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thedrifter
06-06-04, 07:09 AM
06-04-2004

From the Editor:

D-Day without Tears





By Ed Offley



The somber and eloquent rhetoric will be inevitable as the current leaders of the five major combatants in Europe during World War II convene at Normandy this weekend to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944. The presidents or prime ministers of the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia will meet for that event.



As we sit and watch the ceremonies and speeches, wreath-laying events and military aircraft flyovers, and salute the frail survivors of the invasion and six decades of life thereafter, it will be too easy to bathe the scene in sentimentality and Hallmark-Card-poetry. That’s the peril of such optimal photo-ops in a world of 24/7 cable news.



The troops who were there deserve better. Instead, I propose we reflect on the grittier aspects of Operation Overlord.



It was an industrial-age invasion for an industrial-age war.



More than 154,000 U.S. and allied troops – the spearhead of 1.5 million soldiers, sailors and airman who had staged to Great Britain during the past two years – came ashore on D-Day. They went to war aboard a fleet of over 4,400 ships and landing craft, and over 1,000 C-47 aircraft and Horsa gliders bearing nearly 20,000 allied paratroopers. An aerial armada of over 11,000 fighters and bombers created an aerial umbrella over the invasion beaches to thwart German counter-attacks.



There were 47 allied divisions slated for the invasion of Europe, including 21 from the U.S. Army. Confronting them were 60 German divisions in France and the Low Countries. The allies succeeded in putting the initial force ashore on D-Day, and 500,000 troops within a week. By July 2, 1944, more than 2 million troops and 250,000 vehicles had entered France over the Normandy beachheads.



Unlike today, both sides were literally fighting blind.



The realities of combat in the mid-1940s would be unrecognizable on a battlefield today: surveillance capabilities were primitive-to-nonexistent; communications were limited and subject to breakdown, and weather forecasting was an educated guess. Months of allied planning and intelligence-gathering produced a “snapshot” of the Normandy terrain that was inaccurate and all but useless to the front-line units.



Because of this, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and his subordinates had to do what Napoleon, Wellington, Grant, Pershing and Haig had done before them: rely on mass – the accumulation of overwhelming numbers of soldiers, tanks, warships and aircraft – to compensate for the many unknowns awaiting them.



In return, Hitler’s generals had been seduced and blinded by an elaborate intelligence operation, code named Fortitude, which had convinced them that the invasion would be coming to the coastline at the Pas de Calais, closer to the English mainland and theoretically more suitable to an amphibious invasion. Even after the invasion was beyond doubt, the German dictator still refused to release his reserve Panzer divisions, fearing Normandy was a feint and the real invasion was still to come.



On the other hand, the allies’ tactical intelligence about the German Army units at Normandy was horribly inaccurate. In one instance, the allies estimated that there was only a solitary battalion of 750 German soldiers from a second-rate unit guarding Omaha Beach, while in fact three battalions from the combat-hardened 352nd Division – over 2,000 German soldiers – were dug in with a network of pillboxes linked by a network of trenches.



The Overlord battle plan never survived first contact with the enemy.



Hundreds of U.S. and allied warships were assigned the task of bombarding German positions overlooking the invasion beaches, but naval gunsights were not accurate enough to gauge the actual success of the assault, and many of the enemy bunkers survived.



Meanwhile, mass sorties of over 5,000 allied bombers – lacking aerial targeting radar and precision-guided weapons common today – missed their targets and plowed up Norman pastures far to the rear. The three airborne divisions responsible for capturing key areas behind the German coastal lines to prevent enemy reinforcements were scattered for tens of miles after the transport planes broke formation due to clouds over the drop zones and heavy anti-aircraft fire.



Back on their command ships, the allied commanders were immediately and completely cut off from the fight due to the chaos at Omaha Beach and the instant degradation of tactical communications once the battle began. Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley, commander of the U.S. 1st Army, would later recall June 6 as “a time of grave personal anxiety and frustration” over the communications breakdown. At one point he was forced to send staff officers toward shore in land craft where they tried to peer through the shroud of smoke and exploding ordnance to determine whether the Omaha landing was succeeding or not.



The troops paid for all of those limitations and errors with their lives.



Hundreds of paratroopers perished in the early morning hours of June 6 because allied photoreconnaissance interpreters failed to notice that several drop zones had been flooded. More than 2,000 American soldiers perished at Omaha Beach when they waded ashore into the kill-zones of the German battalions. Scores of American tank crews drowned when a flotation device meant to provide buoyancy to their vehicles failed in the heavy surf. Hundreds more soldiers would perish in the weeks ahead in large-scale “friendly-fire” incidents involving allied close-air support raids that went awry.



Historian Stephen Ambrose managed to capture in a single sentence why the allies prevailed despite such negative realities: “Valor and willpower triumphed where planning and prophecy failed.”



D-Day was a turning point of the war, but only presaged even more savage fighting that lay ahead.



More than 10,000 allied troops and an equal number of Germans died during Operation Overlord. Our total casualties in more than a year of violence in Iraq are still less than 1 percent of that butcher bill for one day in the war. Yet even that horrific figure is a footnote to the mass deaths still yet to come.



Thirteen days after Normandy, the Red Army launched Operation Bagration to eject the Wehrmacht from Belarus. In several weeks of fighting, casualties on both sides were in the hundreds of thousands. Six months after D-Day, the German counter-attack in the Ardennes pitted 29 German divisions against 29 American and three British divisions, with an industrial-era roster of dead and wounded: 19,000 Americans killed, 38,446, injured and 23,554 taken prisoner. In the Pacific, the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and the U.S. firebomb and nuclear bombing of Japanese cities still lay months in the future. The Soviet capture of Berlin after three weeks of fighting resulted in 325,000 Red Army deaths and an estimated 325,000 German deaths, half of whom were civilians.



In Europe on June 6, 1944, those who survived death or disabling injury at Normandy knew only one thing: That they would continue to fight in the war either until it was over, or they were. That is why Ambrose’s book and later mini-series, “Band of Brothers,” still resonates so strongly among those who contemplate the realities of World War II.



When Easy Co., 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, dropped inland behind Utah Beach, it marked not the beginning of one pivotal battle but instead, 11 months of hard fighting that would take the paratroopers to the siege of Bastogne and into the German heartland ending at Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest” sanctuary in Bavaria on V-E Day.



In the 20-20 hindsight of history, it was a glorious victory. For the veterans, it was simply 11 months of hell on earth. We should never forget that as we hear the politicians raise their voices in praise of that terrible and sacred shore.



Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley

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Ellie