De invasie in Normandië, Tweede Wereldoorlog

Preparations: Allied Forces In November 1943 the three major leaders of the not nazi world had met in Teheran. This was the result of constant pressing from Stalin’s side since 1942, he wanted the Western world to finally get active in the war. Roosevelt and Churchill had several meetings about this, for example in June 1942. They had agreed it was impossible to open the front immediately but started to investigate possible options. Later, in January 1943 they decided to really get started and set up a basic plan. When they had worked this out in more detail they organized the meeting with Stalin in Teheren, in November 1943. The allies told him their plans and promised to be as quick as possible. In this chapter we will explain how they exactly prepared themselves for the invasion and also why it still took so long to open the front, as it took until June 6, 1944, to open it. The deadline was set for May 1944. This is a very short period for an operation like this. Up till that moment general plans had been worked out by general Morgan, an Englishman. When it became clear that the Americans would supply most of the troops it was obvious that the commander would be an American too. Eisenhower was chosen to lead SHAEF, or Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. The other men of his team were: Arthur Tedder, from the air force, Bernard Montgomery, ground forces and invasion leader, Omar Bradley, commander of the 1st American Army, Bertram Ramsay, naval forces, Trafford Leigh-Mallory, also air force, and Walter Bedell-Smith was appointed as his chief of staff, so the second man behind Dwight Eisenhower himself. In Morgan’s plan, operation roundup, the idea was to strike with 3 divisions on a long strip of land, preferably 40 kilometres long. A specific place had not been set yet, but extensive research was done to find the best location. Criteria were things like the distance from English airfields, the soil type and the strength of German forces inland. When Montgomery came in he got two choices: the Pas de Calais and Normandy. The most logical place was the Pas de Calais, it is a narrow and calm piece of the channel and therefore easy to cross. That was the primary reason to choose for Normandy, it would come as a surprise. He also changed to size of the army and the landing zone. The first strike would be with 5 divisions plus three additional divisions that were to arrive by plane. Each division was commissioned an own beach. The Americans got Utah and Omaha, the British Gold and Sword and the Canadians got Juno. After this had been decided training started right away, at numerous places in the UK. Of course troops had been training before but now specific training started for the landing, to train the fighting on sand and in open spaces and to integrate the three armies into one. In April 1944 the final date was set after long considerations by SHAEF. They had figured out that three elements were fundamental to make sure they were victorious. These were: Weather, tide and possible delay. If delayed too long, security breaches were likely to occur. The best combination of weather and tide were only three days a month. That’s why the final date was set for the 5th of June. The biggest thread to this whole operation was obvious. If the Germans, and thus Rommel, would only find out a little bit about the location, everything would have been useless. That’s why security measures were really strict. The training camps were all closed for English civilians. Every word popping up in a paper or anything that was a codename for something was checked to make sure it wasn’t a co-incidence. German Atlantikwall This is the major German Defence line that was made to prevent an invasion from England. The Germans used more than 17 million tons of concrete and near to 1.2 million tons of steal for this coastline defence. There are more than 10,000 bunkers along the length and the total spread was from the north of Norway until the French border with Spain, length: 5300 km. This line was made to reject the possibility of the allies advancing from England and thus creating a 2 front war. The building of this line was ordered in December 1941 on the orders of Hitler himself. The needed craftsmen were drafted through the German ‘Arbeitseinsatz’ and the project was led by Organisation Todt. This in military buildings specialized group, was named after the German minister Dr. Fritz Todt and made sure that there would be no flaws in the design and that it went as quickly as planned. Emphasis was laid on the street of Dover, there were ninetythree heavy gunneries and thirtynine heavy mobile units. Alongside the numbers of little bunkers and heavy forts there were a couple of rows with beams of steal that came 5.5 metres above the low water level, and that would block or demolish any landing vehicles. Furthermore, a lot of different minefields were placed, that ran until 275 into the country. In 1943 General Rommel gained control over the defence of northern France, worked very hard to also make a bit of the inland less habitable, Along the entire coast, he arranged two 1 km wide minefields with over 2 million mines, this still wasn’t enough. He planned for a third defence line which should be near 7.5 km wide, but this was never finished although on D-Day near to 4 million mines were in place. In likely landing spots for gliders and parachutists, the Germans emplaced slanted poles, which the troops called Rommelspargel ("Rommel's asparagus"), and low-lying river and estuarine areas were permanently flooded. But the main problem for Rommel was that he lacked the personnel to man these defences and he had not been able to position the Germans' tank divisions as he wanted. Rundstedt 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 7th Army (under Friedrich Dollmann) in Normandy and Brittany and by the 15th Army (under Hans von Salmuth) in Pas-de-Calais and eastward. The reserve tank forces, given the name Panzer Group West and commanded by Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, came nominally under Rundstedt's direct command.
Air Campaign During the buildup to Operation Overlord there were differing opinions on the best method of utilizing the Allied air power in support of the invasion troops. Leigh-Mallory, as AEAF Commander in charge of all tactical airforces based in England, was characteristically outspoken in support of his “Transportation Plan”. The "Transportation Plan" was an interdiction campaign that would encompass all Allied tactical and strategic air power and bring it to bear on the Axis forces throughout France and Germany. It had the singular purpose of targeting the transportation systems linking France and Germany. By solely targeting rail marshalling yards and associated service depots, Leigh-Mallory felt that German military traffic could be brought to a stand still. This would support the invasion by preventing German High Command from deploying its mobile reserve to the landing site at Normandy. Leigh-Mallory felt that by implementing the "Transportation Plan" ninety days prior to D-Day would allow the necessary time needed to saturate infrastructure targets across France and Belgium. By championing this approach Leigh-Mallory came into confrontation with Lt. General Carl 'Tooey' Spaatz, commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Force (USSTAF). Spaatz felt that the strategic bombing of aircraft factories and oil refineries was the quickest way to support an invasion and bring the Axis to its knees. After much debate on these courses of the air campaign, the 'Transportation Plan' finally received the approval of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander. Leigh-Mallory took command of all Allied air power, both tactical and strategic, for Operation Overlord. His coordination of these air assets against the railroads and military traffic traveling over them proved to be of incalculable value to the success of the D-Day invasion. By June 6, 1944, rail traffic was sufficiently interrupted as to pose a logistical nightmare to the defending German army and the Luftwaffe units in France had been decimated to a point where they posed little threat to the invasion force. Through the implementation of the 'Transportation Plan' as part of the overall invasion, combined with the failure of the German High Command to recognize Normandy as the actual invasion site, the Allied forces were able to establish a firm foothold on the Continent and begin the drive east to Berlin. Initially the invasion of Normandy had been planned for May, but a landing craft shortage delayed it for another month. This gave the allied Air Force the entire month of May to extend their extensive “Transportation Plan”. Initiated on March 6. With the French northern railway thus destroyed by the Lancasters and Fortresses of the RAF Bomber Command and the US Eighth Air Force during May, air strikes could be focused on the beach itself. On the night and morning of D-Day, Bomber Command and the Eighth Air Force dropped an unprecedented 5000 tons of bomb over the German defenses in the immediate vicinity of the beaches; namely, the ten most important German gun batteries in the assault area.. This was accomplished by substituting long distance fuel tanks with bombs, a strategic advantage of launching from Great Britain. Bad weather had kept almost all of the German Air Force reconnaissance aircraft grounded on June 5th. A message sent by the German Air Force Command shortly before midnight on June 5 showed the extent of German weakness in the air as a result of fuel shortage addressed to the First Parachute Army based at Nancy, it dictated conservation of its consumption of aircraft fuel whenever possible. "With reduction of aircraft fuel by allied action, most essential requirements for training and carrying out production plans can scarcely be covered by quantities of aircraft fuel available.” Of course, the destruction of the French railway system was a co-cause for this. The first men to see action on D-Day were the airborne troops. Three airborne divisions, two American and one British, dropped behind the landing beaches in the hours before dawn. ’ The overall mission of the airborne divisions was to disrupt and confuse the Germans so as to prevent a concentrated counterattack against the seaborne troops coming in at dawn, and to protect the flanks of the invasion force at Sword and Utah beaches. Crashing into farm fields in fragile gliders, or descending in parachutes amid antiaircraft fire, the airborne troops suffered heavy casualties. In the darkness and confusion of the pre-dawn hours, many units became scattered and disorganized. Some men who landed in flooded areas drowned. Despite these difficulties, groups of soldiers managed to form up and attack the enemy. That night over 820 aircraft carrying 20.000 paratroopers in total, or towing gliders, left their air bases in southern England and headed for predetermined landing zones in Normandy. They were preceded by over 1,000 bombers to soften up German coastal defenses prior to the early morning sea-borne landings. Some bombers also dropped by parachute hundreds of life-size dummies all over Normandy as part of a deception and confusion plan, these had fire crackers attached to them that would strart “shooting” when they’d hit the ground. D-Day itself would be supported by more than 13,000 fighter, bomber, and transport aircraft, against which the Luftwaffe was able to deploy fewer than 400 on D-Day. Between April 1 and June 5, 1944, the British and American strategic air forces, deploying 11,000 aircraft, flew 200,000 sorties, dropping 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 and Loire rivers and thus isolating the Normandy 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." Deceptions The biggest deception used in the build-up for D-Day was to let the Germans think that the main attack would be across the Pas de Calais. The Germans would think that the attack in Normandy was just another deception, and that the real attack would be at the other end of the channel, near Calais. Here the channel is narrow. There were two operation that had to do with this: Fortitude South and Glimmer. Operation Fortitude south was an amphibious invasion. It was the most important of all cover plans, and really successful. What they did was set up a fake headquarters in Kent, near Dover, concentrate old ships in Dover and make a lot of tank tracks on the beach to leave the impression that heave training was going on there. Also, leaders would talk about Pas-de-Calais a lot and when an air strike was made inside the target area two additional strikes were made outside it near Calais. The other operation was operation Glimmer. It was a fake assault landing against Boulogne, near Calais, on D-day itself. Now the Germans would all go to Calais for extra defence. It is clear that these operations achieved their goal. Rommel was really confused, and many troops were in the wrong place on D-Day. Deception with radio. Radio was also a popular method of deception. They created a so called phantom army in southeast England by transmitting a lot of messages there. It was “commanded” by Patton, as he was feared by the German leaders for his cunning. It was also made sure that the intensity of radio messages was the same in the east of England as in the west, so that no clues for the Germen could be gained there. Also, when the invasion began special radio devices created a phantom fleet crossing the Pas de Calais while a blackout made sure that actual fleet was covered. The Assault: The Beaches OMAHA Omaha Beach is a 3 mile long stretch of beach overlooked by high cliffs. Along the actual beach a 10 foot high concrete sea wall, with German 88-mm guns perched at the top. The only exits off the beach were through steep ravines. The beach was assaulted by the US 1st and 29th infantry divisions. These men were not gauranteed armored support. The extremely rough seas of the 10 mile approach made it difficult for the tanks to get ashore and as a result only 1 of the original 2 DD tank divisions were launched, and among the 29 tanks launched only 2 made it ashore. Other problems were brought on by the low clouds and heavy smoke, making it incredibly tough for the sea and air attack to hit there targets, and really just making the Germans aware that the invasion were underway. The LC's were met with a barrage of mortars, shells and machine gunner fire, and on one sector only two of the first six LC's made it. Then a large offshore sand bank kept many LC's from making ashore, and forced men to wade through shoulder high water to reach the beach, during which many drowned or were shot. Omaha had become a killing field. The conditions were so horrible that at 0915 it was actually debated whether or not to give up on Omaha and send the remaining me else where. Survival instincts kicked in and the courage of small groups of men saved the day. By the early afternoon more tanks were landed directly onto the beach, but the exits were still only open to those on foot, who had managed through a minefield single file. A group of Rangers, soldiers specially trained for close range fighting, attacked the heavy coastal battery, a top the high cliffs at Pointe-du-Hoc. The Rangers landed at the base of the cliff and were pinned down untill an allied destroyer came to their rescue. Then the Randers had to scale the cliffs while under constant fire from the Germans. The ones who made it to the top were forced to fight hand to hand combat to secure the stronghold only to find out that the Germans had moved the feared guns to a different position, but none the less Omaha Beach still became a victory for the allies. UTAH The original Overlord plan did not call for a landing on the Cotentin (Utah), but General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, added it to ensure an early capture of the port of Cherbourg at the northern tip of the peninsula. Compared to German fortifications at Omaha Beach, the defenses at Utah, based on fixed infantry positions, were sparse because the low-lying areas immediately behind the landing area were flooded and the Germans could control the flooding with locks. Four causeways exited the beach through the flooded lowlands and severely restricted movement inland. Defenses along the causeways consisted mostly of strong points equipped with automatic weapons. Two miles inland were some coastal and field artillery batteries. The invasion was planned for Tara, Green and Uncle Red, with the number 3 causeway almost in the middle of the landing area. H-Hour was scheduled for 0630 hours. The beach was to be assaulted by the U.S. 4th Infantry Division. The plan was to cross the beach and seize control of the coast roads, link up with airborne troops who were to have been dropped inland five hours earlier, and then be prepared to attack toward Cherbourg. The landing plan went wrong from the beginning. Strong currents beset the landing craft, and the area was obscured by smoke from the preceding shore bombardment. But the main problem was the loss of three of the four designated control craft to mines. The fourth control craft eventually rounded up the confused landing craft looking for directions and, using a bullhorn for communication, led them in. The force landed 2,000 yards (1,800 metres) east of the designated landing area, in the less defended Victor sector and almost astride causeway number 2. The assistant division commander, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., quickly realized the error. Uttering his famous remark, "We'll start the war from here!" he ordered the division to advance. Three hours later exits 1, 2, and 3 had been secured, and by 1200 hours contact had been made with paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division around the town of Pouppeville. By the end of the day the 4th Division had pushed inland about four miles, and its westernmost units were within a mile of the 82nd Airborne's perimeter near Sainte-Mère-Église.
JUNO, GOLD AND SWORD We will start with describing how things went at the western beach, Gold. It was one of the two British beaches, and very hard to get. This is because it’s a small beach and bordered by steep cliffs. Also, many of the cannons hadn’t been destroyed because they couldn’t be reached by the marine. On the edges of the cliffs German soldiers from the 352th division had dug themselves in and gave heavy resistance. They were also located in houses in La Riviere and Le Hamel. The tide was high and the wind strong, this made things even worse. The special tanks couldn’t reach the beach yet, and 89 landing boats were lost before they reached the beach. In total 24,970 soldiers were dropped, from which 413 died. The first landing was at 7.30 am, and near midnight a bridgehead had been formed. Even though not all objectives were reached this was a successful landing as losses were minimal and results quite good. The middle of these three beaches is Juno. It was the beach for the Canadians. This beach was 10 kilometres along and covers the fishing town of Courseuilles. The first landings started at 8 o’ clock, and here too the wind was strong. Here they decided to delay the landing of the tanks and try it with troops alone. When they had done some initial fighting the tanks would be sent in to make things easier.. The tanks were too late though, which resulted in unnecessary fighting and losses on the Canadian side. When the tanks did arrive things went a lot quicker. The wall was breached and the troops could advance relatively easy. The Canadians were closest to reaching their objectives at the end of the day. The bridgehead was about 10 kilometres long, and even the large town Caen was already in sight. However, the troops failed to close the gap with Sword. Now the German Panzers could fill this up, which would cause complications later on. At this beach 21.400 men were landed. 304 of them died. The last beach we will deal with is Sword. It was a British beach, and the most Eastern one. It occupied a 8 kilometre long beach, between the villages Lion-sur-mer and Ouistreham. Fire from the Germans was moderate here. The British were able to put out the largest batteries in no less than half an hour. Two hours later they take the first village which is 3 kilometres from the beach. After this quick start action slowed down though. There were problems with the tanks again and it was hard to get off the beach because it was too crowded. This caused a lot of unnecessary waiting. On D-Day 28,845 men landed on Sword beach, around 400 died on the beach. German Disorder When the Allies landed in force in Normandy on D-Day; June 6, 1944 they found the Atlantic Wall far less formidable than they had anticipated. This was attributable to a number of reasons. The Germans had constructed the strongest defenses in the Pas-de-Calais region facing the narrowest part of the English Channel and had stationed their most battle worthy troops there; demands of other fighting fronts had led many of the best German troops from France; the German army lacked air and naval support; Allied airpower was so strong that movement of German reserves was seriously threatened; landings of Allied airborne troops behind the beaches spread confusion in German ranks; and the Germans were deluded into believing the invasion was a diversion, that a second and larger invasion was to follow in the Pas-de-Calais. Only at one of the two American beaches (Omaha) was the success of the landing ever in doubt, partly because of rough seas, partly because of the chance presence of an elite German division, and partly because of the presence of high bluffs behind the beach. Paradoxically, the Allies had less difficulty with the highly publicized beach defenses than they had later with field fortifications based on the Norman hedgerows, earthen embankments that local farmers through the centuries had erected around thousands of irregularly shaped little fields to fence their cattle and protect their crops from strong ocean winds. The German command always believed that the Allies had more men (divisions) and naval forces available. This was brought about by a massive failure of their intelligence network and by the Allied deception plan, Operation Fortitude. The Allies set up Patton to command the nonexistent First Army Group, which the Germans were to believe would be the main Allied effort in the invasion of France. As long as Patton was still in England, the Germans would have a reason to believe that the Allies were capable of launching an additional invasion effort somewhere. Each command level would interpret the invasion slightly different from another. For example, a German sergeant at Omaha Beach would absolutely believe the invasion was the real one, not a diversion. Whereas, the commander of the forces in the West, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, would wait and consider his sources as to whether Normandy was a diversion or not. In addition, if he felt that the Allies had more troops and ships available for another landing, he would always hold back some reserves and not entirely strip away his defences. The Germans radio said the landings were made from Cherbourg to Le Harve, a strip of coast roughly 100 miles, and later said additional landings were being made "west of Cherbourg," indicating that the Allies intended to seize the Normandy peninsula with its ports and airdomes as the first base of their campaign to destroy the power of Nazi Germany. One German broadcast said the Allied landing barges penetrated the Orne and Vire estuaries under artificial fog and "tried to carry out landing operations on a major scale in the rear of the Atlantic wall." Soon after the Normandy landings, the Germans began to move mobile units (panzer divisions) into the beachhead area to contain the invasion forces and push them back. These units were attached to different levels of command and required approval by higher commanders. For example, 21st Panzer was stationed around Caen and under 7th Army control and immediately was put into action on D-Day. Other panzer units, 12th SS and Panzer Lehr were further away but under a higher authority level. They were released for action and moved to the beachhead on D-Day, but other units still were held in reserve. This continued for weeks after the invasion, as the Germans would release units in hopes of containing the beachhead, but keeping reserves available in case of additional landings. This was all in great advantage of the allied forces, and they used it very wel. Conclusion and Evaluation: We hope you have enjoyed reading this Practical assignment and that our information was to the benefit of you intellectuality. We furthermore want to tell you that we’ve worked with the greatest pleasure on this practical assignment and that after you’ve read this paper, you’d know more about the preparations for and the day people sacrificed to enable our lives at this moment. List of sources: http://www.jodavidsmeyer.com/combat/military/wwii_invasion_diversions.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/archaeology/marine_dday_underwater_02.shtml
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dday/hot.html
http://www.geocities.com/paddyjoe_m/ http://cghs.dade.k12.fl.us/normandy/deception/normandy_deceptions.htm
http://search.eb.com/normandy/week1/buildup.html
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1989/KMB.htm
The Battle of Normandy – By Colonel Gerard Legout