Normandy Invasion

▪ European-United States history

Introduction

also called  Operation Overlord 

  during World War II, the Allied invasion of western Europe, which was launched on June 6, 1944 (the most celebrated D-Day of the war), with the simultaneous landing of U.S., British, and Canadian forces on five separate beachheads in Normandy, France. By the end of August 1944 all of northern France was liberated, and the invading forces reorganized for the drive into Germany, where they would eventually meet with Soviet forces advancing from the east to bring an end to the Nazi Reich.

Planning, 1941–43

Hitler (Hitler, Adolf)'s Reich, east and west

  In midsummer 1943, a year before the Anglo-American invasion of Normandy that would lead to the liberation of western Europe, Adolf Hitler (Hitler, Adolf)'s Wehrmacht (“Armed Forces”) still occupied all the territory it had gained in the blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939–41 and most of its Russian conquests of 1941–42. It also retained its foothold on the coast of North Africa, acquired when it had gone to the aid of its Italian ally in 1941. The Russian counteroffensives at the Battle of Stalingrad (Stalingrad, Battle of) and the Battle of Kursk (Kursk, Battle of) had pushed back the perimeter of Hitler's Europe in the east. Yet he or his allies still controlled the whole of mainland Europe, except for neutral Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Sweden. The Nazi war economy, though overshadowed by the growing power of America's, outmatched both that of Britain and that of the Soviet Union except in the key areas of tank and aircraft production. Without direct intervention by the western Allies on the Continent—an intervention that would centre on the commitment of a large American army—Hitler could count on prolonging his military dominance for years to come.

The second front

 Since 1942, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (Stalin, Joseph) had been pressing his allies, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (Roosevelt, Franklin D.) and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Churchill, Sir Winston), to mount a second front in the west. It was impossible in the circumstances. America's army was still forming, while the landing craft necessary to bring such an army across the English Channel had not yet been built. Nevertheless, Britain had begun to prepare theoretical plans for a return to the continental mainland soon after the retreat from Dunkirk, France, in 1940, and the Americans, immediately after Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, had started to frame their own timetable. Less inhibited than the British by perceived technical difficulties, the Americans pressed from the start for an early invasion—desirably in 1943, perhaps even in 1942. To that end George C. Marshall (Marshall, George Catlett), Roosevelt's chief of staff, appointed a protégé, Dwight D. Eisenhower (Eisenhower, Dwight D.), to the U.S. Army's war plans division in December 1941 and commissioned him to design an operational scheme for Allied victory.

Operations Roundup and Sledgehammer

  Swiftly convincing himself that the priority of “Germany first” agreed to by Roosevelt and Churchill in the Atlantic Charter was correct, Eisenhower framed proposals for a 1943 invasion (Operation Roundup) and another for 1942 (Operation Sledgehammer) in the event of a Russian collapse or a sudden weakening of Germany's position. Both plans were presented to the British in London in April 1942, and Roundup was adopted. The British, nevertheless, reserved objective doubts, and at subsequent Anglo-American conferences—in Washington in June, in London in July—they first quashed all thought of Sledgehammer and then succeeded in persuading the Americans to agree to a North African landing as the principal operation of 1942. Operation Torch, as the landing in North Africa was to be code-named, effectively postponed Roundup again, while subsequent operations in Sicily and the Italian mainland delayed preparations for the cross-Channel invasion through 1943 as well. The postponements were a principal cause of concern at inter-Allied conferences at Washington (code-named Trident, May 1943), Quebec (Quebec Conference) (Quadrant, August 1943), Cairo (Cairo Conference) (Sextant, November 1943), and Tehrān (Tehrān Conference) (Eureka, November–December 1943). At the last gathering, Roosevelt and Stalin combined against Churchill to insist on the adoption of May 1944 as an unalterable date for the invasion. In return, Stalin agreed to mount a simultaneous offensive in eastern Europe and to join in the war against Japan once Germany had been defeated.

Operation Overlord

 The decision taken at Tehrān was a final indication of American determination to stage the cross-Channel invasion; it was also a defeat for Alan Brooke (Alanbrooke, Alan Francis Brooke, 1st Viscount, Baron Alanbrooke of Brookeborough), Churchill's chief of staff and the principal opponent of premature action. Yet despite Brooke's procrastination, the British had in fact been proceeding with structural plans, coordinated by Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan (Morgan, Frederick Edgeworth), who had been appointed COSSAC (chief of staff to the supreme Allied commander [designate]) at the Anglo-American Casablanca Conference in January 1943. His staff's first plan for Operation Overlord (Digest of Operation Overlord) (as the invasion was henceforth to be known) was for a landing in Normandy between Caen and the Cotentin Peninsula in a strength of three divisions, with two brigades to be air-dropped. Another 11 divisions were to be landed within the first two weeks through two artificial harbours that would be towed across the Channel. Once a foothold had been established, a force of a hundred divisions, the majority shipped directly from the United States, were to be assembled in France for a final assault on Germany. In January 1944 Eisenhower became supreme Allied commander (Directive to Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force), and the COSSAC staff was redesignated SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force).

Fortress Europe

  Hitler had long been aware that the Anglo-American allies would eventually mount a cross-Channel invasion, but, as long as they dissipated their forces in the Mediterranean and as long as the campaign in the east demanded the commitment of all available German forces, he downplayed the threat. By November 1943, however, he accepted that it could be ignored no longer, and in his Directive Number 51 (Hitler Directive Number 51) he announced that France would be reinforced. To oversee defensive preparations, Hitler appointed Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (Rommel, Erwin), former commander of the Afrika Korps, as inspector of coastal defenses and then as commander of Army Group B, occupying the threatened Channel coast. As army group commander, Rommel officially reported to the longer-serving Commander in Chief West Gerd von Rundstedt (Rundstedt, Gerd von), though the entire structure was locked into a rigid chain of command that deferred many operational decisions to the Führer himself.

Buildup, 1943–44

The Allied commanders

 In January 1944 the Allies appointed an invasion commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and placed him within a flexible, fully binational Anglo-American chain of command. Bernard Law Montgomery (Montgomery, Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount), Rommel's desert opponent in North Africa, was nominated, under Eisenhower, as commander of the ground invasion forces. Walter Bedell Smith (Smith, Walter Bedell), an American, continued as Eisenhower's chief of staff, but his other principal subordinates were British: Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder (Tedder, Arthur William Tedder, 1st Baron) as his deputy, Admiral Bertram Ramsay (Ramsay, Bertram Home) as naval commander, and Air Chief Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory (Leigh-Mallory, Trafford) as head of the expeditionary air forces. A Free French delegate, Marie-Pierre Koenig (Koenig, Marie-Pierre), served as liaison between SHAEF and the president of the French Committee of National Liberation, Charles de Gaulle (Gaulle, Charles de).

 Montgomery's first acts were (1) to demand and get five divisions to make the initial landing and (2) to widen the landing area to include the Orne River estuary and the base of the Cotentin Peninsula. As finally constituted in the so-called Montgomery plan (Neptune Initial Joint Plan), the invasion force was to consist of five infantry divisions—two U.S., two British, and one Canadian—assigned to beaches code-named (from west to east) Utah (Utah Beach), Omaha (Omaha Beach), Gold (Gold Beach), Juno (Juno Beach), and Sword (Sword Beach). On D-Day (the projected first day of the invasion), two American airborne divisions were to land behind the western end of the assault area and one British at the eastern, while amphibious armour was to swim ashore with the leading waves. The Americans constituted the U.S. First Army (U.S. Operations Plan Neptune) under Major General Omar Bradley (Bradley, Omar Nelson), the British and Canadians the British Second Army (British Joint Outline Plan Neptune) under General Miles Dempsey (Dempsey, Miles Christopher). The British divisions had been under intensive training since 1942, the U.S. since 1943. Meanwhile, intensive logistics preparations organized by Lieutenant General J.C.H. Lee (Lee, John Clifford Hodges) provided, by May 1944, almost 6,500 ships and landing craft, which would land nearly 200,000 vehicles and 600,000 tons of supplies in the first three weeks of the operation.

The air campaign

 The invasion would be supported by more than 13,000 fighter, bomber, and transport aircraft, against which the Luftwaffe (the German air force) was able to deploy fewer than 400 on D-Day. Between April 1 and June 5, 1944, the British and American strategic air forces deployed 11,000 aircraft, flew 200,000 sorties, and dropped 195,000 tons of bombs on French rail centres and road networks as well as German airfields, radar installations, military bases, and coastal artillery batteries. Two thousand Allied aircraft were lost in these preliminaries, but the air campaign succeeded in breaking all the bridges across the Seine (Seine River) and Loire (Loire River) rivers and thus isolating the invasion area from the rest of France. The Luftwaffe staff was forced to concede that “the outstanding factor both before and during the invasion was the overwhelming air superiority of the enemy.”

Decryption and deception

 The air campaign was designed not only to disrupt German anti-invasion preparations but also to serve as a deception operation. Two-thirds of the bombs were dropped outside the invasion area in an attempt to persuade the enemy that the landings would be made northeast of the Seine—in particular, the Pas-de-Calais area, directly opposite Dover, England—rather than in Normandy. At the same time, through the top-secret Ultra operation, the Allies were able to decode encrypted German transmissions, thus providing the Overlord forces with a clear picture of where the German counterattack forces were deployed.

 By spurious radio transmissions, the Allies created an entire phantom army, “based” in southeast England (opposite Pas-de-Calais) and alleged to be commanded by the American general George S. Patton (Patton, George Smith). (Patton would later materialize on the Normandy battlefield to lead the armoured breakout into Brittany.) In addition, on the night of the invasion itself, airborne radar deception presented to German radar stations a “phantom” picture of an invasion fleet crossing the Channel narrows, while a radar blackout disguised the real transit to Normandy.

Mines at the beach, tanks in reserve

 The Germans were not altogether deluded. Hitler (Hitler, Adolf) himself declared a last-minute premonition of a Normandy landing. By then, however, the dispositions had been made. Rommel, in his brief period of responsibility for the Atlantic Wall, had been able to decuple mine laying, so that by June 5 some four million more mines had been laid on the beaches. He had not, however, been able to position the German tank divisions as he wanted. Rundstedt (Rundstedt, Gerd von) wished to hold them back from the coast as a reserve. Rommel, warning that Allied aircraft would destroy them as they advanced, wished to place them near the beaches. Hitler, adjudicating in the dispute, worsened the situation by allotting some divisions to Rommel and some to Rundstedt, keeping others under his own command. The rest of Rommel's Army Group B was made up of the infantry divisions of the Seventh Army (under Friedrich Dollmann (Dollmann, Friedrich)) in Normandy and Brittany and of the Fifteenth Army (under Hans von Salmuth (Salmuth, Hans von)) in Pas-de-Calais and eastward. The reserve tank forces, given the name Panzer Group West and commanded by Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg (Geyr von Schweppenburg, Leo), came nominally under Rundstedt's direct command.

D-Day, June 6, 1944

The decision to go

 May 1944 had been chosen at the conference in Washington in May 1943 as the time for the invasion. Difficulties in assembling landing craft forced a postponement until June, but June 5 was fixed as the unalterable date by Eisenhower on May 17. As the day approached and troops began to embark for the crossing, bad weather set in, threatening dangerous landing conditions. After tense debate, Eisenhower and his subordinates decided on a 24-hour delay, requiring the recall of some ships already at sea. Eventually, on the morning of June 5, Eisenhower, assured by chief meteorologist James Martin Stagg (Stagg, James Martin) of a break in the weather, announced, “O.K. We'll go.” Within hours an armada of 3,000 landing craft, 2,500 other ships, and 500 naval vessels—escorts and bombardment ships—began to leave English ports. That night 822 aircraft, carrying parachutists or towing gliders, roared overhead to the Normandy landing zones. They were a fraction of the air armada of 13,000 aircraft that would support D-Day.

The landings

 The airborne troops were the vanguard, and their landings were a heartening success. The American 82nd and 101st airborne divisions, dropping into a deliberately inundated zone at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula, suffered many casualties by drowning but nevertheless secured their objective. The British 6th Airborne Division seized its unflooded objectives at the eastern end more easily, and its special task force also captured key bridges over the Caen Canal and Orne River. When the seaborne units began to land about 6:30 AM on June 6, the British and Canadians on Gold (Gold Beach), Juno (Juno Beach), and Sword (Sword Beach) beaches overcame light opposition. So did the Americans at Utah (Utah Beach). The U.S. 1st Division at Omaha Beach, however, confronted the best of the German coast divisions, the 352nd, and was roughly handled by machine gunners as the troops waded ashore. During the morning, the landing at Omaha threatened to fail. Only dedicated local leadership eventually got the troops inland—though at a cost of more than 2,000 casualties.

The German response

      Meanwhile, the German high command—in the absence of Rommel, who was home on leave—began to respond. Hitler was initially unwilling to release the armoured divisions for a counterattack. When he relented after midday, elements of the 21st Panzer Division drove into the gap between the British 3rd and Canadian 3rd divisions at Sword Beach and Juno Beach and almost reached the sea. Had they done so, the landings might have failed. Fierce resistance by British antitank gunners at Périers-sur-le-Dan turned the tide in late evening.

The lodgment area established

      On June 7 the beachhead consisted of three separate sectors: that of the British and Canadians, between Caen (not taken) and Bayeux; that of the U.S. V Corps, between Port-en-Bessin and Saint-Pierre-du-Mont; and that of the U.S. VII Corps, west of the Vire River behind Utah Beach. The narrow gap between Gold and Omaha at Port-en-Bessin was quickly closed, but it was not until June 12 that the American corps were able to join hands after a bitter battle to capture Carentan. The beachhead then formed a continuous zone, its deepest point being southwest of Bayeux, where the V Corps had driven nearly 15 miles (25 km) inland.

 Meanwhile, work had been proceeding pell-mell to complete two artificial harbours, known by their code name, Mulberry, that were intended to off-load vehicles and supplies until the port of Cherbourg was secured. An outer breakwater of sunken ships for each harbour was in place by June 11. Floating piers, designed to rise and fall with the tides, were half-finished by June 19, when a heavy storm destroyed much of the material. The Americans then decided to abandon their Mulberry, while the British harbour was not in use until July. Most supplies meanwhile had to be beach-landed by assorted landing craft, landing ships (landing ship, tank), and amphibious trucks ( DUKWs).

Stalemate, June–July 1944

Fighting in the bocage

 Fighting inshore, the Allies also encountered difficulty in the dense hedgerow country (Effect of Hedgerow Terrain on Infantry Tactics) known to the French as the bocage. Thanks to the success of the airborne landings, the flanks of the beachhead were firmly held, but efforts to break out of the centre were frustrated by fierce German resistance and counterattacks, particularly around Caen in the British-Canadian sector. A British armoured thrust at Villers-Bocage was defeated on June 13. A large-scale infantry offensive west of Caen, called Operation Epsom, was also defeated on June 25–29. There was gloom at SHAEF; it seemed that stalemate was descending. The gloom was deepened by Montgomery's strategy. His plan was to draw German armour toward the British front and win a battle of attrition between tank forces. The successful German defense, however, led the Americans to doubt the plan's viability.

 In fact, the Germans were also depressed, for their bitter defense was using up men and equipment that could not be replaced. Moreover, the Americans were now able to profit from the deployment of most of the enemy's armour against the British and break into the base of the Cotentin Peninsula and advance on Cherbourg. The last bastion in the heavily fortified city fell on June 28, and clearance of the port began at once.

Crisis in the German command

 The setbacks brought about a crisis in the German high command, which in any case now suffered unforeseeable casualties. Dollman (Dollmann, Friedrich), commander of the Seventh Army, died suddenly on June 28, just after the surrender of the main garrison in Cherbourg; his death was blamed on a heart attack, though it is quite likely he committed suicide. Rommel was severely injured when his car was strafed by a British fighter on July 17. Worst of all, Rundstedt confessed defeatism to Hitler, urged him to make peace, and was dismissed on July 2 along with Geyr, the commander of Panzer Group West. Geyr was replaced by the capable veteran Heinrich Eberbach (Eberbach, Heinrich). Rundstedt himself was replaced by Günther von Kluge (Kluge, Günther von), who soon came round to sharing Rundstedt's doubts. On July 20 a conspiracy of officers (including former army chief of staff Ludwig Beck (Beck, Ludwig) and reserve army chief of staff Claus, Count Schenk von Stauffenberg (Stauffenberg, Claus, Graf (count) Schenk von)) who believed the only hope of securing a peace lay in Hitler's removal made an attempt on his life at his East Prussian headquarters, Rastenburg. The failure of the July Plot led to Hitler's taking draconian powers over the army and exacting terrible revenge on those suspected of complicity. Rommel was forced to commit suicide in October, and Kluge did so on August 18.

      The German defense of Normandy had by then taken a turn for the worse. Though a large British armoured offensive west of Caen, Operation Goodwood, failed on July 18–19, the U.S. First Army conducted a bitter battle of attrition around Saint-Lô in the second and third weeks of July. Its success was to lay the basis for the long-awaited breakout.

Breakout, August 1944

Operation Cobra

 By July 25, with most of the German tanks drawn westward by the British Goodwood offensive, the Americans faced a front almost denuded of armour. Reinforcement gave them a clear superiority in tank and infantry divisions, while the Allied Expeditionary Force had the bombardment power to devastate the Germans in their path. Operation Cobra, scheduled for July 25, opened with a devastating air attack (Air Support in Ground Operations) (some of which fell on the waiting GIs). Through the gap thus opened, the U.S. First Army sped toward Avranches, taken on July 30. At this point George S. Patton (Patton, George Smith)'s newly formed Third Army joined in the advance. A massive American spearhead now threatened to drive into Brittany and, by a left turn, to encircle the Germans in Normandy from the rear.

The German counterattack and the Falaise pocket

 Hitler saw the breakout as an opportunity to restore the front. Bringing the 2nd, 116th, and 1st and 2nd Panzer SS divisions hastily westward, he issued orders for Operation Lüttich, designed to drive behind the point of the American spearhead and reach the sea at Avranches. However, Ultra interceptions of German cipher traffic alerted the Americans to the danger, and, when Lüttich opened on August 7, heavy antitank defenses were in place. The offensive was stopped and defeated in its tracks.

      Meanwhile, as the American encirclement eastward from Brittany developed, the British and Americans began a strong advance west of Caen toward Falaise. On August 16, the day after a Franco-American force had landed on the Riviera (Operation Dragoon), Hitler at last recognized the inevitable and gave permission for a withdrawal from Normandy. The only route of escape lay through a gap between the converging American and British spearheads at Falaise. The position was held by the recently arrived Polish 1st Armoured Division. Despite its heroic efforts, the remnants of the German Seventh Army and Fifth Panzer Army—the latter now led by one of Hitler's top tank commanders, Josef (“Sepp”) Dietrich (Dietrich, Josef)—succeeded in breaking through between August 16 and 19. Some 240,000 men, bereft of equipment, eventually reached the Seine River. They left behind in Normandy some 50,000 dead and 200,000 taken prisoner.

Crossing the Seine

 By 1944 the Germans, after two years of withdrawals in Russia, were expert at organizing retreats. They showed their expertise in the Seine River crossings. Though all bridges had been destroyed by Allied air attack, they improvised pontoons and ferries and conducted skillful rearguard actions to hold off the Anglo-American advance between August 19 and 31, when all survivors were rescued. By then the Allies commanded the west bank of the Seine from the sea to Fontainebleau, while their spearheads were on the Meuse River, 186 miles (299 km) farther on. The architect of the German withdrawal was Field Marshal Walther Model (Model, Walther), the “Führer's fireman,” a veteran of the Eastern Front who had succeeded Kluge on August 17.

Liberation of Paris

 As Model drew the retreating Germans back across northern France at breakneck speed into Belgium, resistance forces in Paris rose against what remained of the German garrison there on August 19. Fighting broke out, and, as news of the struggle reached the public in America and Britain, Eisenhower reversed his earlier decision to bypass the capital. The recently arrived Free French 2nd Armoured Division was ordered to liberate the city. Its vanguards arrived on August 24. Next morning the German city commander, Dietrich von Choltitz (Choltitz, Dietrich von), surrendered to the Resistance and to Jacques-Philippe Leclerc (Leclerc, Jacques-Philippe), the 2nd Armoured commander. On August 26, General Charles de Gaulle (Gaulle, Charles de), head of the Free French, made a triumphal parade down the Champs-Élysées to Notre-Dame Cathedral (Notre-Dame de Paris), where a mass of victory was celebrated.

  Liberation had come at a high cost: more than 200,000 dead, wounded, and missing from the Allied armies, more than 300,000 from the German. French civilian losses numbered more than 12,000. Still, the Normandy campaign had been a stunning success. By early September 1944 all but a fraction of France had been liberated. The U.S., British, and Canadian forces had occupied Belgium and part of The Netherlands and had reached the German frontier. They had, however, outrun their logistical support and lacked the strength to launch a culminating offensive. The coming winter would see much hard fighting—and a German counteroffensive in the Belgian Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge (Bulge, Battle of the)—before the German army in the west was finally to be beaten.

Sir John Keegan

Additional Reading

The Normandy Invasion is the subject of innumerable books and films. The titles recommended below fall into three general categories: overviews of the invasion, official histories, and documentaries available on video.

Overviews

In John Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy (1982, reissued with a new introduction, 1994), the eminent British military historian closely follows six different actors on the Normandy stage—U.S., British, Canadian, German, Polish, and French—at six crucial episodes in the planning and execution of the invasion. Carlo D'Este, Decision in Normandy (1983, reprinted 1994), by one of America's most prominent military historians, analyzes the controversial command decisions made from the period of the buildup through the campaign in Normandy. Max Hastings, Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy (1984, reissued 1993), compares the Allied and German performances in the campaign.Recorded interviews and reminiscences submitted by veterans and held by the Eisenhower Center for American Studies, New Orleans, Louisiana, are collected on audio compact discs and provided to supplement the historical text in Douglas Brinkley and Ronald J. Drez, Voices of Valor: D-Day, June 6, 1944 (2004). The Eisenhower Center's interviews and oral histories are also employed in Stephen E. Ambrose, D-Day, June 6, 1944 (1994), a closely personalized account by an American historian that focuses on the achievements of the enlisted man, noncommissioned officer, and platoon or company commander—particularly in the U.S. Army but also in the British, Canadian, and German armies.

Official histories

The first exhaustive accounts of the invasion, written by accomplished historians and illustrated with maps and photographs, were provided by the armed forces of the belligerent countries. The official U.S. histories are Gordon A. Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack (1951, reissued 1995); and Martin Blumenson, Breakout and Pursuit (1961, reprinted 1993). L.F. Ellis et al., Victory in the West, Vol. 1, The Battle of Normandy (1962, reissued 1993), is the official British history; the reissue contains source references to primary official documents. An excellent account of Normandy is given by C.P. Stacey, The Victory Campaign: The Operations in North-West Europe, 1944–1945 (1960), vol. 3 of Official History of the Canadian Army in the Second World War.The multivolume official history of World War II by the German Armed Forces Historical Research Office is Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg (1979– ), published in English under the title Germany and the Second World War (1990– ); vol. 7 of the series covers the war in western Europe from the Normandy Invasion to the Battle of the Bulge.

Video

D-Day Remembered (1994), produced by WGBH-TV as part of the Public Broadcasting System's American Experience series, features skillfully edited archival film and new footage, overlain with voices of D-Day veterans and narration by historian David McCullough, in an elegiac tribute to the American GI's self-sacrifice. Morning, June–August 1944 (1973), produced as part of the acclaimed World at War series by Thames Television and narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier, is organized around original film footage and contemporary interviews, placing Operation Overlord squarely within the huge global struggle of World War II. The True Glory (1945), produced by the U.S. Office of War Information and the British Ministry of Information, employs dramatized voice-overs of participants from most of the Allied countries in an often sentimentalized and stereotyped film that stresses the truly international effort of the Normandy campaign. Ed.

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