D-Day’s Mighty Host - May ‘98 World War II Feature

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A perilous airborne strike and the mightiest assemblage of seaborne power yet seen heralded the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany.

By David R. Jennys

The road to the invasion of Nazi-controlled France began more than two years prior to its actual execution. In its early stages, the invasion plan was a British operation called Roundup, which would move troops onto the mainland in the event of a German collapse. When the United States entered the war, the idea was resurrected as a combined British-American operation to cross the English Channel and pierce Adolf Hitler’s "Atlantic Wall" defenses.

Roundup had to wait, however, in favor of Operation Torch, the British-American invasion of North Africa. After Torch, the Allies began planning Operation Overlord, as Roundup came to be known, and fixed the target date for May 1, 1944.

The Germans also had been preparing. They knew that the Allies must invade France in order to carry the ground war into Germany. The Germans’ major unanswered questions were when and where the Allies would storm ashore. Most German strategists felt that the target would be the Pas-de-Calais area, where the English Channel was narrowest. Therefore, the strongest defenses were constructed there.

The German forces in Western Europe, commanded by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, consisted of Army Groups B and G. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commanding Army Group B, was given the responsibility of throwing the Allied invasion force back into the sea.

Opinions on the best method of defeating the Allies differed greatly. Rundstedt and others advocated a central reserve that would be used to repel the invaders after their intentions were known. Rommel challenged that plan because he believed that Allied air superiority would prevent the central reserve from conducting an effective counterattack. The time to defeat the invasion force, Rommel believed, was when it first hit the beaches. To that end, he worked to have the strongest units stationed along the coastline and built coastal batteries and strongpoints, augmented by thousands of anti-invasion obstacles and millions of mines.

The result was a compromise between these two conflicting philosophies on defense, causing neither to be effective. Another factor that hampered the German defensive posture was that they, unlike the Allies, had no supreme military commander, so rivalries occurred between the individual departments, and there were numerous overlapping responsibilities.

D-Day was originally scheduled for June 5, 1944. SHAEF arrived at this date by considering two factors–moonlight and tide. H-hour would be near sunrise, when the amphibious troops would have a rising tide, which would enable them to land close to obstacles without coming ashore on top of them. The paratroopers needed a full moon for visibility. The days with the proper tide-moonlight formula closest to the target date were June 5, 6 and 7. The 5th was chosen for D-Day to allow a buffer in case the attack needed to be postponed.

An unprecedented level of security was imposed on the Allied army to prevent information leaks. Despite those efforts, some breaches of security still occurred. Those incidents were minor in the grand scheme of things, but they raised anew the myriad questions in the Allied planners’ minds. Had every detail been covered and sufficiently deliberated? Eisenhower, describing the situation, said, "The mighty host was tense as a coiled spring." When the fateful month of June finally arrived, that human spring was ready to release its energy against the Germans defending the coast of Normandy.

With June, however, arrived the discouraging prospect of terrible weather. In fact, the weather was so bad that General Eisenhower was forced to postpone the invasion by one day. When the SHAEF staff members met to review their options, they were faced with the grim reality that June 6 did not look much better than the original D-Day. The meteorological report gave a thin ray of hope that a lull in the storm would allow enough time to launch the invasion, but no one could say whether the follow-up of the operation would be possible. The decision was a tough one, but the invasion would go ahead.

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