“I CANNOT APPROVE your plan,” the stiff and formal British Air Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory bluntly told American Lieutenant General Omar Nelson Bradley. “It is much too hazardous in the undertaking. Your losses will be excessive—certainly far more than the gains are worth. I’m sorry, General Bradley, but I cannot go along on it with you.”
Bradley, commanding the Twelfth U.S. Army Group, which would, in just a few days, land 55,000 soldiers on two Normandy beachheads code named Utah and Omaha, was stunned at Leigh-Mallory’s complete and sudden rejection of the carefully crafted plan to drop by parachute and glider two American airborne divisions shortly after midnight of D-Day.
His shock—and dismay—was understandable. Just weeks before, Leigh-Mallory, whose responsibilities in the upcoming invasion included the Allies’ entire tactical air operations—from reconnaissance to providing air cover for the troops landing ashore in boats to the dropping of paratroops and the landing of glider forces—had endorsed the airborne plan. And now, on the very threshold of the start of the biggest and most important combined sea and air invasion in history, Leigh-Mallory was pulling the rug out from under what everyone had agreed was an essential component of the overall plan.
Bradley stared incredulously at the dapper, humorless Britisher with the immaculate, slicked back hair and tidy moustache, no doubt wanting to reach across the table in General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery’s paneled Victorian office and strangle him. Summoning all his self-control, Bradley paused for a moment, then said, “Very well, sir, if you insist on cutting out the airborne attack, then I must ask that we eliminate the Utah assault. I am not going to land on that beach without making sure we’ve got the exits behind it.”
After months of studying aerial photographs of the area, Bradley knew that Allied control of a handful of roads—elevated causeways that traversed fields and pastures the Germans had flooded to forestall any sort of airborne landings behind the beachheads—was absolutely essential in allowing the seaborne troops to advance inland, not to mention preventing German reinforcements from rushing in to halt the invasion at the water’s edge.
Leigh-Mallory glanced over at the implacable Montgomery, who said nothing but must have been blanching inwardly at this unexpected turn of events, then calmly responded in his clipped upper-class accent: “Then let me make it clear that if you insist upon this airborne operation, you’ll do it in spite of my opposition.” Turning to Monty, Leigh-Mallory stated, “If General Bradley insists upon going ahead, he will have to accept full responsibility for the operation. I don’t believe it will work.”
Internally fuming, Bradley said in his plain Missouri accent, “That’s perfectly agreeable to me. I’m in the habit of accepting responsibility for my operations.”
Montgomery, uncomfortable with his feuding subordinates, rapped on the table and spoke quietly in his high-pitched voice. “That is not at all necessary, gentlemen. I shall assume full responsibility for the operation,” he proclaimed. With that, the contentious meeting moved on to other D-Day matters. But the rancor hung in the air like a barrage balloon.1
WITH THE ENORMOUS complexity of the airborne/glider phase of the operation, and with all the variables that had to work perfectly and at precisely timed intervals—not to mention other factors such as counting on the Germans being taken by surprise, no enemy aerial activity to intercept the Allied air lift, and the weather to cooperate—it was no wonder that Air Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory expected the American forces to meet with disaster. As far as he was concerned, too much was being trusted to luck—a commodity that can just as easily be granted to the enemy as to one’s own side.
Still, the pessimistic Leigh-Mallory would not abandon his opposition to the American airborne portion of the plan. On 29 May 1944, he wrote a letter to Ike—General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Commander of the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF)—outlining his concerns and reiterating his opinion that the airborne operation behind Utah Beach was doomed to fail and must be canceled. He predicted that Operation Neptune, the assault phase of Operation Overlord, was likely “to yield results so far short of what [you] expect and require that if the success of the seaborne assault … depends on the airborne, it will be entirely prejudiced.”2
In addition to all his other crushing worries and responsibilities, Ike read Leigh-Mallory’s letter with a worried heart. Its premonition of disaster—a terrible prediction that the Americans would lose (killed, wounded, missing) half of their paratrooper strength and seventy percent of their glider strength, not to mention unacceptable losses of C-47 transport aircraft in the first few hours of D-Day if Ike went ahead with the drop—weighed heavily on him.3
The tall, balding Kansan pondered Leigh-Mallory’s words. If he disregarded his air marshal’s recommendations and the airborne/glider troops suffered massive casualties, the seaborne invasion at Utah Beach might be stopped on the sands and thrown back. And if the Utah portion of the invasion failed, what would happen to the rest of the operation?
Ike—a hopeless chain-smoker—lit another cigarette and considered his options, which seemed to be diminishing by the minute.
ONE COULD ARGUE that the Allies’ momentous 6 June 1944 invasion of France, famously known as “D-Day,” actually began on 9 April 1940. That was the date on which Nazi Germany shocked the world by launching Unternehmen Weserübung (Operation Weser Exercise)—the invasion of neutral Norway—with history’s first combined military assault by air, sea, and ground forces.* With a single stroke, Weserübung introduced a wholly new and revolutionary idea to the conduct of warfare—the concept of “vertical envelopment.” For the first time, troops could be delivered to a battlefield and inserted either behind enemy lines or on top of an objective. Suddenly the traditional, age-old horizontal movement of infantry units had been rendered, if not obsolete or irrelevant, at least incomplete. It was as though winged chess pieces had been introduced to the staid game to throw all the old strategies out of balance.
This paradigm shift began early on that crisp spring morning when German warships slipped undetected into Norwegian waters and began bombarding coastal defenses. Later that day, after the Norwegian government bravely rejected Germany’s surrender demands, plane after plane began disgorging parachute troops, or Fallschirmjäger, at key locations. The parachutists were members of Luftwaffe General der Flieger Kurt Student’s 7th Flieger Division, dropping onto the Fornebu airfield near Oslo and at the Sola Air Station near Stavanger. Other 7th Flieger elements floated to earth at Narvik to reinforce sea-landed mountain troops and complete the taking of that vital port.
In a single day, the seven months of tension-filled inactivity facetiously called the Sitzkrieg that followed Germany’s 1 September 1939 invasion of Poland,* and the subsequent declarations of war against Germany by France and Great Britain were swept away. The fighting was on in earnest, with Hitler’s thrust against Norway designed to grab ports and naval bases that would allow him to threaten Britain and dominate the North Atlantic; only then could his long-planned invasion of France and the Low Countries proceed. Owning Norwegian coastal waters would also permit Germany to keep receiving the vital shipments of Swedish iron ore on which its war machine depended.
Intelligence reports and warnings about the impending invasion of Norway had fallen on deaf ears; the government of President Johan Nygaarsvold ignored the signs. But despite being caught more or less by surprise, the Norwegians put up a stiff defense. Some sixty Fallschirmjäger were either killed or wounded by machine-gun fire spitting from a solitary bunker at the Sola airfield before a grenade knocked it out. At Narvik, the fighting was also intense, with French and British troops coming to the aid of the Norwegians. But the Luftwaffe controlled the airspace and pounded the French and British warships and troop transports. The fighting went on for weeks, and on 15 May the Germans dropped a battalion of parachutists to help turn the tide at Narvik and hold onto the prize.4
Although brave, the Norwegian defenders were no match for the better-trained Germans—nor for the fact that the pro-Nazi Vidkun Quisling, head of Nasjonal Samling, the Norwegian Fascist Party, had taken control of the government and betrayed his country to the enemy.5
WHILE BRITAIN AND France were still trying to respond to events in Norway and bring some semblance of order to their largely haphazard and ineffective counterattacks, Hitler thrust the second horn of his two-pronged strategy into France and the Low Countries. This million-man invasion—known as Fall Gelb (Case Yellow)—was an unimagined success, shocking in its audacity and terrible in its result. Driving as they did in World War I through the same “impenetrable” Ardennes Forest—this time with motorized infantry and panzer forces and using paratroops to quickly overwhelm the defenses in Holland, Luxembourg, France, and Belgium—the Germans scored a victory on a staggering scale. As one historian noted, “Large-scale operations early in the war indicated that airborne forces could effectively wage full-scale operations.”6
As if to go its own Operation Weserübung one better, Germany added another strikingly new facet of warfare to Fall Gelb—the military glider (Segelflugzeug). While Fallschirmjäger dropped and surrounded government buildings in the Hague and seized Waalhaven Airport at Rotterdam, along with key parts of the city, glider troops also made their first appearance on the battlefield. To get around the provisions of the Versailles Treaty that forbade Germany from developing an air force, a huge civilian glider program had been instituted in the interwar years that taught thousands of future Luftwaffe pilots to fly, and now they were putting that training to use.
But probably no battle of the opening days of the war was more pivotal in proving the potential worth of glider operations than the assault on the mighty Eben Emael fortress, ten miles north of Liege, Belgium, on the Albert Canal.
CREDIT FOR THIS new concept in tactics probably must go to Adolf Hitler, who, according to British General Sir John Hackett, “inspired the concept of a glider-borne coupde-main himself. Student and his Chief of Operations Staff, Major Heinrich Trettner, took the idea up enthusiastically and went into the planning of the whole highly complicated operation with their customary vigour and in the utmost secrecy.”7
The 1,000-man Belgian garrison of Eben Emael thought themselves invincible and their home impregnable. After all, what enemy in his right mind would dare to expend troops against this formidable concrete fortress emplaced into a cliff a hundred feet above the waters of the Albert Canal, or waste bombs or artillery shells on its steel-reinforced concrete walls and roofs many meters thick?
Early on 10 May 1940, the Belgians got their answer, and the surprise of their lives, when eleven DFS 230 gliders, carrying a force of two officers and eighty-three men—all of whom were engineers trained in demolitions—swooped down on the fortress and captured fourteen of its eighteen guns in twenty minutes. It took another day of hard fighting to finally capture the entire fort, but the act was audacious and stunning in its concept and execution. The entire garrison was taken prisoner, to the Germans’ loss of six killed and twenty wounded. An additional thirty-one gliders landed at three key bridges over the Albert Canal, which the glider troops quickly won from the defenders. As Student declared, “It was a deed of exemplary daring and decisive significance.”8
The world was as stunned by the operation as it would have been had Orson Welles’ terrifying 1939 radio program involved real rather than fictional Martians. The nervous period of waiting, known as the “Phoney War,” when virtually no military action had taken place following Germany’s invasion of Poland and the tit-for-tat declarations of war, had been shattered in an instant. The New York Times’ banner headline that stretched across its entire front page the next day screamed, “DUTCH AND BELGIANS RESIST NAZI DRIVE; ALLIED FORCES MARCH IN TO DO BATTLE; CHAMBLERLAIN RESIGNS, CHURCHILL PREMIER.” The first eleven pages of the paper were devoted to news about these developments; not until Pearl Harbor would one story so completely dominate the Times.9
Initially, no one could figure out how a small group of lightly armed glider-borne soldiers could have single-handedly conquered one of the world’s most technologically advanced military bastions. There had to be something more than gliders. Time magazine reported that, despite stiff Belgian resistance and the aid of the British Royal Air Force and French Air Corps to try and repel the invaders, “the quick fall of Eben Emael fortress, great new strongpoint of the Liege corner, was a heavy blow, whether brought about by a ‘secret weapon’* or sheer power.”10
Although gliders or paratroopers were not needed to subdue France, that country, after initial sputtering efforts to hold off the invaders, waved the white flag on 22 June 1940. The British Expeditionary Force, which had been rushed across the Channel to aid its Gallic neighbor shortly after Fall Gelb was launched, was forced into a massive evacuation back to England from Dunkirk at the end of May.
Within a few short weeks, the combination of aerial and naval bombardment and a fast, violent assault by ground, seaborne, airborne, and glider forces had brought six nations—Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands—to their knees and taught the world a new German word: Blitzkrieg.
Nazi Germany’s brilliant use of airborne and glider troops in the early months of World War II shocked the United States, Great Britain, and Canada into action. Before the German invasion of Norway, not much consideration had been given to the concept of “vertical envelopment.” But the stunning success of the Fallschirmjäger and Segelflugzeug formations would change warfare forever, just as the airplane, tank, and machine gun did.11
AS THE SECOND world war within a generation marched onward, and the U.S., Britain, and their allies gradually gained the initiative, the possibility of invading and regaining the European continent became a real possibility. The question of how to succeed in such a mission loomed large. Small-scale invasions, such as Dieppe in August 1942, had failed badly. Wresting Pacific islands away from entrenched Japanese had become a bloody endeavor, and was possible only with overwhelming fire and manpower. Besides, the Pacific islands were thousands of miles from Japan; enemy resupply and reinforcement was impossible and made American victories inevitable. In Europe, with its heavily fortified coast-lines, the Germans felt they could move troops and supplies around at will to counter any invasion.
To prepare for the day when the invasion was launched, the Allies began doing some preliminary homework. Even before Eisenhower was chosen in December 1943 to take the reins as Supreme Allied Commander, a small team of planners, under British Lieutenant-General Frederick E. Morgan, had been laying the groundwork for what would eventually become Overlord. Morgan, who held the temporary title of COSSAC, (Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander), first met with his staff on 17 April 1943. Quite aware of his group’s limited authority to make any hard-and-fast decisions, he had told them that they should not consider themselves “planners,” but rather, “as primarily a co-ordinating body.” He did not want to tie the future Supreme Commander—whomever he might be—to some rigid, cast-in-concrete plan.12
Once Ike arrived on the job, planning and preparation for the invasion swung into high gear. Meetings, arguments, and decisions on how many troops, tanks, trucks, tires, bombs, bullets, bulldozers, bandages, planes, maps, gallons of fuel, tons of rations, and mountains of other supplies went on non-stop. Early on it was decided that airborne and glider troops, and plenty of them, would be needed to go in before the seaborne troops to secure the flanks of the operational area; this initial assault plan got its own code name: Neptune. For months Allied planners worked on Neptune’s details, trying to figure out how many aircraft were needed to carry how many men, what equipment the paratroopers would need to fight with before the seaborne forces could reach them, where their training facilities and airbases would be located, how long it would take them to reach their drop zones, and how the soldiers and their pilots could possibly find their correct DZs and LZs in the dark. It was enough to drive sane men crazy.
Eventually SHAEF decided to insert the American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions into France “through the back door”—i.e., by coming into Normandy from the west across the Cotentin Peninsula. Major General William Lee’s 101st “Screaming Eagles” would be the first American division to leave England and the first to hit the ground fighting in France; Major General Mathew Ridgway’s 82nd “All Americans” would arrive minutes later. Both these divisions would be followed by additional troops, equipment, and supplies brought in by the greatest glider missions in the history of warfare.
As Overlord/Neptune was a joint Allied operation, the British would also play a vital role. With the two westernmost beachheads, Utah and Omaha, being assaulted by American forces and augmented by American airborne and glider troops, it was only right that the three eastern landing beaches—Gold, Juno, and Sword—which would be attacked by British and Canadian forces, have flank protection provided by British and Canadian airborne and glider units. For this role, Major General Richard
N. Gale’s British 6th Airborne Division, augmented by a Canadian parachute battalion, was selected.
The 6th’s plan was only slightly less complex and ambitious than the Americans’: land a small force of glider troops to capture the bridges over the Orne River near Caen and drop paratroops at the Merville Battery a bit farther east to neutralize the casemated gun battery that threatened the seaborne landings at Sword Beach, then bring in large numbers of follow-up troops by parachute and glider to hold these key positions and prevent any German forces from attacking the beachheads while troops and equipment were coming ashore.*13
But these Allied airborne and glider forces weren’t simply conjured up out of thin air. They were the result of several years of experimentation and training, of trying to fully grasp the potentials and pitfalls of this brand-new concept of “vertical envelopment.”