Supreme Commander (66 page)

Specifically, the two generals wanted a tripartite statement to guarantee law, order and political justice, thus making it possible to create a mood in Germany that might lead to Hitler’s overthrow. They proposed that as soon as SHAEF had won a beachhead in Normandy Eisenhower should issue a statement summarizing the terms of surrender and calling on the Germans to lay down their arms. Smith said that “from all available evidence, in default of such declarations, it would be impossible to exploit the crisis in the German Army which will undoubtedly arise immediately after a successful Allied landing.”
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Hull brought up the matter with Roosevelt, who said first that he doubted that the Russians would agree with the proposal and second that SHAEF could certainly not deliver on promises made only by the British and Americans. On May 20 Eisenhower, in a memorandum to Smith, said that he recognized the force of Roosevelt’s objections, but that he still maintained something could be done. He tried drafting a tripartite statement himself but was not satisfied with the results. In the end, he guessed that if this obstacle could not be surmounted “then we had better drop the whole matter and let it ride as it is.”
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Although he never overcame the obstacle, Eisenhower did use his memorandum to Smith as the basis for a letter to Marshall, which the Chief passed on to Roosevelt.
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The President had earlier said that “he did not want the subject to be further considered without his approval,” but after looking at Eisenhower’s message he made an attempt to compose a statement. The attempt failed, partly because Churchill and Stalin were opposed to it, partly because Roosevelt could not decide how to deal with the quandary of war criminals. Any pronouncement that did not include a declaration of intended punishment for war crimes would leave the Allies open to charges of deception, but any announcement which did mention the subject would terrify the Germans and lead to even more intense resistance. As a final decision, no statement was made.
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Thus, in the three major political areas in which he tried to exert an influence, Eisenhower had failed. Unconditional surrender remained the official policy, the occupation of Germany would be by zones, and the United States and United Kingdom would not formally recognize the FCNL as the Provisional Government of France, nor even give Eisenhower clear-cut permission to deal with De Gaulle. Important as all these matters were, however, they did not have priority among Eisenhower’s concerns. His interest in politics was peripheral. His main concern was OVERLORD itself, and to it he continued to devote by far the great bulk of his time and energy.

All the problems of modern warfare generally, and of Operation OVERLORD specifically, fell on the Supreme Commander. Everyone else had a single given role to play and could concentrate on one set of problems; Eisenhower’s worries were infinite. He and his headquarters were the funnel through which everything passed, but even at SHAEF only Smith worked from Eisenhower’s point of view and shared the range and scope of his problems, and Smith did not have the awesome burden of command. All the others were experts struggling with their specialties. They could study and analyze a problem and make recommendations, but they could not decide and order. The bureaucracy did very well what it was created to do, but its limitations were obvious. Someone had to give it direction; someone had to be able to take all the information the bureaucracy gathered, make sense out of it and impose order on it; someone had to decide; someone had to take the responsibility. If the operation failed, the CCS could not fire the bureaucracy.

It all came down to Eisenhower. This position put enormous pressure on him, pressure that increased geometrically with each day that passed in May. “Ike looks worn and tired,” Butcher noted on May 12. “The strain is telling on him. He looks older now than at any time since I have been with him.” It would get worse as D-Day got closer and innumerable problems came up each day, many unsolved and some unsolvable. Still, Butcher knew that all would turn out all right, that Eisenhower could take it. “Fortunately he has the happy faculty of bouncing back after a night of good sleep,” Butcher recorded, “or a ride on a horse or some exercise.”
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On May 6 Eisenhower told Marshall of some of his principal worries. “Our worst problems these days involve methods for removing underwater
obstacles,” he began, “production of Mulberries and all the other special equipment pertaining to artificial harbors, accuracy in weather predictions and perfection of methods for getting a completely co-ordinate assault—including airborne.” There were major concerns, but Eisenhower confessed that in the midst of all these great problems “some of my most intense irritations are caused” by trivial matters, such as Patton’s latest indiscreet statement about the United States and the United Kingdom running the world. Despite the pressure, Eisenhower concluded, “most of us are staying in very good health” and a spirit of optimism prevailed.
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As with most major seaborne assaults, OVERLORD’s overriding problem was that there were so many unknown factors. What would the weather be like on D-Day? If an Atlantic storm blew in, the air forces could not fly, the paratroopers could not drop, and the soldiers would at best be seasick and unable to fight. At worst, the landing craft would pile up on the beaches with the surf tossing them around like rubber balls. What was the state of the German defense? How effective was the Transportation Plan going to be? Could the Germans move reinforcements to the beachhead quickly? What about the artificial harbors, the mulberries and gooseberries? SHAEF had accepted the COSSAC plan of relying on them for supply until Cherbourg was captured and put in working order, but they were new implements of war and no one really knew whether or not they would work. Construction of them was behind schedule, and Admiral Cunningham told Eisenhower he was worried that he would not have enough tugs to tow the concrete barges from the places they were manufactured to the assembly points and thence across the Channel.
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The immediate task—getting ashore with troops—was going to be difficult. The Germans were feverishly working at improving their defenses, laying mines in the Channel, building up pillboxes and gun emplacements inland, clearing the local population from the coast and setting up observation posts, and trying to upgrade the quality of the troops themselves. Most of these measures, however, SHAEF officers had coped with before. They could be met and overcome. The serious unknown factor was the steel obstacles the Germans were placing all along the Atlantic coast. Some of the obstacles were multi-pointed at the top and would tear out the bottom of any landing craft passing over them. Others were simple steel stakes, made from I-beams or rails and sunk into the sand by water jet. They were capped with Teller mines. The Germans had started placing the obstacles at the high-water mark and by May 1944 had
covered the area halfway to the low-water mark. This development was one of the reasons SHAEF had decided to land shortly after low tide, accepting the risk of passing troops over an exposed beach. Engineers could clear the obstacles as the tide came in. A further advantage of landing at low tide was that landing craft could run ashore, disgorge the troops, and then be floated free by the rising tide.

Eisenhower had to make an attempt to probe the mind of the enemy commander, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, a tight-cheeked old aristocratic professional officer who was something of a pessimist. Von Rundstedt had two army groups under him; the one Eisenhower would be attacking was under Rommel’s command. What these men thought, and what their relationship to Hitler was, would make an enormous difference in the way the Germans fought the campaign. In trying to find out what the Germans intended to do, Eisenhower relied on SHAEF and Twenty-first Army Group intelligence for information. From his G-2 people, for example, Eisenhower learned many things: that the Germans thought there was a possibility that the Allies would invade Norway; that they expected the main attack at Pas de Calais; that they had fifty-eight divisions in France (but that the divisions had been cut in size from 17,000 to 13,000); that they had no general reserve of troops and if they wished to strengthen themselves in France would have to do so at the expense of the fighting fronts in Russia or Italy; and that Rommel wanted to meet the attack head on and drive the invaders back into the sea.
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What G-2 could not supply Eisenhower with was detailed information on personality conflicts and strategic differences of opinion within the German high command. In these areas, he would have to rely on his intuition.

Eisenhower knew that traditional German tactics emphasized mobility, and Von Rundstedt was a traditional soldier. Rommel was not, and Eisenhower realized that Rommel, greatly impressed by American armor and mobility, would try to convince Von Rundstedt that he should meet the invaders on the beach, which meant a linear, static defense with the emphasis on holding ground and the primary dependence on concrete fortifications. After his experiences in the later stages of the Tunisian campaign, Rommel would probably view with skepticism any proposal that relied on moving large forces to the battlefield for a counterattack, since he would fear that Allied airplanes would strafe, bomb, and cut up the columns while they were on the road. But Rommel was the subordinate, Von Rundstedt the superior, and Von Rundstedt would probably want a defense in depth with large-scale counterattacks spearheaded by armored striking power. In contrast to Rommel’s probable program, this
would mean keeping the bulk of the German strength back from the coast. Beyond the Rommel-Von Rundstedt disagreement there was Hitler. Throughout the war Eisenhower counted on Hitler’s “conqueror mentality,” with its empahsis on holding every piece of ground, to make his task easier. Eisenhower’s own guess was that the Germans would follow Rommel’s ideas and try to force a decisive battle on the beachhead.

Eisenhower had experience in meeting either type of response. At Sicily the beach had been hard but the counterattack soft; at Salerno the troops had no trouble getting ashore but Von Kesselring’s counterattack had almost driven the Allies back into the sea. Eisenhower decided that in Normandy the Germans would put the emphasis on static defense; OVERLORD planners therefore concentrated on getting ashore and staying.

One vexing problem was choosing the day to go ashore. Eisenhower had already moved the target date back from May 1 to June 1 in order to have the benefit of extra time for training and procuring landing craft; now he had to decide on the exact date. June 1 was Y-Day; that is, the assault would occur at the first favorable opportunity after June 1. Many factors went into Eisenhower’s selection of D-Day, but a low tide shortly after dawn was the major requirement. The troops had to hit the beach at low tide and the commanders wanted a full day in order to get established. The navies wanted to cross the Channel under cover of darkness but wanted daylight to facilitate their bombardment of the coast. The air force needed a full moon the night before D-Day to make parachute and glider operations possible. What Eisenhower needed, then, was a day on which low tide came just about at dawn, with a moon the night before. In June this combination of conditions came only in two periods, early in the month and at the middle of the month. On May 8 Eisenhower made his decision. D-Day would be Y-Day plus 3, that is, June 4, when the conditions of the moon and tide would be the most favorable. And although the conditions would not be quite so good the following two days, they would be satisfactory, so by picking June 4 Eisenhower gave himself leeway.
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The plans for the air drops reflected Eisenhower’s concern with getting ashore. The U.S. 82d and 101st Airborne would drop on the Cotentin Peninsula, with the British 6th Airborne coming in east of Caen. The paratroopers’ task was to provide immediate tactical assistance to the landings through the seizure of bridges, road junctions, and the like. They would keep German forces at the front occupied, not attempt to engage or disrupt the enemy’s strategic reserve.

The concept ran counter to Marshall’s wishes. At the beginning of the war the Chief had had great hopes for the paratroopers as a new element in warfare, but his hopes had not been realized. Early in 1944 he told Eisenhower that this had been a disappointment to him and he thought SHAEF could do much more to exploit its command of the air with respect to the ground battle. Marshall thought there had been “a lack in conception,” caused by a piecemeal approach, with “each commander grabbing at a piece to assist his particular phase of the operation.” If he had been given command of OVERLORD, Marshall said, he would have insisted on a single, large paratroop operation, “even to the extent that should the British be in opposition I would carry it out exclusively with American troops.” Marshall suggested to Eisenhower that he make his drop south of Evreux, nearly seventy-five miles inland from Caen, in the greatest strength possible. There were four good airfields near Evreux which could be quickly taken, with a resulting build-up of the force.