D-Day: Every Man Was a Hero A Military Gamble that Shaped History

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V-2 rocket.

When and where to attack Hitler's Festung Europa was a question that the Allies had been debating for years. After Pearl Harbor, many American military leaders were adamant that the fight against Japan receive top priority. But the Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, and Marshall's head planner, Brigadier General Eisenhower, argued for a strategy of throwing all possible resources into an invasion of France and the overthrow of Hitler. Their major reason: the Soviets in 1942 were in full retreat, suffering heavy casualties and warning that the whole eastern front might collapse. Roosevelt and Churchill promised Stalin that they would open a second front by 1943.

Despite that promise, however, the British were haunted by the debacle of 1940, when they barely escaped destruction by evacuating their defeated army from Dunkirk just before the fall of France. They were no less haunted by the enormous bloodletting of World War I. "Memories of the Somme and Passchendaele," as Churchill put it,"... were not to be blotted out by time or reflection." Churchill persuaded Roosevelt to delay a risky assault on France and strike an easier target: North Africa. When that proved a swift success, the British continued urging a "Mediterranean strategy": an invasion of Sicily, an advance up the Italian peninsula. But the Italian campaign turned slow and bloody, and the American generals in Europe re-emphasized their basic plan to invade northern France, Operation Overlord. Marshall passionately wanted to take command of the operation himself. When Roosevelt insisted that he could not spare him, Marshall assigned the task to Eisenhower, by then a four-star general. Eisenhower went to London in January 1944 to lead what he was to call, on D-day itself, "a great crusade."

The Germans knew an invasion was inevitable. "An Anglo-American landing in the West will and must come," Hitler told his key commanders that spring, but he added, "How and where it will come no one knows." The obvious place to attack was the coastal bulge known as the Pas de Calais, only 20 miles across the English Channel from Dover. That was where Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, whom Hitler had assigned to defend the Atlantic Wall, expected the landing to come. Rommel deployed his whole Fifteenth Army there, 208,000 men, to defend every mile of beach. "The first 24 hours will be decisive," he said.

The Allies went to great lengths to nourish this German illusion. They repeatedly bombed and shelled the Calais area as though to soften it up for an invasion. They even created an illusory docking area near Dover, complete with inflated rubber tanks, fake landing barges, dummy warehouses and barracks. Eisenhower assigned his friend, Lieut. General George S. Patton Jr., to command a largely phantom "First United States Army Group," which sent out messages about imaginary activities of the nonexistent troops. The British, meanwhile, created a fictitious "Fourth Army" in Edinburgh to threaten an invasion of Norway. The British were secretly monitoring the German response to the Allies' feints with ULTRA, the system by which the British had cracked the German code and could eavesdrop on all German military radio traffic.

The real goal, of course, was the crescent-shaped row of beaches along