How important was Operation Overlord? Had it failed, the map of Europe might look quite different today. Mounting a second try would have taken a year-“at least another year, if you take account of the psychological impact of such a disaster,” says Martin Blumenson, the author of the U.S. Army’s official history of the Normandy campaign. While the shattered armada regrouped, Hitler would have had time to complete the Atlantic Wall, to rain V-1 and V-2 missiles on London and to finish off the Final Solution. Meanwhile, Stalin’s Red Army would have pushed on to the West-perhaps, in time, right across Germany. “It’s not too far-fetched to wonder if the Iron Curtain might have been on the Rhine,” says D-Day historian Carlo D’Este.
That is, unless the Western Allies struck first with nuclear weapons. “If D-Day had failed, then by August 1945 America would have been dropping the atomic bomb on Germany,” says William O’Neill, professor of history at Rutgers and a World War II authority. “Instead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we’d remember, say, Berlin and Frankfurt.”
The prospect of risking so much on a single battle-a single day-gave real pause to Allied leaders. Remembering the carnage of World War I, Churchill muttered morosely about “Channel tides running red with Allied blood” and “beaches choked with bodies of the flower of American and British manhood.” The Americans were more confident, but not without their private qualms. In mid-May, with the invasion only three weeks away, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, the choleric W. Bedell Smith, had “premonitions of disaster.” He put the chances of success at 50-50.
Such fears seem exaggerated, in retrospect. Consider the odds: the Allies could put more than 10,000 warplanes over France that day; the Luftwaffe had 890. Allied naval forces included five battleships and 23 cruisers; the German Navy in the Channel was reduced to a few light E-boats and submarines. In two months the Allies put more than 8,000 tanks into Normandy; the Germans could muster only 1,350. Still, victory was not a sure thing. The weather was the main element of uncertainty. Eisenhower’s meteorologist gave him a 36-hour window between Channel storms. Had he guessed wrong, the fragile landing craft would have foundered in the gale. (As it was, 10 troop craft launched off Omaha Beach were swamped instantly, drowning perhaps 1,000 men.)
It would be romantic to think that bravery carried the day, and the green and seasick young men dodging bullets in the surf along 59 miles of Normandy beach were brave indeed. But in reality D-Day was won far from the beaches of Normandy, by forces larger than courage, The decisive factors:
If the Red Army had not tied down-and chewed up-the Wehrmacht, the Longest Day would have been longer still. The Allies faced 56 depleted German divisions; in Russia, Hitler had 157. Two weeks after Operation Overlord, Stalin launched an offensive that dwarfed D-Day. In 10 days, 130 Russian divisions destroyed three entire German armies, killing, wounding or capturing 350,000 men.
The fuhrer was obsessed with defeating Bolshevism and never grasped the peril of a second front. He rejected the pleas of his top generals in the West, von Rundstedt and Rommel, to smash the Allies by consolidating in the East and shifting divisions to France. Nor would he resolve the dispute between them on how best to deploy the tanks they did have. Von Rundstedt wanted to hold the Panzer tank divisions in the rear, for massed counterattack; Rommel believed the invaders had to be driven into the sea in the first hours of battle. Hitler’s indecision was fatal; the Panzers came too late. “I’d like to shake him by the hand,” Britain’s chief of staff, Gen. Alan Brooke, remarked later to a startled group of generals. “He was worth 40 divisions to us.”
The Germans were crucially delayed by the most successful intelligence operation in history. The Allies created two phony armies under Gen. George S. Patton (temporarily in purdah for slapping a soldier) to con the German General Staff into believing that they were crossing the Channel closer to Germany, at the Pas de Calais. Under “Double Cross,” British intelligence controlled all German spies in England and had them sending false reports about Patton back to the Reich. The Allies were able to tell the ruse was working through the supersecret Ultra operation, which broke German codes.
“They can make cars and refrigerators, but not aircraft,” scoffed Hermann Goring, the chief of Hitler’s air force, the Luftwaffe, in August 1941. He found out differently by 1943, when the American Eighth Air Force began daring daylight raids deep into Germany. A hundred miles from the Normandy beaches, Edward R. Murrow, the CBS newsman, could hear the engines of the Allied bomber fleet as H-Hour approached. “It was the sound of a giant factory in the sky,” said Murrow. For all the individual heroics, D-Day is ultimately the story of how Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy” simply overwhelmed all opposition. “In the East, we were fighting men against men,” said one of the German soldiers caught in the Normandy firestorm. “Here it is men against machine.” Rommel despondently told his son a few weeks after D-Day, “All the courage didn’t help. It was a terrible bloodletting … Every shot we fire now is harming ourselves, for it will be returned a hundredfold.”
The Wehrmacht by 1944 may have been exhausted and outgunned, but the Germans still had nearly a year of bitter fight left in them. There were dramatic breakouts and sweeping envelopments by the Allies, but most of the fighting was a hard slog, from the hedgerows of Normandy to the banks of the Elbe. “For the ordinary rifleman in the infantry divisions, life expectancy at the front was no better than that of the Tommies and the Doughboys of the First World War,” wrote historian John Ellis. The average casualty rate for 11 American divisions cited by Ellis was 76 percent. In one division, the Fourth, which fought for the full 11 months, 83 percent were killed or wounded.
German casualties were beyond belief. Most German units suffered more than 100 percent casualties over 11 months: in other words, they were wiped out. The most formidable force facing the Allies on D-Day was the crack 21st Panzer Division, which began the day with 127 tanks, 350 officers and 12,000 men. When the remnants of the 21st straggled across the Seine 10 weeks later, it consisted of 300 men and just 10 tanks. The commander of another frontline division, the Panzer Lehr, recalled being carpet-bombed by American B-17s: “It was hell … the planes kept coming overhead like a conveyer belt . . . the fields were burning and smoldering… My front lines looked like a landscape on the moon, and at least 70 percent of my personnel were out of action-dead. wounded, crazed or numbed.” After one battle in Normandy, the German dead lay so thick in the summer sun that pilots of the light-artillery observation aircraft flying overhead could smell the stench below
After the war, the commanders of the NATO forces allied against the Soviet Union were almost all veterans of D-Day and the battle for Europe. Until the fall of the Berlin wall, NATO relied for its defense on the threat of nuclear weapons, for a simple reason: no one wanted to fight D-Day again-ever.
