D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (12 page)

Eisenhower overruled Morgan; he decided to extend to the west. He would deal with the problem of flooded areas behind the coastline by dropping the American airborne divisions inland and giving them the task of seizing the raised roads that crossed the flooded areas, so that the seaborne assault troops could use the roads to move inland.

The U.S. 4th Infantry Division would lead the way on the Cotentin, where the beach took the code name Utah. The U.S. 29th and 1st Infantry divisions would land at the beach on the

Calvados coast code-named Omaha. The British and Canadians would land on the beaches stretching westward from the mouth of the Orne, code-named (from east to west) Sword (British 3rd Division, plus British and French commandos), Juno (Canadian 3rd), and Gold (British 50th). The British 6th Airborne would land between the Orne and Dives rivers to protect the left flank.

COSSAC had been tempted to use only one army, either British or American, in the initial assault—that would make things very much simpler and eliminate what is always the weakest spot in any allied line, the boundary between the forces of the two nationalities. But it was politically impossible. As General Barker had put it in July 1943, "It can be accepted as an absolute certainty that the P[rime] Minister] would not, for one moment, allow the assault to be made wholly by American troops. The same is true with relation to the U.S. Government. We must be practical about this and face facts."
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So it was settled. The invasion would come against the Calvados coast, with the British on the left and the Americans at Omaha, with an extension to the right onto the Cotentin coast at Utah.

The great disadvantage of the Calvados coast was that landing there would put the Allied armies ashore southwest of the Seine River, thus putting between them and their objective the major river barriers of the Seine and the Somme. But disadvantages could be made into advantages; in this case, COSSAC believed that the bridges over the Seine could be destroyed in preinvasion bombardments, thus making it difficult for the Wehrmacht to bring panzer divisions from the Pas-de-Calais across the river and into the battle.

The greatest advantages of Calvados were that surprise could be achieved there and that the Germans might be fooled into believing the landing was a feint, designed to draw their armor away from the Pas-de-Calais to the west of the Seine. The basic reason for surprise was that by going to Calvados the Allies would be moving south from England, away from the area the Germans absolutely had to defend, the Rhine-Ruhr, rather than east from England on the straight line toward their objective. It might be possible to persuade the Germans on an ongoing, postinvasion basis that Calvados was a feint by mounting a dummy operation aimed at the Pas-de-Calais.

COSSAC recognized that it could not reverse the process; that is, the Allies would not be able to attack the Pas-de-Calais and mount a dummy operation aimed at Calvados that would be believable. If the attack came ashore at Pas-de-Calais, the Germans would not keep troops in lower Normandy for fear of their being cut off. Instead, they would bring their forces from lower Normandy to Pas-de-Calais and into the battle. But they might be persuaded to keep troops in the Pas-de-Calais following a landing on the Calvados coast, as the men and tanks in the Pas-de-Calais would still stand between the Allied forces and Germany. In short, geography would help to pin down the German armor in the Pas-de-Calais.

To reinforce the German need to keep their panzer armies northeast of the Seine, COSSAC proposed (and Eisenhower, after he took command, mounted) an elaborate deception plan. The code name was Fortitude; the objectives were to fool Hitler and his generals into thinking that the attack was coming where it was not, and into believing that the real thing was a feint. Each objective required convincing the Germans that the Allied invasion force was about twice as powerful as it actually was.

Fortitude was a joint venture, with British and American teams working together. It made full use of the Double Cross System, of Ultra, of dummy armies, fake radio traffic, and elaborate security precautions. Fortitude had many elements designed to make the Germans think the attack might come on the Biscay coast or in the Marseilles region or even in the Balkans. The most important parts were Fortitude North, which set up Norway as a target (the site of Hitler's U-boat bases, essential to his only remaining offensive operations and thus an area he was extremely sensitive about), and Fortitude South, with the Pas-de-Calais as the target.

To get the Germans to look toward Norway, the Allies first had to convince them that they had enough resources for a diversion or secondary attack. This was doubly difficult because of the acute shortage of landing craft—right up to D-Day it was touch and go as to whether there would be enough craft to carry six divisions ashore at Normandy as planned. Therefore, the Allies had to create fictitious divisions and landing craft on a grand scale. This was done chiefly with the Double Cross System, the talents of the American and British movie industries, and radio signals.

The British Fourth Army, for example, stationed in Scotland and scheduled to invade Norway in mid-July, existed only on the airwaves. Early in 1944 some two dozen overage British officers went to northernmost Scotland, where they spent the next months exchanging radio messages. They filled the air with an exact duplicate of the wireless traffic that accompanies the assembly of a real army, communicating in low-level and thus easily broken cipher. Together the messages created an impression of corps and division headquarters scattered all across Scotland.

Of course the messages could not read "We will invade Norway in mid-May." The Germans would never believe such an obvious subterfuge. Instead, they read "80 Div. request 1,800 pairs of crampons, 1,800 pairs of ski bindings," or "7 Corps requests the promised demonstrators in the Bilgeri method of climbing rock faces," or "2 Corps Car Company requires handbooks on engine functioning in low temperatures and high altitudes." There was no 80th Division, no VII Corps, no II Corps Car Company, but the Germans did not know that and they would come to their own conclusion as to what was going on in Scotland.
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Fooling the Germans was not easy; they were experts at radio deception. At the beginning of 1942 they had mounted one of the more elaborate and successful deception operations of World War II, Operation
Kreml.
Its objective had been to make the Red Army think that the main German offensive for 1942 would take place on the Moscow front, not at Stalingrad. As historian Earl Ziemke writes,
Kreml
"was a paper operation, an out-and-out deception, but it had the substance to make it a masterpiece of that highly speculative form of military art." The Germans used radio traffic to manufacture dummy armies that supposedly threatened Moscow; in most of its essentials,
Kreml
was similar to Fortitude.
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Thanks to the Double Cross System* however, the Allies had one advantage over
Kreml.
The turned German spies in the United Kingdom, whose reliability had been "proved" to the Abwehr over the past three years, were put to work. They sent encoded radio messages to the Abwehr in Hamburg describing heavy train traffic in Scotland, new division patches seen on the streets of Edinburgh, and rumors among the troops about going to Norway. In addition, wooden twin-engine "bombers" began to appear on Scottish airfields. British commandos made some raids on the coast of Norway, pinpointing radar sites, picking up soil samples, in general trying to look like a preinvasion force.

The payoff was spectacular. By late spring, Hitler had thirteen army divisions in Norway (along with 90,000 naval and 60,000 Luftwaffe personnel). These were hardly high-quality troops, but still they could have filled in the trenches along the Atlantic Wall in France. In late May, Rommel persuaded Hitler to move five infantry divisions from Norway to France. They had started to load up and move out when the Abwehr passed on to Hitler another set of "intercepted" messages about the threat to Norway. He canceled the movement order. To paraphrase Churchill, never in the history of warfare have so many been immobilized by so few.
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Fortitude South was larger and more elaborate. It was based on the First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG), stationed in and around Dover and threatening the Pas-de-Calais. It included radio traffic, inadequately camouflaged dummy landing craft in the ports of Ramsgate, Dover, and Hastings, fields full of papier-mache and rubber tanks, and the full use of the Double Cross System. The spies reported intense activity around Dover, including construction, troop movements, increased train traffic, and the like. They said that the phony oil dock at Dover, built by stagehands from the film industries, was open and operating.

The capstone to Fortitude South was Eisenhower's selection of Lt. Gen. George S. Patton to command FUSAG. The Germans thought Patton the best commander in the Allied camp and expected him to lead the assault. Eisenhower, who was saving Patton for the exploitation phase of the coming campaign, used Patton's reputation and visibility to strengthen Fortitude South. The spies reported his arrival in England and his movements. So did the British papers (available to the Germans in a day or two via Portugal and Spain; in addition, German agents in Dublin had the London papers the day they were printed and could send on hot items by radio). FUSAG radio signals told the Germans of Patton's comings and goings and showed that he had taken a firm grip on his new command.

FUSAG contained real as well as notional divisions, corps, and armies. The FUSAG order of battle included the U.S. Third Army, which was real but still mostly in the States; the British Fourth Army, which was imaginary; and the Canadian First Army, which was real and based in England. There were, in addition, supposedly fifty follow-up divisions in the United States, organized as the U.S. Fourteenth Army—which was notional—awaiting shipment to the Pas-de-Calais after FUSAG established its beachhead.

Many of the divisions in the Fourteenth Army were real and were actually assigned to Bradley's U.S. First Army in southwest England.

Fortitude's success was measured by the German estimate of Allied strength. By the end of May, the Germans believed that the Allied force included eighty-nine divisions, when in fact the number was forty-seven. The Germans thought the Allies had sufficient landing craft to bring twenty divisions ashore in the first wave, when they would be lucky to manage six. Partly because they credited the Allies with so much strength, partly because it made good military sense, the Germans believed that the real invasion would be preceded or followed by diversionary attacks and feints.
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It was more important for the Germans
not
to know that Calvados was the site than it was for them to think that the Pas-de-Calais (and Norway) was. "The success or failure of coming operations depends upon whether the enemy can obtain advance information of an accurate nature," Eisenhower declared in a February 23, 1944, memorandum.
¹⁰

To ensure security, the Allies went to great lengths. In February, Eisenhower asked Churchill to ban all visitor traffic to the coastal areas in southern England, where the base for the attack was being built and where training exercises were under way, for fear that there might be an undiscovered spy among the visitors. Churchill said no—he could not go so far in upsetting people's lives. General Morgan growled that Churchill's response was "all politics" and warned, "If we fail, there won't be any more politics."
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Still the British government would not act. But when Montgomery said he wanted visitors banned from his training areas, Eisenhower sent an eloquent plea to the War Cabinet. He warned that it "would go hard with our consciences if we were to feel, in later years, that by neglecting any security precaution we had compromised the success of these vital operations or needlessly squandered men's lives." Churchill gave in. Visitors were banned.

Eisenhower also persuaded a reluctant War Cabinet to impose a ban on privileged diplomatic communications from the United Kingdom. Eisenhower said he regarded the diplomatic pouches as "the gravest risk to the security of our operations and to the lives of our sailors, soldiers, and airmen."
¹³
When the government imposed the ban, on April 17 (it did not apply to the United

States or the Soviet Union), foreign governments protested vigorously. This gave Hitler a useful clue to the timing of Overlord. He remarked in early May that "the English have taken measures that they can sustain for only six to eight weeks."
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With the British government cooperating so admirably, Eisenhower could not do less. In April, Maj. Gen. Henry Miller, chief supply officer of the U.S. Ninth Air Force and a West Point classmate of Eisenhower's, went to a cocktail party at Claridge's Hotel. He began talking freely, complaining about his difficulties in getting supplies but adding that his problems would end after D-Day, which he declared would be before June 15. When challenged on the date, he offered to take bets. Eisenhower learned of the indiscretion the next morning and acted immediately. He ordered Miller reduced to his permanent rank of colonel and sent him back to the States—the ultimate disgrace for a career soldier. Miller protested. Eisenhower insisted, and back he went. Miller retired shortly thereafter.
¹⁵

There was another flap in May when a U.S. Navy officer got drunk at a party and revealed details of impending operations, including areas, lift, strength, and dates. Eisenhower wrote Marshall, "I get so angry at the occurrence of such needless and additional hazards that I could cheerfully shoot the offender myself. This following so closely upon the Miller case is almost enough to give one the shakes." That officer too was sent back to the States.
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