How Hitler Could Have Won World War II

21 NORMANDY

IRONICALLY, THE TWO GREATEST ARMORED COMMANDERS IN HISTORY—HEINZ Guderian and Erwin Rommel—clashed on the proper way to meet the Allied invasion of France. Adolf Hitler’s response to that collision largely determined the outcome of the war.

Guderian came to his position from his experiences in the east with the Red Army, Rommel from his experiences in Africa with the western Allies. They proposed diametrically opposite solutions.

In February 1944 Guderian went to St.-Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris, to visit Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander in chief west, and General Leo Geyr von Schweppenberg, in charge of panzer training in the west. Together they came to agreement on handling armor.

Panzer and panzergrenadier divisions, Guderian wrote, “must be stationed far enough inland from the so-called Atlantic Wall so that they could be switched easily to the main invasion front once it had been recognized.”

Guderian and Geyr proposed that the ten fast divisions Hitler had allocated to defend the west be concentrated in two groups, one north and the other south of Paris. Both officers recognized the immense superiority of Allied air power, and that it gravely affected German ability to shift armor. But they believed the problem could be overcome by moving at night.

When Guderian got back to supreme headquarters, he discovered that Rommel, who had taken over defense of the Atlantic Wall in November 1943 as commander of Army Group B, was stationing panzer divisions very near the coast.

To Guderian this was a fundamental error. “They could not be withdrawn and committed elsewhere with sufficient rapidity should the enemy land at any other point.” When he complained to Hitler, the Fuehrer told him to discuss the matter with Rommel. Guderian hit a stone wall when he met Rommel at his headquarters at La Roche Guyon, a magnificent château west of Paris. Because of Allied air supremacy, Rommel said, there could be no question of moving large formations, even at night.

To Rommel the day of mobile warfare for Germany had passed, not only because of Anglo-American air power but because Germany had not kept up with the western Allies in production of tanks and armored vehicles—a result due more to the shortage of oil than to Allied bombing.

Implicit in Rommel’s theory was that the Germans must guess right where the Allies were going to land. If German forces could not move, they had to be in place close to the invasion site. Rommel decided that the Allies would land at the Pas de Calais opposite Dover.

Rommel ruled out other landing places, especially because the Allies could provide greater air cover there than anywhere else. Rommel wrote Hitler on December 31, 1943, listing the Pas de Calais as the probable landing site. “The enemy’s main concern,” he wrote, “will be to get the quickest possible possession of a port or ports capable of handling large ships.”

Guderian did not conjecture precisely where the Allies might invade. He thought they should be allowed to land and make a penetration, so that their forces could be destroyed and thrown back into the sea by a counteroffensive on a grand scale. This was in keeping with successful German movements in Russia. Although Rundstedt and Geyr accepted the idea, neither they nor Guderian had any idea how Anglo-American command of the air could restrict panzer movement.

Rommel did, and to him Guderian’s proposal was nonsense. “If the enemy once gets his foot in, he’ll put every antitank gun and tank he can into the bridgehead and let us beat our heads against it,” he told General Fritz Bayerlein, commander of the Panzer Lehr Division.

The only way to prevent this, Rommel wrote, was to fight the battle in the coastal strip. This required operational reserves close behind the beaches that could intervene quickly. Bringing reserves up from inland would force them to run a gauntlet of Allied air power, and take so much time the Allies could organize a solid defense or drive farther inland.

Rommel set about building a fortified mined zone extending five or six miles inland. He also built underwater obstacles along the shore—including stakes (“Rommel’s asparagus”) carrying antitank mines, concrete structures equipped with steel blades or antitank mines, and other snares. But his efforts came too late to be fully effective, and they were concentrated in the Pas de Calais, though some work extended to Normandy.

Rommel and Guderian were both wrong, of course. The Allies were not bound to take the shortest route to seize the closest port. Rommel did not understand the vastness of Allied maritime resources, and he was not aware of British ingenuity in building two artificial harbors (Mulberries) which could serve as temporary ports. The Mulberries veiled the biggest secret of all: the Allies did not have to capture a port to invade the Continent. This made possible a landing at the least likely place still under the Allied air umbrella: the beaches of Normandy.

Guderian was wrong in his belief that the Germans could duplicate anything like the vast sweeping panzer movements they practiced in Russia. There the Luftwaffe generally had parity with the Red air force, and could achieve temporary local superiority to carry out a specific mission. In the west, Allied air power was overwhelming and permanent. In the winter of 1944, the Luftwaffe was virtually swept from the skies, primarily because of the American P-51 Mustang fighter. The Mustang surpassed all German fighters, yet the Luftwaffe was forced to challenge it since the P-51 was now escorting B-17 bombers in daylight raids over Germany. The Germans lost large numbers of fighters, and by March were reluctant to come up and engage the Mustangs.

Another reason Allied air power was decisive in France was that forests, rivers, and cities forced traffic along predictable arteries, which could be bombed and strafed, and bridges broken, unlike in Russia where panzers could often strike out across open plains.

The two generals should have sought a compromise. There was one: dividing the armor and placing one segment behind each of the invasion sites the Allies might choose, and making each segment available on call to Rommel or the commander of the invasion site directly ahead. Such a compromise would have answered most of Rommel’s concerns, and it would have provided a partial answer to the mobile armored reserve Guderian wanted—in the form of the armor behind the sites not attacked by the Allies.

The actual number of potential invasion sites was three, and they could have been figured out by logic. The Allies would insist on heavy fighter coverage over the landing sites. The Allies were certain to land within the maximum range of their principal ground-support aircraft, Spitfires, P-38 Lightnings, and P-47 Thunderbolts, or about 200 miles from the main fighter bases in southeastern England. A strike into Holland would encounter hard-to-cross rivers and canals, and land below sea level that could be flooded. On the Brittany peninsula an invasion might be sealed off, and the French coast south of the Loire River was much too far. Both were beyond 200 miles of the English fighter bases.

This left just the Pas de Calais, the Cotentin peninsula of Normandy, and the beaches of Normandy as the only possible invasion places.

If Rommel, Guderian, Rundstedt, and Geyr had agreed that the invasion could strike one of these places, and none other, then allocation of armor equally to each of the three would have been sensible. Since Hitler had assigned only ten fast divisions to the defense of western Europe, it was imperative to decide where the landings might occur and locate armor at these places.

But this did not happen. Rommel persisted in believing, until a month or two before the landing, that the Pas de Calais was the only possible site. And since Guderian, Rundstedt, and Geyr believed otherwise, the final decision on where to locate the fast divisions fell to Adolf Hitler. He, in his characteristic indecisive and uncertain fashion, spread the ten panzer and panzergrenadier divisions from northern Belgium to the south of France.

Hitler refused to settle on even a region that the Allies might invade, let alone specific sites. In a meeting with senior commanders on March 20, 1944, he listed potential invasion places from Norway to southern France. In the final allocation, he stationed six fast divisions north of the Loire River, and four south of the river, three of them near the Spanish frontier or close to Marseilles along the Mediterranean coast.

Erich von Manstein had won the campaign in the west in 1940 by convincing Hitler to concentrate his armor. Now, at the moment of Germany’s greatest military peril, Hitler was dispersing his armor—all across the map. Furthermore, he kept a firm rein on most of these divisions, intending to direct the battle from Berchtesgaden.

If, instead, three or four fast divisions had been stationed directly behind the beaches at each of the potential sites, they very likely could have crushed any invasion on the first day.

From March 1944 onward Hitler had a “hunch” the invasion would come at Normandy, though he thought it would be only a diversion to the main assault on the Pas de Calais. He arrived at this hunch because Americans were concentrated in southwest England, thus were closer to Normandy, and because an exercise took place in Devon on a beach similar to Norman beaches. Rommel came around to the same belief, but, despite frantic efforts, it was too late to build adequate defenses along the Norman coast.

Whether the landing on Normandy (Operation Overlord) was actually going to take place was the call of the three Allied leaders, not the generals. They did so at the Teheran conference in late November 1943.

Roosevelt was not as set on Overlord as Marshall, but if Stalin wanted it, he would demand it. Stalin still had the power to sign a cease-fire with Hitler. This was increasingly unlikely with the German retreat after Operation Citadel, but Roosevelt sought to avoid a separate peace at all costs. Beyond that, he was seeking a “constructive relationship” with Stalin after the war—a Soviet Union as a responsible member of the world community, not an agent of further disorder and war.

Consequently, at Teheran, when Stalin contested diversions in the Mediterranean that Churchill was seeking, Roosevelt announced he opposed any delay in the cross-Channel invasion. With that, the die was cast for Overlord.

Because American forces would predominate in an invasion of France, Roosevelt insisted that the commander be an American. Churchill had to accept, dashing the hopes of Alan Brooke to get the job. In partial compensation, Churchill arranged for British General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson to become supreme commander of the Mediterranean theater.

Early in December on his return from Teheran, FDR met Dwight Eisenhower at Tunis. The president was scarcely seated in the automobile when he said: “Well, Ike, you are going to command Overlord.”

General Marshall had expected to receive this choicest of all commands, and Roosevelt had planned to give it to him. But he finally decided that Marshall could not be spared, telling him: “I could not sleep at ease if you were out of Washington.”

Eisenhower, fifty-four years old, was probably the best possible choice. He was not a combat commander, but he was able to build consensus and cooperation among two quite different sorts of armies and officers. He quelled disputes and animosities by reason and with what Max Hastings called an “extraordinary generosity of spirit to his difficult subordinates.”

Eisenhower secured British Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder as his deputy. He had hoped to get General Alexander, whom the Americans liked despite his critical views of American soldiers, as British ground commander. But Alan Brooke favored Montgomery, and Churchill, deciding he needed Alexander in the Mediterranean, gave Montgomery the job. For American ground commander, Eisenhower selected Omar Bradley, a stable, discreet, but colorless fifty-year-old West Pointer. Because the slapping incidents in Sicily had revealed a serious character flaw in George Patton, Eisenhower refused to consider him for any post higher than commanding an army.

An enormous buildup commenced in southern England, and by the spring of 1944 much of the country had become a vast military encampment. Tank and vehicle parks covered thousands of acres. Most obvious were the troops who made up one French, one Polish, three Canadian, fourteen British, and twenty American divisions.

To permit rehearsal of landings with live ammunition, the British evacuated the entire population of a 25-square-mile region along the Devonshire coast between Appledore and Woolacombe. Great tented cantonments arose in the assembly areas. The initial American landing force comprised 130,000 men, with 1.2 million more to follow in ninety days. With them would go 137,000 wheeled vehicles, 4,200 fully tracked vehicles, and 3,500 cannons. Also assembled were prodigious amounts of supplies. Each American soldier in Normandy got six and one-quarter pounds of rations a day, each German three and one-third. On the other hand, a German rifle company’s small-arms ammunition scale was 56,000 rounds, an American company’s 21,000.

British Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan, charged with drawing up an invasion plan, had put his finger on Normandy by the spring of 1943. The Pas de Calais defenses were too powerful, and the Germans might bottle up an invasion of Cherbourg and the Cotentin peninsula. This left only the beaches of Normandy within range of fighter cover. But the final decision came only when a British idea for two artificial harbors (Mulberries) turned out to be feasible, and work began apace.

If the Germans knew the Norman beaches were the site, they could build up overwhelming force there and smash the landing. It was imperative to deceive them into believing the main attack would come at the Pas de Calais, and that Normandy was only a feint or diversion.

Out of this arose the most brilliant Allied deception of the war (Operation Fortitude). The Germans had fingered Patton as the most aggressive, inventive, and determined general among the western Allies, and did not think the little matter of his slapping around a couple of enlisted men would make much difference. Patton, they were sure, would lead the assault forces into France. Therefore, when Eisenhower called him to Britain on January 22, 1944, and named him to command 3rd Army, counterintelligence spread the word that he was actually commanding the “1st U.S. Army Group” that would land in the Pas de Calais. The counterspies set up radio nets of this fictitious army group with lots of fake traffic and created the impression that a real army group was busily preparing for action. The Germans kept their strongest army, the 15th, to guard the Pas de Calais.

The Allies had decided to land at Normandy, but this was only the first step. Shortly after arriving in England on January 14, 1944, Eisenhower established the strategy to defeat Germany. He directed that after breaking out of Normandy the Allies were to advance on Germany on a broad front with two army groups—the British on the left, the Americans on the right. The British were to receive preference in order to capture the ports of Belgium, especially Antwerp, which were vital to build up supplies necessary to break into Germany, and to seize the Ruhr, the main center of German industry, which lay east of southern Holland along the Rhine around Düsseldorf, Duisburg, and Essen.

Eisenhower also ordered a massive bombing offensive against transportation centers in Belgium and France to reduce German ability to reinforce Normandy and to carry on a war in France. To minimize casualities among French and Belgian civilians, the Allies warned inhabitants in advance to move away from specific targets. The Allied aircraft did not target rail and road lines to Normandy alone, but bombed other sites, especially the Pas de Calais.

Sir Arthur Harris, chief of RAF Bomber Command, wanted to continue area or terror nighttime bombing of German cities, while Carl Spaatz, U.S. Strategic Air Forces commander, urged concentration on destroying synthetic fuel plants and refineries to immobilize German panzers, vehicles, and aircraft. However, Eisenhower overruled them.

Nevertheless, Spaatz’s attacks on oil production facilities—which continued in the spring of 1944, and accelerated thereafter—slowed German motorized movements. By September 1944, German aircraft fuel production was only 10,000 tons, while the Luftwaffe’s minimum monthly demand was 160,000 tons. These deficiencies reduced the menace of new German jet-engine fighters, now being introduced.

General Morgan had come up with a limited plan for invading Normandy: an attack by only three divisions on a relatively narrow front. To Eisenhower this was fatally weak, and on January 21, 1944, at his first conference in London, he decided on a five-division assault on as wide a front as possible—60 miles—to reduce congestion when reinforcements came ashore.

The Americans were to land on the right, or west, on Utah and Omaha beaches, and go for Cherbourg, Brest, and the ports around the Loire estuary. In the final version, two U.S. airborne divisions (82nd and 101st) were to land at the base of the Cotentin peninsula to assist in securing it quickly. Also, because a lagoon was directly behind Utah beach, the paratroops were to prevent Germans from blocking the few causeways leading from the beach.

The British and Canadians were to land on the left in the vicinity of Caen, on Sword, Gold, and Juno beaches, and confront the main enemy body approaching from the east and southeast. The British 6th Parachute Division was to secure the high ground just east of Caen and the Orne River. The first objective, Caen, ten miles inland, was to be seized on the first day. All major roads funneled through this town. Then armored forces were to push southward to gain territory—especially around Falaise, 22 miles south of Caen—to make it difficult for German reserves to get past. Eisenhower set June 5, 1944, as D-Day.

The key to Normandy was Caen. Most German reserves would have to arrive from the south and southeast and go through Caen, even those headed for the American beachheads to the west.

Allied commanders knew from intelligence sources that the panzer divisions were being held in reserve, though they thought Rundstedt had control of them, not Hitler. Even so, they expected a delay before they were released to Rommel. This opened the window of opportunity the Allies needed to build strong beachheads. If they could hold on to the fifth day they would have fifteen divisions on shore, Bernard Montgomery, 21st Army Group commander and chief of land forces, told senior commanders on April 7, 1944. Even though he estimated the Germans could bring in six panzer divisions by that time, they would be unable to break up the lodgments. From that point on, Allied power would rise inexorably, making the outcome—the destruction of the German army in the west—inevitable.

Selection of June 5, 1944, as D-Day was based on combinations of the moon, tide, and the time of sunrise. The Allies wanted to cross the Channel at night so darkness would conceal direction and strength of the attacks. They wanted a moon for the airborne drops, and they needed forty minutes of daylight ahead of the ground assault to complete bombing runs and preparatory naval bombardments. But the actual day of the attack would depend upon weather forecasts. Nevertheless, postponing the invasion beyond June 6 or 7 would involve rescheduling the entire operation and problems of enormous magnitude.

As the date approached, authorities cut off all of southern England from the rest of the country. No unauthorized person could go in either direction. Logistical officers charted every encampment, barracks, vehicle park, and unit. They scheduled movements of every unit to reach its embarkation point at the exact time the vessels were ready to receive it. The assault troops—the first wave of the invasion—went into cantonments surrounded by barbed wire to prevent any soldier from leaving once he’d learned his part in the attack.

As Eisenhower wrote, “The mighty host was tense as a coiled spring,” ready to vault across the Channel in the greatest amphibious assault ever attempted.

On the morning of June 4, Eisenhower and his commanders met with the meteorologic committee, headed by RAF Group Captain J. M. Stagg. The news was not good. Stagg predicted low clouds, high winds, and strong waves on June 5. The naval commander, British Admiral Sir Bertram H. Ramsey, was neutral. Montgomery urged going on with the invasion on schedule. Tedder disagreed.

Eisenhower decided to postpone the invasion for one day. Since some vessels already had set out to sea, they had to be called back. Some in the Irish Sea had trouble gaining ports, refueling, and readying to move a day later.

At 3:30 A.M., June 5, a wind of almost hurricane force, along with sheets of rain, pounded Eisenhower’s operational headquarters at Portsmouth on the south coast. At the naval center a mile away Captain Stagg had surprisingly good news: by the morning of June 6 a period of relative calm would ensue for about thirty-six hours. After that, the prospects were for more bad weather. The consequences of delay were so great that Eisenhower quickly announced his decision to go ahead with the invasion on June 6.

Orders went out at once. From the ports, 5,000 vessels put out to sea.

Winston Churchill informed Eisenhower that he was going to observe the invasion from a ship immediately off the Normandy shore. Eisenhower told him he could not do so. Churchill responded that he could name himself as a member of a ship’s company, and Eisenhower couldn’t stop him. King George VI heard about Churchill’s scheme, and announced that if the prime minister felt it necessary to go, he, the king, felt it equally his duty to participate at the head of his troops. With that, Churchill backed down.

On each of the five beaches—two American, two British, one Canadian— forces equivalent to one division were to land on D-Day. On each of the beaches, save Omaha, the defenders were static or garrison divisions, made up of older men or non-German volunteers, with no great enthusiasm and little or no battle experience.

Omaha was the sole exception. There on guard was the 352nd Infantry Division, a combat-toughened field force that had moved in three months before from service in Russia, a fact that had escaped Allied intelligence. One regiment of the 352nd was guarding the four miles of steep bluffs that rose behind the Omaha landing sectors. The other two regiments were a few miles inland at Bayeux. But one regiment of the 716th Division (a static force) had been incorporated into the command structure of the 352nd. Therefore, two full regiments were in place and waiting at Omaha.

The plan was for bombers to shatter the defensive positions on all five beaches in the first few minutes of daylight on June 6. Meanwhile, naval guns would bombard the beaches, while the landing craft approached.

Before any of this happened, however, the paratroops landed—16,000 Americans behind the Utah beaches at the base of the Cotentin peninsula; 8,000 British east of Caen.

The first paratroops came in by parachute and glider in the early hours in the dark. The foul weather and the inexperience of some transport pilots caused most of the Americans and British to be scattered far and wide of their objectives.

The British 6th Parachute Division, though suffering extreme losses in landings or because pilots veered from their assigned targets because of antiaircraft fire, nevertheless secured the area east of the Orne River, including the “Pegasus bridge” over the Caen canal, vital for linking traffic on the main coast road.

The job of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division was to take the four causeways leading to Utah beach; the task of the 82nd Airborne Division was to seize bridges inland. The assignments required the paratroops to land at precise drop zones. It didn’t happen. Many of the aircraft were too high or too far off course, or were flying too fast to see the drop zones. Many pilots banked away to avoid antiaircraft fire, forcing the troopers to jump blind.

The result was chaos. Three-quarters of the paratroopers dropped so wide of their targets they never took any part in the attacks. Scattered through the countryside, they formed small groups, wandering for days, skirmishing occasionally with German patrols. Oddly the confusion helped. The Germans could not figure out Allied intentions and launched no strong attacks on the scattered men.

Major General Maxwell Taylor, commander of the 101st, could assemble only 1,000 men by the night of June 6, but was able to secure the exits to the causeways. The 82nd Division was unable to seize bridges to the west because much of the land was under water. However, the main objective was the village of St.-Mère-Eglise, five miles west of Utah beach, on a road leading northward into the Cotentin and southward to the town of Carentan and connection with Omaha beach.

Thirty men fell into the village itself, twenty of them right on the central square into the midst of the German garrison of a hundred men. Within a few minutes all the paratroops had been killed or captured. Private John Steele’s parachute caught on the church steeple, where he dangled for hours, playing dead, before finally being taken prisoner.

Other 82nd Airborne men assembled outside the village, and drove the Germans out by dawn.

In the British sector, Montgomery held up the landing for an hour and a half after the Americans landed in order to bombard the landing sites for two hours, four times as long as at Omaha. Large numbers of American B-17s and B-24s dropped their bomb loads on the targets, protected by some of the nearly 5,000 fighters the Allies had committed to the D-Day landings.

The land behind the flat beaches was low, and offered no great challenges to the British. The sector was defended largely by the 716th Division, containing many Poles and Ukrainians, and it put up a lackluster defense. The only threat from the air was from two FW-190 fighters based at Lille that made a single bold sweep along the beaches, guns blazing, before banking away and returning to base. On a cliff west of Le Hamel on Gold beach on the west a unit of the 352nd Division mounted an 88-millimeter antiaircraft gun with a clear field of fire. A round struck a landing ship, wrecking its engine room and turning it broadside up on the beach. Eventually a tank carrying a heavy mortar lobbed a forty-pound “flying dustbin” into the 88’s position and destroyed it. The British 50th Division, which landed at Gold, pushed four miles inland, but failed to capture the D-Day objective, Bayeux.

All across the British sector tanks fitted with flails moved up from the beaches, blowing up mines in their path. The tanks created lanes through which the infantry and vehicles could advance.

On Juno, the Canadian beach in the center, the Germans were waiting. Mines and shells sank many of the 306 landing craft. At Bernières, the 8th Canadian Brigade arrived ahead of its flail tanks. The assault regiment, the Queen’s Own Rifles, lost half of one company killed in the 100 yards it had to traverse from sea to sea wall. The Canadians broke through by point-blank fire from a gunship and a quick assault through one point of the defenses, and the Germans withdrew. The Canadians penetrated about four miles inland.

At Sword, on the east, the British 3rd Division lost 28 of 40 tanks in pitching seas, but the remaining 12 knocked out German gun positions. The division overran the enemy, pushed four miles inland, and linked up with the 6th Parachute Division along the Orne River, but failed to take the D-Day objective, Caen.

General Miles Dempsey, commander of 2nd Army, landed 75,000 men on D-Day at all three beaches, plus 8,000 paratroopers, and suffered about 3,000 casualties, one-third of them Canadian.

Meanwhile, nearly forty miles to the west, the U.S. 4th Infantry Division landed on Utah beach. The advance bombing by the air force had achieved little because a heavy overcast obscured the target, and most of the bombs landed far to the rear. An hour-long naval bombardment, however, was highly effective.

Utah was defended by one regiment of the 709th Division, another nonmobile outfit made up of older men and volunteers from the Soviet Georgian republic. The defenders raked the landing craft that came within their field of fire, but quickly surrendered.

By the end of the day, 23,000 Americans had landed on Utah, and the division had pushed six miles inland. Total casualties were only 197.

Omaha was utterly different. In the words of Omar Bradley, it was a nightmare. Before daylight, the invasion fleet, fearing shore batteries, anchored twelve miles off the coast. One of these batteries, at Pointe du Hoc, four miles west of the beaches, was reported to have six 155-millimeter guns with a range of 25,000 yards. Bradley had assigned two Ranger battalions to scale the high cliffs and destroy the guns.

Waves three to six feet high slapped the ships. Launching landing craft in darkness was difficult and dangerous. The “secret weapon” upon which the Americans were relying was the DD (for dual-drive) Sherman tank, equipped with canvas flotation gear and a boat screw. DDs were to be launched at sea and “swim” ashore to provide the troops instant artillery fire. Twenty-nine of the thirty-two DDs for the east sector were launched two and a half miles off the coast. All but two foundered, taking nearly all the crews to the bottom of the sea with them. Three others were landed directly on the beach. The seamen in charge of landing the thirty-two DDs on the western sector, horrified at what was happening, called off the sea launch and landed twenty-eight DDs directly on the beach, though only later—just two of the DDs intended to support the infantry made it ashore with the troops. Most of the amphibious DUKWs transporting 105-millimeter howitzers also foundered.

At 5:50 A.M. terrific salvos burst from the warships onto Omaha. The bombardment went on for thirty-five minutes. Meanwhile, beginning at 6 A.M., waves of B-24s dropped nearly 1,300 tons of bombs. The naval bombardment was partially effective, but the aerial bombardment was useless, falling well inland and missing the beach entirely.

The Omaha beach fortifications were formidable: three rows of underwater steel or concrete obstacles, most mined. The beach was two hundred yards wide with no cover. Beyond a low seawall were sand dunes and bluffs, cut by five draws the Americans intended to use as exits. All the draws were covered by German gun emplacements and the area between the seawall and cliffs was sown with mines.

At 6:30 A.M. the first waves of infantry, 1,500 men in 36 landing craft, hit Omaha: members of the 116th Regiment of the 29th Division and the 16th Regiment of the 1st Division, plus engineers to blow up underwater obstacles.

The Germans held their fire until the first wave of infantry hit the beaches. The initial burst of machine-gun fire came from a strongpoint only a quarter of a mile away from the lead craft. Others followed, creating a hurricane of fire. First out were men of the 116th on the west. As the ramps went down, they saw the shallows ahead whipped white by bullets. Men dropped dead or wounded as they lumbered forward in waist-deep water, creating a bloody surf that horrified everyone from the first moments. Other soldiers, seeing what was happening, tried to dive into deeper water and swim clear of the boats. But their heavy equipment dragged them down. Some drowned, others fought back to the surface. The survivors who dragged themselves ashore found no shelter, and some crawled back into the water for its scant protection. Within ten minutes every officer and sergeant had been killed or wounded. In Company A of the 116th, 22 men from one town—Bedford, Virginia—died, among them three sets of brothers.

The engineers were supposed to clear sixteen 50-yard-wide paths through the obstacles. But half the engineers were dead or wounded, and they managed to clear just one path in the first half hour. The landing craft bringing in the succeeding waves of troops crowded into this single corridor. As the ramps dropped, the men faced almost certain death or wounding. All along the beach landing craft sank or exploded as they hit mines or were struck by artillery.

Ashore, dead and wounded were scattered across the sand and shallows. The survivors lay in the sand or shallow water or crouched behind landing craft, hearing bullets clanging against the steel hulls. Howitzer shells blasted the beach and sent shrapnel flying. The DDs were knocked out, and the Americans had nothing to stop the murderous fire.

Four miles to the west, 225 men of the 2nd Ranger Battalion began scaling the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc to destroy the guns reported there. The Rangers shot rope ladders and rope-bearing grapnels onto the clifftop and started climbing, in the face of withering fire from above. A number of Rangers died, others blasted shelters and hand-holds in the cliff with their grenades. Meanwhile an American and a British destroyer moved in close and drove the enemy away from the top of the cliff with heavy fire. The Rangers hauled themselves up and discovered that the guns were not there. They had been moved back to an orchard. There the Rangers destroyed them.

DD tanks now began to come ashore. The novelist Ernest Hemingway, observing from a landing craft, saw two tanks start burning: “The first, second, third, fourth, and fifth waves [of infantry] lay where they had fallen, looking like so many heavily laden bundles on the flat, pebbly stretch between the sea and the first cover.” Hemingway also witnessed the Germans hitting another tank: “I saw two men dive out of the turret and land on their hands and knees on the stones of the beach,” he reported. “But no more men came out as the tank started to blaze up and burn furiously.”

The only thing that saved the infantry on Omaha was the U.S. Navy. Twelve destroyers moved in close to the beach, ignoring shallow water and mines, and turned every possible gun onto the German positions on the bluffs. This intense fire diminished German resistance, and permitted the soldiers to slowly gain headway.

For six hours, Omaha was bloody chaos. The Americans held only a few yards of beach; the waves actually ran red with blood. Not until the principal commanders got ashore did the men begin to move toward the seawall and bluffs. Brigadier General Norman D. Cota, assistant commander of the 29th Division, strode calmly among the crouching soldiers. He yelled: “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach, the dead and those who are going to die. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

Slowly, lone and mostly anonymous individuals of incredible heroism began to get things moving, creating breaches to open the draws to advance. In front of one such place, a lieutenant and a sergeant in the 16th Regiment took their lives in their hands and went up and found only barbed wire barred the way. The lieutenant returned to the GIs cringing behind a low shingle shelf on the beach. Standing with his hands on his hips, he said: “Are you going to lie there and get killed, or get up and do something about it?” Nobody moved, so the sergeant and the lieutenant blew the wire themselves. That gave the men courage enough to file through the gap and through a minefield.

There were many such events on June 6, 1944. By the end of the day the Americans had pushed out a patchwork of pockets over an area six miles long and two miles deep. Behind them, 3,000 Americans lay dead on Omaha beach.

Early on June 6, German duty officers in Normandy began to get frantic calls that thousands of paratroops were landing. The officers raced to field telephones to report to higher quarters, and the whole machinery of command went into action.

Erwin Rommel was in Germany for his wife’s birthday, assuming the bad weather would prevent an invasion any time soon, and his chief of staff, Hans Speidel, only reached him by phone at midmorning. Rommel at once started driving toward Normandy.

There was one panzer division within immediate striking distance of the beaches, the 21st, south of Caen. Two other divisions were fairly close: the Panzer Lehr in the vicinity of Chartres, and the SS Panzer Hitler Jugend just west of Paris. If they had moved at the first word of the invasion, they almost certainly could have smashed it, since the morning of June 6 was heavily overcast, and Allied fighter-bombers could not fly. But while Army Group B had control of the 21st Division, Hitler controlled the other two. Jodl refused to wake the Fuehrer, and questioned whether the Normandy landings were the main effort. It was 4 P.M. before the divisions were at last released.

The 21st Panzer had 150 tanks, 60 assault guns, and 300 armored troop carriers. Its commander, Edgar Feuchtinger, formed up part of his division to attack the British paratroops east of the Orne River in the morning, but got countermanding orders from 7th Army to attack west of the river. This caused delay and only a single battle group of fifty tanks and a battalion of panzergrenadiers launched the strike toward Sword beach about midday.

Around 9:30 A.M. the 1st Battalion of the British South Lancashires reached a point almost within sight of Caen when they encountered three antitank guns emplaced on a ridge. The South Lancs dug in and waited for the 65 tanks of the 185th Brigade, which were supposed to lead the midmorning attack toward Caen. For three hours the South Lancs sat there, while the tanks waited for the traffic jam on the Sword beach to clear.

Around 2 P.M. twenty Sherman tanks finally attacked the three AT guns, which withdrew, and the tanks’ accompanying force, the Shropshire Light Infantry, pressed on toward Caen. Just short of the town it ran into dug-in infantry, and withdrew to Biéville, four miles north. This was the closest the Allies got to Caen for a month.

Meanwhile the 21st Panzer battle group skirted around west of the Shropshires and drove northward with the intention of splitting Juno from Sword, and destroying each beachhead in turn. The Germans reached the unguarded coast between the two beaches at 8 P.M.

Feuchtinger was sending another fifty tanks to reinforce this advance when overhead the panzers saw the largest glider-borne force in the war, 250 transports, coming to reinforce the 6th Airborne a few miles east. Feuchtinger assumed wrongly that the gliders were landing in his rear with the intention of cutting off the division, and he recalled all his tanks. This fortuitous appearance of the gliders ended the last chance the Germans had to smash the beachheads.

The Germans made another fundamental error: they sent the two closest panzer divisions in daylight toward the Normandy beaches. Rommel and Guderian had preached against this, saying that troops had to move at night. But OKW ordered 12th SS Panzer Hitler Jugend Division, west of Paris, to advance on Caen on the late afternoon of June 6. It did not complete its 75-mile journey until 9:30 A.M., June 7. Friedrich Dollmann, 7th Army commander, ordered Panzer Lehr Division, near Chartres, 110 miles from the front, to drive in daylight on June 7 toward Villers-Bocage, fifteen miles southwest of Caen, to block British movement in that direction. Fritz Bayerlein, Panzer Lehr commander, protested in vain.

Both divisions suffered heavy damage from Allied air attacks. Panzer Lehr, the only division in Normandy at full strength, lost 5 tanks, 84 self-propelled guns and half-tracks, and 130 trucks and fuel tankers. Because of the air attacks Panzer Lehr’s tracked vehicles got separated from the wheeled units, and the division was unable to deliver an attack when it arrived, while SS Hitler Jugend had neither the time nor space to launch a coordinated assault by all its formations.

Nevertheless, the arrival of both panzer divisions stopped the rapid advance of the Allies out of Normandy. But these and other divisions were eaten up as they were committed piecemeal, and the moment passed when the German army could have thrown the Allies into the sea. Meanwhile Hitler held some of his strongest divisions at the Pas de Calais, still believing the Normandy invasion was a feint. From sites around the Pas, he also launched attacks on London, beginning June 12–13, with the V-1 jet-propelled cruise missile, and, in September, fired the first V-2 rocket-propelled ballistic missiles.

On June 10, Rommel proposed to Hitler that all armored forces in the line be replaced with infantry formations, and that armor be shifted westward to cut off and destroy the Americans in the lower Cotentin peninsula (7th Corps that had landed at Utah and the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions). But Hitler vetoed the plan, and the Germans were forced into a wholly defensive operation.

This led to a murderous battle, but the outcome was never in doubt. Overwhelming Allied power was building day by day. Before long the Allies would burst out of Normandy and roll over the German army.