D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (11 page)

Rommel fired his first chief of staff. The successor was Gen. Hans Speidel, a Swabian from the Wiirttemberg district who had fought with Rommel in World War I and had served with him in the twenties. Speidel was an active plotter against Hitler, more politically adroit and aware than his chief. Eventually he was able to persuade Rommel to support the conspiracy against Hitler, which was growing through the early months of 1944.

Here was a profound difference between Rommel and Eisenhower. Eisenhower believed with all his heart in the cause he was fighting for. To him, the invasion was a crusade designed to end the Nazi occupation of Europe and destroy the scourge of Nazism forever. He hated the Nazis and all they represented. Although a patriot, Rommel was no Nazi—even though at times he had been a toady to Hitler. To Rommel, the coming battle would be fought against an enemy he never hated and indeed respected. He approached that battle with professional competence rather than the zeal of a crusader.

4

WHERE AND WHEN?

In mid-March 1943, shortly after the Battle of Kasserine Pass and nearly two months before the final victory in Tunisia, the CCS appointed British Lt. Gen. Frederick Morgan to the post of chief of staff to the supreme Allied commander (designate) and charged him with "co-ordinating and driving forward the plans for cross-Channel operations this year and next year." Within a month the CCS decided that no such operation could be mounted in 1943; the final directive, issued in late April, ordered Morgan to begin planning for "a full-scale assault against the Continent in 1944, as early as possible."
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It would be hard to imagine a broader directive. "Where" could be anywhere between Holland and Brest; "as early as possible" could be anytime between March and September 1944. Morgan put together a staff of British and American officers, with Maj. Gen. Ray Barker of the U.S. Army as his deputy, called the group COSSAC after the initial letters of his title, and went to work.

COSSAC operated under one particularly severe constraint—the number of landing craft allotted to the operation limned the planners to a three-division assault. Coupled with the presumption that the Germans were certain to improve the Atlantic Wall, that limitation removed all temptation to plan for widely dispersed attacks. From the first, COSSAC committed the Allies to

the principle of concentration of force. There would be one invasion site, the divisions landing side by side.

Where? There were many requirements. The site had to be within range of Allied fighter planes based in the United Kingdom. There had to be at least one major port close at hand that could be taken from the land side and put into operation as soon as possible. There was no thought of landing where the Atlantic Wall was complete, that is, around the French ports: the disastrous Dieppe raid by the Canadians in August 1942 convinced COSSAC that a direct frontal assault against a well-defended port could not succeed. Therefore the beaches selected had to be suitable for prolonged unloading operations directly from the LSTs and have exits for vehicles and adequate road nets behind them for rapid, massive deployment inland.

Those were tactical requirements. Most of them could be met easily on the French Mediterranean coast or in Brittany. But the strategic requirement was to land as close to the ultimate objective, the Rhine-Ruhr region, as possible, for the obvious reason that the farther away from the objective the landing took place, the greater would be the distance to be covered and the longer the supply line.

Holland and Belgium had excellent ports, but they were too close to Germany and the Luftwaffe bases, the area inland too easily flooded, too well defended. The Pas-de-Calais coast in northernmost France was ideal in every way but one—it was the obvious place to come ashore and thus it was there that the Germans had built the strongest part of the Atlantic Wall.

Le Havre, in upper Normandy on the north bank of the mouth of the Seine, was an excellent port, but it had numerous disadvantages. To take it the Allies would have to land on both sides of the river. The two forces could not be mutually supporting, which would allow the Germans to defeat them in detail. East of Le Havre the coastline is dominated by cliffs with only a few small beaches that had even fewer exits.

With Brest as its main port, and with smaller but good ports along its north coast, Brittany had advantages, but they were overshadowed by the distance from the United Kingdom and from the objective. Cherbourg was closer to both, which made the Cotentin Peninsula tempting. But the west coast of the Cotentin was open to storms coming in off the Atlantic and was guarded by the German-held Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey. The east coast of the

Cotentin was low-lying ground, easily flooded. Further, the narrow base of the Cotentin would make it relatively easy for the Germans to seal off the beachhead.

A process of elimination brought the choice down to the Calvados coast of Normandy. The port of Caen, although small, could be captured quickly—probably in the initial assault. There was an airfield just outside Caen, called Carpiquet, that could be captured by airborne assault on the first day. The capture of Caen would cut the railroad and highway from Paris to Cherbourg, thus simultaneously isolating the Cotentin Peninsula and putting the invaders in a position to threaten Paris.

There were other advantages. The mouth of the Orne River was the boundary between the Wehrmacht's Fifteenth Army to the northeast and Seventh Army to the southwest, and boundaries between armies are inherently areas of weakness. The attack would come against Seventh Army, which had only one panzer division (the 21st) to Fifteenth Army's five. Calvados was 150 kilometers or so from the major southern British ports of Southampton and Portsmouth. * The Cotentin Peninsula protected it from the worst effects of Atlantic storms. From the mouth of the Orne River westward there were thirty kilometers of open sand beaches, for the most part with only a gradual rise inland, and there was a good road net inland. From Arromanches westward for another ten kilometers the bluffs were almost vertical, but beginning at Colleville the bluffs receded from the coastline for a ten-kilometer stretch. Although the bluff behind was as much as forty to fifty meters high, it was not vertical and the beach was open, sandy, and 200 or so meters wide at low tide, ten meters at high tide. There were four draws with roads running down to that beach, making for suitable exits.

Already the British had collected an enormous amount of intelligence on the French coast. Shortly after Dunkirk, the BBC had broadcast an appeal for postcards gathered over the years from families who had taken prewar vacations in France; 30,000 arrived

Distances are given in two ways, by meter and kilometer and by yards and miles, as is done in, respectively, France and Britain. For England, I use miles; for France, kilometers. But of course when the Allies in France talked about distances, they used yards and miles. This inevitably causes some confusion. To make comparison, a simple method is to remember that a meter is only slightly longer than a yard and may be thought of as equivalent; a kilometer is six-tenths of a mile, so )ust multiply by six-tenths to go from kilometers to miles (eighty kilometers are torty-eight miles; 100 kilometers are sixty miles, and so forth).

in the first post and eventually 10 million pictures were collected. Throughout 1942 and 1943 aerial reconnaissance photographs had been gathered; they were put together into panoramic photos. The French Resistance supplied information on beach obstacles, strong points, enemy units, and the like. Information on tides, currents, and topography could be dug out of old guidebooks.

So a great deal was known about the Calvados coast, but not the answer to a key question. Would the beaches west of the mouth of the Orne River support DUKWs, tanks, bulldozers, and trucks? There was reason to fear that they would not, because British geographers and geologists reported that there had been considerable erosion of the coastline over the past two centuries. The original port at Calvados, the old Roman port, had been two kilometers out from the twentieth-century shoreline. French Resistance people managed to smuggle four volumes of geological maps out of Paris, one in Latin done by the Romans, who had surveyed their entire empire for a report on fuel sources. The survey indicated that the Romans had gathered peat from the extensive reserves on the Calvados coast. If there were boggy peat fields under a thin layer of sand on the current coast, it would not hold tanks and trucks.

COSSAC had to know. The only way to find out was to obtain samples. No. 1 Combined Operations Pilotage and Beach Reconnaissance Party, consisting of Maj. Logan Scott-Bowden and Sgt. Bruce Ogden-Smith, set off on New Year's Eve 1943 in a midget submarine to take samples. They figured the Germans would be celebrating that night. Lt. Comdr. Nigel Willmott of Combined Operations was in command, with a submarine skipper and an engineer. Major Scott-Bowden and Sergeant Ogden-Smith swam ashore, carrying pistols, daggers, wrist compasses, watches, waterproof flashlights, and a dozen twelve-inch tubes.

They came in on a rising tide at the seaside village of Luc-sur-Mer on the beach later given the code name Sword. They could hear singing from the German garrison. They crawled ashore, walked inland a bit, went flat when the beam from the lighthouse swept over the beach, walked some more. They made sure to stay below the high-water mark so that their tracks would be wiped out by the tide before morning. They stuck their tubes into the sand, gathering samples and noting the location of each on underwater writing tablets they wore on their arms.

"The trouble really started," Scott-Bowden recalled, when they had filled their tubes. "The breakers were quite heavy and we were positively bogged and tattered up with all our kit, and we had

a go at getting out to sea and were flung back." They took a breather, tried again, were flung back a second time. "So we went as far out in the water as we could, there were smaller waves coming over us, and watched the rhythm of these breakers until we could time it. The third attempt, having timed it right, we got out, but we got separated a bit and we swam like hell to make sure we weren't going to be pitched back in again. We didn't quite lose contact."

Suddenly Ogden-Smith started yelling. "I was thinking that he'd probably got a cramp or something," Scott-Bowden related, "but when I got close enough to him, all he was yelling was 'Happy New Year!' He's a good chap, a marvelous fellow. I swore at him, then wished him a Happy New Year too."
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The samples showed that the sand could bear the necessary weight. The Combined Operations Pilotage Parties (COPPs) did a series of reconnaissances all along the Calvados coast that winter, at beaches named Juno and Gold. They sometimes set the midget submarine on the sea bottom at periscope depth to take bearings and photographs. Scott-Bowden explained, "We could see things which weren't visible from air photographs as we were looking from a worm's eye view. It was quite a tricky operation, because if anybody moves inadvertently in a midget submarine and you're bottomed at periscope height on a wavy beach, you can upset the trim and put the bottom off, put the stern up, or anything, so one had to be very careful indeed."
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On one occasion, the submarine passed right underneath a French fishing trawler with a German spotter in the bow. Scott-Bowden was able to watch workmen on the beach using two-wheeled carts pulled by horses. He and Ogden-Smith made other swims, including one at the beach between Colleville and Vierville (by this time, late January, code-named Omaha) and did other reconnaissance missions.

At the end of January, Scott-Bowden was called to COSSAC headquarters at Norfolk House, St. James's Square (by then taken over by SHAEF), to report to Admiral Ramsay, General Bradley, General Smith, four other generals, and five more admirals. Rear Adm. George Creasy, Ramsay's chief of staff, drew the curtains and said, "Now, describe your reconnaissance."

Scott-Bowden looked at the map. It was too big, too general. 'Well, I'm afraid, sir, it's going to be very difficult to give much detail from this."

"Oh," Creasy replied, "we've got another map down the

other end, it might be better." So the major followed him across the large room, looked at the map hanging there, and indicated it would do. Creasy called out, "Come on, chaps, bring your chairs down here." As the generals and admirals picked up their chairs and came over, the twenty-three-year-old Scott-Bowden thought, Oh dear, oh dear, I'm getting off to a bad start.

"I'd never been confronted with such a galaxy before," he recalled, "so I stumbled through my account. Then they started shooting questions for getting onto an hour. The Navy were not quite so interested in what I had to say, but General Bradley was. He wanted me to say whether Sherman tanks could go up this track or that track. I thought of the two wheel carts and said it must be possible. And so on."

When the brass ran out of questions, Scott-Bowden offered an opinion. "If you don't mind my saying so, sir," he told Bradley, "I think that your beach with all these tremendous emplacements with guns defilading the beaches from here and there and all over, it's going to be a very tough proposition indeed."

Bradley patted Scott-Bowden on the shoulder and said, "Yes, I know, my boy, I know."
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When Eisenhower and his team arrived in London to take over from COSSAC, they studied Morgan's plan and accepted his logic, except that everyone involved—Montgomery, Eisenhower, Smith, Bradley, and the others—insisted that the invasion front had to be widened to a five-division assault. They demanded, and got, an allotment of additional landing craft. Extension to the east, toward Le Havre, was not advisable because it would bring the assaulting troops directly under the Le Havre coastal guns, among the most formidable in the Atlantic Wall. Morgan had ruled out extension to the west, on the southeast corner of the Cotentin Peninsula, because the Germans were flooding the hinterland there.