIII Corps at his disposal, and put to Hitler his conviction based on successful experience of tank warfare that the only potential for victory over an Allied landing lay in the swift and effective deployment of mobile armour to destroy the British, American and Canadian troops on the beaches before they had had the opportunity to develop and strengthen their beach-head. Impressed by this argument, Hitler had on March 20th given Rommel command of Panzergruppe West, which consisted of I Waffen SS Panzer Corps, plus six other Panzer Divisions including the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler . But despite gaining this tactical command, Rommel remained subject to the strategic decisions of von Rundstedt, who still favoured the outmoded concept of holding Panzer divisions back to the rear as a means of containing the attempts of the Allies to break out from their beach-head. Thus, although Rommel pushed hard to have the tanks ready to conduct lightning attacks on the Allied soldiers as they landed, wherever that might prove to be, he was not to have his way. In the event, this proved a major factor in the Allies' success on D-Day.

Allied preparations for the greatest amphibious invasion of all time had, as we have seen, been in the melting pot for years. But, by the beginning of 1944, the approximate date had been set, General Dwight D. Eisenhower had been appointed to Supreme Command of the operation, General Montgomery had been recalled from Italy to command Allied land forces in Normandy, and S.H.A.E.F. - Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces - had established the team that would see the invasion through to success.

The technological problems set by the landings and by the logistics of supplying the vast army that was to break out from the beach-head and liberate France and the Low Countries before advancing on Germany were quite unprecedented. They inspired scientific invention on a scale that had never before been seen in such a short span of time, and brought forth from the Allied scientists called upon by a British planning group under Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Morgan, and taken over by S.H.A.E.F., an abundance of ideas, some of which seemed to border on fantasy.

The Normandy coastline is rich in sandy beaches that are often pounded by surf, but has few ports capable of berthing ships of any size or in any numbers. Some means of docking and unloading ships over a period of weeks, maybe months, had to be found. The answer was towed across the Channel with the invasion fleet - prefabricated concrete "Mulberry" harbours that were sunk into position and used with complete success. Their hulks can still be seen off the Normandy coast today.

The fuel requirements of the Allied armies were recognised as being too large to be supplied entirely by sea. Again the scientists came up with an answer, this time known as PLUTO - pipeline under the ocean. Revolutionary at the time, the trans-channel pipeline worked well and overcame the problem. "Crabs", developed versions of the tanks equipped with flails to clear mines - similar to the Scorpions which had earlier assisted the Eighth Army in the Western Desert - were deployed in far larger numbers, and proved invaluable during the invasion to combat the large minefields that Rommel had had laid along the coast. Innovation and inventiveness were as much weapons of the Allied Assault as tanks and guns.

During the months immediately preceding D-Day, the build-up of Allied troops and equipment in the South of England was colossal, and the whole area South of London and East of Lyme Regis became one vast army camp. Airfield resources were strained to breaking point as the mighty force of aircraft was crammed as close to France as possible for the attack. Close on three million men were under arms in Southern England as the day approached. Amidst this organised chaos, the Generals finalised their plans.

Despite occasional friction between the British and American commanders, the principle suggested by Montgomery of landings on a broad front by separate US, Canadian and British forces on separate beaches had been accepted early in the planning process. Montgomery was convinced - rightly - that funnelling too many men through too small a front was an invitation to disaster. His plan to disperse the landings ensured that relatively few successive waves of troops would land over any one area of beach on the first and second days, and thereby limited the risk to men and materials until the beach-head was secured and the danger of large-scale enemy attack on the beaches had been reduced. Once that beach-head was firmly in Allied hands, Montgomery's plan called for a massive feint by the British and Canadian troops eastwards towards Caen to draw the German defenders into battle on the East of the beach-head, while General Omar Bradley and the US 1st Army made the actual breakout in a Southerly direction from the West, followed by a swing Eastward, and an advance up the Seine to Paris. By cutting between the beach-head and the German rearguard, the American army would thus cut off the troops on the coast from their supply-line, and also, assisted by the damage already wrought from the air against bridges, prevent reinforcements arriving to hinder further Allied landings.

The sheer scale of the invasion plan agreed by S.H.A.E.F. required a transport fleet of 4,126 vessels manned by almost 200,000 sailors. The fleet included no less than 1,173 ships of all sizes carrying tanks and other armoured vehicles - vital to the initial assault on the Atlantic Wall if the infantry was to survive the initial attack. The assault fleet itself was made up of a further 1,213 ships, including 300 warships, of which 79 were detailed to attack the German batteries between Villerville and Barfleur Cape, under the direction of RAF Spitfires acting as airborne observation posts.

Going ashore on D-Day from the sea were 57,500 American and over 75,000 British and Canadian troops, plus 900 armoured vehicles and 600 guns. A remarkable total of 13,743 aircraft took part, including those that landed the 27,000 airborne troops on the night of June 5th/6th by parachute and in the force of 867 towed gliders.

The first attack was to be by these three airborne divisions, landing from midnight onwards just inland from the coast to the West of the main landing area, and securing vital bridges and positions prior to the amphibious assault. From 6.30am onwards, the landings were scheduled for five major beaches - the US 1st Army on Utah and Omaha Beaches, West and East of the Vire estuary; the British 2nd Army on Gold Beach at Arromanches, and on Sword Beach between Lion-sur-Mer and Ouistrehem; and the Canadians, also part of the British 2nd Army, on Juno Beach between Bernieres and St Aubin.

As June 5th, the scheduled day for the invasion, approached, the weather began to look worse by the hour. On June 4th, confident that not even the British would be mad enough to launch themselves upon their greatest adventure in gales and torrential rain, Rommel left France and went to visit his family in Ulm. On the next day, the fleet was actually at sea in appalling conditions when it was ordered back. Finally, despite continuing bad weather, Eisenhower, quite literally, decided to chance going ahead. So much organisational and logistic effort had gone into getting the fleet to sea that to delay longer meant an almost greater risk than launching the invasion in unfavourable conditions. D-Day was on.

That Longest Day

As the invasion fleet massed in the Channel during the night of June 5th/6th 1944, the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions were landed North of the Vire. Their task was to secure the right bank of the River Merderet and provide cover for the westmost force of those landing on Utah Beach - VII Corps, commanded by Lieutenant-General Collins. In the bad weather, the airborne divisions' gliders and parachutists were blown off course and scattered, and relatively few units of the two divisions were able to carry out their prescribed tasks. Only one regiment of the 82nd achieved success - and made Sainte Mere-Eglise, on the main road from Cherbourg to Carentan (and the rest of France) the first French town to be liberated by the Allies. Despite considerable losses, the US troops managed to hold the town and link up with the US 4th Division after its landing on Utah Beach in the morning.

As dawn broke, the invasion force came out of the mist over the sea, to the frank disbelief of virtually everybody the German troops along the Atlantic Wall tried to tell. The German commanders were so convinced both that any landing would come in the Pas de Calais, and that the weather was too bad even for the English to cross the Channel, that the state of readiness was universally low. At 6.30 am, the US 4th, 9th, 79th and 90th Infantry Divisions began to stream from their landing craft on the Utah beach, and were supported by a tremendous naval bombardment which was deadly, accurate and effective. The shellfire and rockets from the fleet - which in the American Sector (Utah and Omaha) was commanded by Rear-Admiral A.G. Kirk, US Navy - destroyed minefields, pulverised bunkers and eliminated many of the German defensive positions before they had had a chance to do much damage. The Allied firepower was overwhelmingly superior to anything the Germans could lay down.

As a result, the Utah Beach forces had a rapid and successful landing, with very few men killed. On Omaha Beach, the story was sadly different. Most things that could go wrong did, and the beach became known as "Bloody Omaha" with good reason. The air strike that was intended to eliminate the German defensive positions before the American divisions came ashore missed its target and left the defenders largely unscathed. Unknown to the combat troops of the US 2nd, 29th and 1st Infantry Divisions as they streamed ashore, their beach was defended by a newly arrived and very tough German division - the 352nd. The landing craft were shelled by expertly handled artillery as they lumbered to the beach. Many of the Americans' amphibious tanks sank in the rough water. Those of the 1st Infantry Division that managed to get ashore and run up the beach to the sea wall (and many did not get even that far) were pinned down by accurate and well-directed small-arms fire. The US demolition teams had suffered severe casualties and had lost much of their equipment, so were slow to smash openings in the wall. The situation was desperate.

Once again, the Navy came to the rescue. Admiral Kirk brought the guns of his destroyers to bear on the German 352nd Division's positions, and shelled them remorselessly. By 1pm, the Germans' lack of materiel was making itself felt, as the defending artillery began to run out of ammunition. During the afternoon, the US divisions were able to get off the beach, capture the coastal defence positions, and get their armour past the anti-tank obstacles. By comaprison with Utah Beach, where 197 men had died, Omaha was frighteningly expensive, 3,881 men were dead, missing or wounded at the end of the day.

On Gold, Juno and Sword Beaches, the British 2nd Army, commanded by General Dempsey, was assigned a formidable programme of operations and objectives. They were to capture Bayeux, Caen and Troarn and to extend its reconnaissance to Villers-Bocage and Evrecy - some 18 miles of Calvados coastline. In the light of later events, that the British Army did not quite succeed in all those objectives is less surprising than that they almost achieved most of them. The British sector, like the American, also had its crucial Airborne Division landings, which were blessed with better luck and appreciably greater success than those of the US Airborne Divisions. The objectives of the British 6th Airborne Division, who were, like the Americans to the West, entrusted with protecting their Army's flank, were:

1. To capture intact the bridges across the Orne and its canal between Benouville and Ranville.

2. To destroy the German coastal battery at Merville, close to the mouth of the Orne.

3. To destroy the Dives bridges between Troarn and the coast.

Only half an hour after midnight, the British Airborne had taken the Benouville bridges and by 4am the Merville guns had been silenced at considerable cost of life. As dawn came up, the British invasion swept ashore, their zero hour an hour later than that on the American beaches to the West. At 7.30am, as the British began to wade ashore from their landing craft, the Germans were no longer surprised and were only too well aware of what was going on. Here, as on Utah Beach, the role played by the fleet offshore in subduing the defences and lessening the casualties inflicted on the invaders was incalculable. Rear-Admiral Vian's British warships began shelling the Atlantic Wall defences in the British Sector at dawn, and succeeded in breaching the defences in several places.

The British troops had better luck with their amphibious tanks, being able to put them into the water nearer the beach with fewer underwater obstructions. Few were lost, and most were able to break out from the beach within the first hour or two of landing. The inventive flair of the British again proved useful - not only were the "Crabs" able to detonate mines without harming personnel, but a new device called the A.V.R.E. carried a nine-inch mortar on an unarmoured tank chassis into close encounters with concrete gun emplacements and proved effective in dealing with them. Also in evidence on the British beaches was "Crocodile", a tank with a long-range flame-thrower built into it and towing its own fuel tanker behind it.

Despite these wondrous devices, good generalship and the remarkably adept support of the Royal Navy, the British 2nd Army did not and could not meet its objectives. However, by the end of that first day, Major-General Rennie's British 3rd Division had got off Sword Beach, had joined up with the 6th Airborne, had crossed the Benouville bridge and had reached a point only three miles from Caen after a brisk battle with the German 21st Panzer Division. The Canadian 3rd Division had had a more difficult time on Juno Beach, again because of natural obstacles and sheer bad luck, but had overcome its problems sufficiently to be close to taking the Carpiquet airfield. Major-General Graham's 50th Division, which had landed on Gold Beach, was almost at Bayeaux. All this had been achieved with the loss of less than 3,000 men killed, wounded or missing.

The comparative slowness of the German response to this substantial success on the first day of the Allies' long-awaited Second Front was due in part to their sheer surprise that an invasion could be mounted in such terrible weather, and rather more to the fact that the German armour was not near the coast (although the effects of sea-power on tanks had been demonstrated convincingly at Anzio, and might have been demonstrated again if Rommel had had his way). A major factor in slowing the German chain of command was the simple fact that Hitler was asleep when the invasion started and nobody dared to wake him. But by far the largest influence upon German ability to react to the threat was Allied air supremacy.

Throughout the day, the Allied Air Forces gave support to every movement that the ground forces made to break out from their beaches, and attacked German columns, tanks, defensive gun emplacements, every obstacle that the Armies encountered. Some 4,600 air sorties were flown by Allied aircraft during that first day, most of them in the ground-attack role. The recently introduced Hawker Typhoon, resplendent, like other Allied aircraft over Normandy, in its black and white striped invasion markings, demonstrated convincingly, with the eight 60-pounder rockets that it carried beneath its wings, that it was the heir to the Stuka in its ability to destroy equipment on the ground. The American P-47 Thunderbolts, with their 10 five-inch anti-tank rockets, did tremendous damage to German armour. And the Mustangs, Hurricanes, Spitfires and Mosquitoes were everywhere.

Perhaps the greatest superiority of the Allies over the German forces on D-Day, apart from the sheer firepower that they could muster, was the success of the integrated Allied command structure. There was no one commander other than Hitler himself who could co-ordinate the activities of the German Army, the Luftwaffe and the Waffen-SS . Jealousies and duplicated command structures meant that few senior commanders in the German services had a clear idea of who could and who could not tell him what to do next. Everybody was afraid to act. Hence effective orders came only from the top, and delays were inevitable. In contrast, the careful planning of S.H.A.E.F., and the detailed briefing of every fighting man in the Allied forces resulted in complete harmony and cohesion of action at virtually every level in the Allied land, sea and air forces. Not for the first time did the Allied commanders reflect on how differently the war might have gone if the three Axis powers had co-operated as effectively from 1941 onwards.

The Week After D-Day

Having been caught with the entire eighteen divisions of their 15th Army in the Pas de Calais, the Germans might have been expected to move the lot southwestwards to Normandy as soon as the invasion had landed. But Hitler, incredibly, persisted in his belief that the Normandy attack was a diversionary exercise for another landing in the Pas de Calais, even after the Allied battle orders had been captured. He seemed to have convinced himself even that the orders captured from an abandoned American battle barge were forged and designed to mislead him. Rommel was therefore forbidden to use the reinforcements of the 15th Army to contain the Allied beach-head, and was thereby constantly at a greater disadvantage than was actually necessary.

The German counter-attacks began on the day following the initial invasion, as the Allied "floating reserves" were beginning to land to build up the size of the Allied Armies for the breakout into Normandy. On June 7th and 8th, the formidable 12th SS Hitlerjugend Panzer Division, aided and abetted by the Panzer Lehr Division, attacked the British 2nd Army formation near Caen with the avowed intention of thrusting them back into the sea. Despite severe Canadian casualties, the Allied line held.

On D-Day$JB2, June 8th, the US 1st Army and the British 2nd Army linked up at Bayeux. The German 7th Army, constantly harried by Allied air attacks, was set to counterattack when its commander, General Geyr von Schweppenburg, was seriously injured in an air attack on his headquarters, and the attack was called off by his successor, General Sepp Dietrich. Four days later, on the 12th, now reinforced by the arrival of the 2nd Panzer Division, Dietrich successfully contained an attempt by XXX Corps to break out, but on the American front, the US 29th Division and the 101st Airborne jointly took Carentan. Thus, by the 12th, the Allied front extended from the Dives to Saint Marcouf. During the six days since the initial landing, five more infantry and three more airborne divisions had jonied the Allied armies from the sea. The Germans - mainly because Hitler had refused to use the 15th Army - had on paper brought up seven divisions, but all were under strength, and there was no doubt on either side that the Allies were succeeding in bringing up reinforcements more quickly and more effectively than were the Germans.

Now the world waited for the breakout from the beach-head - and the beginning of the true liberation of France.