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

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the northern coast of Normandy. They lay 100 miles from the great British ports of Southampton and Portsmouth, a span that no invader had successfully crossed in nearly three centuries. The Allies spent two years turning all of southern Britain into an arsenal and point of departure. They built 163 new airfields. They shipped in 2 million tons of weapons and supplies, 1,500 tanks, mountains of food and fuel. Since the targeted beachfront lacked harbors, Allied engineers built two enormous artificial harbors that could be towed across the Channel and moored in place once the beaches were won.

D-day was supposed to be early in May, but when British Field Marshal Sir Bernard L. Montgomery took up his post as Eisenhower's deputy for ground forces that January, he immediately balked at the preliminary plans for a 25-mile-wide invasion front. He told Eisenhower, who already had strong misgivings of his own, that the front must be much broader, about 50 miles, so that the Allies could land at least five divisions, instead of the planned three. The planners said they did not have enough landing craft for such an expansion. Get them, said Montgomery. That was impossible by the May deadline, said the planners. Then change the deadline, said Monty.

This was the final plan: 58,000 men from the U.S. First Army under General Omar Bradley would attack on the western section, at two strips code-named Omaha Beach and Utah Beach. To the east, a force of 75,000 men, drawn mostly from Lieut. General Sir Miles Dempsey's British Second Army but also including a Canadian division and an assortment of French, Polish and Dutch troops, would invade three adjoining beaches, Gold, Juno and Sword. Some 16,000 paratroopers from the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions would drop in first to guard the western flank against counterattacks, and 8,000 men of the British 6th Airborne would seize and guard the eastern flank.

On the German side, Rommel had some 500,000 men strung out along an 800-mile front from Holland to Brittany, and he knew only too well how vulnerable they were. Since the bulk of German power was committed to the Russian front, his 213,000-man Seventh Army, charged with defending Normandy, was an untested force, filled out with middle-aged conscripts and unreliable recruits from Eastern Europe. Only 70,000 of the defenders were stationed near the targeted beaches. The Luftwaffe's fighter defenses had been seriously depleted in two years of air battles, and the remnants were in the process of being pulled back to defend the Reich itself. Three crack panzer divisions stood ready as a reserve, but Rommel could not count on them, for Hitler insisted on retaining personal control over their movements. Only recently had Rommel succeeded in organizing a crash program to install 1 million mines a month along the heavily barricaded beaches.

The most serious German failure, though, was in military intelligence. Apparently because of the bad weather, neither naval patrols nor reconnaissance planes maintained surveillance of the invasion preparations on the crucial last day before the landing. German meteorologists assured their commanders that the storm would prevent any Allied attack, and that prediction prompted Rommel to take a quick trip home. His wife's birthday happened to fall on June 6. When Rommel heard the news from Normandy at his home near Ulm, he could