The end of the day at Omaha Beach. American men and equipment coming ashore in staggering numbers. One pilot thought, as he looked down on this scene, that Hitler must have been mad to think he could beat the United States. (U.S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS)
(U.S. COAST GUARD)
There was lots more to come. On D-Day plus one, troops of the 2nd Division move inland from Easy Red sector, near St.-Laurent, Omaha Beach. The column curves around a German strongpoint that did great damage on D-Day. (IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM)
A part of the continuous stream of men and equipment sailing from England to France, June 7. In the background, a Rhino ferry loaded with ambulances eases toward the beach. (U.S. COAST GUARD)
Only a handful of German planes dared to fly anywhere near the invasion beaches; those who did after dark on D-Day were greeted by a tremendous barrage (and only one in six of the shells being fired were tracers). In the foreground, an American transport vessel that hit a mine is slowly sinking. (U.S. COAST GUARD)
ALSO BY STEPHEN E. AMBROSE
To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian
The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany
Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869
Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals
The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys: The Men of World War II
Americans at War
Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944–May 7, 1945
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest
Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973–1990
Eisenhower: Soldier and President
Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962–1972
Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913–1962
Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944
Eisenhower: The President
Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890–1952
The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point
Eisenhower and Berlin: 1945
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors
Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938
Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment
Halleck: Lincoln’s Chief of Staff
Upton and the Army
A Wisconsin Boy in Dixie
The National D-Day Museum
In 1992, the U.S. Congress authorized the building of the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, on the site where the Higgins boats were constructed and tested. The Museum’s mission is to remind the American people of the day when the fury of an aroused democracy was hurled against Nazi-occupied Europe, and to inspire future generations by showing that there is nothing this Republic cannot do when everyone gets on the team. In addition to hands-on displays, a photographic gallery, weapons, uniforms, and other artifacts, the Museum will house an Archives that will hold all printed work on D-Day, plus the oral and written memoirs from participants in the battle that the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans has been gathering since 1983. This is the largest collection of eyewitness accounts of a single battle in the world. For information on how to become a Friend of the Museum, or to donate artifacts, please write the National D-Day Museum, 1600 Canal Street, Suite 501, New Orleans, La. 70112.
The author is donating his royalties from this paperback edition of D-Day to the National D-Day Museum.
Glossary
AKA
cargo ship, attack
APA
transport ship, attack
BAR
Browning automatic rifle
Belgian Gates
antilanding obstacles
CCS
Combined Chiefs of Staff
CIC
Combat Information Center
CO
commanding officer
COSSAC
Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (Designate)
CP
command post
CTF
commander task force
DUKW
2 1/2 ton amphibious truck (Duck)
E-boat
German torpedo boat
ECB
engineer combat battalion
ESB
engineer special brigade
ETO
European Theater of Operations
FUSAG
First United States Army Group
GHQ
general headquarters
JCS
U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff
LCA
landing craft, assault
LCC
primary control vessel
LCI
landing craft, infantry
LCM
landing craft, medium
LCT
landing craft, tank
LCT(R)
landing craft, tank (rocket)
LCVP
landing craft, vehicle and personnel (Higgins boat)
LST
landing ship, tank
MG-34
a tripod-mounted machine gun with a rate of fire of up to 800 rounds per minute
MG-42
a tripod-mounted machine gun with a rate of fire up to 1,300 rounds per minute
OB West
Oberbefehlshaber West (general HQ for the Western Front)
OKH
Oberkommando des Heeres (Army High Command)
OKW
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command)
OP
observation post
OSS
Office of Strategic Services
OWI
Office of War Information
Rhino ferry
barge constructed of pontoon units
SAS
Special Air Service
SCR
Signal Corps Radio
SHAEF
Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force
SOE
Special Operations Executive
SP
self-propelled guns
SS
Schutzstaffel
Sten gun
British 9mm automatic weapon, 30 inches long, weighing 7 pounds
TBS
talk between ships
Tetrahedra
pyramid-shaped steel obstacles
UDT
underwater demolition teams
combat arm of the SS
Widerstandsnest
resistance nest
Endnotes
The vast majority of the quotations in this book come from oral histories, written memoirs, letters, action reports and individual and group interviews with the men of D-Day, ranging in rank from the supreme commander to seaman and private, in the Eisenhower Center (EC) at the University of New Orleans. Other depositories that provided similar material include the United States Army Military Institute (AMI) at Carlisle Barracks, Pa.; the Imperial War Museum (IWM), London; the Documentary Center, Battle of Normandy Museum, Caen; the Eisenhower Library (EL), Abilene, Kans.; and the Parachute Museum, Ste.-Mère-Église.
1. THE DEFENDERS
1. It was the looniest of all his crazy decisions. He was not required by the terms of the “Pact of Steel” to come to Japan’s aid, as the treaty was for defensive purposes—if one of the partners (Italy, Germany, and Japan) were attacked, the others were pledged to come to her aid. But Japan had not been attacked on December 7, and Japan had not come to Germany’s aid in June 1941 when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union.
It was also the loneliest of his lonely decisions. Amazingly, he consulted no one. He threw away his long-range plan for world
conquest, in which the final struggle against the United States was left to the next generation, utilizing the resources of the Soviet Union and the rest of Europe. One would have thought he would have at least asked his military leaders what the implications of a declaration of war against the United States were, that he would have at least talked to Goering, Himmler, Goebbels, and his other henchmen about it. But he discussed it with no other person; on December 11, he simply announced it to the Reichstag. See Sebastian Haffner, The Meaning of Hitler, tr. Ewald Osers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 120.
2. Directive No. 51 is printed in a translated version in Gordon A. Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Army, 1951), pp. 464–67.
3. Erwin Rommel, The Rommel Papers, ed. B. H. Liddell Hart (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), p. 466.
4. Reported in Samuel Mitcham, Rommel’s Last Battle: The Desert Fox and the Normandy Campaign (New York: Stein & Day, 1983), pp. 44–45.
5. Ralph Williams, “The Short, Unhappy Life of the Messerschmitt ME-262,” April 6, 1960, in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas.
6. Quoted in John Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), p. 332.
7. Robert Brewer interview, EC.
8. Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack, pp. 145–47; U.S. War Department, Handbook on German Military Forces (Baton Rouge, La.: L.S.U. Press, 1990), p. 57.
9. U.S. War Department, Handbook on German Military Forces, p. 2.
10. Quoted in Mitcham, Rommel’s Last Battle, p. 26.
11. Directive No. 40 is reprinted in translation in Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack, pp. 459–63.
12. Ibid., p. 136.
13. Ibid., pp. 136–37.
14. Heckler interview with Warlimont, July 19–20, 1945, in American Military Institute, Carlisle, Pa.
2. THE ATTACKERS
1. Quoted in Carlo D’Este, Decision in Normandy (London: Collins, 1983), p. 21.
2. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Invasion of France and Germany 1944–1945 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), pp. 152–53.
3. For a discussion of landing craft, see Gordon Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Army, 1951), pp. 59–63.
4. Geoffrey Perret, There’s a War to Be Won: The United States Army in World War II (New York: Random House, 1992), pp. 110–12.
5. Quoted in Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack, p. 64.
6. Jerry Strahan interview, EC.
7. Perret, There’s a War to Be Won, p. 124.
8. Carl Weast interview, EC.
9. Carwood Lipton interview, EC.
10. Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 282.
11. Charles East interview, EC.
12. Quoted in Max Hastings, Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 317.
13. John Howard interview, EC.
14. Quoted in Hastings, Overlord, p. 25.
15. Ibid., p. 24.
16. Sidey to Ambrose, 7/9/92, EC.
17. See J. C. Masterman, The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972) and Ronald Lewin, Ultra Goes to War (London: Hutchinson, 1978).
18. Gordon Carson interview, EC.
3. THE COMMANDERS
1. For Rommel’s early life, see David Irving, The Trail of the Fox (New York: Dutton, 1977); for Eisenhower’s, see S. E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890–1952 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983).
2. Irving, Trail of the Fox, pp. 14–15.
3. Ambrose, Eisenhower, p. 63.
4. Ed Thayer to his mother, 1/11/18, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas (hereinafter cited as EL).
5. Irving, Trail of the Fox, p. 25.
6. Ambrose, Eisenhower, p. 93.
7. Hans von Luck, Panzer Commander: The Memoirs of Colonel Hans von Luck (New York: Praeger, 1989), pp. 103–4.
8. Quoted in Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 88.
9. From the first draft of Eisenhower’s memoirs, in EL. Eisenhower chose not to publish this section.
10. Martin Blumenson, “Rommel,” in Thomas Parrish, ed., The Simon and Schuster Encyclopedia of World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 532.
11. For Eisenhower’s letters, see Letters to Mamie, ed. John S. D. Eisenhower (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978). For Rommel’s, see Irving, Trail of the Fox, which quotes from many of them.
12. Irving, Trail of the Fox, p. 313.
13. Quoted in Samuel Mitcham, Jr., Rommel’s Last Battle: The Desert Fox and the Normandy Campaign (New York: Stein & Day, 1983), pp. 18–21.
14. FDR to Stalin, 12/5/43, EL.
15. Bernard Law Montgomery, Memoirs (Cleveland: World, 1958), p. 484.
16. Cunningham to Eisenhower, 10/21/43, EL.
17. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1948), pp. 206–7.
18. Irving, Trail of the Fox, p. 317.
19. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, p. 220.
20. Irving, Trail of the Fox, p. 324.
22. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, pp. 187–88.
4. WHERE AND WHEN?
1. Gordon A. Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Army, 1951), pp. 48–49.
2. Scott-Bowden interview, Imperial War Museum, London.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack, p. 106.
6. Anthony Cave Brown, Bodyguard of Lies (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 465.
7. Earl Ziemke, “Operation Kreml: Deception, Strategy, and the Fortunes of War,” Parameters: Journal of the U.S. Army War College 9 (March 1979): 72–81.
8. The Fortitude story is best told in James Bowman, “Operation Fortitude,” a 1,000-page manuscript in EC.
9. Bowman, “Operation Fortitude.”
10. Eisenhower to Chiefs of the Belgian, Norwegian, and Dutch Military Missions, 2/23/44, EL.
11. Quoted in Stephen E. Ambrose, Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981), p. 90.
12. Eisenhower to Chiefs of Staff Committee, 3/6/44, EL.
13. Eisenhower to Brooke, 4/9/44, EL.
14. Quoted in Ambrose, Ike’s Spies, p. 91.
15. Forrest Pogue, The Supreme Command (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Army, 1954), pp. 163–64.
16. Eisenhower to Marshall, 5/21/44, EL.
17. Quoted in Irving, The Trail of the Fox (New York: Dutton, 1977), p. 336.
18. Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack, p. 259.
19. Quoted in Irving, Trail of the Fox, p. 347.
20. Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack, p. 259.
21. These weekly summaries are in EL.
22. Quoted in Irving, Trail of the Fox, p. 347.
23. Ibid., p. 351.
24. Ibid., p. 354.
25. Ibid., p. 342.
26. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Letters to Mamie, ed. John S. D. Eisenhower (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), pp. 165, 183.
5. UTILIZING ASSETS
1. Marshall to Eisenhower, 2/10/44, EL.
2. Eisenhower to Marshall, 2/19/44, EL.
3. Whiteley to John Kennedy, 9/23/43, EL.
4. Arnold to Eisenhower, 1/21/44, EL.
5. Forrest Pogue, The Supreme Command (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Army, 1954), p. 127.
6. Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890–1952 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), p. 287.
7. Pogue, Supreme Command, p. 124; Gordon A. Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Army, 1951), pp. 219–20; Sir Arthur Tedder, With Prejudice (London: Cassell, 1966), pp. 510–12.
8. Eisenhower diary, 3/22/44, EL.
9. Tedder, With Prejudice, p. 524.
10. Eisenhower to Churchill, 4/5/44, EL.
11. Tedder, With Prejudice, pp. 528–33.
12. Ibid., 531–33.
13. Winston S. Churchill, Closing the Ring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), pp. 529–30.
14. The weekly summaries are in EL.
15. Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, eds., Europe: Argument to V-E Day (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 73.
16. Pogue, Supreme Command, p. 132.
17. Hechler interview of Jodl, American Military Institute, Carlisle, Pa.
18. Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack, pp. 224, 230.
19. Clement Marie interview, EC.
20. Quoted in Irving, The Trail of the Fox (New York: Dutton, 1977), p. 336.
21. André Rougeyron, “Agents for Escape,” translated by Marie-Antoinette Verchère-McConnell, manuscript copy in EC.
22. André Heintz interview, EC.
23. Thérèse Gondrée and John Howard interviews, EC.
24. Richard Winters interview, EC.
25. Guillaume Mercader interview, EC.
26. Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack, p. 204.
27. Ibid., p. 202.
28. Guillaume Mercader interview, EC.
29. Anthony Brooks interview, EC.
30. Ibid. See also M. R. D. Foot, SOE: The Special Operations Executive 1940–46 (London: BBC, 1984), pp. 226–27.
6. PLANNING AND PREPARING