D-Day: History in an Hour. Rupert Colley

earlier, Ramsay had made his name by overseeing the mass evacuation of 330,000 soldiers stranded at Dunkirk. Both men, Ramsay and Leigh-Mallory, would die in plane accidents before the war’s end.)

      The following month, Eisenhower set up his headquarters first in London’s Grosvenor Square, then, from March 1944, in Bushy Park, near Hampton Court. His team, the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), replaced COSSAC as the driving force planning the invasion of occupied Europe. Montgomery expanded Morgan’s three-beach proposal on the Cotentin Peninsula to five, and extended the target area from thirty to fifty miles, with airborne attacks on both the western and eastern flanks. The Americans would land on the two western beaches, codenamed Utah and Omaha, while the British would attack via the middle and eastern beaches, codenamed Gold and Sword, and between these two, the Canadians would land at Juno. The town of Caen, Montgomery decided, needed to be captured within the first twenty-four hours, followed swiftly by Cherbourg. (In the event, it would take Anglo-Canadian forces until 9 July to capture Caen.)

      The expansion of Morgan’s original plan entailed greater numbers of landing craft, ships and, vitally, troops; hence, to have more time to prepare, the launch date was pushed back first to 1 June, then, from mid-May, to 5 June 1944. War production went into overdrive in an effort to meet SHAEF’s demands in time.

      On Christmas Eve 1943, President Roosevelt broadcast one of his ‘fireside chats’, in which he said, ‘The war is now reaching the stage where we shall all have to look forward to large casualty lists – dead, wounded and missing. War entails just that. There is no easy road to victory. And the end is not yet in sight.’

      By the spring of 1944, over 2 million troops had amassed across southern England – thirty-nine divisions, of which twenty divisions were American, fourteen British, three Canadian, one Polish and one French. Among these divisions were troops from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Rhodesia, Denmark and India.

       THE ATLANTIC WALL

       Artillery position, part of the Atlantic Wall (Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-263-1583-35 / Valtingojer / CC-BY-SA)

      Hitler knew an invasion would at some point materialize. On 23 March 1942, in his Führer Directive No. 40, he declared, ‘In the days to come the coasts of Europe will be seriously exposed to the danger of enemy landings.’ Appointing 66-year-old Field Marshal Karl Gerd von Rundstedt in command, he ordered the building of a defensive perimeter known as the Atlantic Wall. Employing 2 million labourers from across Nazi-controlled Europe, many of them slave workers, construction began on a line of fortifications that, once completed, spread 2,800 miles along the coast of the whole of Western Europe – from the northern tip of Norway, along the coasts of Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, along France’s Channel and Atlantic coasts down to the border of neutral Spain in the south. Consisting of some 700 concrete gun batteries and 12,250 fortified bunkers at intervals rarely more than a hundred yards, it was guarded round-the-clock by 300,000 troops. These troops were far from Hitler’s crack troops, but were, instead, often made up of the oldest and youngest men and POWs captured on the Eastern Front and forced into working for the Germans.

      In February 1944, Hitler appointed one of his ablest generals, Erwin Rommel, to oversee the defence of France. Rommel, who had gained fame during Germany’s defeat of France four years earlier and in North Africa where he earned the sobriquet ‘the Desert Fox’, believed that to prevent the Allies from securing a presence on continental Europe, they had to be contained on the beaches and driven back to the sea within ‘the first twenty-four hours’. Declaring the French section of the Atlantic Wall to be inadequate, Rommel ordered the immediate bolstering of defences, with the laying of mines both on the beaches, in places up to a thousand mines deep, and inland, eventually numbering some 6 million, and the installation of obstacles underwater, such as lethal metal spikes. In April 1944, on Rommel’s orders, the Germans planted huge numbers of wooden poles, fourteen to sixteen feet long, sticking out of the ground in fields behind the beaches to disrupt and damage potential Allied paratroopers or gliders. The poles, nicknamed ‘Rommel’s asparagus’, were linked by wire and often armed with a mine.

      Rommel also wished to have all nine German panzer divisions available in northern France near the beaches to help repulse any invasion. His superior, Rundstedt, wanted the tanks positioned north of Paris, out of reach of Allied firepower, from where they could be moved as required at short notice. Rommel argued that Allied air superiority would simply destroy the panzers once they tried to move into position. Refereeing this battle of wills, Hitler compromised and allocated three divisions to Rommel, and the rest to Rundstedt.