Battle of France

The Second Enemy

The Allied Expeditionary Force battled two stubborn foes. One of them-the Germans- was reasonably predictable. The other-the weather-defied close analysis and for that reason gave the Allied high command the kind of trouble it had hoped to avoid.

Supplies and reinforcements were moving across the Channel and up the beaches in great volume. Even the Germans admitted that. But the Allied high command made no bones of a sobering fact: unloading had been thrown behind schedule.

So had the work of supporting air power, the one decisive advantage the Allies hold over the Germans. Up to the end of the first week, the invasion of Western Europe had not had the smile of a single clear day comparable with those which beamed on Hitler's legions in the Battle of France in 1940.

The difficulties of landing food, fuel and equipment from ships lying in the roughwater anchorages of the Bay of the Seine gave the first clue that the invasion was running behind schedule. The second was in the slow deepening of the bridgehead: an average of barely three miles a day.

So it was that soldiers, who had approved General Eisenhower's gamble on the weather, retreated from their first optimistic judgments of the invasion, which were based on the relative ease with which all but one of the scheduled landings were accomplished, the low casualties, the slowness of German reaction, the virtual absence of the Luftwaffe. Now, as the fighting progressed, there was still no indication that casualties were becoming prohibitive. But there was every indication that the rate must be increasing.

The Simple Plan.
The immediate strategy of the invasion was clear; simple masterly: 1) to seize beachheads on a sector of coast well within efficient fighterplane range and economical shipping range of southern England; 2) to join and deepen them, thereby making a solid bridge- head; 3) to drive southwest across the base of the Cotentin Peninsula, severing it from the rest of Nazi-held France; 4) swing north and take (from the rear) great port of Cherbourg.

In the first week, everything depended on the Allies' ability to land enough supplies on the obstacle-strewn beaches sustain their forces until Cherbourg could be taken. Thereafter, Cherbourg would be the port of entry.

It was a foregone conclusion that Nazis' demolitions would wreck the tide gates of Cherbourg's commercial basin; they might have some temporary success in blocking the entrances to the harbor by sinking ships. But there was little they could do to lessen the usefulness of the roadstead.

Part of Necessity.
There was no doubt that, once Cherbourg was taken, U.S. and British engineers could have the port usable again in a few days. Within the shelter of the five-mile-long roadstead, even lightering in supplies would be far easier and faster than in the wide-open Bay of the Seine, or in the tiny fishing- village ports opened by Royal Marines.

The nub of the problem was to take Cherbourg-and to take it fast. To this task a U.S. army under Lieut. General Omar N. Bradley was assigned. It was known in advance that the Americans' job would be tough: the Nazis had flooded 500,000 acres around Carentan to depths up to seven feet. Four days after landing, the Americans captured some of the sluice gates at Trevieres, started to drain the drowned land. But there was no assurance that the land would dry out enough to permit maneuver by heavy armor.

To protect the Americans' Cotentin operation, the Allies had to guard against interference by Field Marshal Erwin Romrnel's mobile reserves. To this task Ike Eisenhower assigned a British-Canadian army which drove swiftly inland to Bayeux and Caen; and cut the Germans' main supply road and railway from the east.

One Beachhead.
But neither Americans nor British attained their full preliminary objectives as early as had been hoped. It mas week's end before the Yanks drove through Trevieres to Sully, effected a firm juncture with the British and thus united the beachheads; meantime the British were still battling to close a vise around Caen and there set up an immovable roadblock against Nazi counterattack.

The urgent need for this block was clear: Rommel lost no time in making tactical counterattacks with his 21^st Panzers. Around Caen the first tank battles of the invasion were fought. But they were preliminary, minor skirmishes compared with what was to be expected when Rommel finally struck.

Why did he delay? Said a Nazi military spokesman: "If we could be sure that the beachhead would remain only one, we could liquidate it when it pleased us. However, we are counting upon the [Allied]establishment of more beachheads where also we are holding reserves in readiness."

The Priceless Chance.
The Nazis had missed their first chance, to cripple the invading forces by vigorous Luftwaffe blows at sea and on the beaches; they had missed their second, to counterattack strongly while the Allies were still disorganized on and near the beaches. Would they miss their third chance-to strike a decisive, strategic counterblow while the Allied bridgehead remained "only one"?

Where was the Luftwaffe? One explanation of its infrequent sorties was that Field Marshal Hugo Sperrfe, bull-necked veteran of Spain's ill-famed Condor Legion, was saving his strength, to use it in close support of Rommel's army when his counterattack finally got under way.

Meanwhile, Nazi air squadrons made pinprick night attacks. They harassed beachheads occasionally, kept convoy gunners alert to repel assaults for which Berlin claimed good results.

Atlantic Wall.
Was there or had there been an Atlantic Wall? Countering boisterous dispatches that the highly advertised defenses were "the biggest bluff" of the whole war, the London Times miilitary correspondent rumbled: "This is to do less than justice to the Allied troops." Said Reuter's Stanley Burch: "You could not make a single pinpoint on the map of the invasion beachhead not covered by crossfire from machine guns, mortars or light artillery."

On D-plus-six, despite the intervening hell of fire, high winds and high water, the Allies sped up their advance. U.S. troops took Carentan, drove farther southwest toward sealing off the peninsula. Said Montgomery: "American troops did absolutely magnificently," recovering from a situation in which they had been "hanging on by their eyelids. . . . I am very pleased with the progress so far. Our soldiers . . . are in tremendous form . . . full of beans. And they have already got the measure of the enemy."

THOSE WHO FOUGHT
The Normandy poppies were pale with dust. The Normandy sky was heavy with smoke. Land and sky rumbled and trembled with battle.

On the Beaches.
In the fair fields where the tide had rolled, the ground was littered with the debris of battletanks, jeeps, rifles, ration tins, bulldozers, first-aid kits, canteens. Everywhere lay the dead-weltering in the waves along the shore, lying heaped in ditches, sprawling on the beaches. Here and there in trees hung the shattered body of a paratrooper.

In field hospitals, the wounded lay. The smell of ether mingled with the smell of earth. Probably no one yet knew the price that had been paid for the first week in Normandy.

The Airborne.
That first day the paratroopers had landed near midnight-six hours before H-hour-to prepare the way for the glider-borne divisions which had swooped like hell's witches into the area behind the German lines.

A paratroop lieutenant survived to return and tell how the Germans "were machine-gunning us all the way down."

One officer told of seeing German tracers ripping through other men's parachutes as they descended. In one plane nine soldiers had dived through the plane's door; the tenth, laden with his 90 pounds of equipment, got momentarily stuck. A 20mm. shell hit him in the belly. Fuse caps in his pockets began to go off. Part of the wounded man's load was TNT. Before this human bomb could explode, his mates behind him pushed him out. The last they saw of him, his parachute had opened and he was drifting to earth in a shroud of bursting flame.

Some of the airborne divisions were identified: the U.S. 82nd, tough veterans of Sicily and Salerno; the U.S. 101^st, in its first battle; the British 6th.

They captured gun positions, pillboxes, road junctions, destroyed bridges. Some of them made contact later with ground troops. Some of them, the Germans claimed were annihilated.

The Old Ladies.
It was at 5:35 a.m. that morning that the Allied armada had begun to pour its fire onto the French coast, where brightly colored German attack was streaking the morning sky.

In the fleet were old ladies like the Arkansas, belching with twelve 12-in. guns, the Texas and the Nevada, each with ten 14-inchers; the British Warspite, veteran of Jutland, the new British Black Prince, the British monitor Erebus , Closer inshore stood the cruisers and, even closer, the destroyers-the whole great armada, spread out from horizon to horizon, trying to batter down the Atlantic Wall.

Overhead were 8,000 planes of the R.A.F. and the U.S. Eighth and Ninth Air Forces, adding their big and little bombs to the destruction. Grey-black clouds puffed up from the land to shroud the sun rising over Normandy.

The Wreckers.
Under the fiery canopy the engineers and Army and Navy demolition units had crawled ashore. Hidden by the sea at high tide were concrete piers, pointed steel and wooden stakes. At low tide, they were visible.

On the beach itself were great tripods of steel rails, braced steel fences, all of them ingeniously mined. The demolition units went to work clearing paths while German shells fell among them and German machine gunners hidden in tunnels and six-foot-thick concrete pillboxes raked them.

An assault engineer said: "We had to work with water up to our necks, sometimes higher. Then there were sniprs. They were nipping us off. As I was working with two blokes on a tough bit of element, I suddenly found myself working alone. My two pals just gurgled and appeared under the water."

In those early hours Rangers had gone ashore in LCTs under cover of darkness. At one point, atop a 200-ft. cliff, were six 155mm. guns which could sweep the sea approaches. The Rangers shot a grapling hook to the top of the cliff. One of them climbed a rope hand over hand, carrying rope ladders which he made secure. Up swarmed the Rangers; took the gun positions, knocked them out with TNT.

Infantry.
On the heels of the demolition units went the infantry. It was not announced which divisions were in the first wave, but two divisions were identified as taking part in the invasion: the storied 1^st, once predominantly a Brooklyn outfit, now a rainbow division of men from many states, veterans of the North African campaign; the 29th, a National Guard outfit whose ranks were originally filled with men from Maryland and Virginia.

Beside them fought the Canadian 3rd Division and the tough little men of England's 50th Northumbrians, who had fought in France and Flanders four years before, had covered the evacuation of Dunkirk, had chased the Nazis across North Africa, across Sicily and up Italy.

On the Left.
The British 2nd Canadians were on the eastern water flank, which was churned by a brisk wake across the Bay of the Seine. Some small landing craft were swamped or impaled on the water barriers, or bobbed helplessly offshore, targets for German 88s and 155s which had survived the bombardment.

Bert Brandt, an Acme photographer, later reported: "Boats were burning and a pall of smoke hung over the beach. I saw some bodies of soldiers who had been killed in the first landings floating in the water. . . . There were tremendous rafts floating offshore, jammed with trucks, tanks, ambulances."

As the ramps went down and khaki-clad men plunged shorewards, German fire mowed them down. Others ran over them. The living lay beside the dead and with flame-throwers, grenades, bazookas and bangalore torpedoes, which blasted holes in barbed-wire entanglements. From the sea the naval guns did their best to pin down Nazi emplacements. The ancient Texas laid her guns on a 155-mm. battery, blew it up. New waves of men poured ashore like waves of the Channel.

"Get Those Mortars."
Mortar fire from the cliffs fell like rain on one beach. Over the radio came a pleading voice to R.A.F. Spitfire pilots wheeling overhead: "For God's sake get those mortars quick. Dig them out, boys, they are right down our necks." The Spitfires dipped down and dug the Nazis out.

Not until late afternoon of D-day were some of the beaches secured. All night, while the naval guns boomed in the roadstead and explosions flashed along the embattled coast, the drenched wounded lay in the sand, some whimpering in delirium. Then the invasion rolled on-beyond the dreadful jetsam on the beaches.

The Bridge.
On the third day, the wind moderated, and the great fleet of ships from England worked mightily to make up for the delays caused by weather and rough water. Standing on the flanks, the warships guarded the great marine bridge which the Allies had thrown across the Channel.

At week's end LSTs were crawling steadily back to English ports. Negro stretcher bearers lifted out the men whose up-ended feet were dusty with the sands of France. Medical Corpsmen moved among them, looking at their wound tags. Some of the wounded were smoking.

A homesick U.S. soldier said wryly: "Is that really England? I never thought I wanted to see the goddam country again but now it looks like heaven." Some of the men had their eyes closed. Over the faces of some, blankets had been drawn.

As the wounded and the dead came back, other soldiers, with flowers stuck in the camouflage netting of their tin hats, marched past them through the streets of the English town. They avoided looking at the returning troops. Now it was their turn.

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