The major point of Operation Overlord on 6 June 1944, of course, was to achieve surprise. Without surprise, there would have been no successful invasion. Had the Germans known in advance where and when this battle was going to be fought, there is no question that they could have hurled the invaders back into the sea. Had the Germans been able to penetrate the secret of Overlord, we would have had to wait until the summer of 1945 to defeat the Germans, and we would have done it not with the Allied Expeditionary Force (AEF), but with atomic bombs.
Why did General Dwight D. Eisenhower go south, when his objective was east? The straight line to the objective ran over Calais through Belgium to the Rhine-Ruhr region, Dusseldorf, Bonn, and Cologne. Instead of going in that straight easterly direction over the shortest distance and across the narrowest part of the channel, he picked the widest part of the channel and went south. In the process, he put between the AEF and its objective the major barriers of the Seine and Somme rivers.
But by going south, of course, he achieved the desired surprise—and not only on D-Day. He also kept German Panzers pinned down in the Pas de Calais all through June and July, where they waited for the real attack to come; they were still there in September. Had it not been for Operation Market Garden later in the year, they would probably still be there.
Contributions to the fabulously successful deception operation came from all quarters and sides. The Allies could not have mounted a dummy operation toward the Calvadose Coast in Normandy, made the real attack at the Port de Calais, and kept the Germans in Normandy waiting for the real attack. The minute the major forces landed east of the mouth of the Seine River, all German forces south and west of the Seine would have pulled out and come back to get between the Allied force and the Rhine-Ruhr. That was a great triumph for the Allies and for the whole Allied intelligence operation.
The Trouble Was Hedgerows
The great intelligence failure was in neglecting to anticipate the problems of fighting on the offensive in the hedgerow country. The Allies had pinpointed every single house along the coast, the objective of the attack. The intelligence at hand surely had to have been the most extensive ever gathered by a military force about to undertake an offensive. But we had the wrong idea of what lay in store two kilometers inland.
So many veterans, U.S. soldiers who had to fight in that hedgerow country, have said, in so many words: “God almighty, yes, we knew there were hedgerows there. But we thought they were like English hedgerows that the fox hunters jump over. We had no idea there were sunken rows between those hedgerows, that the Germans had a massive trench system ready built for them. We just didn’t have any idea at all.” Glider pilots have said that they had no idea how high those hedgerows were. They did not realize they were going to have to stay up high before coming into those little fields around Ste. Mere Eglise and that they would be running into the hedgerow at the other end. They had no idea that bank of earth was going to crush their gliders when they hit. Nobody had briefed them on this.
Many of our people had studied the Normandy countryside, but their focus was narrow. It was exclusively on “let’s get ashore.” Of course, there would be no reason to anticipate problems afterward if we didn’t get ashore in the first place.
One reason no one studied the hedgerows was that British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery promised to take the city of Caen on the first day. With Caen as a base for an attack toward Paris, we would have had no need to fight in the hedgerow country. The only fighting the Americans would have needed to do there would have been to seal off the Co- tentin Peninsula and take Cherbourg.
What about Monty and Caen? What did he promise? Did he change his plan or not? Montgomery said at the St. Paul’s briefing on 15 May that he would have Caen on the first day. He even talked about getting to Falaise on the same day. No matter how our British friends may twist and turn on this one, that is what he said was going to happen. As we all know, it did not.
What did happen was a breakout on the right after all of that terrible hedgerow fighting. What was so intolerable about Montgomery was his claim that he had planned it all along. It was his plan, he said, to hold on the left and break out on the right. He also said something to the effect that, “I can’t help it if you Americans are too dumb to understand what I told you.” To be blunt, he was a liar.
On the other hand, his plan worked—even though it really never was his plan. It was forced by circumstances. One of my favorite sayings from General Eisenhower goes as follows: “In war, before the battle is joined, plans are everything. The minute the shooting starts, plans are worthless.” And that absolutely was the case on D-Day. Just think of it. The Fourth Division landed a full kilometer south of where it was supposed to be. Throw away the plan. For the attack on Omaha Beach, everybody had been briefed that they were going to blast holy hell out of those beaches; there would not be a German alive or a fortification intact. Anything that the Air Forces missed the Navy would handle. But practically nothing went as planned.
The Fourth Division came closest of all the assault divisions to achieving its objectives on D-Day. Nowhere were the forces of the Allies as far inland as they had planned to be. One reason was that the concentration in the training had focused so intensely on getting through the Atlantic Wall and up the bluff at Omaha, over those flooded beaches and dunes at Utah, and past the little resort villages at Gold, Juno, and Sword. But once the men got a bit inland, they tended to sit down, brew up some tea, and congratulate themselves on having won a great victory—at just the moment they should have been pushing hardest.
This applies more to the British than it does to the Americans. The following story came directly from an infantry company commander in the British Army. His chaps made it ashore, they got inland, and they were marching toward Caen, another three or four clicks down the road. As they marched toward their objective, they came upon a field of ripe strawberries. Immediately, the men all broke ranks and went out into the field. In response, a farmer came up to the captain, shaking his head, watching his field of strawberries disappear in front of his eyes. He turned to the British officer and said, “The Germans were here four years and they never took one—not one—strawberry.”
The delays at Caen, the frustrations of fighting in the hedgerow country, and the increasing impatience on the part of the high command, the governments, the press, and the peoples of the Allied world, along with the growing fear that we were in another stalemate, all put a tremendous strain on the Alliance that focused on Montgomery. Anti-Montgomery sentiment built even among the most broad-minded of Americans. That sentiment became almost overwhelming.
I think one of Eisenhower’s great contributions to the victory was that he resisted pressure to sack Montgomery and understood that we just simply had to work with Monty. Whatever the military considerations, politically it was just not going to be possible to fire him. Holding together the Alliance was more important than getting a more aggressive commander for the British forces at Normandy.
The miracle was that Eisenhower was able to keep General George Patton and Montgomery fighting on the same side instead of fighting each other. I know of no one else who could have done it. From beginning to end, the name of Dwight D. Eisenhower is forever going to be linked to Operation Overlord, the beginning going way back to 1940 and the end coming at Reims on 7 May 1945. The Supreme Commander was Dwight David Eisenhower the whole way through, and he did a magnificent job.
