Posted on 06/06/2004 6:04:00 PM PDT by Pokey78
The success of D-Day is now a historical fact. Little thought is wasted on the possibility of its failure. Yet D-Day might have failed. It is not to indulge in fashionable "contrafactual" history to raise the possibility. General Eisenhower, supreme Allied commander, made provision for that disaster.
On the morning of June 6 he wrote a note, to be issued as a press release if things turned out wrong. It read: "Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine."
It was characteristic of Eisenhower, never a man to dodge responsibility, to be ready to take the blame for failure. In the event, he crumpled the draft and stuck it in a pocket, from which it was retrieved later by his aide.
Yet, as Eisenhower recognised, as did Churchill and Roosevelt, and perhaps even the supremely confident land commander, Montgomery, D-Day could have gone wrong. The plan called for 150,000 troops to be landed by sea and air, from 4,000 ships, supported by 10,000 aircraft. The numbers were calculated to overwhelm the German defenders, particularly in the air. What could have miscarried?
The first and most imponderable factor was the weather. The landing plan for D-Day required a day of calm sea for the troops to get ashore, followed by several days of moderate weather to facilitate the build-up. As bad luck would have it, June 1944 was an unsettled month. Part of the great armada set out on the night of June 4, timed to arrive on June 5, only to be recalled because the weather was forecast to worsen. A different weather forecast on June 5 emboldened Eisenhower to repeat the order to go.
The landing force just got away with it. Even so, conditions on the beaches were turbulent. At four of the six beaches, a combination of choppy seas and German resistance made for losses. At a fifth beach, Omaha, strong German resistance and rough seas, which sank almost all the amphibious tanks, caused heavy casualties.
Eisenhower's boldness in deciding to persist with the landing on June 6 was admirable. A more cautious commander might have postponed the landing again. Had he done so, it is unlikely that D-Day could have been mounted during June 1944. The tides were wrong for several subsequent weeks; as things happened, moreover, an unseasonal but fierce storm from June 19 to 22 made amphibious operations impossible.
These dates are important because, during June 1944, Hitler's secret weapons programme was approaching fruition. He had two revenge weapons, as he called them, the V1 flying bomb and the V2 rocket. The V1 was the further advanced and, on June 13, the first to be launched against Britain landed on a railway bridge in the East End. During the next three months, more than 4,000 were to land on British soil.
The V1 was a crude weapon of mass destruction. It carried a ton of high explosives but the average error of its guidance system was 30 miles from the desired point of impact. Nevertheless, against a big target, it did terrible damage. The V1 that hit the Guards Chapel on June 25 killed 120 people.
Had Eisenhower been compelled to postpone D-Day from June to July, Hitler would undoubtedly have shifted the aiming point of the flying bombs from London to the invasion ports of Southampton, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Weymouth. Flying bombs, however inaccurate, falling on the masses of invasion shipping in southern English ports and on the camps holding the invasion troops, would have inflicted serious damage and heavy casualties. The whole timetable of the invasion would have been disrupted.
A postponement of the invasion once the armada had put to sea would also have revealed to the German defenders where the landings were to fall. German maritime and aerial surveillance, hampered as it was by Allied counter-measures, could not have failed, at the second attempt, to identify that the British and Americans had chosen Normandy as their landing place. Logically, they would have reacted accordingly, bringing down the divisions stationed in northern France to reinforce those in the attack area.
It is possible, however, that the Germans might have come to the conclusion that Normandy was the danger area in any case. Hitler had belatedly come to that conclusion himself. A postponement brought about by bad weather might have encouraged him to move divisions from all over France to oppose the landings. He had 50 divisions in France before D-Day, distributed equally around all her coasts, including the Mediterranean and Atlantic. A redeployment, which the French Resistance would have reported, would have made the Channel coast formidably difficult to attack. Eisenhower and Montgomery might have had to think again, with no guarantee that a reorganised D-Day, launched in a different place, would have worked.
A second D-Day, moreover, would have been a later D-Day, and it might not have been possible to launch it in 1944 at all. With the extra time, Hitler could have pushed ahead with his V weapons programme. The V2, against which Britain had no defence, was first launched operationally on September 8. Thereafter, it began to arrive at the rate of 200 a month. The rate could have been increased. Alarmingly, Hitler was meanwhile proceeding with the development of an atomic bomb. A V2 with a nuclear warhead would, for Hitler, have been a war-winning weapon.
Fortunately, Hitler's nuclear scientists were less capable than his rocket technologists. When their work was eventually assessed by Allied scientists after the war, it was found that they had several years to complete before their nuclear device would have been practicable. Nevertheless, a D-Day postponed until 1945 might have allowed them just the time and provided the impetus they needed.
We might have even more reason than we recognise to pay our tributes to the D-Day veterans and to thank them for what they achieved. It made the difference between victory and what could have been disaster.
History channel and NBC have done a great job tonight honouring these men. If there is anything that puts you off war, is to hear the tragic tales of slaughter from old soldiers.
God Bless them all!
I have always felt that one MAJOR reason that D-Day didn't fail is that the mad little corporal didn't leave the strat to the High Command. Hitlers ego, ignorance and rule by fear scuppered his plans oe worked against him time and again. I often shudder to think what the German forces might have accomplished if someone who wasn't utterly egomaniacal were in command.
Eisenhower dared.
If Rommel had been on the spot, there is not much doubt things would have taken a bad turn.
I watched IKE on the A and E channel tonight. (Recorded onthe DVR). I was impressed with the amount of planning and huge amount of data that had to be considered, with the weather being such a huge constraint.
I am thankful we had men of such courage to both plan and implement the action.
It struck me, however, that an action such as this could never be done in secrecy today. The satellite and overhead intelligence services available would make it practically impossible in a major conflict.
In addition, the press would find some way to find out what was happening blow the whistle as soon as possible.
I despise the media more every day!
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