Read The Cost of Courage Online
Authors: Charles Kaiser
Why would the BBC possibly broadcast the time of the invasion in advance?
these Germans ask themselves.
Obviously this is just another feint on the part of the Allies!
So the commanders of the 7th Army — the one defending Normandy — are never warned on the night of June 5 of the imminent attack. Two other factors contribute to the lackadaisical attitude of many of the German commanders. During May there have been eighteen days when the weather, the sea, and the tides have been perfect for a landing, and the Germans obviously noticed that Eisenhower has not taken advantage of them.
And on June 4, the German Air Force meteorologist in Paris has predicted that inclement weather means that no Allied action could be expected for at least a fortnight.
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had been shifted from Italy to northern France by Hitler in January 1944, where he became commander of Army Group B, which has the main responsibility for repelling an Allied invasion. On the basis of everything he has been told, the Desert Fox writes a situation report on June 5 stating that the invasion is not imminent. Then he sets off to Germany, first to celebrate his wife’s birthday and then to meet with the Führer. The second meeting will not occur.
Around one
A
.
M
. on June 6, one British and two American airborne divisions begin descending by parachute and glider right into the middle of the German 7th Army. But even this isn’t enough to convince Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the German commander in chief in the west. At two forty he sends word to the chief of staff of the 7th Army that he does “not consider this a major operation.”
Hitler himself has been up until three
A
.
M
. with his deputy, Heinrich Himmler, “reminiscing, and taking pleasure in the many fine days … we have had together,” Himmler recorded. When three of his generals call his headquarters to beg for permission to rush two tank divisions to the front, word comes back that Hitler wants to wait and see what develops. Then he goes to bed and sleeps undisturbed until three o’clock the following afternoon.
Even after the gigantic Allied armada starts arriving later that morning, the chief German general in the west remains convinced that the main invasion is going to happen elsewhere.
At five fifty on the morning of June 6, the Allies open a massive naval bombardment on beach fortifications and nearby Normandy villages. The main American landings take place forty minutes later at Utah and Omaha beaches.
There is heavy fighting everywhere, but the Allies are particularly successful at Utah, where 23,000 men get ashore with only 210 dead and wounded on the first day. After the 101st Airborne manages to block four exits from the beach, the only regiment
facing them from the German 709th division surrenders in large numbers.
At Omaha, the situation is catastrophically different. This is the site of by far the largest landing of D-day by Americans. Here, 34,250 troops face the Germans dug in on bluffs 150 feet above the beach, and the inward curvature of the coast also allows German fields of fire to overlap.
The disasters for the Allies begin at six
A
.
M
., when waves of American B-24 bombers drop thirteen hundred tons of bombs intended for German defenses at Omaha and completely miss their targets, bombing too far inland.
The official history of the 116th Infantry, 29th division, was written by S. L. A. Marshall, a World War I veteran who rejoined the army in 1942 as a combat historian. In his notebook he recorded the horrific conditions faced by the men who hit the beach at Omaha at six thirty that morning:
ABLE Company riding the tide in seven Higgins boats is still five thousand yards from the beach when first taken under artillery fire. The shells fall short. At one thousand yards, Boat No. 5 is hit dead on and foundered. Six men drown before help arrives …
At exactly 6:36 a.m.… the men jump off in water anywhere from waist deep to higher than a man’s head. This is the signal awaited by the Germans atop the bluff. Already pounded by mortars, the floundering line is instantly swept by crossing machine-gun fires from both ends of the beach …
The first men out … are ripped apart before they can make five yards. Even the lightly wounded die by drowning, doomed by the waterlogging of their overloaded packs. From Boat No. 1, all hands jump off in water over their heads. Most of them are carried down … All order has vanished from Able Company before it has fired a shot.
Already the sea runs red. Even among some of the lightly wounded who jumped into shallow water the hits prove fatal.
Knocked down by a bullet in the arm or weakened by fear and shock, they are unable to rise again and are drowned by the onrushing tide. Other wounded men drag themselves ashore and, on finding the sands, lie quiet from total exhaustion, only to be overtaken and killed by the water. A few move safely through the bullet swarm to the beach, then find that they cannot hold there. They return to the water to use it for body cover. Faces turned upward, so that their nostrils are out of water, they creep toward the land at the same rate as the tide. That is how most of the survivors make it. The less rugged or less clever seek the cover of enemy obstacles moored along the upper half of the beach and are knocked off by machine-gun fire.
… From the cliff above, the German gunners are shooting into the survivors as from a roof top.
In spite of the huge initial casualties, the terrible handicaps of Omaha’s topography, and the almost total lack of cover, seven hours after the first troops hit the beach, General Leonard Gerow signals General Omar Bradley that “troops formerly pinned down on the beaches” are finally “advancing up heights behind the beaches.”
At a cost of two thousand Americans killed at Omaha, by the end of the first day more than thirty thousand men have made it ashore. Two Ranger battalions scale the hundred-foot-high Pointe du Hoc with rope ladders, only to discover that the Germans have already dismantled their big cannon.
It isn’t until four o’clock that afternoon (one hour after he was finally awake) that Hitler agrees to send two more Panzer divisions into the battle to bolster the 12th SS and 21st Panzer Divisions. “But the reinforcements dribbled into the invasion front were never enough,” writes the historian Gerhard Weinberg, “and the Allied air forces as well as the sabotage efforts of the French resistance and Allied special teams slowed down whatever was sent.”
Indeed, the actions of the Resistance were probably just as important to the success of the invasion as the incredible bravery of the men storming the beaches. “We were depending on considerable assistance from the insurrectionists in France,” Eisenhower reported.
During the first twenty-fours of the assault, nearly one thousand acts of sabotage paralyze the French railways. Locomotives are destroyed, trains are derailed, and more bridges are blown up, reducing rail traffic by 50 percent. For a week after the invasion, every train leaving Marseille for Lyon is derailed at least once, and in the department of Indre, which includes the line from Toulouse to Paris, there are eight hundred acts of railroad sabotage in June alone.
This is vital to the success of the Allies, because 90 percent of the German Army is still transported by train or horse. The disruptions achieved by the Resistance give the troops on the beaches crucial additional hours, and then days, to prevail, before significant German reinforcements can arrive.
Across the French coast, by the end of the first day, there are 9,000 Allied casualties, of whom one-half were killed: 2,500 Americans, 1,641 Britons, 359 Canadians, 37 Norwegians, 19 Free French, 13 Australians, 2 New Zealanders, and 1 Belgian. British air chief marshal Arthur Tedder had predicted a casualty rate of 80 percent for the airborne troops, but the actual number was 15 percent.
Rommel finally makes it back to the front from his wife’s birthday party at the end of the first day of the invasion, after canceling his meeting with Hitler. By the time he returns, one of his earlier predictions is well on its way to coming true. Unlike General von Rundstedt, who thought it was impossible to prevent an Allied landing and hoped to fling the invaders back into the sea with a counterattack, Rommel had been certain they had to be prevented from coming ashore at all. “The first twenty-four hours will be decisive,” he said.
On the night after the invasion, Roosevelt goes on the radio to ask one hundred million Americans to pray with him:
Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity …
They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people …
With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace, a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.
Thy will be done, Almighty God.
By the end of June 11 (D-day plus five), an astounding 326,547 troops, 54,186 vehicles, and 104,428 tons of supplies have been landed on the beaches. While there would be several more serious setbacks on the way to victory — and hundreds of thousands of additional casualties — by now the Allies have clearly turned the tide of war.
The sabotage missions carried out by the Resistance in the immediate aftermath of the invasion make a huge contribution to the success of the Allies. They also come at a tremendous cost to the French civilian population.
When the 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division sets out on June 8 on a 450-mile journey from the south of France, they expect to reach Normandy a few days later. Instead, the trip takes three weeks, because of the heroism of the Maquis, who attack the Germans and destroy numerous bridges and railway tracks in their path.
On the second day of the trip, in retaliation for the deaths of forty German soldiers, the Panzers seize a hundred men at random in the town of Tulle in the Corrèze and massacre all of them. “I
came home from shopping on June 9 to find my husband and son hanging from the balcony of our house,” recalled a woman from the town.
On the third day, Major Adolf Diekmann’s unit is responsible for a much greater atrocity in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, where 642 citizens, including 205 children, are killed. The men are shot; the women and children are burned to death in a church.
Though still shocking in France in the fourth year of the Nazi Occupation, the German war crimes committed in these villages paled in comparison to what the Nazis had been doing on a vast scale in Eastern Europe ever since 1940. Referring to the latest massacre in France, an eastern front veteran who had become one of Diekmann’s officers told a colleague, “In our circles, Herr Muller, it was
nothing.
”
*
On November 3, 1943, Hitler had written in Führer Directive No. 51, “The threat from the East remains, but an even greater danger looms in the West: the Anglo-American landing!… It is there that the enemy has to attack, there — if we are not deceived — that the decisive landing battles will be fought.” (Roberts,
The Storm of War,
p. 462, and www.britannica.com/dday/article-9400228)
†
That was the number given by the Soviets immediately after the war, but when Mikhail Gorbachev was president of the USSR, he said the total number of Soviet deaths could have been 29 million. (O’Neill,
The Oxford Essential Guide to World War II,
p. vii)
Throughout France the Free French had been of inestimable value in the campaign. They were particularly active in Brittany, but on every portion of the front we secured help from them in a multitude of ways. Without their great assistance the liberation of France and the defeat of the enemy in western Europe would have consumed a much longer time and meant greater losses to ourselves.
— General Dwight Eisenhower
O
N THE DAY BEFORE
the Normandy invasion, Christiane, Jacqueline, and André and Solange Rondenay are ordered by London to leave Paris, to join up with the Maquis in the Morvan, 150 miles south of Paris, near the Château de Vermot in Dun-les-Places.
The two sisters go to their parents’ apartment to say goodbye. Jacques and Hélène are very unhappy that they are leaving Paris. They have had no word about their youngest son since he was shipped off to a concentration camp in Germany at the end of April, and now they won’t know where their daughters are either. Only their son Robert still seems relatively safe in his government job at the Finance Ministry.
Once again, Rondenay manufactures impeccable identification cards for everyone, and they reach the Morvan without incident. They are incredibly relieved to be out of Paris. In the weeks before
the invasion, the Gestapo has intensified all its activities, and the pain of seeing more and more of their friends and relatives getting arrested has become overwhelming. Now, for the first time in years, they can speak out loud without worrying about being “overheard, suspected or unmasked.” They finally feel safe, although that is not exactly what they are.
In the Morvan they join up with Jean Longhi, another legendary figure of the Resistance, whose nom de guerre is Grandjean. Christiane is captivated by him. A Communist and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Longhi flees Paris after learning that the Germans are after him. Longhi and his friend Paul Bernard founded the Maquis de Camille in the fall of 1941.
With his sister, Longhi started a hospital at the Château de Vermot to care for the wounded of the Maquis. At the end of 1943, the Service National Maquis, which coordinated the actions of the various individual groups, made him the head of all of the Maquis in the department of Nièvre in the center of France. Even though Grandjean is a Communist, Christiane does not sense any political tension with him: “We had a common enemy, and that was enough.”