D-Day: 60Th Anniversary: The Greatest Day

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Nor could the Allies rely on superior technology to win the day, though being able to listen in on coded German communications certainly helped. There was no Kevlar; there were no nightscopes, no cruise missiles or stealth fighters. Instead, Allied engineers invented artificial harbors to tow across the channel and moor once the beaches were won; sawtooth steel tusks were attached to the front of tanks to cut through the Normandy hedgerows; paratroopers used the little clickers that sound like crickets to find one another in the dark. Most of their radios and 60% of their supplies didn't survive the jump.

D-day's success depended on knowing the enemy, anticipating his reflexes, using his strengths against him. The Germans were nothing if not logical and disciplined. They knew an invasion was coming and calculated when and where; the Allies needed to throw off those calculations. Do you hit the easiest point, Pas de Calais, only 27 miles from Dover, where Rommel and his men sat waiting? Allied bombers kept shelling the Calais area as though softening it for an invasion, even building dummy landing craft in southeastern England, rubber tanks, fake warehouses and barracks. In Operation Fortitude, Lieut. General George Patton commanded a fake Army group, sending fake messages about the phony invasion to come. It all made so much more sense than doing what no invaders had managed in centuries: crossing the 100 miles to the Normandy beaches and plunging ashore; so only 70,000 German troops were waiting there.

As for June 6, that made no sense either, especially once God smiled by making the weather bad enough to convince Rommel and the Germans that no invasion was coming but good enough, during a crucial 36-hour window, to make it possible after all. It was raining sideways the day before, Eisenhower recalled, as the commanders listened to weather reports. Assured that the Allies would have to pass up this optimal alignment of tides and moon because of the impenetrable storm, Rommel got to slip home to celebrate his wife's birthday. Wars are won and lost over decisions big and small. "How stupid of me," Rommel said when he heard the news. "How stupid of me!"

And once word came, the Germans were fatefully slow to respond. Hitler jealously controlled the armored regiments, and his aides were reluctant to wake him up before 9:30. Had the Luftwaffe been there to rain fire on the beaches, had the weather turned worse rather than better, had Rommel stayed on the scene or had Hitler sent his tanks, it is entirely conceivable that the whole landing force could have died on those beaches or been forced to turn back. As it was, at one point Lieut. General Omar Bradley, hearing of the carnage of Omaha Beach, said he feared that "our forces had suffered an irreversible catastrophe" and considered sounding the retreat and waving off the reinforcements. The decision to press on through iron rain gave his forces the day.