The last days and the attack of the Allied paratroopers
The invasion of France involved not only military difficulties, but also political ones. Technically, that nation was either an ally either an enemy. It had fought to the side of English until the date of the separate armistice and since that moment De Gaulle's Free France had been seen as official representative of those people who didn't recognize the government of Vichy. Nevertheless, Great Britain had tried to have the support of whole France, particularly during the landing in North Africa (see Appointment with History, General De Gaulle's life during World War 2) and only when French Prime Minister Laval had decided to openly fight with Nazi Germany, the republic of Vichy had been treated as an hostile nation. Therefore, it had to be decided how to administer the territories conquered to the Germans.
A first hypothesis was to entrust the freed territories control to an allied military government risking to crack the good relationship between Churchill and De Gaulle. He could not bear that the sovereignty of the French people could undergo to a foreign nation, though it was an allied one. It was so decided that it a provisional government would have been organized and the French General would have guided it. However, to justify an action of this kind, French had to be involved into the military operations. The contingent of Free France was a little thing and it was included among other 44.000 volunteers of all occupied nations that participated to the mission. The French contribution was more important only thanks to the irreplaceable activity of the Maquis, the French partisans. During the definitive planning of the operations, the SHAEF, with the doubt of what the importance of these irregular units could be, considered their activity as an additional bonus from which to take advantage. Nevertheless, on June 1, they were the Maquis to receive the first official order of mobilization on the European continent before the landing.
At 9 PM on that day, the news-bulletin of the BBC spread over the French territory the first verse of the Chanson d'Automne by Verlaine: Les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne (The long sobs of the violins in autumn). The coded message meant that the invasion was imminent and it would have been confirmed by the following verse of the same poem within forty-eight hours before the real date of the attack. For irony of the fate, the 15th German army had full awareness of the meaning of that verse, for direct information of the Head of the Abwehr, Canaris, but for inexplicable delays of the communication service of the Wehrmacht, neither Rundtstedt nor Rommel knew about those important news. To upset the already precarious informative system, on June 2 the BBC, rather than completing the verse, repeated the beginning of the poem without a reasonable motivation, at least for the Germans.
What were the reasons for the Allied behavior? The SHAEF had already decided that the landing would have happened between June 4 and 7, the only days in the first half of the month that had the features desired by the Allied command: a moon that rose late (favorable element for the paratroopers) and a low tide at dawn (useful to individualize the German defenses otherwise hidden.) About the matter of the tide, we can notice how few the Wehrmacht high ranks knew about the amphibious landings. Rommel was, for example, convinced that the invasion would have happened with the high tide that would have made briefer the journey that the soldiers had to complete. Instead, the Allies had planned to exploit the increasing tide because so the Higgins Boats, once unloaded the infantry units, would have been able to go back with the increase of the sea level and they would have not become additional obstacles for the divisions that would have followed (follow-up units according to the official diction).
The rally of the troops that would have been employed for the invasion had begun in the first days of May. There were two zones of rallying: the Americans to West, in the region of Salcombe, while the Anglo-Canadians to East between Solent and New Haven. The follow-up units (10 divisions) were organized in the neighboring zones between Plymouth and Falmouth for the Americans and between Sheerness and Harwich, next to the estuary of the Thames, for the British. During that whole month, a number of men very next to 2.500.000 was rallied in a very narrow zone. The main problem for the Allies was to keep the order in these huge camps. Initially, they had allowed the traditional sports: football and baseball for the Americans and soccer for English. However, having noticed the increasing number of brawls that the games provoked, they were all forbidden except baseball, sport in which there was no contact between the gamers. Hazard games were popular too. Poker and dices were the preferred pastimes and there are testimonies of soldiers that were enriched and lost everything in an only night, in proximity of the great day. The lack of movement risked letting the troops get lazy and when on May 31 finally arrived the order of embarkation, many soldiers cheered unconsciously. It existed a technical time for embarking and to bring in position all men of the first attack forces and it was 5 days. This meant that the day selected by Eisenhower would have been on June 5. It's still a mystery how Germans completely ignored the concentration of troops and ships on the English coasts. The negligence of the German Navy was so high that last U-boots were deployed in the North Atlantic, instead of being in the Channel.
In the first three days of June, the weather had been particularly clement, with days of sun and clear sky, the ideal for the air raids of support. Then, unexpectedly, on June 4 the weather worsened with forecasts of further worsening. In the complex organization of the operation Overlord existed a section entirely devoted to the meteorological forecasts to whose command there was Captain J.M. Stagg of the Royal Air Force. One particularly negative bulletin of his let the SHAEF fell into the panic: on June 5 storms and bad sea were forecast. The Allied command tried to avoid the inevitable choice, but at the end it was order the delay of the invasion. Such decision was very important, because of the radio silence imposed to all the attacking ships, a lot of them had to be reached by fast destroyers and there was a curious light signal dance. A lot of the ships were already too distant from the starting ports to be able to return there and they were forced to remain in open sea. However, none of them could disembark their own human load, because it was known that the definitive order was imminent and there would not have been the necessary time to effect the embarkation again. The days on June 4 and 5 were recalled by the D-Day veterans as a real hell. Many among them had never sailed and they got the sea sickness. The space reserved to each man was least and nervousness started to grow among the less experienced units.
The SHAEF was aware of the problems that it involved to maintain so many men. However, it could not do otherwise. If the forecasts had maintained negative after June 5 evening, the landing would have been postponed to the following favorable period, that is at least until June 19. The last weather bulletin for Monday 5 had been established at 9 pm. Eisenhower had the opportunity to read it in advance and summoned an extraordinary meeting of his Staff for 9.30 PM. Some of the most interested participants, Marshal Leigh-Mallory, commander of the Air Forces and Admiral Ramsey, were very worried. Stagg announced that the possibility of a clear improvement existed for June 6 dawn. This fact involved that the crossing of the invasion ships as well as the flights of the airborne divisions and the preventive bombardments had to be done under very hard weather conditions. It was chosen to prolong the discussion up to 10 PM. Eisenhower, at the end, decided that the attack would have begun on June 6, without further delays.
Though the decision was not definitive since it was always possible to revoke the order within 3.30 AM on the following day as it had already happened on June 4, it was decided to go ahead. The BBC at 10.15 PM broadcast the second part of Verlaine's verse: � blessent mon couer d'une langueur monotone (they hurt me my heart by a monotonous languor). During the same minutes, the immense apparatus of the Allied aviation was ready to take off. The tactical air support would have been guaranteed from 3340 heavy bombers of classes B-17 and B-24 and from 930 light bombers Mitchell, Boston, Mosquito, Marauder and Havoc. Including the fighters, the transport airplanes and the recognition ones besides the important gliders of the airborne troops, the total amount of the Allied air forces was over 11000 aircrafts. The nations represented besides United States and Great Britain were: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Norway and an undetermined number of nations of the center and South-America that also gave their contribution with an incalculable quantity of volunteers who fought for Freedom of Europe. The air operations would have been extremely difficult. Because of the bad weather, the bombardments were effected with the instrumental guide and this involved an high inaccuracy. This defect would have revealed itself in its gravity at the moment of the landing of the infantry that would have had to face an harder German resistance.
The invasion begins
The first Allied soldiers to put their feet on the French ground were the members of the British and American airborne units. Their assignment was as important as hazardous. They had to take possession of some zones close to Utah and Sword beaches. The two places, in fact, are placed to the Western and Eastern extremities of the landing zone, but, as already remembered, they had two natural obstacles that could force the Allied armies in a narrow land strip without any way out: the river Orne to East and the swamps between the Dunes of Varreville and S.te Mère Eglise to West. The air operation was divided in two moments. Firstly, some special troops would have been landed to trace some sure paths for the units that would have followed and in some cases as on Bridge Pegasus near Caen, to hold the position waiting for reinforcements against a superior enemy. They were carried up to their targets from gliders Horsa hauled by C-47 or Dakota. The action was never tried before and it was more difficult than what estimated. Many of those gliders crashed ruinously, provoking more victims than the German fire. However, already at the midnight an important target had been conquered: British special troops (2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire light Infantry) had occupied the bridges on river Orne and on the channel of Caen, assuring that way out that the Allied commanders feared it might have been blocked
When it was nearly 1 AM, the first news about the air attack arrived at the German command of the 84th German Army. They were still fragmentary and misleading. The German high ranks believed that the action in Normandy was another diversionary attack done to conceal the true target: the Pas de Calais. To support this German conviction, the Allies completed the Fortitude operation by launching near Calais rag dolls dressed as paratroopers that, at the contact with the ground, exploded. It was also modified the approach rout of the American airborne divisions that rather than flying to their own targets in straight line, flew initially toward Brittany and then completed a wide curve in direction of the peninsula of the Cotentin that had to be attacked from West and not from East as it would have been logical to do.
It was really the logic to put in crisis the German Headquarter. The largest part of the high ranks officers was absent because on travel toward Rennes where the following day would have been a Kriegspiel (literally: a wargame that is a theoretical exercise about the invasion). Nobody waited for the invasion with those adverse weather conditions. Even Rommel. He was guiltily absent from the place of command. It is sufficiently known the story that tells he traveled to Germany to celebrate the birthday of his wife and to bring a gift to her: a pair of red shoes acquired in Paris. Although, love for the consort was very strong, as shown by the recovered correspondence that has allowed to reconstruct at least partially the thought of this great general, it would be ungenerous to affirm that he was in Germany entirely for personal reasons. Rommel, also knowing that a hypothetical invasion had to have stopped on the beaches, was also aware of the fact that a sudden counterattack conducted by armored divisions against units not yet well attested on the ground would have meant the failure of the Allied attack. Unfortunately, the available panzerdivisionen were too distant from the coast and in general placed in direction of Calais. As if this was not enough, Hitler had reserved the right to order any move to himself. Rommel, with his travel, hoped to convince the Führer to change his own decision, at least partially, giving back so the necessary mobility to the German army.
Between 3 and the 3.30 AM of the D-Day, the Allied aviation gives the best of itself. 20.000 Anglo-American soldiers dropped from high altitude to land in the zones of S.te Mère Eglise and river Orne. The opposition was weak. The dangers that these brave soldiers faced were mostly due to the conformation of the French ground. Particularly, around S.te Mère Eglise, there was a large number of marshes that would have been avoided according to the dropping plan by landing near Chef du Pont, a town in the proximities of the road toward Cherbourg. Only few members of the 82nd American division landed really there. The rest was scattered on a vast zone between Carentan and S.te Mère Eglise. Same fate touched the British troops, though in lesser manner. During the first hours of attack of the best organized operation in the history, an only element predominated: the disorganization. Some American soldiers drowned into the swamps and river Merderet under the weight of their own equipment, others disappeared up to the following day. It is part of the movie history the scene in which a lucky paratrooper (the soldier John Steele) got entangled into the bell tower of the church of S.te Mère Eglise while his companions were falling under the hostile fire. Because of the big din of the bells he was for some weeks deaf. Later, he was imprisoned from the Germans, but he incredibly succeeded in escaping. However, under the guide of energetic officers as General Matthew Ridgway of 82nd Division, General Maxwell Taylor of 101st American Division and English General Richard Gale of 6th British Division, 2500 American soldiers on 13200 and 3000 British soldiers on 4800 were immediately rallied for completing the assigned duties of that night.
At St. Lo, German General Marcks, whose birthday ironically was really on June 6, was convinced that the Allied attack to Normandy was not an heavy action, in sight of the real invasion at Calais. He ordered the mobilization of the coastal defenses of the Wehrmacht, but it was already too late. The disorganization that characterized the Allies was nothing if compared with what happened in the Wehrmacht. The artillery batteries were paralysed by the air bombardment to which someones could survive only for the inaccuracy of the attackers. In this context, there was only a military action really perfect for how much hazardous and risky it was. The Allies knew the existence of a battery of 150 mm guns near Merville. The power of that unit was such that if it had survived to the nighttime attack it would have seriously threatened the approach of the invasion fleet. The attack was conducted frontally from 150 men of the 9th battalion of the 6th British airborne Division, only a fifth of the initial force sent for that attack, because of the enormous dispersion of the paratroopers. Lieutenant Colonel Otway who commanded the unit ordered an assault with the style of World War 1: against fortified positions and firing machine-guns. In the long journey that passed through two grids of barbed wire and a mined field, half the 150 young attacking men lost their life, but only 10% of the defenders would have seen the dawn that day. A similar sacrifice was, in effects, useless, because once conquered the battery Otway discovered that the guns were only 75 mm pieces and they would never have been able to threaten the Sword beach.
The German command had realized by now that the actions of the Allied paratroopers were not a bluff. Every permission was annulled and they got ready to counterattack. German General Dollman, head of the zone of Le Mans ordered to proceed to the annihilation of the bridgehead of S.te Mère Eglise with a manoeuvre from North and South. General Speidel, head of the armored units in the Eastern zone of the front of invasion, ordered that the banks of the Orne were defensed at any cost. However, these were nothing else other than orders valid on the paper. The mighty Allied bombardment had heavily damaged the German communications and the "bonus" of the maquis was present right in this neuralgic sector of the military organization of the Reich. Hundreds of telephone and telegraphic pylons were destroyed by French partisans and the rails of the most important railroads of France were destroyed or made unusable too. Von Rundstedt knew in a very approximate way what was happening, but he knew that the only solution for a German victory was counterattack as soon as possible and with all the armored forces left in reserve. They were the "Panzer Lehr", some units of which had been "hijacked" to the Russian front in the days preceding the invasion, and the 12nd SS armored division. The Führer had been categorical: they would be moved only for his explicit order. In the indecision on what behavior to have, everybody waited until 6 AM for then to call Berchtesgaden, Hitler's residence. To complete the ungrateful assignment was the head of German High Staff, General Blumentritt. On the other side of the phone wire, a farce without precedents began . Firstly the orderly Warlimont and then Jodl resolutely refused to communicate to the Führer what was happening in Normandy. The reason was only one: Hitler slept and nobody had courage to wake him. Von Rundstedt was astonished in front of such conclusion, but he didn't do anything else other than confirming his previous order of alarm for the armored reserves. The events had said if the sleep of the little Austrian corporal would have marked the destiny of Germany.
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