Operation Overlord

Operation Overlord

INTRODUCTION
On June 5, 1944 Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower issued the Order of the Day. At 12:15 AM, June 6, 1944, 23,000 paratroopers and glider troopers plunged into the darkness and the allied troops; American, French, British and Canadian, stormed a 50-mile stretch of French beach called Normandy, D-Day had begun.
General Eisenhower started the morning off with this speech to the troops:
Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Forces: You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.
But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!
Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.
In midsummer 1943, a year before the Anglo-American invasion of Normandy that would lead to the liberation of western Europe, Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht, or armed forces, still occupied all the territory it had gained in the blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939-41 and most of its Russian conquests of 1941-42. It also retained its foothold on the coast of North Africa, acquired when it had gone to the aid of Italy in 1941. The Russian counteroffensives at Stalingrad and Kursk had pushed back the perimeter of Hitler’s Europe in the east. Germany or its allies still controlled the whole of mainland Europe, except for neutral Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Sweden. The Nazi war economy, though overshadowed by the growing of America’s, outmatched both that of Britain and that of the Soviet Union except in the key areas of tank and aircraft production. Without direct intervention by the western Allies on the continent, an intervention that would center on the western Allies commitment of a large American army, Hitler could count on prolonging his military dominance for years to come.
Since 1942, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had been pressing his allies; U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, to mount a “second front” in the west but the circumstances would not permit it. America’s army was still forming, and the landing craft necessary to bring such an army across the English Channel had not yet been built. Britain had begun to prepare theoretical plans for a return to the continental mainland soon after the retreat from Dunkirk, France, in 1940. The Americans started to frame their own timetable immediately after Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941. Less inhibited than the British by perceived technical difficulties, the Americans pressed from the start for an early invasion, desirably in 1943, perhaps even in 1942. To that end, George C. Marshall, Roosevelt’s chief of staff, appointed a protégé, Dwight D. Eisenhower, to the U.S. Army’s war plans division in December 1941 and commissioned him to design an operational scheme for Allied victory.
Eisenhower convinced President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill that the priority had to be “Germany First”. He framed proposals for a 1943 invasion (Operation “Roundup”), and another (Operation “Sledgehammer”) for 1942 in the event of a Russian collapse or a sudden weakening of Germany’s position. Both plans were presented to the British in London in April 1942, and Roundup was adopted. The British, nevertheless, reserved objective doubts, and at subsequent Anglo-American conferences in Washington in June, and in London in July; squashed all thought of Sledgehammer and then succeeded in persuading the Americans to agree to a North African landing as the principal operation of 1942. Operation “Torch” as the landing in North Africa was to be code-named, effectively postponed Roundup again, while subsequent operations in Sicily and the Italian mainland delayed preparations for the cross-Channel invasion through 1943 as well. The postponements were a principal cause of concern at inter-Allied conferences at Washington, Quebec, Cairo, and Tehran. At the last gathering, Roosevelt and Stalin combined against Churchill to insist on the adoption of May 1944 as an unalterable date for the invasion. In return, Stalin agreed to mount a simultaneous offensive in Eastern Europe and to join in the war against Japan once Germany had been defeated.
The decision taken at Tehran was a final indication of American determination to stage the cross-Channel invasion and a defeat for Alan Brooke, Churchill’s chief of staff and the principal opponent of premature action. Despite Brooke’s procrastination, the British had in fact been proceeding with structural plans, coordinated by Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan, who had been appointed COSSAC (chief of staff to the supreme Allied commander [designate]) at the Anglo-American Casablanca conference in January 1943. His staff’s first plan for Operation “Overlord” was a landing in Normandy between Caen and the Cotentin Peninsula in strength of three divisions, with two brigades to be airdropped. Another 11 divisions were to be landed within the first two weeks through two artificial harbors that would be towed across the Channel. Once a foothold had been established, a force of a hundred divisions, the majority shipped directly from the United States, were to be assembled in France for a final assault on Germany. In January 1944 Eisenhower became supreme Allied commander, and the COSSAC staff was redesignated SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force).
Hitler had long been aware that the Anglo-American allies would eventually mount a cross-Channel invasion, but, as long as they dissipated their forces in the Mediterranean and as long as the campaign in the East demanded the commitment of all available German forces, he downplayed the threat. By November 1943, however, he accepted that it could be ignored no longer, and in Fuher Directive 51 he announced that France would be reinforced. To oversee defensive preparations, Hitler appointed Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, former commander of the Afrika Korps, as inspector of coastal defenses and then as commander of Army Group B, occupying the threatened Channel coast.
In January 1944 the Allies also appointed an invasion commander. Bernard Law Montgomery, Rommel’s desert opponent in North Africa, was nominated under Eisenhower as commander of the ground invasion forces. Walter Bedell Smith, an American, continued as Eisenhower’s chief of staff, but his other principal subordinates were British. Air Chief Marshall Arthur Tedder as his deputy, Admiral Bertram Ramsay as naval commander, and Air Chief Marshall Trafford Leigh-Mallory as head of the expeditionary air forces.
Montgomery’s first acts were (1) to demand and get five divisions to make the initial landing and (2) to widen the landing area to include the Orne River estuary and the base of the Cotentin Peninsula. It was finally decided the invasion force was to consist of five infantry divisions, two American, two British, and one Canadian assigned to beaches code-named, from west to east, Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. On D-Day, two American airborne divisions were to land behind the western end of the assault area and one British at the eastern, while amphibious armor was to swim ashore with the leading waves. The Americans constituted the U.S. 1st Army, under Major General Omar Bradley, the British and Canadians the British 2nd Army, under General Miles Dempsey. The British divisions had been under intensive training since 1942, the American since 1943. By May 1944, intensive logistic preparations provided almost 6,500 ships and landing craft, which would land nearly 200,000 vehicles and 600,000 tons of supplies in the first three weeks of the operation.
The invasion would be supported by more than 13,000 fighter, bomber, and transport aircraft, against which the Luftwaffe (the German air force) was able to deploy fewer than 400 on D-Day. Between April 1 and June 5, 1944, the British and American strategic air forces, deploying 11,000 aircraft, flew 200,000 sorties, dropping 195,000 tons of bombs on French rail centers and road networks as well as German airfields, radar installations, military bases, and coastal artillery batteries. Two thousand Allied aircraft were lost in these preliminaries, but the air campaign succeeded in destroying all the bridges across the Seine and Loire rivers and thus isolating the Normandy Invasion area from the rest of France. The Luftwaffe staff was forced to accept the fact that “the outstanding factor both before and during the invasion was the overwhelming air superiority of the enemy.”
The air campaign was designed not only to disrupt German anti-invasion preparations but also to serve as a deception operation. Two thirds of the bombs were dropped outside the invasion area, in an attempt to persuade the enemy that the landings would be made northeast of the Seine or the Pas de Calais area, directly opposite of Dover, England, rather than in Normandy. At the same time, through the top-secret Ultra operation, the Allies were able to decode encrypted German transmissions providing the Overlord forces with a clear picture of where the German counterattack forces were deployed. By spurious transmissions, the Allies created an entire phantom army based in southeast England (opposite of Pas de Calais) and alleged to be commanded by the American general George S. Patton. In addition, on the night of the invasion itself, airborne radar deception presented to German radar stations a “phantom” picture of an invasion fleet crossing the Channel narrows, while a radar blackout disguised the real transit to Normandy. The Germans were not altogether deluded. Hitler himself declared a last-minute premonition of a Normandy landing. By then, however, Rommel, in his brief period of responsibility for the Atlantic Wall, had been able to lay mines, so that by June 5 some 4 million mines had been laid on the beaches. He had not, however, been able to position the Germans’ tank divisions as he wanted. Rundstedt wished to hold them back from the coast as a reserve. Rommel, warning that allied aircraft would destroy them as they advanced, wished to place them near the beaches. Hitler, adjudicating in the dispute, worsened the situation by allotting some divisions to Rommel and some to Rundstedt, keeping others under his own command. The rest of Rommel’s Army Group B was made up of the infantry divisions of the 7th Army in Normandy and Brittany and by the 15th Army in Pas de Calais and eastward. The reserve tank forces, given the name Panzer Group West and commanded by Leo Geyr Von Schweppenburg, came nominally under Rundstedt’s direct command.
May 1944 had been the time chosen in Washington in May 1943 for the invasion. Difficulties in assembling landing craft forced a postponement until June, but June 5 was fixed as the unalterable date by Eisenhower on May 17. As the day approached, and troops began to embark for the crossing, bad weather set in, threatening dangerous landing conditions. After tense debate, Eisenhower and his subordinates decided on a 24 hour delay, requiring the recall of some ships already at sea. Eventually, on the morning of June5, Eisenhower, announced, “O.K. We’ll go.” Within hours an armada of 3,000 landing craft, 2,500 other ships began to leave ports. That night, 822 aircraft, carrying parachutists or towing gliders roared overhead to the Normandy landing zones. They were a fraction of the air armada of 13,000 aircraft that would support D-Day.
The airborne troops were vanguard, and their landings were a heartening success. The American 82nd and 101st airborne divisions, dropping into a deliberately inundated zone at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula, suffered many casualties by drowning but nevertheless secured their objective. The British 6th Airborne Division seized its un-flooded objectives of the eastern end more easily, and its special task force also captured key bridges over the Caen Canal and Orne River. When the seaborne units began to land about 6:30 am on June 6, the British and Canadians on Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches overcame light opposition. So did the Americans at Utah. The American 1st Division at Omaha Beach, however, confronted the best of the German coast divisions, the 352nd, and was roughly handled. During the morning, its landing threatened to fail. Only dedicated local leadership eventually got the troops inland.
Meanwhile, the German high command, in the absence of Rommel, who was home on leave, began to respond. Hitler was initially unwilling to release the armored divisions for a counterattack. When he relented after midday, elements of the 21st Panzer Division drove into the gap between the British 3rd and Canadian 3rd divisions at Sword Beach and Juno Beach and almost reached the sea. Had they done so, the landings might have failed. Fierce resistance by British antitank gunners at Periers-sur-le-Dan turned the tide in the evening.
On June 7 the beachhead consisted of three separate sectors: the British and Canadian between Caen and Bayeux; that of the American 5th Corps, between Port-en-Bessin and Saint-Pierre-du-Mont; and that of the American 7th Corps, west of the Vire River behind Utah Beach. The narrow gap between Gold and Omaha at Port-en-Bessin was quickly closed, but it was not until June 12 that the American corps was able to join hands after a bitter battle to capture Carentan. The beachhead then formed a continuous zone, deepest southwest of Bayeux, where the 5th Corps had driven nearly 15 miles inland. Meanwhile, work had been proceeding pell-mell to complete the two artificial harbors, known by their code name, Mulberry. The outer breakwater of sunken ships was in place by June 11. The floating piers were half-finished by June19, when a heavy storm destroyed much of the material. The Americans then decided to abandon their Mulberry, while the British harbor was not in use until July. Most supplies meanwhile had to be beach-landed.
The price paid by the invasion forces was a stiff one. By evening on D-Day, the Allies had managed to land 130,000 men on the beaches, plus another 22,000 dropped by air. The entire assult force had suffered 8,600 casualties. No exact figures are possible, either for the number of men landed or for casualties, for D-Day alone. These figures are estimated as close as possible.
REFERENCES
Hastings, Max (1984). Overloard D-Day, June 6, 1944 New York, Simon and Schuster
Patrick, Stephen A. (1986). The Normandy Campaign Australia, Sun Books
Ambrose, Stephen A. (1994) D-Day New York, Simon and Schuster

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