The Allied preparation for D-Day

The Anglo-American Supreme Command had several doubts. The weakness of the enemy was not known but rather perceived. However, the fear of a failure paralysed those people who had to give the official order of invasion. A defeat would have meant the delay sine die of whatever project of intervention to help the Soviet Union and Roosevelt's pretension to get an unconditional surrender from Germany would have had to be abandoned in favor of a peace agreement.

The principal questions of the Allies were exactly the same the Germans had: where and when the attack would have had happened. In 1943, the COSSAC had been created (Chief of Staff Supreme Allied Commander) that had got its own name from the office of its commander, English General Frederick E. Morgan. This organism had the assignment to organize the invasion and, as only directive, "do it as soon as possible." The defects of the COSSAC were essentially two. Indeed, the assignment that had to be dispatched was as grandiose as few resources the organ had to complete it. The initial plan foresaw a specific attack with the employment of only 3 divisions for the conquest of a large port in Northern France, through which to let land on the territory the immense resources available in the United States. Secondarily, Morgan had to obey to the CCS (Committee of Chief of Staff) to which he had to submit whatever initiative he wanted to undertake, with the risk to find some unjustified vetoes.

This situation lasted for several months up to January 1944 when it was created the SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces), whose command was entrusted to General Dwight Eisenhower, while Morgan had the office of deputy commander. It had been lost one year only to establish what structure had to command the invasion and what its powers were. Where and When had not been yet established. Almost immediately, Eisenhower provided a term for the mission: June 1 1944. The date was a prolongation of the original term that had been on May 1. The American general pretended an additional month to be sure to have a great availability of forces to proceed. In fact, in the first months of 1944 there was a decrease of the threat of the German U-bootes against the convoys that crossed the Atlantic ocean. Even the ships Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary could transport a division a time and effect two Atlantic crossing a month.

All Allied commanders, especially Montgomery, had judged 3 divisions as particularly insufficient for the main attack and, therefore, the number had been increased to five plus three airborne divisions. To do so, it was canceled the contemporaneity of the operation Anvil that was the invasion of South France, in Provence. The figure of men needed for the attack was directly proportional to the difficulties provided from the select zone: the East coast of the Cotentin and the beaches of the Calvados in Normandy. Two other hypotheses had been analyzed and then discarded: the Pas de Calais and Brittany near Brest. The latter one because it was too far from English air bases that would have had to guarantee the tactical support during the invasion, the former one because of the immense fortifications that had been built around the port of Calais. Being the Pas de Calais the briefest way toward the Ruhr, the OKH had seen it as the most logical zone for an attack. Even Hitler had this opinion and he also tried to force the Allied decision by positioning right in that area the attack bases of the tele-guided V-1 bombs and of the V-2 rockets. Instead, the zone of the Calvados had been expressly excluded by the Abwehr (the German secret services) because it was considered too impervious.

The choice of the SHAEF had not been simple. Caen, with his small port was designated as a strategic point of the whole operation. Cherbourg in the north of the Cotentin was surely a better prey thanks to its exceptional naval structures, but it had the fundamental disadvantage to have been powerfully strengthened and, therefore, an amphibious action against that position was not discussed. Normandy had two important advantages: it was protected against the Atlantic storms from the peninsula of the Cotentin (we will see subsequently for what reason the crossing of the Channel had to be the calmest possible) and it was exactly on the point of union of the German divisions that had to defend the territory. The order of attack would have been the following:

* at La Dune de Valleville and la Madelaine on the East coast of the Cotentin (area Utah) the 4th division of American infantry supported by 82nd and 101st American Airborne Division that landing near S.te Mère Eglise and S.te Mère du Mont would have divided in two parts the coastal road that connected Cherbourg to Carentan, preventing that the German forces arriving from the port could threaten the landing.
* between point Hoc and Port en Bessin in Western Calvados (area Omaha) the 1st division of American infantry.
* between Arromanches and the river Seulles (area Gold) the 50th division of British infantry.
* in front of Courseilles sur Mer (area Juno) the 3rd division of Canadian infantry.
* between Lion sur Mer and the River Orne (area Sword) the 3rd division of British infantry that would have been supported by the 6th British airborne division that had the assignment to attack the zone across river Orne and to defend to death the bridge denominated Pegasus, the only sure way to cross the Orne.

To have decided a date and a place for the invasion and to have predisposed the order of battle it didn't mean that Allies knew how to effect the invasion. The previous amphibious operations (the attack in North Africa, the landing in Sicily, at Salerno and Anzio) were not comparable to what the Allies had to do in Normandy. In Africa, the French army of Vichy had opposed a symbolic resistance, while in Sicily the soldiers of Mussolini were too demoralized to be a true danger. At Salerno and Anzio, the Wehrmacht, more experienced after the preceding attacks, had seriously threatened letting fail the landing. The SHAEF, so, set as necessary condition for the success that the attack had the maximum surprise factor. To achieve such a result two ways were followed, a tactic and a strategic one. On tactical level the Allies opted, unwillingly, for an extremely limited bombardment that would have involved a large number of casualties among the divisions that would have conducted the first attack, but it would also have guaranteed that Germans didn't discover the operation until the troops were in proximity of the French ground.

This decision was particularly difficult for the English commanders. While the American divisions were nearly totally inexperienced and so mostly unaware of the danger they had to face, the British divisions, being tested under enemy fire, (i.e veterans from Africa's campaigns), knew very well the destruction and the death to which Great Britain had been forced for four years because of the terror bombardments of the Luftwaffe. The possibility was hypothesized even to attack with troops of only one nationality in order to avoid that the possible panic could be propagated more quickly, increased by the acridity, often joky but some times serious, existing between English and Americans. At the end, the risk that the serious losses could reset the impetus of the assailants it was judged, however, inferior to the danger of an announced invasion.

On the strategic level, the secret of the D-Day (where the D is still for Day. In fact it's pointed out the "day" of the action) was kept by organizing the biggest operation of counterespionage that the war history had ever seen. Denominated conventionally "Fortitude", it drew advantage from the great successes gotten in the preceding years from the British Intelligence Service. The German code system produced by the cryptography machine called Enigma had been deciphered and the Abwehr had not realized it. In this way, the Allies could know with enough sureness what the movements of the German troops were and, at the same time, they could give wrong information to the counterpart that didn't recognize them as such because that information was written in such a way to be perfectly conform with the communications created by Enigma. The net of German spies in Great Britain was also broadly discovered and it had been decided to involve those hostile agents in a game of betrayals and deceptions that it had to serve for the cause of the Western Democracies.

Fortitude had been organized essentially in two sections. The first one involved that interesting details were given about the possibility that the invasion took place in Norway. To inculcate into the enemy such a conviction, a large net of elderly English officers was organized, who for whole April and May 1944 produced, from Scotland, a lot of radio communications among divisions and army corps existing only thanks to the imagination of the English Intelligence. This first part of the deception was so effective that to the date of the D-Day, 9 German divisions were in Norway instead of being on the French ground. The second part of the plan was more difficult. With the name in code of Fortitude South, it had to let the Wehrmacht believe that the attack would have run over the region of the Pas de Calais. The same methods used in Scotland could not be utilized there because of the air surveillance of the Abwehr over the English coastal regions. At least part of the troops had to be real ones and therefore the 1st Canadian Army, with bases in England, was the fulcrum of this "bad joke". Others 2 armies were added to it (3rd American Army, really existing, but displaced in the United States and the 4th British Army that didn't had a man!). To the infantry an incalculable number of armored forces were added that were mostly constituted from vehicles made by plastics or rubber, built on purpose for deceiving the air surveillance! The real winning card was, however, that the command of the presumed invasion was given to General George Patton. In the Wehrmacht, Patton was considered the better man of the Allies and his new role was considered a logical action for an imminent attack.

The impetuous temper of Patton, who felt himself excluded from the action, threatened several times the secretiveness of the plan, but it also contributed to feed the legend of his following ride in France, perhaps a consequence of those months of "purgatory" to which he had been forced. To confuse in a definitive manner the ideas of the Germans, the Allies accented enormously the air raids over Southern France. During the night between May 26 and 27 that region of the republic of Vichy was nearly destroyed from hundreds of bombardments. The sad result was more than three thousand victims among the inhabitants of the cities of Nice, Saint-Etienne, Chambèry, Amiens, Marseille, Avignon, and Nimes, but also a strengthening of Fortitude South that shows us how the Allies arrived to sacrifice anything in order to guarantee the success of operation Overlord.

Everything had been done. The men for the invasion had been trained, the secret had been maintained and at the beginning of April 1944, the invasion was ready. Correctly, it would be better to say that it would have been ready if the SHAEF had had enough ships to transport all the divisions of the first attack. They were not "ships" in the common sense of the word, because the Royal Navy and the U.S. Navy had completed huge moves of troops across the Atlantic Ocean, as we have already remembered and they were not even transport boats of large dimension, since they already existed and had been used during the previous landings: the LSTs (landing ships with the flat fund that served for crossing sea over long distances. Difficult to drive and very slow, they had been one of the reasons for which Normandy was chosen. In fact, that land was protected from the strong Atlantic storms from the peninsula of the Cotentin.) and the LCTs (boats of small dimensions in comparison to the LSTs, 33 m against 60 m, that completed the last part of the journey toward the attack beaches). The greatest problem consisted to provide a mean of transport suitable for the attack against an enemy fortified on the beaches. During the landings in Africa and Italy, the Allied soldiers had been forced to jump from the edges of the LCTs, but this was not a problem, because the defenders didn't have a defensive apparatus worthy of being called such.

In Normandy, instead, a different solution was necessary. There were two main issues:

* the soldiers had to run up to the beach, and then get a shelter as soon as possible
* they had to be supported from armored vehicles even in the first minutes of the invasion that otherwise would have been transformed in a disaster.

The former problem got an American solution thanks to the so-called "Higgins Boat" that had their name from their genial builder. They had small dimensions (only 11 m). They were similar to the LCTs, but they had a large anterior port that had to be opened at the moment of the landing, becoming a ramp from which the men could exit at high speed. They would have been the protagonists of the landing.

Instead, the latter problem was resolved in Great Britain, with the invention of the DDs tanks. They were armored vehicles with double propulsion (Double Drive) that were made impermeable thanks to a covering made by cloth . In this way they could cross by floating several hundred meters of sea and reach the beach where they restarted to move in the traditional way. It was right to have an enough figure of these vehicles that the definitive date for the beginning of the landing operations was postponed from May 1 to June 1.

Nevertheless, it existed a further danger for the success of the operation Overlord. It consisted in the possibility that the divisions initially employed didn't succeed in conquering a large port in a reasonable time. In this case, the enemy would have had enough time to reorganize and to counterattack. The English engineers were able to overcome that danger with the preparation of artificial floating harbors denominated Mulberry. The system was essentially simple. The floating benches, called Whales, were towed up to the place where the port structure had to be displaced and then anchored to the seabed with four pillars, which could move up and down according to the height of the tide. The connection with the land was assured from mobile gangways and the protection from the open sea was got by sinking some old ships (Gooseberries) and with artificial breakwaters (Phoenix).

Although in the reality these little masterpieces of naval engineering worked only for two weeks, since either the American Mulberry either the English one were seriously damaged by an Atlantic storm, they served to guarantee an continuous influx of vehicles and men in that brief period that was one of the most difficult of the campaign. As far as it concerns the fuel supply, it was constructed a clever system denominated Pluto (Pipe-Line-Under-The-Ocean) that served the allied troops up to the conquest of port structures more efficient than the Mulberries that could host ships only up to 10.000 tons.

http://www.geocities.com/iturks/html/normandy2.html[/url:a312a]

 

The decoys built in England to fool the enemy into believing that the invasion would fall on the Pas de Calais would take a massive share of the enemy bombing that would otherwise have fallen on the real Invasion forces. One story tells of damage caused to a decoy in quite a different way. This happened at the village of Chaul End where the military had set up a number of 'rubber' tanks. One night a large bull got loose resulting in a sharp horn puncturing one 'tank' which ingloriously collapsed.

I suppose he was getting his revenge for all the cans of 'Bully-Beef' shipped to feed the flies in North Africa (LOL).