D-Day: The First 72 Hours E-Book

William F Buckingham

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 553

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2004

Beschreibung

The Allied invasion of occupied France began by delivering three airborne and six infantry divisions onto a 60-mile stretch of the Normandy coast. Accomplishing this involved over 1,200 transport aircraft, 450 gliders, 325 assorted warships and more than 4,000 landing vessels. The first 72 hours of the D-Day invasion were pivotal – from the initial airborne landings in the early hours of Tuesday 6 June 1944 we follow the Allied attackers and their German opponents hour-by-hour as they fought until fresh units began to take over from Thursday 8 June 1944. William F. Buckingham's astounding history finally lays to rest the myths surrounding the Normandy invasion. He contradicts the popular perception that the American OMAHA landing force suffered disproportionately. In fact, the fighting on the British and Canadian beaches (GOLD, SWORD and JUNO) was no less intense, and the cost was much closer to that of OMAHA than is commonly thought. The reality of D-Day was that a devastating number of men from all sides of the Allied forces who landed on the beaches that day would never set foot on their native soil again.

Leseprobe

WILLIAM F BUCKINGHAM completed his PhD on the establishment and initial development of British Airborne Forces in 2001.

Praise for Arnhem 1944

‘Startling … reveals the real reason why the daring attacks failed’

The Daily Express

‘The originality of this book lies in its exploration of the long term origins of the battle as well as in its account of the fighting itself … an excellent read’

Professor Hew Strachan

First published 2004

This paperback edition first published 2024

The History Press

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Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© William F. Buckingham, 2004, 2009, 2013, 2024

The right of William F. Buckingham to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 75249 641 2

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

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CONTENTS

Preface

1   Rhetoric, Raiders and the Evolution of the OVERLORD Plan, June 1940–June 1944

2   Wiederstandneste, Bodenständige Divisions and Panzers: The German Defence in Normandy

3   The Means: Landing Craft, Fireplans and Funnies

4   Red Devils, All Americans, Screaming Eagles and Rudder’s Rangers: The First Phase of the Normandy Plan

5   Commandos, Reginas, Dorsets and Twenty-Niners: The Sea Landing Plan and Tasks

6   On the Brink: Immediate Preparations and Launching the Invasion, 20 May–5 June 1944

7   D-Day, H Minus 6 Hours 30 Minutes to H-Hour (00:30 to 06:30, Tuesday 6 June 1944)

8   D-Day, H-Hour to H Plus 5 Hours 30 Minutes (06:30 to 12:00, Tuesday 6 June 1944)

9   D-Day, H Plus 5 Hours 30 Minutes to H Plus 18 Hours (12:00 to 23:59, Tuesday 6 June 1944)

10 D-Day Plus 1, H Plus 18 Hours to H Plus 30 Hours (00:00 to 12:00, Wednesday 7 June 1944)

11 D-Day Plus 1, H Plus 30 Hours to H Plus 42 Hours (12:00 to 23:59, Wednesday 7 June 1944)

12 D-Day Plus 2, H Plus 42 Hours to H Plus 66 Hours (00:00 to 23:59, Thursday 8 June 1944)

13 D-Day Plus 3, H Plus 72 Hours (06:00, Friday 9 June 1944)Situation Report

Maps

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

PREFACE

In the early hours of 6 June 1944, 20,000 British and American airborne soldiers descended by parachute and glider in the areas of Ranville and Ste-Mère-Église in Normandy. Employing 1,200 transport aircraft and 188 gliders, this was the largest airborne landing executed to that date. It was, however, merely the opening phase of a larger operation, the next stage of which commenced six hours or so later. A fleet of 6,000 assorted vessels, ranging from battleships to miniature submarines, delivered getting on for a quarter of a million Allied soldiers onto a 60-mile stretch of the Normandy coast, extending from the mouth of the River Orne in the east to the coast of the Cotentin Peninsula in the west. Years in the making and code-named Operation OVERLORD, this was and remains the largest amphibious invasion in history. It began the liberation of German-occupied North-West Europe and led ultimately to Allied victory within the year.

Unsurprisingly, such a momentous event has generated a great deal of interest. Researching this book, for example, involved consulting almost a hundred works and documents dealing wholly or partially with the Normandy invasion, and there are many, many more. Generally speaking, these can be divided into two broad groupings. Leaving aside the official histories, which do a creditable job of covering all the angles in detail, the largest category tends to focus on the strategic ‘big picture’ and deals with the Normandy campaign as a whole, up to the breakout after Falaise or the liberation of Paris. Within this treatment, the initial assault usually merits a few pages at best or a few lines at worst. Works in the other category take the opposite tack and concentrate almost exclusively on the events of Tuesday 6 June 1944, through oral histories or by examining the activities of specific units or arms of service within that narow time frame. A similar tendency exists in the treatment of the airborne and amphibious elements of the invasion, which are frequently dealt with in virtual isolation and along national lines.

These approaches are of course perfectly valid, and in sum provide thorough coverage of Operation OVERLORD from inception to completion. However, the problem with minimising or maximising the initial assault is that it gives a distorted impression of that event and its relevance in the wider context. The casual observer reading two randomly selected works, for example, could be forgiven for forming the view that the Normandy invasion consisted of a twenty-four hour flurry of activity on the beaches, seamlessly followed by three months of massed tank attacks near Caen that went on until the Americans rode to the rescue from the west and closed the Falaise Gap. They would likely not be aware that in reality the initial assault went on for three days, or that the course of events in that period totally shaped the following three-month campaign and arguably what came after. Neither would they be aware that the initial assault also highlighted command, doctrinal and organisational shortcomings that were to dog Allied operations for the rest of the war in North-West Europe.

The primary aim of this work is thus to provide a coherent and comprehensive account of the first seventy-two hours of the Normandy invasion, amalgamating the two approaches cited above and incorporating both the Allied and German perspectives. The time frame is not accidental. It took seventy-two hours for the assault force to achieve most of their D-Day objectives, and the end of the period marks the point where the burden began to pass from the assault divisions to follow up formations. In addition, the events and imperatives that led to OVERLORD will be examined, along with the planning, preparation and forces assigned to both carry out and prevent the invasion, in order to put the operation into its proper perspective. In the process, a critical eye will be cast on received wisdom regarding the D-Day invasion. The American landings on the UTAH beaches, for example, are almost invariably lauded for their low casualties and efficient disembarkation and logistics build-up. Rather less attention has been paid to the performance of the US 4th Infantry Division once ashore, although this was to have serious implications at the time and later. Similarly, much is made of the alleged failure of the British 3rd Infantry Division to seize the city of Caen on 6 June as ordered, but the question of whether or not that objective was realistic or indeed achievable is rarely addressed, if ever.

On the German side, there has been an unquestioning acceptance that the British airborne lodgement around Ranville could have been swiftly eliminated had the senior commanders not reacted in a sluggish and hesitant manner. The biggest piece of received wisdom, however, relates to the American OMAHA landing beaches. Over the years events these have attained near-legendary status as the unparalleled Calvary of D-Day, a perception reinforced recently by the feature film Saving Private Ryan. This has led to a widespread assumption that the beaches assigned to the British and Canadian forces were a pushover in comparison. The OMAHA defences are thus automatically assumed to have been formidable, although there is no shortage of evidence to challenge the assumption, and the possibility is rarely considered that there might have been deeper problems among the American assault troops.

This work will therefore assess the accuracy or otherwise of these assumptions, and hopefully provide a considered and balanced account of the initial, vital but largely overlooked stage in the Allied invasion of Normandy. In conclusion, I would like to thank Jonathan Reeve at Tempus Publishing for his forbearance with my sometimes elastic approach to deadlines, and once again my son Chris for putting up with my life being virtually on hold for the past few months, and for once again acting as unpaid sounding board and proof reader.

William F. BuckinghamBishopbriggs, GlasgowJanuary 2004

1

RHETORIC, RAIDERS AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE OVERLORD PLAN

JUNE 1940–JUNE 1944

At 04:30 hours on the morning of 10 May 1940, forty-two Luftwaffe Junkers 52 transport aircraft lifted off from airfields around Cologne, each towing a DFS 230 troop-carrying glider. Two machines were obliged to abort after take off due to tow-rope failure. An hour later, in the last minutes of pre-dawn darkness, the remaining gliders cast off just short of the Belgian–German border. As first light tinged the sky, they began landing on the meadow atop the Belgian fortress of Eben Emael, protecting three nearby bridges across the Albert Canal. The gliders carried assault pioneers from 7 Flieger Division, who moved to their objectives with the fluidity and speed generated by intensive practice. A mere ten minutes after touchdown, the fort’s observation cupolas and gun turrets had been destroyed or disabled with specially designed shaped charges and flame-throwers. Two of the three bridges were also seized, and a bridgehead established at the third after the defenders triggered their demolition charges.1

The attack on Eben Emael was the opening move in Operation Sichelschnitt (Cut of the Scythe), which involved three German Army Groups fielding a total of ninety-three divisions. The Eben Emael operation heralded a feint attack into the Low Countries while the main focus of the German attack was an armoured thrust through the Ardennes region, which forced the River Meuse at Dinant and Sedan on 13 and 14 May 1940. Allied counter-attacks failed to stem the German advance, and the Panzers reached the Channel coast south of Boulogne on 21 May, trapping the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in the Pas de Calais. An ad hoc evacuation, code-named DYNAMO, was launched on 27 May. Over the next week 311,586 British, French and other Allied personnel were lifted from Calais, Dunkirk and adjacent beaches.2 The rest of the BEF was evacuated from ports along the north and western French coast by 20 June 1940.3 The price of the evacuation was high. The BEF lost 68,111 of its personnel in France killed, missing or as POWs, and mere fractions of its stores and heavy equipment were salvaged. In all, 2,472 guns, 63,877 vehicles, 105,797 tons of ammunition, 415,940 tons of assorted stores and 164,929 tons of fuel were left behind.4

This then was the sequence of events that made a cross-Channel invasion necessary almost exactly four years to the day after the end of Operation DYNAMO. In the more immediate term, it also provided the catalyst for a number of practical measures without which the Normandy invasion in June 1944 would have been far more difficult, or even impossible. The main driver behind this was Winston Churchill. Made Prime Minister on the same day the German offensive began, Churchill actually began issuing directives aimed at returning to the offensive before Operation DYNAMO had run its course. On 3 June 1940, in a minute to the Military Secretary to the Cabinet, General Sir Hastings Ismay, warning against the dangers of adopting a defensive mindset, Churchill also mooted raising a 10,000-strong raiding force.5 He expanded on the latter topic two days later in a further minute that ended with a number of specific proposals. These included a call for suggestions for delivering tanks onto enemy-held beaches, setting up intelligence gathering networks along German held coasts, and the establishment of a 5,000-strong parachute force.6

The War Office and Air Ministry response was commendably swift in the circumstances. On 6 June 1940 the War Office authorised raising a raiding force, dubbed Commandos in honour of the Boer guerrillas of the same name,7 and three days later the Army’s Director of Recruiting and Organisation (DRO) called for volunteers for unspecified special service.8 On 10 June the Air Ministry formulated its response to Churchill’s demand for a parachute force, and the Army Chiefs of Staff included additional parameters for prospective parachute volunteers into Commando recruiting instructions.9 Two days later Lieutenant-General Sir Alan Bourne RM was appointed the first Director of Combined Operations;10 his higher ranking successor, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes supplanted him on Churchill’s instructions on 17 July.11 Bureaucratic measures were accompanied by the practical. By July 1940 twelve 500-strong Commandos were forming, and the new joint-service Parachute Training Centre at RAF Ringway had been established. Combined Operations carried out its first live operation on the night of 24–25 June 1940; Operation COLLAR saw five small parties landed at three separate spots south of Boulogne. A second raid, code-named AMBASSADOR, was aimed at the airfield and installations on recently occupied Guernsey on the night of 15–16 July 1940.12

This was commendable but by no means flawless progress. The Commando idea was not universally accepted, and there were difficulties in obtaining volunteers, obliging a second recruiting drive in October 1940.13 Even then, the War Office department tasked to implement the Commando directive had to invoke the CIGS to force recalcitrant Commandos to comply with its instructions.14 The peculiar Commando conditions of service were also problematic. Such postings were temporary,15 and units were soon agitating for the return of their volunteers,16 and morale suffered when the separation between volunteer and parent unit caused problems with pay and allowances for dependants. In addition, Commando volunteers were not provided with billets or rations, but were expected to make their own arrangements with a monetary allowance, amounting to thirteen shillings and four pence per day for officers, and six shillings and eight pence for other ranks.17 This still brought the War Office into conflict with the Ministry of Food, particularly when Commando units moved into rural areas for training.18

These teething troubles do not detract from what was highly creditable progress, given the threat of seemingly imminent invasion and the need to rebuild the British Army. According to received wisdom, Churchill’s rationale in demanding the formation of Commando and Airborne forces was to carry out pin-prick raids to boost British civilian morale, which by happy accident later developed into one capable of spearheading more conventional operations as well. In the process this involved a largely needless and wasteful diversion of high quality manpower and other resources that would have been better employed elsewhere. This explanation is very popular with Churchill’s critics and those generally opposed to the creation of so-called ‘elite’ forces alike.19

It is easy to see how this view was formed. Arguably the biggest culprit was Churchill himself, because of the language in which he couched his directives. His initial minutes, for example, advocated developing a ‘reign of terror’ along German-held coastlines via a ‘butcher and bolt’ policy. This language was mirrored in internal War Office communications, which invariably referred to the new Commando force as a basis for ‘irregular units’ and ‘special parties’ with no fixed organisation and intended for ‘tip and run tactics depending on speed, ingenuity [and] dispersion’.20 Churchill’s badgering for action without delay reinforced this interpretation, if only because the lack of time and resources made small-scale raiding the only immediate option.

This interpretation also fitted neatly with a pre-existing War Office interest in irregular warfare. This went back at least to the end of the First World War, with British involvement in such operations in Russia and Ireland. A small section entitled General Staff (Research) was set up in the mid-1930s, being expanded and renamed Military Intelligence (Research) in early 1939. As well as publishing pamphlets on guerrilla operations, MI(R) carried out covert intelligence gathering in Rumania, Poland and the Baltic States, and was involved in an abortive scheme to assist the Finns in the Winter War.21 In April 1940 ten ‘Independent Companies’ were formed for irregular operations in Scandinavia, five of which briefly saw action.22 Administrative convenience may also have played a part in focusing Churchill’s directives into raiding. This appears to be the only reason the War Office folded the parachute requirement into the Commando recruiting effort,23 for example, and the Air Ministry used the same excuse for its unilateral reduction of the parachute requirement from 5,000 to 500.24

However, there is evidence to counter the raiding interpretation of Churchill’s directives, starting with what Churchill actually asked for. The first minutes called for the raising of not less than 10,000 raiders, with an additional and separate requirement for 5,000 parachute troops. This clearly shows that Churchill did not consider the two requirements indivisible, and a total force of 15,000 men was a considerable force for small-scale raiding under any conditions. This in turn strongly suggests Churchill had a more substantial purpose in mind, and he was not alone. In July 1940 Major John Rock RE, ranking Army officer at the Parachute Training Centre, requested the War Office reserve the new parachute force for key tasks like the ‘… capture of a Channel port for an invasion of France’.25 In fact, planning for an airborne brigade group was already under way, leading to a formal requirement for two all-arms ‘Aerodrome Capture Groups’.26 Such thinking was not restricted to the embryonic airborne force either. Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten, who replaced Keyes as Director of Combined Operations in October 1941, claimed that he was left in no doubt that the primary focus of his new command was to be preparation for a large-scale cross-Channel invasion.27

It is possible that Rock was expressing a personal opinion, but it is unlikely that the Director of Combined Operations was doing the same. A closer examination of his directives suggests Churchill was thinking along similar lines from the outset too. The minute of 3 June 1940, for example, referred to the need to play the Germans at their own game. Only the Eben Emael operation and a coup de main against bridges in Rotterdam can be construed as raiding operations, and it is therefore logical to assume that Churchill was instead referring to the German employment of ‘shock troops’.28 Yet more pertinently, on 25 August 1940 Churchill briefed Secretary of State for War Anthony Eden on the requirement for 5,000 parachutists and 10,000 raiders, which were to be

… capable of lightning action. In this way alone will those positions be secured which afterwards will give the opportunity for highly trained regular troops to operate on a larger scale.29

This clearly shows that Churchill viewed raiding as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself, and the scale and scope of the operations carried out under the raiding umbrella reinforces the point. These ranged from Operation BITING, the seizure of apparatus from the German radar station at Bruneval on the night of 27–28 February 1942, to the operation to destroy the ‘Normandie’ dry dock facility at St-Nazaire on 28 March 1942. The former employed 119 men from the 2nd Parachute Battalion, supported by a thirty-two strong Army covering party, six assault landing craft, five motor gunboats and two destroyers.30 The latter involved over 600 Commandos and naval personnel, three destroyers, one of which was converted into a floating time bomb, and eighteen smaller craft.31 Despite their disparate scale, these operations required exactly the same skills, expertise and detailed planning as a large-scale invasion. The sheer number of such operations also generated a considerable amount of research and development data and operational training and experience; by early 1942 Mountbatten was pushing for an operation every two weeks.

In fact, some operations were launched purely to test operational concepts, as Mountbatten pointed out to personnel training to attack the defended port on the Norwegian island of Vaagsö.32 Launched on Boxing Day 1941, Operation ARCHERY involved 800 Commandos, supported by the cruiser HMS Kenya, two dedicated landing ships (HMS Prince Leopold and HMS Prince Charles), four destroyers and the submarine HMS Tuna. The latter vessel acted as a guide to place the attack force in the correct fjord, and RAF bombers dropped smoke pots to cover the landings and provided daylight air cover for the duration of the operation.33 The Vaagsö was thus in essence a small-scale invasion, and used a number of techniques employed in the cross-Channel invasion two and a half years later.

It is therefore clear that Churchill intended the new forces to play a larger role than small-scale raids for British public consumption from the outset. The creation of Combined Operations, the Commandos and what was ultimately to become British Airborne Forces was intended to provide the British military with a vital capability totally lacking in its order of battle in mid-1940. This was a properly trained, configured and equipped shock force, capable of operating from the sea or air, and controlled by an independent executive command answerable to the highest British command echelon. The primary purpose of this force was to spearhead a future large-scale invasion of German-occupied Europe, which it did at the beginning of June 1944. It can therefore be argued that, thanks largely to Churchill’s foresight and prompting, British preparations for the invasion began as the last British and Allied troops were being lifted from Dunkirk, and exactly four years before British, Canadian and US troops set foot on the Normandy beaches.

Planning for the cross-Channel invasion commenced only slightly later than these practical measures. In October 1941 the British Chiefs of Staff drew up a scheme code-named ROUNDUP, which envisaged landing just twelve divisions and six tank brigades north and south of Le Havre. ROUNDUP was not intended to fight through serious opposition, but as a pursuit operation to take advantage of a German withdrawal following a decisive defeat in Russia. Given German success in the Soviet Union at the time ROUNDUP was conceived, this was somewhat optimistic, and the scheme was probably intended as a first step for planning purposes.34 Nonetheless, the Chiefs of Staff ordered Combined Operations HQ and Home Forces Command to prepare a collective outline in April 1942, based on a detailed survey of coastal topography, intelligence on German defences and research and development work on assault landing techniques and equipment.35

At this time it was an article of faith that the logistics of a large-scale landing required the seizure of a port at the outset or immediately thereafter, and the larger the better. The ROUNDUP landing area included several ports beside Le Havre, and Dieppe to the north was selected as the venue for a scaled-down dry run for ROUNDUP in August 1942. The operation, initially code-named RUTTER, was first mooted in April 1942, presumably in response to the Chiefs of Staff directive cited above. The primary stated aim of the operation was to test the feasibility of seizing a defended port, with the secondary aims of investigating possible problems inherent in controlling a large and disparate invasion fleet, and to test assault techniques and equipment.

Dieppe stands at the mouth of the River Arques, overlooked by flanking headlands. The harbour lay to the east of the town, which was fronted by almost a mile of steep shingle beach backed by a concrete sea wall, a 150-yard-wide esplanade and a row of seafront hotels ending with a large casino built into the western end of the seawall. Infanterie Regiment 571 was stationed in the town, the beach was laced with mines and barbed wire, concrete obstacles were placed in the narrow streets leading inland from the esplanade, the casino was fortified and the eastern headland was reinforced with concrete artillery positions and machine-gun emplacements. This allowed the defenders to enfilade the beach from both ends, and the esplanade formed a secondary killing zone. Defences were also constructed covering two outlying beaches to the east and west, and four batteries of coastal defence guns provided long-range support.

The initial plan was scheduled for July 1942, and envisaged landing troops east and west of Dieppe, with a parachute attack on the outlying coastal artillery batteries. It was postponed at the last minute when an unexpected weather front grounded the parachute force.36 Thereafter the parachute element was discarded along with the intensive pre-landing bombardment. Ostensibly the latter was to avoid French civilian casualties, and the former to remove weather-dependent factors from the plan.37 These were undoubtedly valid concerns, but there was also the fact that the RAF was unable to provide sufficient aircraft to lift even a single parachute battalion without borrowing operational aircraft from Bomber Command, and that the 1st Parachute Brigade was significantly under-strength.38 Whether or not, dealing with the coastal batteries was given to the Commandos, and the scheme then snowballed in size and scope. The major focus became a frontal assault with tanks on Dieppe, with flank landings to seize the headlands overlooking the port. Later additions included seizing the airfield at St-Aubin-sur-Scie and an attack on a nearby German divisional headquarters, a rather tall order given that the latter objectives were 3 and 6 miles inland respectively, and that the entire raid was scheduled to last a maximum of seven hours.

Nonetheless the scheme, renamed JUBILEE, went ahead and ultimately involved delivering the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division and Nos 3 and 4 Commandos onto five separate beaches. The Canadian contingent made up 4,693 of the 6,100-strong attack force, which included fifty men from the US 1st Ranger Battalion attached to various units to gain experience. The landing force employed 252 other assorted ships and landing craft, supported by a flotilla of minesweepers, five destroyers and sixty-nine RAF and RCAF fighter and light bomber squadrons.39 The operation began at 04:50 on Wednesday 19 August 1942, with the neutralisation of the German coastal defence batteries. One attack went like clockwork, and the Commandos involved were back aboard their vessels within three hours. The other went less smoothly. The landing force was scattered after running into a German coastal convoy, and only a handful landed late in the correct place. One group of Commandos was captured by a German counter attack, and the rest were only able to temporarily distract the battery from firing on the attack force. The supporting attacks by the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada and The South Saskatchewan Regiment on the headlands overlooking Dieppe did not go as planned either. One landing was unopposed, but the other came under heavy fire and suffered a number of casualties. Stiffening resistance and unrealistic timetabling prevented either objective being achieved; the attackers had to fight their way back to the beach and their evacuation was delayed by a lack of landing craft. Both battalions were virtually destroyed; the Queen’s Own Highlanders lost 346 men killed, wounded, missing and captured, and the South Saskatchewans lost just over 500.

The real disaster unfolded on the Dieppe seafront. After a five-minute bombardment from the supporting destroyers and single strafing run by RAF fighters, the Essex Scottish went ashore at 05:20 into a storm of enfilading fire from both headlands and fortified seafront buildings. Between forty and seventy-five per cent of its effective strength was lost within thirty minutes. The Royal Hamilton Light Infantry managed to take the casino at 07:12, but few survived to cross the fire-swept esplanade. The first wave of nine Churchill tanks arrived fifteen minutes late, and only three tanks managed to surmount the sea wall and engage the fortified seafront buildings. They and a further twelve from succeeding waves were trapped on the esplanade by the concrete obstacles blocking the streets into the town, and eventually fell back to the cover of the sea wall. The reserve battalion from the Fusiliers Mont Royal was committed at 07:00 following an erroneous report that the Royal Hamiltons had penetrated into Dieppe. They too were effectively wiped out, losing 512 all ranks from the 583 committed to the landing. At around 08:00, Royal Marine A Commando was also despatched to the main beach, with orders to bypass the town and eliminate the German positions on the east headland. The first wave, accompanied by their commander, Lieutenant-Colonel J.P. Phillips RM in a launch, were again pinned down immediately on landing. Realising the futility of landing more troops, Phillips donned white gauntlets, moved into the open and succeeded in waving off some craft from the succeeding waves before being killed.

The 2nd Canadian Infantry Division took 4,693 men to Dieppe. 2,892 remained there, 1,895 as prisoners or missing; the remaining 907 were dead. The supporting units also suffered relatively heavily. Sixty-six men from the Royal Marine A Commando were killed or captured on the beach, No. 3 Commando lost 120 killed, wounded and/or captured, while No. 4 Commando lost twelve dead, twenty-one wounded and thirteen missing.40 In addition, the fifty-strong contingent from the US 1st Ranger Battalion lost six dead, seven wounded and four captured.41 Lieutenant Loustalot, who accompanied No. 3, earned the dubious honour of being the first US serviceman killed in ground combat in the European theatre.42

Unsurprisingly, the Dieppe débâcle has spawned a great deal of controversy. Churchill, for example, has been charged with deliberately setting up the operation to fail, to provide a credible counter to vociferous Soviet demands for a Second Front in 1942. In Canada, Dieppe is widely viewed as an example of British carelessness with the lives of their colonial subjects, although this conveniently overlooks the Canadian enthusiasm for the operation. One recent author has argued, not altogether convincingly, that Mountbatten overstepped his authority and launched JUBILEE without the knowledge or sanction of his superiors.43 Be that as it may, with hindsight the Dieppe operation contained a number of flaws. The close naval escort proved insufficient, and the near total reliance on surprise was a mistake. A five-minute bombardment from heavy naval units would have been insufficient, and that from a mere four destroyers did little more than provide a morale boost for the first assault wave and alert the German garrison of the impending landing. While undoubtedly courageous, the landing craft crews required more marshalling and forming up training, and some of their craft were poorly configured and constructed for large-scale landings. The British Landing Craft Personnel (Large), for example, lacked a ramp and obliged passengers to jump down from a high prow, and the craft’s wooden construction was not sufficiently robust; several were holed on rocks during the landings.44

These flaws were undoubtedly costly, but that has to be set against the fact that the Dieppe operation was explicitly intended to combat test command and control arrangements and assault equipment and techniques, hardly a recipe for playing safe. Mountbatten may thus have been wise after the event in claiming that the success of the Normandy landings was won on the beaches of Dieppe,45 but he was essentially speaking the truth. JUBILEE did not fail in every respect, and those that did yielded valuable experience and lessons that were later incorporated into the Normandy plan. The majority of the Dieppe attack force was delivered accurately and on time, which suggests that amphibious planning and procedures were largely sound. The destruction of one coastal battery proved that eliminating such installations in this way was feasible, and the performance of the Commandos showed their selection and training was turning out troops with the necessary high levels of initiative and flexibility. The flank landings also proved the feasibility of inserting flank guards for the main landings, and it should be noted that things only began to seriously unravel for the South Saskatchewans and the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada during the extraction phase. This would not have been a factor in a permanent invasion.

However, arguably the most significant outcome was the impact on German and Allied perceptions. Their apparent success reinforced German conviction that any Allied invasion would involve seizure of a major port, and they continued to invest a great deal of time and resources fortifying ports and constructing supporting coastal defences along the entire coastline of occupied Europe. For their part, the British took the opposite tack, and drew the conclusion that seizing a major port would be extremely costly and probably impossible, at least before the garrison had demolished the port facilities. The alternative was therefore to think the previously unthinkable – plan for a cross-beach assault, and work out a way to get around the logistical handicap this would entail.

In the event, the cross-Channel invasion was to be an Anglo-American affair, and liaison between the two militaries predated US entry into the war. The US Navy Department stationed a semi-official observer in London in the summer of 1940, the US War Department regularly despatched officers on ‘special missions’, and there was a mutual exchange of military missions in the spring of 1941. These agreed the Germany-first principle for Allied strategy, which was formalised after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and Hitler’s declaration of war on the US four days later. The ARCADIA conference held in Washington on 31 December 1941, however, accepted that circumstances precluded a direct attack upon Germany, and agreed to a strategy of peripheral attacks and an aerial bombing offensive against the German homeland. The long-term aim was thus a full-scale invasion of Western Europe by 1943.46

However, both parties held fundamentally different views of the arrangement. The British viewed it as but one option in a step-by-step approach, partly due to a long-standing principle of attempting to avoid Continental entanglements, and partly in acknowledgement of post-Dunkirk military weakness and more recent maulings in Greece and the Western Desert. The aim was to wear down German operational capabilities via peripheral operations and only then use the cross-Channel invasion to deliver the coup de grace. This line of thinking was clear in the British ROUNDUP plan of October 1941, which was intended to take advantage of a sudden German collapse on the Eastern Front.47 The Americans took the opposite tack, favouring the concentration of overwhelming force against a single point to bring matters to a speedy and favourable conclusion. Had they possessed the means, the Americans would have insisted on a cross-Channel invasion in 1942.

Perhaps fortunately, the blunt fact was that the US Army was incapable of properly protecting the continental United States, let alone prosecuting a global war. These differences reinforced less than helpful mutual preconceptions. Many of the British viewed American self-confidence as unwarranted cockiness at best and outright arrogance at worst, allied to profligacy with materiel and personnel. For their part, not a few American officers viewed their new British allies as erstwhile colonial oppressors, and considered the British preference for the indirect approach as an excuse to cover an unwillingness to come to grips with the Germans. On a more practical level, there was also a lack of administrative arrangements necessary to undertake operational planning. Thus in May 1942 the Americans imitated the British Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee and its associated machinery by creating a whole new command and planning organisation headed by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and a dedicated Joint Planning Staff. There was also an Anglo-US Combined Chiefs of Staff office, consisting of the British and US Chiefs of Staff or their representatives, with a subordinate group of Combined Staff Planners and a direct line to Churchill and Roosevelt.48

Unsurprisingly given all this, American planning for the cross-Channel invasion predated these arrangements. In February 1942 US planners drew up a scheme for an invasion of the Pas de Calais, similar to the British ROUNDUP plan of the previous October, although their efforts were handicapped by a lack of suitable landing craft and troops. According to the US Army Chief of Staff, the Americans would only be able to deploy a maximum of three and a half divisions to the UK in 1942.49 Any invasion would thus have to rely on British support that was unlikely to be forthcoming given their more realistic appraisal of German capabilities, the accuracy of which was graphically illustrated at Dieppe. In addition, the invasion area was dictated by the operational range of the available fighter aircraft, which restricted the projected area of operations to the region between Abbeville and Dunkirk, an unsuitable location for a number of reasons. The beaches there were shallow and thus unsuitable for British landing craft, they lacked suitable exits, the handful of ports in that area were too small to host a large-scale logistical effort, and the German defences were at their strongest. The US Army thus accepted, albeit reluctantly, that a cross-Channel invasion was not feasible in mid-1942. The plan was thus code-named SLEDGEHAMMER, modified and filed as a contingency measure.

The Americans were not discouraged, however. In March 1942 the US planners began working on a much larger scheme, provisionally scheduled for the spring of 1943. The result was the ‘Marshall Memorandum’ passed to President Roosevelt on 2 April 1942. This envisaged a raiding phase to wear down the German defenders and camouflage the location of the invasion before landing forty-eight astride the mouth of the River Somme. The similarity of the US design to the British ROUNDUP scheme of the previous year led to it being dubbed ‘1943 ROUNDUP’. The plan was presented to the British Chiefs of Staff in April 1942, who received it more favourably than SLEDGEHAMMER. However, they were unwilling to give a firm commitment, even when Marshall promised a million US troops and a top priority build-up called BOLERO in return for an undertaking to launch the invasion in 1943. Marshall was trying to placate Roosevelt’s impatience for action, maintain the President’s commitment to the Germany First principle, and to forestall his US Navy counterpart from diverting resources to the Pacific theatre. The result was a compromise, and at the Washington Conference in June 1942 Marshall thus signed up to the invasion of Algeria in November 1942 and reluctantly put Sledgehammer on the back burner.

BOLERO nonetheless went ahead and logistical planning bodies called BOLERO Combined Committees were established. One of their main functions was to prepare bases for US troops slated for the invasion, 32,000 of which had arrived in the UK by June 1942.50 However, BOLERO was hamstrung by the demands of Operation TORCH. Three of the first four US divisions assembled in the UK, totalling 150,000 men, were redirected to North Africa and their replacements did not start to arrive in the UK until March 1943. The supply effort was similarly retarded, dropping from 240,000 tons in September 1942 to 20,000 tons in February 1943. It took a further five months to re-attain the former level.51 The situation changed for the better after the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 when, with badgering from Churchill, the British Chiefs of Staff finally made a firm commitment to a cross-Channel invasion in 1944. This was the first of a number of developments that shifted the invasion from a disputed abstract to a concrete undertaking. BOLERO was given precedence over the requirements of subsequent operations in the Mediterranean, and the groundwork was laid for a single, dedicated command to oversee the preparation and execution of the operation. No Supreme Allied Commander was appointed, but the necessary staff and planning organisation was set up in anticipation.

Thus in March 1943 British Lieutenant-General Frederick E. Morgan was summoned to the War Office, presented with all material relating to the cross-Channel invasion, and informally requested to draw up a proposal for the next step.52 By April 1943 he had produced a number of propositions and a suggested structure for a new, Anglo-American planning staff. Morgan was then officially appointed Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (Designate). After some wrangling over structures, delineation of authority and the precise wording of the Casablanca agreement had been resolved,53 Morgan’s new office opened on 17 April 1943. It was named COSSAC, the initials of Morgan’s title, and initially concentrated on three specific plans. COCKADE was a scheme aimed at supporting the Soviets by keeping as many German units in the west as possible. RANKIN was an updated SLEDGEHAMMER, intended to take advantage of a sudden German collapse. OVERLORD was the operational plan for full-scale, cross-Channel invasion. With mid-1944 pinpointed as the time for the latter, the next step was to establish the location.

In November 1942, after the Dieppe débâcle, British planners re-examined the requirements for invasion. Multiple and widely separated landings were abandoned in favour of a single, large but defensible landing area capable of accommodating a rapid build up, and a list of factors was compiled to aid selection. An invasion site had to be within range of UK-based fighters, not too strongly defended, protected from the weather, suitable for over-the-beach supply, contain suitable and sufficient beach exits, be linked to a developed road net, and be near a major port. Unfortunately, the planners were unable to locate a site meeting all these criteria, and only two came close. Both were in Normandy, on the Cotentin Peninsula and in the area of Caen, and the latter was judged the more suitable, although it lacked a port; the nearest was Le Havre, 30 miles east on the other side of the River Seine.

This appreciation was accepted by the Combined Chiefs of Staff on 1 March 1943, and formed the basis for the last American invasion plan before responsibility passed to COSSAC. SKYSCRAPER envisaged landings near Caen and the east coast of the Cotentin Peninsula. Two airborne divisions were to be delivered behind each landing area, and Commandos were to carry out simultaneous attacks along the entire coast. Two divisions were to land initially at each area, followed by a second wave of three divisions. After securing the port of Cherbourg at the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula, the force would break out to the east. Ironically given its similarity to the final OVERLORD plan, SKYSCRAPER was rejected by the British Chiefs of Staff, who claimed it minimised likely German opposition, and that insufficient resources were available.54

Morgan made his own study of past work before setting his staff to preparing appreciations and outline plans for landings at Caen and the Pas de Calais. Their conclusions, which appeared in mid-June 1943, rejected the Pas de Calais and recommended a three-division assault on a 30-mile front west of the River Orne. The scheme was deliberately broad-brush, and made no effort to address details like the composition of the assault force or timings, although the need to frame future planning around predicted weather and tidal conditions and the conflicting needs of the various forces involved were noted. The likelihood of speedy and powerful German counter-attacks was also acknowledged, with the recommendation that the assault wave and initial follow-up forces should contain a high proportion of armoured and anti-aircraft units.

The COSSAC scheme also broke with previous thinking by making no provision for seizure of a port, advocating using prefabricated artificial ports that could be towed across the Channel and assembled in place instead. This was a bold step, given that the idea was untested and that many of the components were still on the drawing board. The scheme also omitted any landing on the Cotentin Peninsula because the British Chiefs of Staff were unwilling to guarantee sufficient landing craft, and similar concerns over aircraft provision restricted the airborne contribution to a single rather than two such divisions. The latter highlights the most pressing handicaps faced by the COSSAC planners at this stage. Morgan lacked executive authority, he had no superior with sufficient clout to obtain additional resources or force compliance, and his position was complicated yet further by the lack of a clear chain of command. This left COSSAC open to all kinds of interference, well meaning or otherwise. Churchill, predictably, was a particular offender in this respect.

The ongoing strategic disagreement compounded these difficulties. Success in Sicily and seemingly imminent Italian collapse led to a further 66,000 US troops being diverted from the BOLERO build-up, and the British Chiefs of Staff, still keen to pursue the indirect approach, suggested redirecting a further 50,000. This was a step too far for the US Chiefs of Staff, however, and the result was yet another strategic debate at the QUADRANT Conference in Quebec, beginning on 12 August 1943. This both reaffirmed the primacy of BOLERO and significantly advanced the OVERLORD cause. Morgan’s outline plan was endorsed, with the proviso that it be expanded to include the Cotentin landing. In addition, several battle-tested divisions were to be transferred from the Mediterranean for the invasion, and COSSAC was directed to continue with preparations and planning.

Ironically, this exacerbated Morgan’s problems. The outline OVERLORD plan presented at Quebec fulfilled his brief in full, and COSSAC was not configured to deal with the myriad details required to turn the outline into an operational reality. Those required direct participation and input from corps, army and army groups, many of which were not fully established, and COSSAC lacked the authority and chain of command necessary to work with them in any case. The Combined Chiefs of Staff invested Morgan with limited executive powers after he complained in September 1943, but this could only be a stopgap.55 Further progress thus depended on finalising the command structure for OVERLORD by designating a Supreme Allied Commander.

This, however, raised the potentially vexed questions of finding a candidate and deciding nationality. The Chief of Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, was considered briefly and Churchill suggested the US Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, at the Quebec conference.56 Roosevelt also favoured Marshall, but hesitated after being warned of the potentially serious consequences of removing him from the highest levels of Allied decision making. The matter came to a head at Tehran in November 1943, when Stalin asked point-blank who was to lead the much-promised cross-Channel invasion. Forced into a corner, Roosevelt finally recommended General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The choice was both popular and wise. Churchill considered Eisenhower the only US officer beside Marshall qualified for the job and the selection of a long-standing protégé doubtless eased Marshall’s disappointment. Eisenhower had been involved in the initial planning for the invasion in February 1942, and as Commander Allied Forces in the Mediterranean had gained experience with amphibious operations, and demonstrated the skills vital for effective command of a multi-national force. He was therefore appointed Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force on 6 December 1943, and he arrived in London six days later, presumably amid rejoicing from Morgan and the COSSAC staff.

With a Supreme Commander in place, the detailed planning for OVERLORD moved ahead rapidly. COSSAC was superseded by Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), and General Sir Bernard L. Montgomery was appointed to command 21st Army Group, the top British command slot. Eisenhower designated Montgomery temporary Supreme Commander while he returned to the US for a brief leave. Montgomery was tasked to explore ways of expanding the outline OVERLORD plan, which both considered too small. This Montgomery duly did, whilst ruthlessly remodelling 21st Army Group HQ to his liking.57

The re-evaluation was presented to Eisenhower on 21 January 1944, and advocated widening the landing area to include the entire length of coast between the River Orne and the eastern side of the Cotentin Peninsula, with airborne landings to secure the flanks. The British were to land in the east and Americans west of Bayeux, which was selected as the demarcation line. The initial landing had three major objectives. These were to seize Caen and the surrounding area suitable for airfield construction; to block and destroy German reserves moving to oppose the invasion; and to facilitate the rapid seizure of Cherbourg, all of which were to be carried out concurrently. Eisenhower accepted the plan, and directed SHAEF to pass it to the Combined Chiefs of Staff for authorisation. This was granted on 1 February 1944, after the first stage of the invasion was delineated into a distinct sub-operation with its plan. This was code-named the NEPTUNE Initial Joint Plan, leaving the OVERLORD code name for the overall strategic scheme. NEPTUNE envisaged delivering six British, Canadian and US divisions onto five landing areas, code-named UTAH, omaha, gold, juno and SWORD.

This still left the matter of resolving the precise timing and date, which involved balancing a number of sometimes mutually exclusive factors. A daylight assault would have greatly aided navigation and gunnery observation, but at the cost of conferring the same advantage on the defence. A night landing, on the other hand, would initially conceal the scale and direction of the assault. The choice was thus between an aggressive daylight fight through and a more stealthy approach to get the leading waves ashore under cover of darkness. A detailed study recommended that the attack should go in approximately an hour after first light, permitting the preliminary approach to be carried out in darkness but allowing sufficient daylight to direct an intense pre-landing barrage. The date of launch was dependent on moon and tide. Airborne landings were impossible without some natural illumination, and the seaborne landings had to be made on a rising tide to avoid stranding landing craft after delivering their loads. This narrowed the choice down to one or two three-day periods in any given month. As 1 June had been selected as the approximate date for the invasion, the nearest favourable period fell on 5, 6 and 7 June 1944. Monday, 5 June was therefore designated D-Day, with H-Hour three hours before high tide.

With the location, date and time fixed, preparatory activities and operations could go ahead. Planning for NEPTUNE required a huge amount of information, ranging from beach gradients, composition and obstacles to the location, equipment and morale of German units. Monitoring communications yielded an abundance of such data, thanks largely to total German confidence in their ENIGMA encipherment machine. This used interchangeable lettered wheels to encrypt signals prior to despatch, and offered up to 150 billion possible permutations of any given message. Thus the Germans, unsurprisingly, considered ENIGMA to be unbreakable. However, a team of mathematicians and cryptographers based at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, building on Polish and French intelligence work, succeeded in doing just that.58 Code-named ULTRA, the resulting decryptions allowed the Allies to read virtually any German military communication they could monitor. This, in conjunction with data gathered by the Resistance, permitted SHAEF to assemble an extremely accurate picture of German dispositions and activities in France and Belgium.

The planners also required visual information. Allied reconnaissance aircraft took tens of thousands of photographs of the landing area, and specially configured aircraft with oblique or side mounted cameras obtained low-level close-ups of specific objectives and pictures of the landing beaches, some while flying parallel at very low level up to 1,500 yards offshore. The latter photographs were assembled into panoramas issued as navigation aids to landing craft crews and junior commanders in the initial assault waves. To avoid alerting the Germans to the target of the invasion, this activity was extended along the entire coast of occupied Europe, with three sorties being flown elsewhere for every one over Normandy. For more detailed information on the beaches the planners could also call on the combat swimmers of the Combined Operations Pilotage Parties (COPPs). Originally formed to reconnoitre and mark landing sites for Commando raids using dinghies or canoes, by January 1944 they were using modified 9-ton landing craft dubbed Landing Craft Navigation (LCN) equipped with echo sounders, radar and radio navigation equipment, and X-Type miniature submarines. Both craft were used to carry combat swimmers close inshore to carry out surveys, and later to mark the route for the invaders.

The first COPP survey of the landing beaches was carried out on the night of 31 December–1 January 1944 off la Rivière, primarily to investigate the make up of old peat workings behind the beach. Another party was despatched to the area off Laurent-sur-Mer on the night of 17–18 January 1944, when tidal conditions permitted an X-Craft to cross the Calvados Reef. It remained on station for three days, carrying out periscope surveys during daylight and sending in combat swimmers for close-reconnaissance at night; on one occasion a German sentry unwittingly stepped across a marker line while the swimmers gathered samples of beach material for analysis. They returned with details of beach exits, and the location of German fortifications, minefields and the number and type of beach obstacles. Sand samples proved the beach could support tanks and heavy vehicles, confirming the site as suitable for an artificial harbour.59

Not all preliminary activity was passive. Aerial bombing of German coastal defences began in mid-April 1944, again with three raids elsewhere for every one in Normandy. Thus only approximately ten per cent of the total tonnage delivered was directed against the coastal batteries there; more concentrated attacks against targets in the invasion area were planned for the night of D Minus 1, and attacks by medium bombers were incorporated into the assault fire plan.60 Targets were also struck well inland. The US 9th Air Force, for example, destroyed or badly damaged twenty-one of the twenty-four bridges over the Seine north of Paris, and hit thirty-six airfields as far afield as Belgium. The RAF’s 2nd Tactical Air Force carried out 2,000 raids against ninety-two radar stations along the German occupied coast; seventy-six were put out of action, including almost all those covering the landing area.

The Continental railway system received equally intensive treatment. The TRANSPORTATION Plan pinpointed key marshalling yards, track junctions and repair facilities in France, Belgium and western Germany, and struck them in a way that appeared to focus on the Pas de Calais while actually cutting rail links with Normandy. Allied heavy bomber squadrons delivered 75,000 tons of bombs via 21,949 sorties between February and June 1944, while fighter-bombers caught elements that avoided bombing of the marshalling yards; by June 1944 three-quarters of the locomotives in Northern France and Belgium had been destroyed or rendered unserviceable.61 The air effort was paralleled by Plan VERT, a covert sabotage campaign co-ordinated by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). Beginning in July 1942, SOE had cultivated resistance activity among French railway workers. Among the most successful SOE initiatives was the introduction of abrasive paste into the wheel bearings of flat cars capable of carrying German tanks and armoured vehicles. This rapidly seized the wheel bearings and rendered the cars useless.62 In the year beginning June 1943, saboteurs destroyed 2,500 freight cars, and damaged a further 8,000 along with 1,822 locomotives and 1,500 passenger carriages. The result was a slow but steady reduction in the flow of rail traffic into the invasion area that increased as the invasion neared. Between March and June 1944, the total volume of rail traffic across France and Belgium was reduced by sixty per cent, and in northern France generally the proportion was as high as seventy-five percent.63

The Allies also put an immense amount of effort into disinformation and deception operations. Operation FORTITUDE created the fictitious 1st US Army Group or FUSAG in south-east England, poised to attack the Pas de Calais. The illusion was maintained with an elaborate radio network that generated spurious traffic, and huge dummy camps complete with inflatable trucks and tanks for the benefit of German reconnaissance aircraft. Large numbers of timber and canvas aircraft and landing craft were also shuttled between locations by specially trained detachments. This supported the German conviction that the Pas de Calais was the most likely area for invasion, which was subtly reinforced by feeding the German high command corroborating disinformation via the totally compromised German spy network in the UK. The Spanish reporter Luis Calvo, code-named GARBO and turned by British intelligence in February 1942, was particularly noteworthy. The British built an elaborate and totally fictitious spy ring around GARBO, which the Germans came to view as one of their most reliable intelligence assets. Another deception plan created a complete British 4th Army with a headquarters in Edinburgh, and a phantom US 14th Army based around Stirling and Dundee. Around sixty signallers succeeded in persuading the Germans that one armoured, four infantry and one airborne division were poised to invade Norway,64 a deceit that kept twenty-seven German divisions tied up in Scandinavia for over a month after the launch of OVERLORD.65

As preparations advanced and the invasion drew nearer, maintaining security became increasingly complex, necessitating a new category of top secret. Code-named BIGOT, this was created to cover information connected to NEPTUNE, and officers so cleared were thus dubbed BIGOTS. In one grisly incident, divers had to be employed to account for the bodies of two BIGOTS killed when German E-Boats sank two LSTs engaged in a landing exercise on the Devon coast on the night of 26–27 April 1944.66 On a lighter note, physics teacher Leonard Sidney Dawe was arrested while walking his dog one Sunday morning, and interrogated by MI5. Dawe was senior crossword puzzle compiler on The Daily Telegraph, and was singled out after the words Utah, Omaha, Mulberry, Neptune and Overlord appeared in his puzzles during May 1944.67 A Czech military writer caused a similar stir when it was noticed that map-diagrams relating to the employment of airborne troops in one of his works virtually replicated the actual OVERLORD airborne plan; he too was investigated and exonerated.68 Some were not so fortunate. The Quartermaster General of the US 9th Air Force was relieved of his command, reduced in rank and sent back to the US in disgrace following unguarded remarks at a dinner party in April 1944. A British officer who left a copy of the OVERLORD communications plan in a London taxi was presumably treated equally harshly; the offending briefcase was actually handed in to Scotland Yard’s lost property office by the cab driver.69 Despite these and other scares, security remained unbreached and as we shall see, the cross-Channel invasion achieved total surprise.

This then was the two-and-a-half-year process of discussion, argument and outright disagreement that shaped the Allied cross-Channel invasion. Before examining the operational detail of the invasion plan, we shall first take a look at the other side of the hill, to see what the Germans had in the area slated for the invasion, and how they planned to meet such an eventuality.

2

WIEDERSTANDNESTE, BODENSTÄNDIGE DIVISIONS AND PANZERS

THE GERMAN DEFENCE IN NORMANDY

Wherever the Allies had elected to invade in 1944, they would have faced fixed defences of some description. These ranged from Fort Austrått in Norway, which incorporated a triple 128mm gun turret lifted from the German battlecruiser Gneisenau, to the Ringstand, a roughly 4 x 3-metre concrete shelter capable of housing a machine-gun team and ammunition.1 These and a host of other fortifications formed part of the Atlantic Wall, stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Spanish border, and were presented by Nazi propaganda as the impregnable result of a seamlessly implemented masterplan. The reality was somewhat different in all respects, however, for the evolution of the Atlantic Wall was at least as convoluted as that of the OVERLORD invasion that overran the stretch covering the Normandy coast.

It is generally accepted that the concept and term Atlantic Wall came out of two directives. Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) chief of staff,2 issued the first on 14 December 1941. It contained detailed instructions for the construction of a new Westwall