Allied commanders knew from intelligence sources that the panzer divisions were being held in reserve, though they thought Rundstedt had control of them, not Hitler. Even so, they expected a delay before they were released to Rommel. This opened the window of opportunity the Allies needed to build strong beachheads. If they could hold on to the fifth day they would have fifteen divisions on shore, Bernard Montgomery, 21st Army Group commander and chief of land forces, told senior commanders on April 7, 1944. Even though he estimated the Germans could bring in six panzer divisions by that time, they would be unable to break up the lodgments. From that point on, Allied power would rise inexorably, making the outcome—the destruction of the German army in the west—inevitable.
Selection of June 5, 1944, as D-Day was based on combinations of the moon, tide, and the time of sunrise. The Allies wanted to cross the Channel at night so darkness would conceal direction and strength of the attacks. They wanted a moon for the airborne drops, and they needed forty minutes of daylight ahead of the ground assault to complete bombing runs and preparatory naval bombardments. But the actual day of the attack would depend upon weather forecasts. Nevertheless, postponing the invasion beyond June 6 or 7 would involve rescheduling the entire operation and problems of enormous magnitude.
As the date approached, authorities cut off all of southern England from the rest of the country. No unauthorized person could go in either direction. Logistical officers charted every encampment, barracks, vehicle park, and unit. They scheduled movements of every unit to reach its embarkation point at the exact time the vessels were ready to receive it. The assault troops—the first wave of the invasion—went into cantonments surrounded by barbed wire to prevent any soldier from leaving once he’d learned his part in the attack.
As Eisenhower wrote, “The mighty host was tense as a coiled spring,” ready to vault across the Channel in the greatest amphibious assault ever attempted.
On the morning of June 4, Eisenhower and his commanders met with the meteorologic committee, headed by RAF Group Captain J. M. Stagg. The news was not good. Stagg predicted low clouds, high winds, and strong waves on June 5. The naval commander, British Admiral Sir Bertram H. Ramsey, was neutral. Montgomery urged going on with the invasion on schedule. Tedder disagreed.
Eisenhower decided to postpone the invasion for one day. Since some vessels already had set out to sea, they had to be called back. Some in the Irish Sea had trouble gaining ports, refueling, and readying to move a day later.
At 3:30 A.M., June 5, a wind of almost hurricane force, along with sheets of rain, pounded Eisenhower’s operational headquarters at Portsmouth on the south coast. At the naval center a mile away Captain Stagg had surprisingly good news: by the morning of June 6 a period of relative calm would ensue for about thirty-six hours. After that, the prospects were for more bad weather. The consequences of delay were so great that Eisenhower quickly announced his decision to go ahead with the invasion on June 6.
Orders went out at once. From the ports, 5,000 vessels put out to sea.
Winston Churchill informed Eisenhower that he was going to observe the invasion from a ship immediately off the Normandy shore. Eisenhower told him he could not do so. Churchill responded that he could name himself as a member of a ship’s company, and Eisenhower couldn’t stop him. King George VI heard about Churchill’s scheme, and announced that if the prime minister felt it necessary to go, he, the king, felt it equally his duty to participate at the head of his troops. With that, Churchill backed down.
On each of the five beaches—two American, two British, one Canadian— forces equivalent to one division were to land on D-Day. On each of the beaches, save Omaha, the defenders were static or garrison divisions, made up of older men or non-German volunteers, with no great enthusiasm and little or no battle experience.
Omaha was the sole exception. There on guard was the 352nd Infantry Division, a combat-toughened field force that had moved in three months before from service in Russia, a fact that had escaped Allied intelligence. One regiment of the 352nd was guarding the four miles of steep bluffs that rose behind the Omaha landing sectors. The other two regiments were a few miles inland at Bayeux. But one regiment of the 716th Division (a static force) had been incorporated into the command structure of the 352nd. Therefore, two full regiments were in place and waiting at Omaha.
The plan was for bombers to shatter the defensive positions on all five beaches in the first few minutes of daylight on June 6. Meanwhile, naval guns would bombard the beaches, while the landing craft approached.
Before any of this happened, however, the paratroops landed—16,000 Americans behind the Utah beaches at the base of the Cotentin peninsula; 8,000 British east of Caen.
The first paratroops came in by parachute and glider in the early hours in the dark. The foul weather and the inexperience of some transport pilots caused most of the Americans and British to be scattered far and wide of their objectives.
The British 6th Parachute Division, though suffering extreme losses in landings or because pilots veered from their assigned targets because of antiaircraft fire, nevertheless secured the area east of the Orne River, including the “Pegasus bridge” over the Caen canal, vital for linking traffic on the main coast road.
The job of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division was to take the four causeways leading to Utah beach; the task of the 82nd Airborne Division was to seize bridges inland. The assignments required the paratroops to land at precise drop zones. It didn’t happen. Many of the aircraft were too high or too far off course, or were flying too fast to see the drop zones. Many pilots banked away to avoid antiaircraft fire, forcing the troopers to jump blind.
The result was chaos. Three-quarters of the paratroopers dropped so wide of their targets they never took any part in the attacks. Scattered through the countryside, they formed small groups, wandering for days, skirmishing occasionally with German patrols. Oddly the confusion helped. The Germans could not figure out Allied intentions and launched no strong attacks on the scattered men.
Major General Maxwell Taylor, commander of the 101st, could assemble only 1,000 men by the night of June 6, but was able to secure the exits to the causeways. The 82nd Division was unable to seize bridges to the west because much of the land was under water. However, the main objective was the village of St.-Mere-Eglise, five miles west of Utah beach, on a road leading northward into the Cotentin and southward to the town of Carentan and connection with Omaha beach.
Thirty men fell into the village itself, twenty of them right on the central square into the midst of the German garrison of a hundred men. Within a few minutes all the paratroops had been killed or captured. Private John Steele’s parachute caught on the church steeple, where he dangled for hours, playing dead, before finally being taken prisoner.
Other 82nd Airborne men assembled outside the village, and drove the Germans out by dawn.
In the British sector, Montgomery held up the landing for an hour and a half after the Americans landed in order to bombard the landing sites for two hours, four times as long as at Omaha. Large numbers of American B- 17s and B-24s dropped their bomb loads on the targets, protected by some of the nearly 5,000 fighters the Allies had committed to the D-Day landings.
The land behind the flat beaches was low, and offered no great challenges to the British. The sector was defended largely by the 716th Division, containing many Poles and Ukrainians, and it put up a lackluster defense. The only threat from the air was from two FW-190 fighters based at Lille that made a single bold sweep along the beaches, guns blazing, before banking away and returning to base. On a cliff west of Le Hamel on Gold beach on the west a unit of the 352nd Division mounted an 88-millimeter antiaircraft gun with a clear field of fire. A round struck a landing ship, wrecking its engine room and turning it broadside up on the beach. Eventually a tank carrying a heavy mortar lobbed a forty-pound “flying dustbin” into the 88’s position and destroyed it. The British 50th Division, which landed at Gold, pushed four miles inland, but failed to capture the D-Day objective, Bayeux.
All across the British sector tanks fitted with flails moved up from the beaches, blowing up mines in their path. The tanks created lanes through which the infantry and vehicles could advance.
On Juno, the Canadian beach in the center, the Germans were waiting. Mines and shells sank many of the 306 landing craft. At Bernieres, the 8th Canadian Brigade arrived ahead of its flail tanks. The assault regiment, the Queen’s Own Rifles, lost half of one company killed in the 100 yards it had to traverse from sea to sea wall. The
