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The greatest US military battles are discussed. Murray writes about one of humankind's greatest endeavors, Operation Overlord and the invasion of Normandy during World War II.
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In June 1944 America and her Allies were steeled to confront Germany's war-loving Nazis on their own soil and restore the ideals of the unified democracies to the Continent.
Steel beach obstacles intended to hamper landing craft offered invading infantrymen temporary cover from the heavy German fire that raked the coastline. D-Day's success depended on the resolve of these men to cross the beaches.
IN A RADIO SPEECH IN October 1940, Winston Churchill told France: "Good night then: Sleep to gather strength for the morning. For the morning will come. Brightly will it shine on the brave and the true, kindly upon all who suffer for the cause, glorious upon the tombs of heroes. Thus, will shine the dawn." But the dawn Churchill had forecast did not break until four years after the Germans had expelled British forces from Dunkirk's beaches. On June 6, 1944, the Allies returned to the Continent in Operation Overlord-the most important effort that Anglo-American military forces executed during the war.
By 1943, Allied planners had chosen France's Normandy Peninsula as their invasion site. The ill-fated 1942 Dieppe raid had taught them that the cost of taking a French port would probably be too high. By assaulting beaches rather than docks and piers, they would still face two huge challenges: crossing open beaches under fire, and then facing an engineering nightmare, running supply lines over those same beaches. By selecting Normandy, they rejected a more obvious choice, Pas de Calais, which was nearer to Britain-the invasion's point of origin-and to the Allies' ultimate destination, Germany. However, Pas de Calais was better defended than Normandy. That made all the difference.
Supreme commander General Dwight Eisenhower and land force commander General Bernard Montgomery knew they needed more than the four divisions (three infantry divisions and a single airborne division) they had been authorized. They demanded five infantry divisions and three airborne divisions. Air commanders objected to the airdrop, but Eisenhower backed Montgomery's request for massive airborne operations even after Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, commanding Allied air forces, estimated paratroops would suffer 90 percent losses.
Planning the buildup phase was a daunting problem because the Germans could use western France's road and rail networks to reinforce their units in Normandy faster than the Allies could get off the beaches. So Eisenhower's renowned chief deputy, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, planned to use air power-including strategic bombers-to destroy the French transportation network.
First, Tedder and Eisenhower had to fight the bomber barons. Sir Arthur Harris, chief of the British Bomber Command, agreed that his planes could hit targets like marshaling yards, but he argued that tens of thousands of Frenchmen might perish in the process. Churchill nearly forbade the attacks. But Bomber Command's estimates of so-called collateral damage were based on the massive raids of the 700 bombers it was already launching against Germany rather than the smaller raids that Tedder was proposing. Small-- scale test raids confirmed Tedder's estimate that relatively little collateral damage would occur.
The Combined Chiefs of Staff placed the strategic bombing forces of both nations under Eisenhower and Tedder. With Eisenhower's permission, Lt. Gen. Carl Spaatz ordered his American bombers to attack German synthetic oil facilities in May 1944. Meanwhile, Allied air power hit France's transportation system indiscriminately to avoid giving the invasion site away. The interdiction campaign ranged across France's length and breadth. For the most part it worked. Attacking by day and night, airstrikes leveled France's rail system: yards, locomotives, freight cars, tracks and bridges. By late May, rail traffic had declined to 55 percent of January's levels. Wrecking the Seine River's bridges reduced that level to 30 percent by June 6, and by early July, rail traffic was 10 percent of what it had been at the outset of the year. Attacks in western France were particularly effective; by mid-June, trains that might have supplied defenders in Normandy no longer operated. The daylight air campaign forced German panzers to the roads at night.
The massive air offensive by the Eighth and Fifteenth air forces also compelled the Luftwaffe to defend the factories on which its survival depended. U.S. strategic bombers received cover from long-range fighters; by March, North American P-51s were accompanying bombers all the way to Berlin. In February, the Luftwaffe lost 18 percent of its active duty fighter pilots; in March, 22 percent; in April, 20 percent (while fighter units in the Reich lost at least 38 percent of their pilots); and in May, 25 percent. Even over the Reich, the Luftwaffe collapsed as an effective defense force. On June 6, Allied air forces would fly more than 14,000 missions to support the invasion. On the other hand, Luftflotte 3, in charge of the air battle in France, could not get even 100 sorties over Normandy, most by single-engine fighters.
American, British and Canadian forces made up the 21st Army Group that invaded the Normandy coast on June 6, 1944. By the end of the day some 156,000 men-eight divisions-had made it ashore by aircraft and ship.
The Allied air campaign hamstrung Germany's already weak logistical chain even as the Allies were devising their own resilient, deep supply system. Battles for Normandy and all France would turn on the abilities of the contending sides to reinforce and supply their combat troops. By June 1944, the Allies drew on a wealth of amphibious warfare experience from the Pacific and Atlantic theaters, including knowledge gained in four major landings in the European theater. Moreover, ingenious British and U.S. engineers invented unique solutions such as huge artificial harbors.
On the ground, however, the German soldier remained the best in Europe. His training, officers, fighting doctrine and ruthless ideology all ensured extraordinary skill in battle. Moreover, the topography of Normandy, with its bocage (hedgerow) country, small villages and sturdy farmhouses, offered countless defensive strongpoints, maximizing the inherent strengths of the German soldier and his tactical system.
Through late 1943, the Germans did not take the threat to invade northern France seriously. But by early 1944, they recognized that an invasion was coming, and coming soon. Consequently, strengthening the western Wehrmacht received highest priority and German forces in France improved impressively. Hitler gave Field Marshal Erwin Rommel command of both Army Group B (across northern France) and the coastal defenses most likely to receive the assault. Restlessly energetic, Rommel galvanized preparations. By the time the Allies invaded, the Desert Fox hoped to have sown as many as 15 million mines along French beaches. He also planned to emplace tens of thousands of poles ("Rommel asparagus") in fields behind potential landing areas to deter glider landings, and to erect huge numbers of obstacles in the water and beaches to hinder landings.
Rommel recognized the Allies' overwhelming air and logistical superiority. Therefore, he aimed to defeat the invaders on the beaches. He knew that if the Germans did not defeat the invasion in the first days of the fighting, their war was lost. On the other hand, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the supreme commander in the West, believed that the German army should fight a mobile battle, relying on its tactical and operational strengths. However, neither Rommel nor Rundstedt enjoyed full authority to lead the battle. Only Hitler and the OKW (the armed forces high command) could release reserves for counterattack and reinforcement. As usual, there was no clear German chain of command, and Hitler's directives could be bizarre, to say the least. Rommel was prevented from intervening quickly, thus improving the Allies' chances for gaining a beachhead.
Allied commanders had their own problems. At the operational level, few understood how to use mobility. Senior officers did not understand how completely the face of battle had changed. As late as April, two months before D-Day, Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff (and one of the war's most overrated officers) told American generals that the war of movement was over. France would not see the lightning advances that had characterized the German campaign in 1940, he said. His logistical planners prepared a slow, methodical advance to the German frontier, a campaign resembling fall 1918.
In a way, Brooke was right: Allied forces that came ashore were far from perfect and ill-prepared to move fast at first. Much of their equipment was inferior to that of the Wehrmacht. Allied armor was undergunned and not well protected. The Allies' numerical superiority in tanks would affect the attrition battle, but that was small comfort to crews whose main weapons could not pierce the frontal armor of Panther or Tiger tanks at pointblank range.
NO MISTAKE WAS WORSE than the poor tactical preparation of ground troops. Although British and Canadian armies had been expecting to land in France for four years, they focused too hard on landing and not enough on anticipating the inland fight that would follow. Too many of Brooke's friends found continuing employment in senior positions after failing in command. General Sir Neal Ritchie, who had been in charge of the May 1942 debacle at El Gazala-- where Rommel had nearly destroyed the Eighth Army-would be the British corps commander who would fail to seal off Falaise in August 1944.
At lower levels, the British had no doctrine for the combined employment of its branches. As a result, British training rarely reached the consistently effective levels attained by the German system. Hard, tough, realistic training was hit-or-miss. After-action reports by German military units in Normandy suggested that British problems went beyond conventional explanations about limited prewar funding or the army's unhappy social position in British society. Even basic infantry tactics were lax. The British seemed to rely on straightforward infantry rushes while hoping that the artillery would smash the Germans to bits. As one division commander noted to Basil Liddell Hart after the war: "I have already told you how shocked I was at the meagre results of training in the United Kingdom...which learnt nothing, ever, even after years in the desert .... If I told you what I had seen among those divisions, you'd not believe it."
The Canadians shared most of the weaknesses of their British comrades. Although Canadians and Australians had once been the Commonwealth's elite troops, extended exposure to the British style seems to have worn away the initiative and flexibility that characterized their operations in World War I. Moreover, except for participants in the Dieppe disaster, those who went ashore at Normandy lacked the leavening experience of combat. The Germans had taken six years, from 1933 to 1939, to prepare and then spent five terrible years in combat, honing their skills.
The Americans, coming into the war last, had their own problems. At the outbreak of war in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the world's 17th biggest army. Not surprisingly, many units that fought in Normandy were depressingly green. They lacked tactical preparation, too. These deficiencies resulted in the deaths of many young men. Moreover, the sudden expansion of air, naval and ground forces, combined with the rapid mobilization of the American economy and the huge logistical infrastructure required to fight separate wars in Europe and Asia all placed severe pressures on manpower. After other services and army administration had grabbed their recruits, the infantry got what was left.
But Americans were quicker to adjust to combat than their British counterparts. From first contact, Americans steadily improved. American senior commanders ruthlessly sacked officers who did not measure up. Results, not relationships, were paramount. When the battle finally went mobile at the end of July, the Americans exploited opportunity as did no British army-except for General William Slim's in Burma.
Allied plans were straightforward. The initial landing force would seize a lodgment, allowing a logistical buildup to follow. Five attacking divisions, each with its own beachhead-code-- named, from west to east, Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword-- would seize the bridgehead. A massive paratroop drop by the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions west of Utah would prevent counterattack and take German defenses in the rear. Similarly, on the eastern side of Normandy, the British 6th Airborne Division would seize the bridges over the Orne River and the Caen Canal, also blocking counterattack.
Once he had sizable forces ashore, Montgomery aimed to fight a mobile battle in open country east of Caen with British armor. Meanwhile, Americans would seize Cherbourg and eventually Brest. As he had done in Sicily, Montgomery gave the Americans a subordinate role. But the British general, as arrogant as he was unimaginative, would not get to fight his battle. Perhaps that was lucky, because his troops were not trained to fight in mobile conditions.
Throughout May, in glorious weather, Allied forces massed in southern England. Overlord's target date was June 5, but June brought atrocious weather. Forecasts said the storms might break late on the Sth and conditions might be tolerable on the 6th. Eisenhower took the risk and ordered the invasion. There was only a brief time in early June when tides would be low enough around dawn to allow attackers to escape the full impact of the German man-made beach obstacles.
Defenders of Hitler's Atlantic Wall raise their arms in surrender to be rounded up by American troops near Quinville on Utah Beach.
As dusk settled over the English airfields on June 5, paratroops from three airborne divisions clambered aboard their aircraft. The first pathfinders were down before midnight. Most British paratroops landed within their drop zones. But to the west, the Americans were less successful in hitting their zones. To avoid weather and flak, U.S. aircrews flew high and fast, so paratroops of the 82nd and 101 st Airborne were blown all over the Cotentin Peninsula and Normandy. Luckily, this dispersal helped the invaders. Seeing American paratroops all around them completely confused German commanders in D-Day's first hours.
Bad weather actually helped the invasion. As usual, German intelligence ignored signs suggesting something big was in the offing, while the German weather service added to the illusion of calm by reporting (reasonably) that conditions would not be suitable for an invasion. Rommel went home to attend his wife's birthday party. Meanwhile, the commander of the Seventh Army ordered his commanders to join a war game at his Rennes headquarters. German moves throughout June 6 were poorly directed and incoherent.
AS REPORTS OF PARATROOP landings began arriving, two hours before seaborne landings began Rundstedt gave two reserve panzer divisions near Paris-Panzer Lehr and the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend-a preparatory order to move to Caen. Neither division could begin moving until Hitler confirmed the order. Colonel General Alfred Jodl, the OKW chief of operations, informed a disgruntled Rundstedt that the Fuhrer was sleeping and would make the decision later in the morning when the situation was clearer. Thus, Normandy's German defenders fought with insufficient troops the first day.
The British and Canadians overcame opposition on their beaches with relative ease. British paratroops successfully blocked the Orne River and the Caen Canal, and several hours later, infantry reinforced them. Moving south from the beachhead, Commonwealth troops were more hindered by beachhead confusion than by German opposition. One appalled officer watched a Scots battalion march up the road under artillery fire in peacetime formation.
Even if there had been less confusion, it is unlikely the British and Canadians could have captured Caen that day as Montgomery had hoped, because much of the 21st Panzer Division was in their way. The lead battalion of the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division had a clear road into Caen, but its brigade commander twice ordered it to remain in place, since moving to Caen was not yet planned. It is not certain the Canadians could have held Caen anyway. That night the 12th SS Panzer Division arrived in the city, and the 21st was already in place, to the north.
Late in the day, the 21st attacked the gap between Sword and Juno. Running into the heavy guns of the Sherman Firefly tanks-the Sherman was adequate if equipped with a decent weapon-the Germans immediately lost 13 tanks. In the end, the 21st failed to achieve anything and lost 70 of its 124 tanks.
At Utah the Americans achieved an easy landing, assisted by paratroopers who disturbed, confused and at times even crushed German resistance. Lieutenant Richard Winters of the 101 st and 12 paratroopers, reinforced by a few soldiers, took out a battery of four 105mm guns looking down on Utah beach. German artillerymen were protected by approximately 50 of their own paratroopers, but Winters and his men took them all out, as well as their guns. Still, American troubles at Omaha imperiled the entire invasion. Omaha was the beach most exposed to Channel weather; landing there, Americans paid a heavy price. Out of 32 amphibious tanks that were supposed to swim ashore to support the infantry, only five reached the beaches. The rest foundered, and most of their crews drowned. Virtually no first-wave howitzers made it through the roiling surf, either. The infantry had to fight its way ashore facing heavy resistance from the whole 352nd Infantry Division, not just a weak infantry brigade as intelligence had reported. Not surprisingly, the initial landing waves suffered heavy casualties, and Germans pinned survivors to the beaches. A German officer commanding fortifications overlooking Omaha in the first hours thought the defenses had stopped the attack. Noting that the Americans lay huddled on the shoreline, he reported many vehicles were afire and German artillery was inflicting heavy casualties.
American commanders were hearing dire reports. Lieutenant General Omar Bradley considered sending later waves intended for Omaha into Utah instead. But gradually the situation improved. American infantry moved inland. Naval gunfire took an increasing toll on the 352nd. After receiving optimistic if premature reports from that sector, German commanders sent reinforcements to deal with the British elsewhere. By the end of June 6, despite considerable confusion, Americans at Omaha had fought far enough inland to let reinforcements flow into the beachhead.
It had been a close thing. What might have happened if the Americans had not succeeded in making lodgment? Could the Germans have won? Certainly the Allies would have had a difficult time linking up the American and British bridgeheads. After isolating the attackers, the Germans might have launched successful counterattacks. On the other hand, given the continuing German command confusion in the face of the onslaught, it is doubtful that even so favorable a circumstance would have mattered much. As Rommel had warned, once the Allies were ashore, the Wehrmacht's position became desperate. If the Germans had stationed virtually all their reserves near the coast, as Rommel had wished, they might have defeated the Omaha landing and perhaps also bottled up one British landing, too. However, even Rommel had expected the main landing to be to the east, at Pas de Calais. Consequently, he probably would have sent his reserves to the Fifteenth Army. Regardless, Hitler insisted on controlling operations, so the Germans had no chance to stop the invasion.
As the sun set on June 6, the Allies had lodged themselves in western Europe. By the end of the day, they had gotten about 156,000 men ashore by aircraft and ship. In all, eight divisions were ashore. In the west, the Americans had solidly established a beachhead for the VII Corps, into which poured vast numbers of men and mountains of supplies. Though the British and Canadians had not captured Caen, they had established a good lodgment and had linked their beaches together. On the other side, the Germans were in general disarray. Most of their high command would remain convinced that a second, greater invasion would come at Pas de Calais. Now the Luftwaffe deployed its battered fighter squadrons to France. Through Ultra-intelligence material derived from decrypting German military radio traffic-the Allies knew the German plans, even forward operating base locations. Within 36 hours of the invasion's onset, the Luftwaffe had moved more than 200 fighters to France. Another 100 followed in the next three days. Those moves only swelled Allied victory claims; the Germans lost 362 aircraft in the first week and 232 the next. Allied fighter aircraft still enjoyed complete air superiority over northern France. By day, nothing German moved by road.
Not until midnight, June 6-7, did the first troopers from the SS Hitlerjugend Division arrive in Caen, focusing the battle on that city for the next six weeks. (The Hitlerjugend had been created from the elite of the fanatical Hitler Youth.) The next day the Hitlerjugend's panzer brigade, under the baleful Kurt Meyer, piled into the Canadians. In ferocious fighting, the Canadians came off second best against the well-trained juvenile killers, but supported by naval gunfire and artillery already ashore, they held.
Several hundred Canadians surrendered to the SS, but many failed to reach POW camps. In one incident, the teenagers machine-gunned Canadian prisoners and then drove tanks over their bodies. The troops of the Hitlerjugend executed many prisoners. There was some rough justice for the perpetrators-most were killed or mutilated in the fighting that followed. Allied intelligence officers got some wounded SS troopers to talk by threatening to give them transfusions of Jewish blood-hardly a comparable transgression.
But the German effort to batter the British and Canadians at the gates of Caen allowed the Allies to consolidate the beachheads. Hitler still hoped a counterattack would push the Allies into the sea, but Rommel was desperately trying to plug holes in a bulging dike. As German reinforcements flowed-or crept-into Normandy, they were broken up and rushed to many different sectors.
Signal breakdowns made the German situation worse. Ultra intercepts on June 9 and 10 indicated the precise location of the headquarters of Panzer Group West. Obligingly, the Germans placed their tents and support vehicles in an open field. Allied fighter-bombers wrecked the entire site and killed 17 officers, including the chief of staff. This air attack removed Panzer Group West as an operating headquarters and destroyed the only German command organization near Normandy that could handle mobile divisions.
Increasing French resistance and sabotage added to German difficulties. The SS Panzer Division Das Reich took nearly two weeks to arrive in Normandy from Limoges. A journey that should have taken only two days was made a nightmare by air attacks and ambushes. Along the way, members of the division committed many atrocities. The Hitlerjugend's behavior was symptomatic of the criminal nature of the Waffen SS as a whole. At Oradour-sur-Glane, SS troopers murdered 600 French civilians, machine-- gunning men in open fields and burning women and children in the village church.
Throughout the Normandy battles, outnumbered German infantry held out against superior opponents. But they were being gradually worn down despite Allied carelessness. The British found it disconcerting to find Germans dug in on the reverse slopes of the ridgetops they were traversing. That was "something that we had never envisaged," as one lieutenant put itan extraordinary admission because reverse-slope positions had been basic German defensive doctrine since 1917.
The British were often their own worst enemies. On June 12, their commanders recognized that the German. positions west of Caen, between Villers-Bocage and Caumont, were unsettled. They switched the axis of the 7th Armored Division's westward advance to take advantage of the situation. They were right to do so: Germans had little force in the area because they had concentrated their strength in Caen. The 7th Armored Division's lead brigade passed through the German lines, reaching Villers-- Bocage without hindrance. But the British advanced as if on a peacetime maneuver, without reconnaissance in front or flanks.
One of the few Germans in the area was Captain Michael Wittman, a great tank ace of the Eastern Front. His five Tiger tank crews blasted the column's head and rolled up the British formation. By the time fighting in Villers-- Bocage was over, the British had lost 25 tanks and 28 other armored vehicles. Wittman's action plugged the dike until the 2nd SS Panzer Division reinforced him, preventing the British from pushing the Germans away from Caen's west flank. For more than a month Montgomery attacked, but the British and Canadians did not make a breakthrough.
Although the Canadians did not secure Caen until July 13, one must give the British their due. Whatever their tactical and operational weaknesses, they had fought the best formations in the German army in the West to exhaustion. The fighting around Caen served a larger purpose, too: pinning German armor on Normandy's eastern battlefield and preventing Germans from concentrating a powerful counterthrust. Again and again Rundstedt and Rommel stabilized their collapsing line and prevented breakthroughs to the east. The price they paid was sapping their best units.
Ironically, the failure to achieve a breakthrough to open ground east of Caen worked to the Allied advantage. Battles of attrition played to Allied strengths of superior firepower and manpower, wearing away outnumbered German front-line units. Any breakthrough before August would have meant a mobile battle in central France. The Germans would have fallen back on their supply dumps and extracted their forces from western France in less damaged fashion while inflicting heavier Allied casualties.
IN EARLY JUNE, ALLIED forces moved to an area less welcoming to German reinforcement and supply. Advances in the bocage country led only to more and more tall, thick hedgerows around each patch of field where the Germans could form one defensive line after another, making the bocage ideal defensive terrain. Not surprisingly, commanders had thought more about initial landing terrain than about the terrain beyond that they would have to fight through after the invasion.
By June 18, the Americans had cut the base of the Cotentin Peninsula, reaching the Atlantic Ocean at Barneville. Major General Lawton "Lightning Joe" Collins, a Guadalcanal veteran, now the VII Corps commander, drove north into Cherbourg. Before enemy resistance ended, however, the Germans had wrecked the port's facilities. Despite efforts to repair the damage, the Americans failed to open the port fully until September. By then, the battlefield had moved far from Normandy. In retrospect, however, clearing the Cotentin Peninsula was wise because doing so placed the American flank on the Atlantic and permitted operational freedom.
American commanders were worried because many units performed weakly. Bradley was forced to keep airborne divisions in the front lines longer than he had planned while relying on a small group of better trained infantry divisions (like the 1st and 9th). Eisenhower and Bradley ruthlessly weeded out incompetents. Americans were paying a price in the bocage country for their emphasis on mobility over heavy weapons. In Normandy, mobility made little difference at first-though that changed once the breakout occurred. But as Rommel noted, the Americans generally learned from experience, while all too often the British did not.
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel aimed to defeat the Allied invaders on the beaches. His defensive plan called for millions of mines and huge numbers of beach obstacles along the French coast, such as these at Normandy pictured before D-Day.
On July 3, the VII Corps launched a drive on Saint-Lo that Bradley hoped would carry all the way to Avranches, ending a frustrating stalemate. The Americans advanced no better than British attacks, despite facing weaker forces. Nevertheless, though suffering heavy casualties, the Americans slowly pushed the Germans back to Saint-Lo, a process that would eventually crack German defenses.
Meanwhile, Americans solved the hedgerow problem by attaching a new device with steel teeth to the front of a tank. The "Rhino" allowed American tanks to cut through hedge roots so they could support infantry attacks directly. Uniquely American, the Rhino was devised and built by noncommissinned officers who used steel obstacles scattered by the Germans on the beaches of Normandy. It is almost inconceivable that British NCOs would have invented such a device, and doubtful that senior British officers would have embraced an invention from the "other ranks." Hundreds of Rhino-equipped tanks gave Americans cross-country mobility, while German tanks remained roadbound.
By late July, the German situation was rapidly deteriorating. Their logistical position was a shambles. Moreover, they were running out of reinforcements to rebuild their collapsing line, and Allied strength in Normandy now exceeded a million men. Adding to German woes, their high command collapsed in July. After snapping that Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel should "make peace," Rundstedt was replaced by Field Marshal Hans Gunther von Kluge, who was known for his malleability. Kluge arrived both sure of himself and sure of the German army's tactical skills. Like most German leaders who had served in the East, he underestimated Allied air power. Kluge's first advice to Rommel was to start obeying orders, but before relations between the field marshals exploded, Allied fighter bombers caught Rommel's staff car in the open on July 17, severely wounding the Desert Fox.
Refusing to appoint a replacement for Rommel, Kluge assumed command of Army Group B along with his previous overall command of the West. By the end of the month, he saw how desperate the situation had become. The explosion of a bomb in the Fuhrer's headquarters on July 20 worsened the burdens besetting the German high command. Kluge had extensive connections with the assassination plotters-his own former headquarters in the Soviet Union was one of the most active centers of resistance-so he was now nervously looking over his shoulder as the plot unraveled. His political problems influenced his decisions as the front collapsed. Soon he would commit suicide.
At the end of July, Bradley unleashed
Inland hedgerows severely hampered tank mobility until Sgt. Curtis Culin, Jr., devised the 'Rhino' hedgerow cutter, fashioned, ironically, from Rommel's steel-beam beach obstacles and welded to the front of Sherman tanks.
Normandy's decisive offensive. Operation Cobra broke the deadlock, and British and Canadian attacks in the east were crucial. Fourteen German divisions, including six of the Wehrmacht's best panzer divisions, faced Commonwealth soldiers. Only 11 divisions confronted American attacks in the west-including two panzer divisions in dreadful shape. Instead of attacking across a broad front, the VII Corps concentrated its offensive on just 7,000 yards. Bradley requested a carpet bombardment by strategic bombers to prepare the way. However, air commanders refused requests that their bombers make their runs parallel to the front. Instead, the airmen came in perpendicular to U.S. lines, believing that there was little chance of a "creep back"-friendly fire, as it were-after bombing began.
Bad weather delayed the start. On July 24, bombers took off from England, but by the time they reached the target, the weather was unsuitable again. However, some aircraft bombed anyway, and the American infantry suffered 25 killed and 131 wounded. For U.S. troops, the next day was even worse. No fewer than 1,800 bombers from the Eighth Air Force struck German positions. Although the weather was nearly perfect, the last waves dumped a substantial number of bombs on U.S. positions. This time the Eighth Air Force killed 111 American soldiers, including Lt. Gen. Lesley McNair, and wounded 490 others.
The air attack did not completely break German resistance, but when shaken American attackers recovered, they discovered that there were now holes in enemy defenses through which they could press forward. The ensuing fighting destroyed what was left of many already weakened German units. After receiving an order from Kluge that his Panzer Lehr Division must hold to the last, General Fritz Bayerlein replied: "Out in front everyone is holding out. Everyone. My grenadiers and my engineers, and my tank crews-they're all holding their ground. Not a single one is leaving his post. They are lying silently in their foxholes, for they are dead."
The Americans failed to achieve a breakthrough. However, they did eventually pry German defenders from the coast. Mobile at last, they forced the Germans back, pushing them east rather than south. The German flank was soon up in the air. Americans pushed through, reaching Avranches on July 30, liberating it the next day.
WITH THE ACTION of the Third Army and the arrival of General George S. Patton, Jr, Americans rolled into high gear. But the Third Army's actions displayed the shortcomings as well as the strengths of the U.S. Army. The first units to move through Avranches headed west, not to the east where the greatest opportunity for exploitation lay. Patton's instincts were to move rapidly, but since plans called for him to go west into Brittany toward Brest, he obeyed his orders. Only when the Allied high command recognized that it had made a mistake did Patton turn the remainder of the Third Army to the east. What makes the move so inexplicable was the fact that whatever the logistical needs for more port capacity, by destroying Cherbourg, the Germans had indicated that Breton's ports would not be much help. Brest would hold out until mid-September. Nevertheless, in slavish devotion to their plans, disregarding protests by Maj. Gen. John Wood, one of America's better division commanders, the initial move went entirely in the wrong direction.
Luckily for the Allies, Hitler made the Germans' already serious situation into pure desperation. Instead of authorizing a withdrawal to save as much manpower and equipment as he could, the Fuhrer ordered Kluge to concentrate his armor, recapture Avranches and cut off Patton's rampaging forces. As a result, Hitler stuck German forces deeper into their sack. Ultra intercepts alerted Bradley to the move. With the Americans ready and waiting, the German counterattack at Mortain had no chance. Patton's forces began their drive into central France, forming a gigantic encirclement around German forces in Normandy.
Nevertheless, the Allies failed to reap full benefit from the German collapse. Patton's spearheads stopped at Argentan to wait for slower British and Canadian forces moving south. Patton jokingly suggested to Bradley that the Third Army could continue north and push the British into the ocean for a second Dunkirk. Yet one senses that nobody-not Bradley, Patton or their troops-had much desire to close the gap at Falaise. They knew that if they actually encircled the Germans, doing so would have precipitated a battle costly to both sides. Nor did they understand how crucial such an action could be to achieving victory in 1944. Without an American focus on Falaise, British and Canadian efforts from the north faced a tough road. Unfortunately, efforts from the north were less than effective. The resulting failure of American, British and Canadian forces allowed large numbers of the toughest German troops to escape from Falaise. As they returned to the Reich, Albert Speer's economic efforts provided them with enough weapons and equipment to prolong the war into 1945.
IN THE LARGEST SENSE, the Normandy campaign achieved its goals: Armies of the Western powers returned to the Continent. In an enormous battle of attrition, they had fought the Germans to exhaustion and caused their collapse. The Allied armies did not fight the battle according to the wishes of their commander, however Montgomery wanted to achieve a breakout from Caen in which his Commonwealth troops would destroy the Germans in a mobile battle while the Americans mopped up rear areas and provided logistical support. Ironically, the exact opposite is what occurred: The Americans fought the mobile battle while the British mopped up. In the end, the actual battle emphasized the combined strengths and superiority of the Allies.
Tragically, the Allies were not able to translate their successes into outright defeat of Nazi Germany in 1944, partly because of command weaknesses. Yet that command failure was inevitable. The very qualities that made it possible for Eisenhower to persuade and cajole a collection of raging egos, forging them into a cohesive team, had made the invasion possible, but it was not the sort of driving bullheadedness that might have tumbled Germany quickly. Moreover, one can doubt whether any other personality could have made the disparate coalition work in harness as well as Eisenhower's tact and toughness did. A supreme Allied commander with the authoritarian personality of an Earnest King, say, a Douglas MacArthur or a Sir Alan Brooke might well have fractured the coalition structure on which victory in war and peace depended. The campaign marked many Allied commanders permanently. Eisenhower and Tedder still look particularly good today. At least until the breakout, the campaign played to Montgomery's strengths, too. Normandy was among his finer moments. Soldier's soldier Omar Bradley performed stolidly and steadily. The first team had passed its test.
However, walking today past all the gravestones in Normandy's silent cemeteries, the cost of victory might seem to be excessive, especially when one pauses and reads the ages of those who died and then considers the deficiencies of democracies' leaders and armies on the field of battle. The price of prewar neglect, paid by the blood of young men, is evident in those long, silent rows of crosses and stars of David. Yet one must remember that the Anglo-Americans were confronting pernicious war-loving tyrannies that had arisen in the world during the 1930s. In the end, these young Allies won, and doing so, they created the basis for a stable peace and enabled the re-creation of Europe. The Normandy campaign brought the armed power and political ideals of the unified democracies back onto the Continent, a triumph of monumental political significance. It was not pretty, but it served the purpose.
Copyright Cowles Enthusiast Media 2002