D-Day E-Book

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 413

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

"The D-Day landings in Normandy on 6th June 1944 have been described as the greatest amphibious operation in the history of warfare. The scale was majestic; 5,000 ships, together with thousands of lesser craft and backed by 11,000 aircraft. If the scale of the military undertaking was heroic, so too was its objective - nothing less than the defeat of Nazi Germany and the liberation of Europe. In this dramatic account of events, military experts from Britain, the United States and Germany describe the planning, build-up and execution of the D-Day attack."

Leseprobe

CLASSIC CONFLICTS

D-DAY

CLASSIC CONFLICTS

D-DAY

‘OPERATION OVERLORD’ FROM ITS PLANNING TO THE LIBERATION OF PARIS

CONTENTS

THE SECOND FRONT DEBATE

Charles Kirkpatrick

PREPARATION FOR OVERLORD

Stephen Badsey

THE GERMAN DEFENCES

Detlef Vogel

OPERATION NEPTUNE

Edward Marolda

D-DAY

Roger Cirillo and Stephen Badsey

THE BUILDUP

Charles Kirkpatrick

THE AIR BATTLE

Alfred Price

THE NORMANDY BATTLEGROUND

Nigel de Lee

THE BREAKOUT

Nigel de Lee

THE INVASION OF SOUTHERN FRANCE

Bernard Nalty

PURSUIT TO THE SEINE

Roger Cirillo

INDEX

THE SECOND FRONT DEBATE

In an address to students at the US Army War College in the mid-1920s, Brig. Gen. Fox Conner harshly characterized the business of fighting as part of an alliance. While serving in France as an operations officer on Gen. John J. Pershing’s staff, he had witnessed the perpetual inability of the Allied and Associated powers to settle on a common strategy against the Germans or even to agree on allocation of resources. The incessant pursuit of purely national interests, in his opinion, prevented the Allies from bringing the full weight of their military and economic power efficiently to bear against their common enemy. Thus, as he pondered the problem for the benefit of the Army’s future strategists, Conner concluded that, if he had to go to war again, he would prefer to go to war against an alliance, rather than against a single power.

Conner was a considerable scholar of the military art, but his strictures on the perils of alliances had already been voiced centuries before by Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher of war, who warned against entering into alliances without being entirely certain of the war aims of the potential ally. Hastily conceived agreements, Sun Tzu suggested, could easily founder because two powers fighting a common foe might themselves have conflicting intentions. His was sound advice, for whenever two or more nations combined their efforts in war during the succeeding centuries, bitter disagreements, rather than concord, were often the rule. In fact, one of the peculiarities of alliances is that successful ones have always tended to disintegrate in discord as fast as unsuccessful ones. That certainly was the American experience of World War I, the first major occasion since the Revolution when the United States had waged war in concert with allies. As isolationism and the depression jointly spiraled through the 1930s, a residuum of suspicion was directed even against the United Kingdom. There were those, both in the Army and out, who believed American naivety had been cold-bloodedly exploited in 1917 in a war to preserve the British Empire.

The Anglo-American alliance of World War II stood in contrast to the experience of 1917–18 as perhaps the most successful coalition in the history of modern warfare. From the very beginning, the United States and the United Kingdom adopted the defeat of Germany as their common goal. Agreement on ultimate aims nonetheless did not imply agreement in detail, and the progress of the war was marked by periodic disputes. Among the most famous was the occasionally acrimonious debate between Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Sir Bernard L. Montgomery about the proper strategy to be employed on the European continent: the “broad front” or the “knife-like thrust.” The springs of such disagreements arose from the gradually evolving leadership of the coalition. Until 1943, Britain was the dominant partner and consequently more powerfully influenced the course of the alliance. After 1943, however, the United States, by virtue of its contribution of the greater mass of manpower and economic power, became senior partner. The Second Front debate, more than any other, was emblematic of that shift in coalition leadership. It was, furthermore, the most significant difference of opinion that arose between the United States and Britain during the war. Both nations agreed that Germany had to be assaulted, but the specific agreement that the assault would be launched from England, across the English Channel, to the coast of France, was reached only after extended discussion. At its root, the Second Front debate was the question of whether the alliance would adhere to a long-term plan for a cross-channel attack, or would retain the flexibility to take advantage of the military situation at the time of attack to strike where Germany was weakest. Economic, political, and military differences, as well as differences in national styles of waging war, complicated the debate.

■ The American Position

Even before the fall of France in May 1940, the United States was slipping away from the dubious neutrality that it had proclaimed at the start of the European war. President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a national emergency and ordered the Navy into the Atlantic, ostensibly on “neutrality patrols,” but in fact to help the British by convoying ships at least part of the way across the danger zone. Against the possibility that the United States would eventually enter the war, American naval and military staffs began a series of unofficial, unrecognized, but nonetheless crucial discussions in Washington between January and March 1941. The most important single decision the military leaders reached in these American–British Conventions, or ABC talks for short, was that Germany would be the number one enemy of any future Anglo-American partnership. Such a decision was contrary to long-standing assumptions of Army and Navy war planning. Plan Orange, meticulously refined over more than two decades, outlined the strategy to be employed when the United States and Japan eventually went to war, as many naval and military officers assumed would eventually happen. Tension in the Pacific increased throughout 1941, and thoughtful observers of the Far East warned of Japanese aggressive designs that would almost certainly involve American interests and possessions. Despite this, American leaders agreed that any war that might begin with Japan would have to take second place; primacy of effort would go to defeating Germany.

Much of this reflected President Roosevelt’s conviction that the fate of the United States was indissolubly linked with that of the United Kingdom. The continued existence of the latter was in the best interests of the United States, not only because of the commonality of language and culture, but also because Britain stood as a bulwark against any possible Axis aggression in the Americas. American armed forces in 1941 were frankly unready for global war, and it was the British fleet, guaranteeing control of the Atlantic, that provided security during the period of national mobilization that the President was attempting to hurry. The President and his principal advisors were likewise convinced that the United States should do that which was morally right, rather than just that which was politically expedient. The conclusion Roosevelt drew was that American energies should be focused in support of the British to defeat the greatest threat to the free world. That threat, he concluded, was Germany. Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s delight with the agreement, however, was soon to be tempered by the American view on how it should be carried out. American plans for the impending war were conditioned by an interplay of military philosophy and economic and geographic constraints that did not affect the United Kingdom.

One aspect of European military thought that had fallen on fertile ground in the United States came from one of the most profound military thinkers of the century, Maj. Gen. J. F. C. Fuller, a highly experienced British officer whom many regarded as the foremost exponent in the world of armored warfare. Fuller’s enumeration of the “principles of war” appealed greatly to Americans. A listing of the most important considerations in military operations naturally appealed to the mechanically-minded. Yet the principles of war were more than just a check-list for military commanders. They were, rather, an organized way of thinking about war, and most officers saw the “principle of the objective” as far and away the most important of all considerations. Their military ideal was a legacy of the American Civil War and the style of Gen. U. S. Grant, who tenaciously maintained contact with Gen. R. E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia until he achieved victory. Americans preferred a short, extremely violent war, with all possible resources brought to bear in continuous combat until the enemy was defeated. The principle of attacking a clearly defined and attainable military objective, almost always the main body of the enemy’s army, accorded well with the limitations under which American officers perceived they would have to fight.

Geography was equally important. Broad oceans offered the Americas great physical security from attack, but they also isolated the continent from European and Asiatic battlefields. In the event of war, as planners at the Army War College clearly foresaw during the 1920s and 1930s, the United States would have to erect and maintain a large and sophisticated logistical structure to send substantial forces across the oceans, sustain them in foreign theaters, and employ them against powerful enemies on other continents. If war came in Asia as well as in Europe, as some officers expected, the problem of allocating scarce resources would be even more acute. Those essential demands on manpower and materiel would certainly detract from the total fighting power the United States could muster. These geopolitical factors were expressed in the American planning document for World War II.

In the spring and summer of 1941, during the last months of peace for the United States, the War Department was superintending the sale of surplus war materiel to Britain and other nations arrayed against Hitler, and considering how to meet the demands imposed by the recently passed Lend-Lease Bill, under the terms of which the United States would transfer massive amounts of military equipment to the countries fighting the Axis. At the same time, the Army was involved in a limited expansion, virtually a peace-time mobilization, that threw mobilization plans out of joint. In the work of military supply and procurement, chaos reigned. In an attempt to develop a manageable production plan, the Assistant Secretary of War and President Roosevelt asked the general staff for an estimate of what would be needed to defeat the Axis if the United States became involved in the war.

Gen. George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, handed that question to Albert C. Wedemeyer, an infantry major assigned to the War Plans Division of the general staff, and Wedemeyer’s staff estimate, later known as the Victory Plan, succinctly delineated the steps necessary to win a European war. Wedemeyer reasoned that he could not estimate the nation’s total military production requirements unless he had some idea of the size and missions of the Army in the event of war. He immediately drew on the substance of the ABC talks to define the Army’s mission in the event of war. The chief task, he assumed, was the defeat of Germany, to which all other missions would be subordinate.

Military logic, as embodied in the principles of war, demanded that the Army strictly keep its eye on the objective, and not fritter its limited energies away in attractive, but indecisive, side issues. If the defeat of Germany was the objective, then the mission was to attack the heart of German power as early and as forcefully as possible. That meant massing the Army for a direct invasion of the continent of Europe at the earliest possible date. Determining that date relied on three interrelated factors: the date by which enough men could be trained and equipped for war, the date by which the necessary shipping would be available to move them to Europe and sustain them there, and the date by which the necessary military preconditions for attack could be completed.

Careful consideration of Army mobilization and training, military construction, and naval and merchant shipbuilding revealed that the Army could expect to go over to the offensive no earlier than July 1, 1943. Achieving the necessary military conditions for attack, though simple to state, was a more uncertain proposition. Wedemeyer suggested in his plan that no invasion of Europe could succeed until the navies defeated the Axis fleets and secured the Atlantic lines of communication; the Allies established air superiority over Europe; air bombardment had disrupted the German economy and industry, thus decreasing that country’s war-making potential; German military forces had been weakened; and adequate bases had been established. Although he did not specify it in the Victory Plan, Wedemeyer assumed, and fellow war-planners explicitly stated, that the only useful European bases that would still be available to the United States in 1943 would be those situated in the British Isles.

Thus, before war even began for the United States, there existed a conceptual plan for the ultimate defeat of Germany. That plan relied on an invasion of the continent of Europe to strike into the heart of Germany, to the exclusion of all other military designs. Implicit in the plan were fighting and winning the Battle of the Atlantic; what became known as the combined bomber offensive that sought to destroy German industry and economic life; continued attacks on the Germans wherever they could be found, to decrease their military strength; and the creation of a major American buildup in Britain. The climactic battle, because of the practicalities of production and military preparations, could not start before July 1943, two years hence.

American war planners accordingly had to figure on deploying a large army and air force, as well as a powerful navy, to Europe; sustaining it there while maintaining long and easily attacked lines of communications across the oceans; allotting enough military power at least to contain the Japanese in the meantime; and producing enough materiel to support not only American forces, but also the armies of the Allies. This, they felt, could never be done without a master plan, adjustable in fine detail, but not in its major points. Such massive industrial production demanded careful timing, and Americans wanted a corresponding military timetable.

The choice of Britain as a base for the attack on Europe, made while Eisenhower was chief of War Plans Division in early 1942, was equally crucial. Early, planners dismissed fanciful ideas of landings in Liberia and subsequent campaigns through North Africa, across the Mediterranean, and into southern Europe. A concept to deliver American troops to Russia was scrapped because shipping routes to Murmansk or through the Persian Gulf, both for troops and for supplies, were simply too long. Attacks through Portugal, Norway, and Spain were all dismissed as too roundabout.

For a time, there was serious thought about an attack from the Mediterranean, where the British were already doing well against German forces. Despite Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s later enthusiasm for the “soft underbelly” of Europe, Americans rejected the Mediterranean avenue of approach because long supply lines made it impossible to concentrate full Allied strength there, and because of the distance to the heart of Germany from North American bases when the attack had to pass through southern Europe. More serious opposition to an attack through the south of France, or through the Balkans, arose because of the extremely difficult terrain, favorable for defense, that stood between the Mediterranean shores and Germany.

The choice settled on Britain for all the reasons that made the other options impractical. The most important single consideration was that Britain lay on the shortest of all possible transatlantic routes from the United States. A perennial problem for war planners, regardless of the proposed operation, was the perpetual Allied shortage of merchant ships. The Battle of the Atlantic had consumed too many ships, both merchant and naval; losses that were made up by new construction at the cost of accumulating the tonnage needed to increase the pace of offensive operations. Many convoys had to be dedicated to feeding and supplying the British Isles, while others tried to sustain the Soviet ally, whose continued resistance was an essential element in all American war planning. Once war began, other vessels had to be diverted to maintain American and Commonwealth military strength in the Pacific, even at minimal levels. Economy of supply was therefore a foremost consideration. A short route meant a shorter travel time. An easy route facilitated large convoys. Good ports in Britain meant a shorter turnaround time for the ships. Placing the American buildup in the British Isles was the most efficient use of scarce shipping.

Secondly, the British Isles were a logical point of departure for military operations against the continent. Big enough to support the buildup, the islands were also the best place from which to use relatively short-ranged fighters of the Royal Air Force to support the landings, and an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the American Army Air Forces. The short distance across the English Channel offered for the Allies the chance to give the attacking infantry continuous and effective air support. The Royal Navy, major units of which were already concentrated around the North Sea to bottle up the German surface fleet, could most easily be used to support landings against the Channel coast. The most important, however, was the geographical fact that the most direct route into the center of Germany was the one from the French coast opposite England, and thence across northwest Europe. That route also offered the minimum in natural, and therefore defensible, obstacles. Militarily, it was the most logical choice.

For the Americans, the decision to use the United Kingdom was axiomatic. When compared with the other possible avenues of approach, it was superior in almost every way, offering the possibility of the quickest buildup and concentration of force. The intention to concentrate rapidly in Britain meant that the United States would enforce rigorous economies of manpower and materiel in the other theaters, while intensifying the campaign of aerial attack on Germany and blockade of Europe, and the naval war in the Atlantic. Industrial mobilization plans began to structure American industry to support such a plan, and the military enthusiastically began to organize itself around the requirements for just such a major attack. American planning for what became Operation Overlord actually began before the United States entered the war, and it was always the essence of American war policy. Literally everything the United States did was aimed at that decisive invasion of the continent, and military operations were judged in terms of how well they contributed to that end. Overlord was far more than just D-Day, and far more than just one important battle. It was the culmination of the entire American strategy.

■ The British Position

Geographical location and a different philosophy of waging war gave the British a different outlook on the nature, timing, and location of the Second Front against Germany. At the time of the initial staff talks, the United Kingdom had already been at war for some two years and had suffered grievous losses during the Battle of France, the Battle of Britain, and the Battle of the Atlantic. Even as the famous Eighth Army began its successful march across North Africa after the battle of El Alamein, it was clear that the British lived in a world of ever-declining resources. Certainly from 1943 onward, their forces would never be as strong tomorrow as they were today, because the limits of British and Commonwealth manpower had been reached. It was also true that the British were forever confronted with the specter of the Somme. Politically, militarily, practically, and in humanitarian terms, it was unthinkable that Britain should again suffer the enormous casualties that she had borne in the 1914–18 war. The notion of attacking carefully prepared fortifications along the French coast struck many conscientious soldiers as being potentially as costly as any of the great assaults of World War I.

British political and military leaders were therefore inclined to be extremely cautious. They certainly were in favor of an invasion of Europe but only when the time was right; when circumstances were in the Allies’ favor. They could not, many held, afford to be repulsed. If the invasion failed for any of the many possible dangers inherent in such a risky operation, then, at least from the British point of view, there could be no second try. Churchill and his commanders accordingly had the tendency to define favorable circumstances very precisely.

The British were also historically a maritime power, and their entire experience in dealing with a hostile continental military power – chiefly the wars of the French Revolution and of Napoleon – inclined them to a sea power solution. The result was that many preferred to draw a blockade, a net of steel, around the Axis and gradually pull it tighter and tighter, nibbling away with the army at exposed bits of Axis military strength. At the end, following the successful naval battles of the Atlantic and the bombing campaign which British leaders agreed were necessary preconditions for the assault, Germany would be debilitated and weak. A single, powerful blow would then be enough.

The British further counseled caution because they had a more recent, more extensive, and generally more sobering understanding of amphibious operations than the American allies, whose last important landing had been during their civil war, and who, it was possible to argue, had never conducted an opposed amphibious landing at all. British planners well understood that the English Channel, however narrow at various points, was a formidable barrier that had stopped Napoleon and, more recently, the technically sophisticated Germans. More to the point was their own World War I landing at Gallipoli, which warned of the high costs of attacking a hostile shore, and appeared to show that well-organized defenses could contain even successful landings.

Carefully studied between the two world wars, Gallipoli convinced thoughtful soldiers that the defender would always be able to bring up reinforcements faster than the attacker could build up his forces on the invasion beaches, and would likewise be better able to supply and support those forces than the attacker. Amphibious landings were by nature always frontal assaults, very much like those that characterized fighting on the Western Front; although without the advantages of extensive artillery support, the availability of reserves, and attacks launched from prepared positions. The British experience on the Western Front had been grim; how much worse, then, a frontal attack that arose from the waves? It was the lessons learned from the 1942 attack on the French port of Dieppe (Operation Jubilee), however, that worried invasion planners most.

British forces had launched minor raids on the French coast almost from the moment of the evacuation of the army from Dunkirk. In August 1942, Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Combined Operations headquarters passed from mere raids to a deliberate, large-scale invasion of Dieppe. The intention was never to hold the beachhead, but to test military and naval cooperation; the use of combined arms in large-scale landings of infantry and armored troops; and the organization of air forces in obtaining and maintaining control of the air over invasion beaches. Mountbatten’s operation was also to test a new piece of equipment, the Landing Craft, Tank (LCT), to see whether it could place tanks directly on the beaches, thus enabling assault forces to take a port by direct frontal assault.

The August 19 landings, conducted largely with soldiers of Canadian 2nd Division, although about one thousand British troops and some fifty US Rangers also took part, were an unmitigated tactical failure. German resistance was unexpectedly fierce. Within nine hours of the assault, British commanders were forced to withdraw the survivors under heavy pressure from the defenders. Almost one thousand soldiers died in the attack and around two thousand were left on the battlefield as prisoners of war. Of the 6,100 men in the assault force, only 2,500 returned to England. If Dieppe was a dry run for the eventual invasion of France, its high casualty lists made British planners’ blood run cold. Ordinary German garrison troops, it turned out, and not elite formations, had repulsed the Canadian attack. One of the chief lessons of Dieppe was thus that a large naval bombardment force was essential to crack the prepared defenses of any hostile shore, and the accumulation of that force awaited the winning of critical naval battles in the Atlantic and elsewhere. Clearly, the lessons of Gallipoli still applied. There was not much subtlety to amphibious assaults, and overwhelming force was essential if there was to be any hope of success.

The consequence of all these considerations was that the British always appeared willing to explore alternate strategies and points of attack that would enable the alliance to hit the enemy where circumstances offered, rather than adhering strictly to a carefully conceived and, as they saw it, excessively rigid, plan. Senior American officers and their staff planners tended to see Churchill’s perpetual willingness to entertain other objectives than the cross-channel attack as an unwillingness to conduct that operation at all. Even as the English-speaking nations marshaled their forces for their joint war against Germany, the suspicions of which Sun Tzu had written so many centuries before began whisperingly to penetrate the structure of an alliance both Churchill and Roosevelt regarded as unshakable.

■ The Progress of the Debate

When Roosevelt, Churchill, and their chiefs of staff met at the Arcadia Conference in Washington, DC, immediately after Pearl Harbor, they endorsed the earlier and informal agreement to defeat Germany first, while containing the Japanese. They further agreed to wear down Axis strength by tightening a ring around those nations and to use aid to the Russians, naval blockade, strategic bombing, and limited offensives at points of Allied superiority as their principal means. While American staff studies envisioned a major attack into the heart of Germany, such a proposal formed no part of the Arcadia agreement because it did not seem, at that moment, to be possible.

First principles occasioned no disagreement. “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the whole war,” Winston Churchill wrote, “was the U-boat peril.” In the early years, German submarines threatened to starve Britain out of the war. Later, winning the Battle of the Atlantic was essential to concentrating ground, naval and air forces for an invasion of the continent. By the time the United States Navy entered the battle, the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Navy had established convoy routes and an effective system to escort the vital merchantmen across the ocean. Despite these efforts, sinkings spiraled until the introduction of escort aircraft carriers and effective radar coverage gave the Allies the upper hand. Losses reached a crescendo in December 1943, after which German successes dropped off sharply. At the same time, the rate of construction overtook the rate of ships destroyed. As of January 1944 the Allies could say that the Battle of the Atlantic had been won. Rapidly, delivered tonnages of supplies and equipment increased. The secure line of communication across the ocean guaranteed that the invasion, once started, could be sustained with replacements, supplies, and new weapons.

The other major precondition for invasion was also attained by 1944. When the US Army Air Forces arrived in England, the Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force was already busily attacking German cities by night. Following a profound disagreement about techniques, the two air forces each followed their own doctrines: the British bombed at night and the Americans by day. While the air war over Europe did not precisely prove the strategic bombing theories, propounded between the wars by Italian general Giulio Douhet, or realize the predictions of its American prophets – German industry was still functioning at the time of the surrender in 1945 – it did have a profound impact on the ground war. Possibly the most important result of the bombing campaign over Germany was that it drew increasing numbers of Luftwaffe fighters away from the fighting fronts and dedicated them to home air defense. The day bombing campaign was decisive in this regard, for the 8th Bomber Command became the anvil on which the 8th Fighter Command, the hammer, literally pounded the life out of the German air force. As Luftwaffe losses increased, a second consequence was the German shift in production from bombers to fighters, thereby decreasing the capability of the remaining tactical air force to support the German army. The Allies had to have aerial superiority, at least over the invasion beaches, to hope for success in the amphibious landings. The combined bomber offensive achieved that goal. By D-Day, German fighter forces were largely stripped out of France, and only two German sorties appeared over the invasion beaches. The first round of the landings was therefore won in what turned out to be very costly battles that the Allied air forces fought in the skies over Germany in the long months of 1943 and early 1944.

Simultaneously, the bombing campaign enormously increased the difficulties the Germans had to overcome in keeping their war machine running. While the factories survived, and production in some cases actually increased, the bombers crippled the German transportation network and systematically attacked the fuel supplies essential not only to the armed forces, but also to the lines of communications. German army units in France, among other places, accordingly became somewhat anaemic with respect to supplies. They were also deficient in armament, and part of that may also be attributed to the bombing campaign. That German army units, both on the eastern and on the western fronts, did not have a large artillery and anti-tank reserve may in part be attributed to the voracious demands of the anti-aircraft organization within Germany for high velocity guns and skilled gunners.

Finally air power offered a partial solution to the manpower problem. In sheer numbers, the Germans in France could always muster more men than the Allies could put on the beaches at one time. The trick was to strike the Germans, as far as possible, at a place they did not expect, and to keep them from concentrating their divisions to repel the assault. Planning for the landings assumed that Allied air forces, freed from aerial combat missions because they had already won the air battle over France, could perform the tactical mission of isolating the Normandy battlefields from the Reich, destroying rail lines, bridges, and centers of communication. Particularly by the time of the landings, Allied fighter bombers, operating almost without opposition from the Luftwaffe, made it impossible for the Germans to move in daylight. Roads became deathtraps, and German mobility – together with German capacity to mass forces to deal with the invasion – was hobbled.

British and American planners correctly foresaw all of these necessities and, as time revealed the impact of the great air battles over the continent, laid plans to exploit the advantages that were gained. From the American point of view, Maj. Albert Wedemeyer’s sketch of the essential military tasks to be performed before the final attack on Germany was proceeding well, and seemed to be fulfilling the terms of reference laid down in the Arcadia agreement. British staffs agreed that, whatever the future plans of the alliance, these battles had to be won. When the Allies met again at Casablanca in January 1943, they agreed the plan toward entering the continent of Europe in 1944, to set up a planning staff to work out the details of such an operation, and to push the buildup of forces in the United Kingdom while continuing operations in the Mediterranean. Disagreements arose from other sources, at once perceptual and practical.

The essential point is that both Allies agreed that the ultimate attack on the German-occupied continent had to be made in northwestern Europe. While, however, the Americans were anxious to make that attack as soon as possible, the British were concerned that the time should be right. In the end, the decision to launch the invasion across the English Channel was not made final until both Allies were persuaded that it made military sense. Because of their practical concerns, that time came later for the British than for the Americans who, in part conditioned by residual suspicions from the previous war, worried that the British delays portended a refusal to make such landings at all.

The Anglo-American landings in North Africa (Operation Torch) exacerbated the debate, because they diverted troops already earmarked for the attack Americans saw as decisive. Gen. Marshall and his staff had already devised a plan (Bolero) to concentrate American troops in the United Kingdom for a massive attack on France in the spring of 1943. This attack, dubbed Roundup, envisioned using 48 divisions, 30 of which would be American, on a six-division front between Le Havre and Boulogne, supported by a powerful air force. An attractive aspect of Roundup was that the Germans had only begun to fortify the coast in 1942, and the bulk of their army was critically engaged in Russia. To exploit the unlikely collapse of the German army as a result of that fighting or, more likely, to create a diversion in case the Russians found themselves in serious trouble, Marshall’s staff devised a contingency plan that used only three and a half divisions, to be launched across the Channel as early as September 1942. This plan, Sledgehammer, was always unlikely, but still made British planners uneasy because it suggested that the Americans did not have any realistic understanding of the difficulties involved.

Regardless of the invasion plan under discussion, President Roosevelt’s agreement to divert American troops to North Africa, and the subsequent agreement to use those troops in assaults on Sicily and on the coast of Italy, made it impossible to concentrate the forces and materiel to invade northwestern Europe in 1943. Americans suspected that Prime Minister Churchill intended to continue to postpone operations in northwestern Europe indefinitely, in favor of those in the Mediterranean that would serve long-range British political interests. In fact, that possibility seems to have existed only in the minds of the American joint chiefs, who had a different and more optimistic definition of favorable military conditions for the final attacks in France than did the British.

In fact, while Americans insisted that final plans for the landings in France go forward, and that a final date be set, it was the British who pointed out the critical shortage of LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank) and other landing craft to make the assault powerful enough to succeed. Until production of LSTs could catch up with demand, no assault on the coast of France could be powerful enough to counter the expected German riposte. Such a landing would, as far as Churchill and his advisors could see, be a repetition of Dieppe, where a single, well-entrenched German company had halted three battalions and the overall losses had been proportionate to those of the first day on the Somme in 1916. It is in that context that the Prime Minister’s often quoted remark about French beaches being choked with the bodies of British and American youth must be understood.

Instead of wishing to cancel Overlord, Churchill and his military advisors argued through 1943 that the assault had to be made stronger. Finally, only after a high-level conference at Norfolk House in February 1944, in which more tank landing ships were promised from the United States and reallocated from other theaters, did the means appear more nearly to suit the demands.

Marshall and his staff in particular, and the American joint chiefs in general, rightly complained that the landings in North Africa could have no meaningful impact on the course of the war, and that the subsequent assaults on Sicily and Italy frittered away precious resources in an aimless strategy of opportunism that formed no part of a coherent plan for the defeat of Germany. To that extent, their criticism of peripheral warfare, especially when contrasted to the ideal of maintenance of the objective, was on the mark. But that point of view overlooked important practical considerations. President Roosevelt knew that it was politically important for American troops to come to grips with the Germans some time in 1942. Forces certainly had to be accumulated in the United Kingdom for the invasion of the continent, but to hold those soldiers idle there only encouraged critics – Gen. Douglas MacArthur and senior naval commanders among them – who wanted to concentrate American strength on fighting the Japanese, a war in which Americans in general had vested far more emotion. Practically, it turned out that Mediterranean operations were militarily expedient, giving the US Army time to shake down for war and to learn the difficult lessons that the British had already had three years to assimilate. Landings and warfare in the Mediterranean hardened the soldiers, brought the most capable commanders to the fore, and gave both nations experience in conducting amphibious warfare, experience that was almost certainly crucial to the subsequent success of Overlord.

It was in this context that the Allies agreed at the Trident Conference in Washington, in May 1943, to use forces already in the Mediterranean to invade Italy, but also to set May 1, 1944, as the date for the cross-channel invasion and to that end to concentrate the buildup of their forces in Britain. Later in August 1943, at the Quadrant Conference in Quebec City, they reaffirmed that intention. Finally, at the Tehran-Cairo Conferences of November-December 1943, the long and anxious debates ended with the appointment of Eisenhower as supreme commander for the invasion, the principal, Anglo-American effort in 1944. An impatient Generalissimo Josef Stalin was responsible, in part, for the final decisions of the conference. He had long been pressing the Western Allies to open a Second Front that would take some of the pressure off of his forces, and it was at his insistence that Roosevelt and Churchill finally named a supreme commander. If no commander were named, Stalin believed, then there was also no prospect that plans for a Second Front would be translated into reality any time in the near future.

The final date was set, as Prime Minister Churchill had earlier suggested, by the moon and the weather. The decision for Overlord was finally a compromise and an artful merging of the two nations’ conceptions of how to wage the war. At the end, however, it was more a reflection of the realism of the British proposal at the Arcadia Conference of December 1941 than of the optimism that colored the American estimates of the art of the possible through 1942 and 1943.

That the alliance stood firm throughout the Second Front debate was the result of several related and indispensable facts. One key to that success was that, from the very beginning of the most preliminary discussions between the two powers, British and American leaders agreed on their common objective. A second was the utter determination of Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt that the solidity of the Anglo-American alliance had absolute primacy over every other question. A third was that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, military leader of the coalition and a protégé and student of Conner came to his task as supreme commander determined to make the coalition a success, and built a staff that mirrored his determination.

PREPARATION FOR OVERLORD

Almost from the fall of France in 1940, plans and preparations began for its liberation. Churchill organized or sponsored a number of “private armies” to carry out raids or encourage resistance in France and other occupied countries, and in fact the first Commando raid on German positions in France took place only 20 days after Dunkirk. The Commandos, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and the Airborne Forces all grew from raiding forces like these, into sizeable organizations that played a major role in the British effort on D-Day. Despite debates over strategy and the perilous British strategic position until the middle of the war, it was always clear to Churchill and his military staffs that only the liberation of France could secure the defeat of Germany.

■ Operation Bolero

The entry of the United States into the war made it possible to draw up realistic plans for the invasion, starting with Operation Sledgehammer, a possible small landing at Cherbourg in 1942, and developing to Operation Roundup, a major invasion of the Pas de Calais planned for 1943. In July 1942, in order to provide the American forces for Roundup, the Allies began Operation Bolero, the movement of troops and weapons to Britain on a massive scale. Bolero continued for nearly two years as Roundup was postponed until 1944, and eventually modified into Operation Overlord. Meanwhile the British continued to train and organize their own troops for the invasion, increasingly supplemented by forces from the Commonwealth, and from Allied “governments in exile” in London, whose forces were equipped by the British and Americans.

The United States began to build up its armed forces immediately after the collapse of France, in anticipation of its involvement in the war, and thereafter its military industrial achievement was little short of phenomenal. Although in many cases the factories themselves had to be built before they could produce the tanks or aircraft, American war production tripled in 1941, increased over four fold in 1942, and four fold again in 1943. The United States by itself out-produced Germany by four to one in tanks during the war, and more than two to one in total munitions. In addition to equipping their own forces, the Americans supplied the British with about a quarter of their weapons and equipment, paid for largely by Lend-Lease. In return, the British provided the Americans with some of their own specialist weapons, and with most of their barracks, airfields and training grounds for Overlord.

■ The American “Invasion”

Nothing had quite prepared the British public, however, for the scale of the American arrival. The first American troops to reach the UK landed in Belfast harbor in January 1942, and Americans were stationed in Northern Ireland throughout the war. Because of the threat of German invasion in 1940, most of the British forces had been based in southeast and eastern England. This left the western half of Britain for the arriving American armies. The final decisions to land American forces on the western invasion beaches of Normandy, and the British on the eastern beaches, had its origins in this purely practical solution to the problem of accommodating the Americans.

By spring 1944, as the plans for Overlord were finalized, the British civilian population was playing host to the largest invasion force ever assembled in one place, of which about half was American. To make Bolero possible, the United States produced over 2,500 Liberty ships of 7,000 tons each as troop transports. The British contribution included the transport of 425,000 men in the ocean liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, adapted to each hold 15,000 men per trip. By 1944 the Allied domination of the sea and air was so complete that the transfer of American and Canadian troops to Britain across the Atlantic was completed virtually without loss.

The Britain to which the GIs came was a gloomy and depressing country, and this had little to do with the weather. In order to defeat Germany, Britain had organized itself for war to a greater degree than any other member of the Allies, conscripting even women after 1941. Over half the working population was either in uniform or in civilian war employment, and half the national income was devoted to war expenditure. Strict rationing, an average working week of 50 hours, and some 295,000 civilian dead and injured in air raids all contributed to an air of war. weariness in a country which had little to cheer about in its fifth year at war.

A nation traditionally wary of foreigners accepted its army of friendly occupation with remarkably good grace, although some suspicion and trouble on both sides was inevitable. The arrival of American troops far from home in a remote Cornish or Scottish village usually meant a sudden increase in prices, and a corresponding shortage of alcohol and dancing partners for the local men. Compensations ranged from razor blades and candy to American charm and the music of Glenn Miller.

The United States’ armed forces were still segregated, with black troops mainly used in non-combat roles. Britain had for centuries had its own small black communities, but these existed only in the major ports, while Indian, West Indian and African troops of the British Empire were usually stationed overseas, and none were intended to fight in Normandy. Most people in Britain had simply never seen black soldiers before, and probably many believed the story that American blacks were specialist night-fighting troops with artificially darkened skins. Generally, as in all their dealings with their Allies, the British accepted the American practice of segregating their troops, while reacting with angry disbelief to American behavior outside their own experience, such as the racist attitude of many white American officers or the rare cases of serious violence between white and black troops.

By D-Day, some British people seemed to be getting almost as weary of the Americans as of the war, and both governments were acting to encourage better relations and understanding between their peoples. But as with all news, the bad was being reported more readily than the good, and the predominant American memory of Britain was of friendly people. Just as the Anglo-American alliance coped with its strains surprisingly well, so over 70,000 British girls married GIs immediately after the war and returned home with them.

By June 1944, Bolero had done its work. The Allied forces assembled for D-Day numbered over 1,700,000 British troops, 1,500,000 Americans, 175,000 Dominion troops (chiefly Canadians) and 44,000 from other allies. Over 1,300 warships, 1,600 merchant ships, and 4,000 landing ships and craft were available for the liberation campaign, together with 13,000 aircraft (including 5,000 fighters and 4,000 bombers) and 3,500 gliders. In terms of fighting troops, the British had three armored divisions, eight infantry divisions, two airborne divisions and ten independent brigades ready for Normandy, plus one Canadian armored division, two infantry divisions and one independent brigade. There was also a single Polish armored division and a parachute brigade, both equipped by the British. The Americans with their much greater resources had six armored divisions (out of 16 which would fight in Europe before the end of the war), 13 infantry divisions and two airborne divisions waiting in Britain, and more still training in the United States.

The tactical air forces for direct support of these armies numbered some 100 RAF or Commonwealth squadrons (1,200 aircraft) and 165 USAAF squadrons (2,000 aircraft). Simply to assemble such a force had been a colossal undertaking,

■ The High Command

At the Arcadia Conference of December 1941, the Americans and British established a command system enabling them to plan and fight the war jointly. This began at the top with the close personal relationship between President Roosevelt, who was also commander-in-chief of all American forces, and Prime Minister Churchill, who created the title of Minister of Defence for himself in 1940 to fulfil a similar function. Although a lawyer by profession, Roosevelt had been Secretary of the Navy in World War I, and had a good practical understanding of warfare, but tended to leave the planning to his military staffs. Churchill, whose military and naval experience stretched back to the Malakand Expedition of 1897, took a far more active role once the invasion of France had been agreed, and was only narrowly prevented from sailing with the forces on D-Day itself.

The formula established at the Arcadia Conference, with Roosevelt, Churchill and their staffs meeting at intervals to decide strategy, continued throughout the war. An important part of planning was that the Supreme Allied Commander for a designated theater of war must have control over all forces in it, regardless of nationality. In December 1943 Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was named as Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and his command as the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces, or SHAEF. Given the greater American contribution to the liberation forces, there was little doubt that an American officer should be appointed, and Eisenhower was the natural choice. Born in 1890, he had served in the army since 1911 and had considerable staff experience, but had never seen combat or commanded as much as a battalion. Eisenhower had risen rapidly from brigadier-general in 1942 to full general and Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean a year later through his remarkable skill in handling the complex political problems of coalition warfare. His relaxed style and ability to find a compromise often won him only grudging admiration from his subordinate commanders, but his insistence on cooperation and coordination at all levels gave him the respect of political leaders, and was to be decisive for the outcome of the liberation battle.

The appointment of subordinate commanders for Operation Overlord reflected the importance of integrating British and American forces; the fact that Britain was the host nation; and the need to coordinate air forces with land operations. The Deputy Supreme Allied Commander was Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder. The same age as Eisenhower, Tedder had originally joined the Army in World War I, transferring into the Royal Flying Corps and so into the RAF. As Air Officer Commander-in-Chief Middle East Air Force in 1941, he had pioneered the use of ground attack aircraft, developing the “Tedder carpet” of bombs laid in front of the advancing troops. A sometimes prickly figure, Tedder made little secret of his belief that air power was chiefly responsible for winning the war. Despite this, he worked extremely well with Eisenhower.