Posted on 06/26/2004 5:13:06 PM PDT by RWR8189
The extraordinary success of D-Day
D-Day
by Martin Gilbert
Wiley & Sons, 240 pp., $19.95
Omaha Beach
D-Day, June 6, 1944
by Joseph Balkoski
Stackpole, 410 pp., $26.95
Ten Days to D-Day
Citizens and Soldiers on the Eve of the Invasion
by David Stafford
Little Brown, 400 pp., $26.95
D-Day
The Greatest Invasion--A People's History
by Dan van der Vat
Bloomsbury, 176 pp., $40
The D-Day Atlas
Anatomy of the Normandy Campaign
by Charles Messenger
Thames & Hudson, 176 pp., $34.95
The D-Day Experience
From the Invasion to the Liberation of Paris
by Richard Holmes
Andrews McMeel, 64 pp., $39.95
WITH THE BIAS OF HINDSIGHT, success on D-Day, June 6, 1944, now seems inevitable--a simple matter of momentum. The Germans had been driven out of North Africa, Sicily, and the southern half of Italy, and lost all the initiative in World War II. Hitler had made two egregious mistakes: the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the reckless declaration of war against the United States six months later. The German army was over-stretched, weary, and dispirited, and its senior officers already plotting to assassinate Hitler. Old men and boys were all that was left to guard the Atlantic Coast from an Allied assault. The German U-Boat threat at sea had collapsed, partly because of one of the greatest Allied achievements of the war, the cracking of the German code, Ultra. The Luftwaffe was a shadow of its old self. The German homeland was under massive bombing attack, day and night.
All of this suggests that when Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, wrote a statement to be given to the press if the D-Day landings were thrown back, he was indulging a weak pessimism. He must have known victory was all but certain.
Ike knew nothing of the kind. The night before D-Day, he said, "I hope to God I know what I'm doing." The success of the invasion--success that made it a turning point in history--was not inevitable. It was contingent on many factors, perhaps the most important was the deception of the Germans. The British and American scheme known as Operation Fortitude worked, persuading Germans a huge army commanded by General George Patton was left behind in England on D-Day, ready to stage the real assault on the continent on a later day at a different site. The belief the landings on five beaches of Normandy were merely a feint was firmly held by Hitler and the German high command for weeks after D-Day. They feared a larger attack near Calais, 150 miles away, at the shortest point for crossing the English Channel, or maybe in Belgium or the Netherlands, or even in Norway. As a result, nineteen German divisions and more than 500,000 men were deployed near Calais, and more than 372,000 were kept in Norway to ward off a fictitious joint Anglo-Soviet operation.
For that matter, what if Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox and the best of the German generals, had had his way? He was assigned to erect the coastal defense, the Atlantic Wall, from France to the Low Countries. His plan for a barrier might well have impeded an invasion, if only he'd been given the resources to build it. Even the scaled-back version of his wall led to thousands of Allied deaths on D-Day. Rommel also failed to gain command of four Panzer divisions that, if rushed to Normandy, might have made D-Day a victory for the Germans. And what if Rommel had been in Normandy on June 6 rather than on a brief holiday in Germany? Or what if Hitler's secret weapon, the V-1 and V-2 rockets, had been available earlier? The first of these flying bombs was launched against England a week after D-Day, too late to change the course of the war. And what if the best-kept secret in war since the Trojan horse--the actual date and location of D-Day--had leaked, as it almost did? Finally, what if Winston Churchill had let his qualms about invading France prevail?
ALL THIS UNCERTAINTY of success is what prompted the ringing of church bells across a relieved America once a Normandy beachhead had been secured at least temporarily on June 6. This doubtfulness, too, plays a role in today's near-obsessive focus on D-Day here and in England.
But there are also two bigger reasons for attention to D-Day. The first is the fact the D-Day assault on sea, land, and air was the largest military operation in history. And the second is the fact that D-Day won the war. Within three months, Paris had fallen to the Allies. By March, Allied troops had crossed the Rhine. And within a year, Hitler had committed suicide.
Next to Gettysburg, D-Day is the subject of more books than any battle in which Americans took part. On each ten-year anniversary, more and more are published, and this year, the sixtieth, is no exception. For many readers, The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan, published in 1959, remains the classic account. On the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in 1994, Stephen Ambrose came out with D-Day: The Climactic Battle of World War II, a bit longer and more comprehensive than Ryan's study but just as readable.
Of the dozens of new books, six are worth noticing. D-Day by Sir Martin Gilbert, the prolific British historian and official biographer of Churchill, looks at the invasion from a strategic standpoint. An American, Joseph Balkoski, concentrates on the botched and bloody American landing in Omaha Beach. In Ten Days to D-Day, David Stafford, another British writer, traces the lives of eight people caught up in D-Day, including an American paratrooper, a French schoolteacher, and a female British secret agent who parachuted into France.
D-Day lends itself to picture books and maps. D-Day: The Greatest Invasion--A People's History by Dan van der Vat is as good a collection of pictures (with extensive explanatory notes) as you'll find. The D-Day Atlas by Charles Messenger is exactly what its title says it is: lots of maps, and understandable ones at that. The D-Day Experience by Richard Holmes takes a multimedia approach, with a CD-ROM, pictures, maps, and replicas of World War II documents--all in all, informative and quite entertaining.
Gilbert in particular is enthralled with the program of deception and the fits and starts leading up to June 6. "One way in which failure would be assured for [D-Day] was if the Germans could throw into Normandy sufficient divisions to overwhelm the Allied forces, not only on the day of the landings and in the week after that, but even in the month after the landings," he writes. They didn't because they were deceived into thinking D-Day itself was a deception. On D-Day, "the art of strategic deception had found its finest hour," Gilbert insists.
Initially it was President Franklin Roosevelt and Eisenhower who were wary of committing an invasion of Europe, wanting instead to emphasize the Pacific front. Then, at Casablanca in January 1943, they opted for an attack on Western Europe. But Churchill had second thoughts, wondering if the Italian campaign might be an adequate second front. A few months later, Churchill developed a preference for a landing in northern Norway, called Operation Jupiter. Gilbert describes this as a "serious" alternative to Normandy, but "only if circumstances were to render" a Normandy invasion "impossible."
TO GET THE MOST out of Balkoski's Omaha Beach, it will help to have read an overview of D-Day such as Gilbert's, Ryan's, or Ambrose's. Balkoski's minute-by-minute account dwells on the most narrow of details, but it is nonetheless riveting and aided by quotations from many of the participants. He doesn't sugarcoat a thing, noting repeatedly that the air attack (which General Omar Bradley said would be "the Greatest Show on Earth") and the naval bombardment failed to hit their targets. Nor were engineers able to sweep away mines and obstacles effectively. So infantrymen were left defenseless as they clambered out of landing craft. About 2,000 of the 4,500 deaths on D-Day occurred at Omaha Beach, mostly before the soldiers had come close to reaching the shore. They were at the mercy of a larger and better trained German force than expected.
Yet within three hours of the 6:30 A.M. landing, Omaha was a success. How so? Balkoski offers "four main reasons: the Germans were surprised; the Americans applied overwhelming force; American soldiers were superbly prepared for the task; and the German defenses were incomplete." Of these four reasons, the biggest unknown on D-Day was how the American soldiers would perform. Wellington said the battle of Waterloo was won on the "playing fields of Eton." Balkoski says, "victory on Omaha Beach was achieved on the training grounds of the Assault Training Center" in England, where American troops spent many months.
Pinned on the beach, officers realized they had to change plans. With passage inland blocked, they would have to climb the bluffs to survive. Without waiting for orders, they seized the initiative. Colonel George Taylor of the First Division shouted to his men, "Get the hell off the beach! If you stay on, you're dead or about to die." A Ranger officer yelled out, "Rangers, lead the way." Captain James Pence of the First Division jumped up and screamed, "Come on, you bastards, let's go! If we're going to die, we might as well die a little further inland." In all these instances, their men followed.
AND THEN THERE WAS Brigadier General Norman Cota of the Twenty-Ninth Infantry Division. "Instances of generals being precisely in the right place at the right time are a rarity in military history," writes Balkoski, "but this was undeniably one of those cases." To the astonishment of riflemen lying prone on Omaha Beach, "Cota walked upright, unflinchingly, daring the enemy to bring him down....Cota drew stares from the unbelieving GIs as he earnestly waved his Colt pistol in the air, offering frequent shouts of advice and encouragement in his harsh workingman's accent." Finding a brave leader, the soldiers rose and fought their way off the beach.
Of D-Day, Balkoski says history gives it meaning to its soldiers, alive or dead. "D-Day was the decisive chapter of a twentieth-century Iliad, and when no one remains alive who can declare, 'I was there,' the storytellers will carry on, in Homeric fashion, to preserve the tales of bygone warriors little different from those cast upon the shores of Troy," he writes. "The D-Day epic will be preserved, told and retold for as long as there are people who are devoted to their ancestors--and to freedom."
Indeed, it will be recalled, not as an inevitable success, but as a hard-fought victory.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
BUMP
Excellent piece.
Thanks for posting it.
We owe so much to those men and that generation of men and women! My parents and their brothers and sisters.
ping.
Standing Bump!
BUMP
No comment on today's "Anti-War" cowards that not only won't even fight cowardly terrorists, but condemn the rest of us for supporting a President with character that leads our troops in defense of America against the sneakiest bastards to ever attack her in the most cowardly way imaginable!!!
May they take their damn "Peace Symbol" and shove it up their differentials, collectively!!!
YEAH >>>>RIGHT!!!!
Only a couple of weeks ago was the anniversery of another
"D" day, that of Dunkirk.
What an amazing example of courage and heroism and one that made possible the D-day to come.
I know of two brothers who survived the invasion and are still alive. One brother went in on the first day and was wounded. The other brother went in on the third day. I wonder how many other American brothers were in their situation.
BTTT! great article!
Barnes makes one factual error, or rather, a misinterpretation, in calling Hitler's invasion of Russia a mistake. It WAS, of course a mistake--and a suicidal one at that--but aggressive eastern expansion was part of Nazi party doctirne from the very beginning. Invading Russia wasn't a choice. Hitler couldn't have made any other decision and remained true to the principles of Nazism.
Make sure your speakers are on loud when you click the linky pooh!
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