The D-Day story you’re about to read was originally written as historical background for a walking route through the Normandy landing beaches (to be published later). But the material is so fascinating that it stands perfectly well on its own, so here it is. Everything you’ll read is based on Stephen E. Ambrose’s book D-Day.
Before we get to the impressive operation of the landing itself, “Operation Overlord,” let’s look at an operation that was just as impressive: the deception operation, “Operation Fortitude.” Just as much effort went into the deception operation, and it worked. The deception had two stages.
In the first stage, the goal was to mislead the Germans about where the landing would take place. But that alone wasn’t enough, because once the landing began, the mobile elite forces the Germans held in many locations would reach the landing beach within a short time, before a beachhead could be established there. So there was a second stage of deception, flipping the first on its head: make the Germans believe that the landing they’d spotted was only a diversionary attack, that the “real” landing would happen elsewhere, so there was no reason to rush forces to the site of a “mere” diversion.
The Allies’ Operation Fortitude Deception Plan
The double deception plan had many components. Very many.
First of all, from the start, the natural landing spot was the Pas de Calais area, across from Dover in England. That’s where the Channel is narrowest, where the route to Paris is shortest, so obviously that’s where the Allies would land. So, precisely because it was so obvious, they would land anywhere but there. But the Germans knew that too, so the Allies needed to bring them back around to believing the landing really would be at Calais after all.
Across from Calais, in southeast England, the Allies built up an enormous concentration of forces: thousands of tanks, thousands of landing craft, rigs, planes, gliders, everything a landing force would need. All of it made of cardboard, papier-mâché, inflated rubber, and canvas. Field kitchens sent smoke into the sky from embers that were fed again and again. High-ranking “commanders” wearing the insignia of divisions that didn’t exist wandered the streets. Radio operators carelessly transmitted encoded messages between army headquarters that had never been created.
Not only was the location of the phantom force misleading, but its mere “existence” doubled the apparent size of the real Allied force. So when the actual landing began, the Germans assumed that most of the force hadn’t taken part in it, meaning it would land elsewhere. In fact, the Germans believed the Allies had the ability to land about twenty divisions in the first wave. In reality, they only had the means to bring six to the beach. This meant that once those six landed, the Germans only grew more confident that it was merely a diversion, and that the other fourteen divisions would land somewhere else any moment.
General Patton, whom the Germans considered the Allies’ finest commander, was kept out of the first stage of the landing and sent off touring the Dover area instead, obviously because he was “commanding” the “real” landing force there. And there’s more: in the weeks and months before the landing, the Allies heavily bombed the Calais area, while largely avoiding significant bombing of the real landing area in Normandy. That came at a heavy price, of course.
The bombing of the Calais area had no tactical value whatsoever, while not bombing the real landing area meant leaving the fortifications, bridges, and roads intact for German use. In the hours before the landing an effort would be made to fix the damage, mainly with heavy naval guns, but that could only accomplish so much.
There were more components to Operation Fortitude. Let’s call them “seasoning,” since they weren’t the main dish, but they added flavor. “Drunk” soldiers would let loose in bars across southern England, talking loudly about the women of Calais waiting for them with open arms, German prisoners of war overheard their guards “preparing” to transfer them to Calais right after the landing to set up POW camps there. And on, and on. All of it, naturally, reached German intelligence. Did we mention massive resources? We did.
But it was worth it. The deception succeeded beyond all expectations. It took the Germans nearly a week after the Normandy landings to realize they weren’t a diversion but the real thing. Nearly three weeks after D-Day, on June 26, the German 15th Army, the main counterattack force, remained north of the Seine, 200 kilometers from the landing beaches as the crow flies, or 400 kilometers by road, over bombed-out roads and shattered bridges. By the time they got there, if they ever did, the Allies would already have their own armies in France.
The Landing on the Normandy Beaches
That covers the deception. I got a little carried away with enthusiasm there, because to me it’s the most brilliant part of the whole Normandy landing story. Now, to the landing itself.
After a massive bombardment by more than five thousand bombers, escorted by a similar number of fighter planes, Allied forces began landing along a stretch of coastline about eighty kilometers wide. On Sword Beach, the easternmost beach, the British 3rd Infantry Division landed, along with the British 6th Airborne Division, which landed from the air.
On Juno Beach, the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division landed. On Gold Beach, the British 50th Infantry Division landed. On Omaha Beach, considered from the start the toughest of them all (and it turned out to be exactly that), two American infantry divisions landed, the 1st and the 29th. On Utah Beach, the American 4th Infantry Division landed. In addition, on the night before the landing, two American airborne divisions, the 82nd and the 101st, were dropped on the western edges of the landing beaches to block German armored reinforcements from reaching the area.
The Battles on the Landing Beaches
I won’t go into the details of the fighting on each beach. But here’s a summary:
Sword Beach: The main objective was to capture the city of Caen and the nearby Carpiquet airfield. That goal wasn’t achieved until six weeks later. Chaos reigned on the beach, as the additional landing waves crowded onto a shrinking strip of sand as the tide came in. Still, the beachhead held. By nightfall there were about 30,000 soldiers on the beach. Casualties: 630.
Juno Beach: The same tide problem repeated here. The objectives weren’t achieved, but the beachhead was widened and pushed deeper inland. More than twenty thousand soldiers were on the beach by nightfall. About 1,000 casualties.
Gold Beach: Resistance on the beach was lighter than expected. By nightfall the forces had advanced about 10 kilometers inland, but failed to capture Bayeux, the main objective. 25,000 men held the captured ground, at the cost of about 1,000 casualties.
Omaha Beach: Hell itself. Of 32 amphibious tanks, 27 sank or were destroyed. As a result, the infantry landed with almost no support. Many were dropped far from shore and had to swim in. Landing craft were destroyed by mortar fire. Others reached the beach safely, but the soldiers stepped off into machine-gun fire that cut down entire platoons. Of the 34,000 men put ashore, about 4,000 became casualties. The beachhead was established, though the forces advanced no more than 2.5 kilometers inland.
Utah Beach: The landing craft drifted about two kilometers south of the planned spot. Resistance was light. By nightfall there were 23,000 soldiers on the beach, at the cost of 197 casualties. The objectives weren’t achieved, but the beachhead held.
The End of the Beginning, or the Beginning of the End?
In the end, despite all the chaos, General Eisenhower was able to tear up the retreat speech he’d prepared in advance in case the invasion failed, and read the victory speech instead. Most of the planned objectives weren’t achieved, and it would take another two and a half months before Normandy was fully under control. But contrary to Winston Churchill’s famous words, “many people think this is the beginning of the end, but it would be more accurate to say this is the end of the beginning,” in this case it truly was the beginning of the end.
Speaking of Churchill: he insisted on joining the landing forces himself. General Eisenhower threatened to resign over it, but Churchill wouldn’t budge. In the end he was forced to give up the idea only after being told that if he insisted, King George would come along too.
There’s no doubt that the Normandy landing was, as I said, the beginning of the end of the war. The Germans were forced to pull forces from the Eastern Front, which was harder fighting but far from Germany’s own border, to the Western Front, which now threatened the vital Ruhr region. But about two weeks later the Russians launched Operation Bagration, in which the German army was crushed and forced to retreat from most of Soviet territory, as the Red Army pushed into Poland and approached Germany’s border from the east. That’s how the pincers began closing in on Germany.
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