(Brig. Gen. Norman “Dutch” Cota, second in command of the 29th Division, did not like the idea of storming ashore an hour after first light. He had little faith in the accuracy of air and naval bombardment, thought it would do little good, and wanted to land the first wave in total darkness. That way the assault troops could cross the tidal flat safely and would be able to take up firing and attacking positions at the foot of the bluff before the Germans could see them. “The beach is going to be fouled-up in any case,” he declared. “Darkness will not substantially alter the percentage of accuracy in beaching—not enough to offset the handicaps of a daylight assault.” He was overruled.21)
Each movement required an exact timing schedule that would begin three and four days before H-Hour at ports in southwestern England that were up to 160 kilometers from Omaha. Men and equipment would load up on LSTs, LCIs, and LCTs. Off the mouths of the harbors the convoys would form up. After crossing the Channel, the ships would anchor off the coast of France. Men would climb down the rope nets to their LCVPs, or descend in the boats as they were lowered by the davits. They would circle, circle, circle until they got clearance to form up line abreast and go in.
There was much more to the plan of assault than outlined here, and there were variations at different sectors and beaches, but basically the 116th plan was similar to those elsewhere. The emphasis was on a crescendo of high explosives hitting the beach defenses for a half hour before the tanks arrived, to be immediately followed by the first wave of skirmishers, who should be able to take advantage of the dazed enemy and seize the trenches as well as the exits from the beach. After that it was a question of getting enough transport and firepower ashore quickly enough to take the plateau area and move inland. All this was planned out on a timetable that was exceedingly rigid and complicated—and it was done without a single computer.
• •
When Pvt. John Barnes of Company A, 116th Infantry, attended the briefing on the assault plan, he was mighty impressed. He would be going ashore at H-Hour; one minute later E Company would come in behind him, followed by engineers at H-Hour plus three minutes. Then would come Headquarters Company and antiaircraft artillery, then more engineers, then Company L at H-Hour plus fifty minutes, and so on through the day. “It seemed so organized,” Barnes recalled, “that nothing could go wrong, nothing could stop it. It was like a train schedule; we were almost just like passengers. We were aware that there were many landing boats behind us, all lined up coming in on schedule. Nothing could stop it.”22
Others were not so sure. Capt. Robert Miller of the 175th Regiment, 29th Division, remembered his CO, Col. Paul “Pop” Good, holding up the operation plan for the regiment. “It was thicker than the biggest telephone book you’ve ever seen. After the briefing was completed, Colonel Good stood up, he picked it up and tried to tear it in half, but it was so thick that this strong man couldn’t do it. So he simply threw it over his shoulder and said, ‘Forget this goddamned thing. You get your ass on the beach. I’ll be there waiting for you and I’ll tell you what to do. There ain’t anything in this plan that is going to go right.’ ”23
Had Eisenhower heard the remarks, he would have agreed. Whenever he said that before the battle plans are everything, he added that as soon as the battle was joined, plans were worthless.
• •
By mid-May the plans down to regimental level were complete, but not poured in cement. Changes were made right up to D-Day in response to new information or the pace of Rommel’s construction activities. At Omaha, for example, Maj. Kenneth Lord, assistant G-3 (Operations) for the 1st Division, spotted an ominous development. Up to mid-April, 1st Division staff had noted happily that the hedgehogs and Belgian gate obstacles were piled up on the beaches rather than being put in place. But when a B-17 happened to jettison some bombs onto Omaha Beach before returning to England from an aborted raid, Lord examined a photograph of the bombs exploding. He saw a series of sympathetic detonations of underwater mines just at Easy Red Beach.
Major Lord appealed to the Navy to take care of the mines, pointing out that the official landing operations manual gave the Navy responsibility up to the high-tide mark. The Navy did not disagree; it just said it did not have an ability to demolish those mines. 1st Division appealed to SHAEF and got two engineering battalions assigned to it. The division HQ put them into the first wave. When Lord informed the engineers that they would lead the way, they expressed “great shock.” Lord assured them that they would have plenty of support, from the DD tanks—he pointed out that the DDs had worked “beautifully” during practice exercises.24
Those exploding mines caused consternation at Twenty-first Army Group. Were they electric, or pressure, or magnetic, or what? To find out, they sent Capt. George Lane, a commando working with COPPS, to bring back a sample. One night in late April he swam among the obstacles. He could find only Teller mines. He brought one back. His superiors “nearly died of fright when I presented it because it was not waterproofed, it was never meant to be an underwater mine, so they realized that the corrosion must have played havoc with its mechanism and it might go off any minute.”II They told Lane “there must be something else” and sent him back, not only to look for new types of mines but to take infrared photographs of the underwater obstacles.
In May, they sent him back once again, and his luck ran out. He was captured by a German E-boat and brought to Rommel’s headquarters at La Roche-Guyon. An elegant staff officer came into the room and asked, “Well, how are things in England? The weather must be beautiful. End of May is always nice in England.” It turned out he had an English wife. He took Lane in to see Rommel.
“You are in a very serious situation,” Rommel said, “because we think you’re a saboteur.”
Lane turned to the interpreter. “Please tell his excellency that I know that if he thought I was a saboteur, he wouldn’t have invited me here.”
Rommel laughed. “So you regard this as an invitation?”
“Yes, indeed,” Lane answered, “and I consider this a great honor indeed, and I’m delighted about it.”
Rommel laughed again, then asked, “So how’s my friend Montgomery?”
Lane said he did not know Montgomery.
“Well what do you think he’s doing?”
“I only know what I read in the Times. It says he is preparing the invasion.”
“Do you really think there’s going to be an invasion? The British will invade?”
“That’s what I read in the Times, so I believe it.”
“Well, if they are, this is going to be the first time that the British Army will do some fighting.”
“What can you mean?” Lane demanded.
“They always get other people to do the fighting for them, the Australians, the Canadians, the New Zealanders, the South Africans. They are very clever people these English.”
Rommel grew serious. “Well, where do you think the invasion is coming?”
“I certainly don’t know, they don’t tell junior officers. But if it was up to me, I would do it across the shortest possible way.”
“Yes,” Rommel nodded, “that’s very interesting.”
They talked politics. Rommel thought the British should be fighting side by side with the Germans against the Russians. Lane thought not.
When Lane was dismissed, he was driven to Paris and turned over to the Gestapo. But the Gestapo asked no questions, used no torture—after all, he had been interrogated by Rommel himself. So Lane was very lucky, as were the Allies—Lane’s missions had all been directed against the Calvados coast of France.25
• •
Other adjustments had to be made. In the Cotentin, the arrival in late May of the German 91st Division in the area where the 82nd Airborne was scheduled to come down caused a change in plan. On May 28, the drop zone was moved west, astride the Merderet, with the objective of seizing the ground between the Merderet and Douve rivers.
“Daily I viewed new aerial photographs of Utah,” Col. James Van Fleet, commander of the 8th Regiment, 4th Division, recalled. “The Germans were working furiously to strengthen their defenses. It seemed a terrible assault against steel and cannon for us to make. I kept asking the Navy to land us further south, to get away from these defenses. But the Navy commander said the water was too shallow, and our boats would ground.”
Van Fleet did win one fight with the Navy. The operations manual said the skippers of the LCTs would decide when to launch the DD tanks. Van Fleet had little faith in the DDs. He wanted the Navy to take them in as close as possible before launching, because the DDs moved so slowly in water and were terribly vulnerable to artillery. The Navy insisted that the skipper would decide when to launch. Van Fleet recalled, “I argued back so strongly that the Navy backed down; the tank commander would give the launch command.”26
Multiply Lord’s and Van Fleet’s experiences by hundreds to get some idea of the scope of the ever-changing planning operation. With such dedication, and with such an awesome firepower, how could the invasion not work?
• •
Montgomery had no doubts. On May 15 he held the final great dress rehearsal for Overlord at his St. Paul’s School headquarters. Churchill was there, and King George VI, and all the brass, admirals and generals from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Montgomery presided in a large lecture room; the audience looked down from a crescent-shaped auditorium; on the floor Montgomery had placed a huge colored map of lower Normandy. Churchill arrived smoking a cigar; when the king arrived Churchill “bowed in his usual jerky fashion retaining the cigar in one hand.”
“As we took [our] seats,” Adm. Morton Deyo of the U.S. Navy, in command of the bombardment group for Utah, later wrote, “the room was hushed and the tension palpable. It seemed to most of us that the proper meshing of so many gears would need nothing less than divine guidance. A failure at one point could throw the momentum out of balance and result in chaos. All in that room were aware of the gravity of the elements to be dealt with.”
Eisenhower spoke first. He was brief. “I would emphasize but one thing,” he said. “I consider it to be the duty of anyone who sees a flaw in the plan not to hesitate to say so.” According to Deyo, “His smile was worth twenty divisions. Before the warmth of his quiet confidence the mists of doubt dissolved.”27
Montgomery took over. He was wearing a well-cut battle dress with knifelike trouser creases. He looked trim and spoke in a tone of quiet emphasis. According to the note taker, Churchill occasionally interrupted him to ask questions designed to show off his military knowledge. “At one point the PM intervened, saying a trifle wryly that at Anzio we had put ashore 160,000 men and 25,000 vehicles and had advanced only twelve miles. He thought, therefore, that to take a risk occasionally would certainly do no harm.” Montgomery remained “quiet and deliberate.”
Montgomery’s message was “We have a sufficiency of troops; we have all the necessary tackle; we have an excellent plan. This is a perfectly normal operation which is certain of success. If anyone has any doubts in his mind, let him stay behind.”
He was more realistic about Rommel’s plans than he had been in April, when he had expected the enemy to hold back his tanks for the first couple of days. Now he said, “Rommel is an energetic and determined commander; he has made a world of difference since he took over. He is best at the spoiling attack; his forte is disruption; he is too impulsive for the set-piece battle. He will do his level best to ‘Dunkirk’ us . . . by using his own tanks well forward.”
Montgomery said, “We have the initiative. We must rely on:”
“(a) the violence of our assault.
“(b) our great weight of supporting fire from the sea and the air.
“(c) simplicity.
“(d) robust mentality.”
He went on to say some words that later would come back to haunt him: “We must blast our way ashore and get a good lodgement before the enemy can bring sufficient reserves up to turn us out. Armoured columns must penetrate deep inland, and quickly on D-Day; this will upset the plans and tend to hold him off while we build up strength. We must gain space rapidly, and peg out claims well inland.”28
The meeting began at 0900 hours and concluded at 1415, “thus ending,” according to the minutes, “the greatest assembly of military leadership the world has ever known.” Churchill was all pumped up. At the beginning of 1944 he had expressed qualms about Overlord, saying to Eisenhower on one occasion, “When I think of the beaches of Normandy choked with the flower of American and British youth, and when, in my mind’s eye, I see the tides running red with their blood, I have my doubts . . . I have my doubts.” Early in May Eisenhower had lunched alone with the prime minister. When they were parting, Churchill had grown emotional. With tears in his eyes he had said, “I am in this thing with you to the end, and if it fails we will go down together.” But after the St. Paul’s briefing Churchill grabbed Eisenhower by the arm and said, “I am hardening toward this enterprise.” That was a bit late to be getting on the team, but it was good that he had finally joined up. As for Eisenhower, his confidence was high.29
I. The beach that visitors see today is considerably different from what it was in 1944. U.S. Army engineers tore down most of the seawall and entirely removed the shingle embankment during unloading operations in the summer of 1944.
II. So Admiral Ruge had been right when he told Rommel that the army mines were no good for the job at hand.