War Stories III (30 page)

Hitler was stunned by how quickly the Abwehr sabotage venture had been wrapped up, and he forbade risking any more U-boats or agents on such operations. In July 1944, two German spies—not saboteurs—Erich Gimpel and William Curtis Colepaugh, were transported by U-boat to the coast of Maine with the desperate mission of collecting information on, among other things, the Manhattan Project, America's secret attempt to create an atomic bomb. They too were quickly apprehended, tried before a military tribunal, and sentenced to death.

Colepaugh and Gimpel had their sentences commuted to life in prison by President Harry Truman. Eventually, the sentences of all four surviving German agents, ill-fated saboteurs Dasch and Berger and captured spies Colepaugh and Gimpel, would be reduced to time served. But by the time
they were released, all that remained of the Führer and his Third Reich were ashes. The American home front that Adolf Hitler sought to sabotage and spy upon had armed and fed his enemies—and crushed his dream of world domination.

CHAPTER 11

OPERATION OVERLORD: NORMANDY 1941

T
hat was the kind of message no general would ever want to send. It meant that Operation Overlord—the biggest military maneuver ever conducted—had failed. General Dwight David Eisenhower penned the brief communiqué by hand on a small sheet of notepaper late on 5 June 1944, and put it in his pocket. He knew that the monumental effort to cross the channel and breach Hitler's Atlantic Wall across Normandy's beaches was that uncertain. Eisenhower was supreme allied commander and he shouldered that responsibility. He kept the note with him throughout D-Day, 6 June, and all of the next day. Thankfully, it remained in his pocket.

Overlord, a name chosen by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, had been in the planning stages for more than two years. Churchill had done
all in his power to delay or even avert the operation altogether—fearing a repeat of the carnage the British army had endured in the trenches of France during World War I. Churchill instead preferred a “Second Front” against Hitler that would have been launched through the Mediterranean, against what he called “Europe's soft underbelly.” The issue was finally decided in a series of conferences among the Allied leaders: Trident, in Washington, during May 1943; Quadrant, in Quebec the following August; and ultimately a meeting at Tehran with Stalin, in November.

 

Allied troops landing at Normandy.

Though the Soviets had done nothing to help the British when England stood alone against Hitler from June 1940 through the start of Barbarossa a year later, Stalin had been pleading for Churchill and Roosevelt to launch a second front that would relieve the pressure on his Red Army. Overlord was the answer he had been hoping for.

The decision to invade Fortress Europe across the beaches of Normandy had not been easy. The point of entry had to be within the operational radius of the British Spitfire—the most plentiful but short-range Allied fighter. The beach gradient had to be such that amphibious ships and landing craft could pull in to discharge their cargoes and then quickly withdraw.
“Sea room” offshore had to be sufficient to allow battleships, heavy cruisers, and destroyers to maneuver safely while delivering shore bombardment. And there had to be a major port or ports in the area to enable the offload of millions of tons of supplies and equipment to support a rapid buildup—and then effect a breakout from the beachhead.

Pas de Calais met all these requirements. It was a shorter dash across the English Channel—and far closer to Berlin—but the city had formidable German defenses. Eisenhower, Montgomery, and the Allied planners all agreed that Normandy's beaches weren't as well defended, and that the nearby ports at Cherbourg, Deauville, and Le Havre would suffice—if they could be captured early. Just in case, the Allies prepared two artificial harbors to be towed into position once the invasion beaches were secure.

These two “portable ports” were comprised of sixty-five vessels that would be sunk to create a breakwater, enormous concrete and steel caissons, piers that would rise and fall on the tide, and nearly one hundred floating concrete sea-walls—all of it codenamed “Mulberry
.
” It was all frightfully expensive, but well worth the cost—for the Wehrmacht intended to hold the Channel ports.

Against an expected Allied assault, Hitler arrayed ten armored and fifty infantry divisions organized in two army groups, B and G—all under General Gerd von Rundstedt, the Führer's senior commander in the west. Notwithstanding the nominal size of this force, the Germans were in fact stretched thin by the need to defend a 2,000-mile long coastline that ran from the Baltic to the Pyrenees.

In November 1943 Hitler had issued Führer Directive No. 51, ordering that the Atlantic Wall be strengthened. The following month he dispatched Erwin Rommel to command Army Group B and invigorate improvements in the defenses.

Over the next five months Rommel supervised a frenzy of construction. On potential landing beaches his engineers built thousands of “Belgian gates”—ten-foot-high steel structures topped with mines that were invisible at high tide. Long posts with mines affixed to them were dug into the sand at low tide. Tens of thousands of steel tetrahedrons—called
“hedgehogs”—were placed at the water's edge to rip open the hulls of landing craft.

Press-ganged Frenchmen and slave laborers were used to string hundreds of miles of barbed wire, pour concrete for gun emplacements, construct fortifications, and dig anti-tank ditches. By the end of May 1944, the beaches of France were isolated by rows of barbed wire and some
six million
land mines. For miles back from the beaches, open fields that could be used to land paratroopers or gliders were mined, flooded, and booby trapped with sharp steel spikes to impale airborne invaders.

By late spring, Rommel was convinced that his beach defenses were adequate to slow, but not stop, an Allied landing. His many painful encounters with the Allies in North Africa convinced him that if he also placed his Panzers well forward, he could achieve another Dieppe—or Dunkirk—and push the invaders back into the sea.

Positioning the German armor to repulse the invasion was crucial, and it became a major point of contention between von Rundstedt and Rommel. The Desert Fox, knowing personally the effectiveness of Allied air power, wanted his Panzers as close to the invasion beaches as possible. Von Rundstedt insisted that the armor be held back from the coast until the Allies were ashore, and be used to launch a massive counter-attack.

Hitler resolved the dispute the worst way possible—by placing most of the Panzer and mechanized units in a central reserve and under his personal command and control. Then, compounding his error, he positioned these mobile forces north of the River Seine, close to where the Allies were expected to come ashore at Calais.

That the German high command believed Calais to be the most likely invasion site is testament to Operation Fortitude—the remarkably effective deception and disinformation campaign that the Allies had been conducting for more than a year. To convince Hitler that the invasion would indeed come across the Channel narrows, a fictitious First U.S. Army Group—FUSAG—ostensibly commanded by General George Patton—“formed up” in Kent and Sussex. Empty tent-camps, plywood trucks, rubber tanks,
inflatable artillery pieces, dummy landing craft, and phony radio transmissions were employed—along with some less benign measures.

As they had prior to Operation Husky in Sicily, Allied counter-intelligence put false documents showing plans for an invasion across the Dover Straits on the body of a dead Briton and planted the corpse on the French coast. In January 1944, Abwehr agents in England—they had all been caught and “doubled”—began filing “intelligence reports” with controllers in Berlin about the Allied build-up along the Dover Straits. For weeks before D-Day, bridges, road intersections, and rail lines in and around Calais were bombed far more heavily than similar targets in Normandy. And though they did not know the true invasion site until the last minute, French resistance cells were repeatedly told to collect detailed intelligence on German dispositions near Calais.

Adding to German uncertainty was their lack of aerial or naval intelligence. Although nine
Kriegsmarine
E-boats managed to torpedo three LSTs—and kill 749 U.S. soldiers and sailors—during an Overlord training exercise at Slapton Sands on 29 April, the German naval command at Cherbourg didn't connect the event with preparations for an invasion at Normandy.

The Luftwaffe was likewise flying blind when it came to what was taking place just across the Channel. The build-up for Overlord would have been impossible to miss from the air: 6,500 ships and landing craft jammed into every port and anchorage from Falmouth in the south to Brighton in the north; more than 125 airfields—many of them brand-new—swarming with 12,000 Allied aircraft; nearly 500 miles of new railroad track jammed with hundreds of thousands of packed freight cars; and nearly a million American, British, and Canadian troops crammed into cantonments all over southeastern England.

All of this would have been visible from the air. But the Luftwaffe, with only 475 combat-effective aircraft left in France, had long ago been driven from the skies over England. From January 1944 to D-Day, fewer than thirty-five German aircraft survived the flight from France to England and back again.

 

General Eisenhower addressing troops before Operation Overlord.

Unwilling to trust deception and surprise alone, Eisenhower ordered that the approaches to the beachhead be sealed off just before the landings. Starting ninety-six hours before D-Day, thousands of American and British fighters and bombers swept over the French countryside, attacking every train, truck, bridge, or vehicle they could find. Though the Germans had by June become masters of camouflage, the aerial attacks were devastating.

By 4 June 1944, Gen. Eisenhower, Gen. Montgomery, Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley, and Gen. Miles Dempsey—the senior Allied commanders—had visited every assault unit scheduled to land at H-Hour in Normandy, a total of more than 160,000 troops. Their visits were an encouragement to those about to undertake one of the most difficult operations in history: an amphibious attack against the most heavily defended coastline in the world.

The British 3rd and Canadian 3rd Infantry Divisions—along with the 40th and 48th Royal Marine Commandos—would land on the far left at Juno, closest to Caen. Gold Beach would be assaulted by the British 50th Infantry Division, while the 56th Brigade of Royal Marine Commandos would attack near Arromanches. The American 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions and the 2nd Ranger Battalion would take Omaha beach, and Utah
would be seized by the 4th Infantry Division—followed by the 9th and 90th in order to seal off the Cotentin Peninsula.

High winds and seas and low clouds forced the assault—originally scheduled for 5 June—to be postponed for twenty-four hours. General Erwin Rommel, convinced by his meteorologists that the weather was too poor for any kind of action on the coast of France, left for a short leave in Germany. He brought with him a pair of French shoes for his wife's birthday on 6 June.

Montgomery and Eisenhower spent the last hours of 5 June with those who would secure the flanks of the beachhead and be the first to meet the enemy: the paratroopers of the British 6th, and the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. Bernard Ryan, a physician from upstate New York and a graduate of Harvard Medical School, would be among those first Americans to hit the ground on D-Day.