Remembering D-Day: 76 years ago

The liberation of western Europe from the Nazis was the Allied goal ever since the Dunkirk evacuation of May 1940. By 1942 the tide was turning after Allied victories at Stalingrad and El Alamein and the American entry to the war. The little remembered Canadian-led 1942 Dieppe Raid was disastrous but its lessons (and those of the Sicily and Italy landings in 1943) were absorbed. With the Russians winning in the east but pushing for a second front, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force was finally ready to strike in 1944.

The Germans knew the invasion was coming but the Allies kept them guessing whether it would land at the Cotentin Peninsula, the Pas de Calais or Normandy beaches. Cotentin had the strategic port of Cherbourg but its geographical shape meant any invading force could be hemmed in. Pas de Calais was most obvious choice as the shortest Channel crossing and the closest route to Berlin. Even after the Germans heard what was happening they still thought it was a diversion to a Calais landing.

But SHAEF had plumped for the 50km stretch of Normandy's wide open beaches. Now 7000 vessels carried 350,000 soldiers and sailors in the long haul across the channel. Some 850,000 German soldiers of the 15th Army led by Erwin Rommel lay in wait behind the formidable Atlantic Wall. But Rommel himself was missing. The weather was so atrocious around D-Day he assumed the Allies would not attempt a landing and rushed off to Germany for his wife's birthday.

Operation Overlord indeed depended on good weather and it was awful in the days leading up with heavy rain and gale force winds. But meteorological officers convinced Eisenhower there was a window of opportunity when an eastward front across the Atlantic would bring clear skies and calm seas on Tuesday, June 6, 1944. The day was lucky as it needed to be a full moon and a high tide to land. The plan called for the invasion of five beaches 50km along the Normandy coastline from east to west Sword (British), Juno (Canadian), Gold (British), Omaha (US) and Utah (US). Airborne forces would capture key bridges and knock out others with the help of the Resistance. The ambitious plan was to capture Caen and Bayeux by mid-afternoon of D-Day and cut off Cherbourg.

The airborne invasion began first. In the middle of Monday night gliders landed thousands of soldiers scattered across the Normandy landscape. A key objective was the capture of Sainte-Mere-Eglise a tiny market town 8km from Utah on the main road that linked Cherbourg with Paris. Buildings burning in town illuminated the sky allowing defenders to easily pick off the invaders as they descended. But the Germans panicked at the number of landings and withdrew, allowing Lt. Colonel Edward Krause's 505th Parachute Infanty Regiment take Sainte-Mere-Eglise at 5am, the first French settlement to be liberated on D-Day. They had to hold it till the sea invaders joined them later in the day.

Battalion commander Benjamin Vandervoort (played by John Wayne in the other famous D-Day movie The Longest Day) broke his ankle in a crash landing and commandeer an army cart to secure the northern approaches to Saint-Mere-Eglise. British paratroopers concentrated on Merville Battery, situated close to Sword Beach which they captured easily though it was not as formidable as they feared. News of the airborne assault reached Nazi Supreme High Command in Bavaria at 4am with a request to release two reserve SS Panzer Divisions, which only the sleeping Hitler could grant. Officers refused to wake the heavily sedated Fuhrer.

Coded messages on the BBC alerted the Resistance to the invasion. German code breakers worked it out too, but again Berlin had difficulty accepting it was really on. The sea landing was planned for 5am following an aerial bombardment. Heavily populated areas inland were not considered in this plan and 3000 civilians died in next 48 hours. When bombs were not hitting homes, they went off harmlessly in cliff-top pastureland to avoid hitting shorebound infantry sparing the defensive wall.

The exact landing time differed from beach to beach depending on the time of high tide. At 6.30am soldiers landed at Utah Beach and ran 360m past minefields up the sand to reach the sea walls while supporting amphibious tanks were stuck in heavy swells. Led by Brigadier General Teddy Roosevelt, the highest ranking officer in the first wave and son of president Theodore, the men were landed a mile away from their intended targets due to rough sea conditions. With their training targets out of reach, they improvised and attacked what they found.

It was worse at nearby Omaha Beach which faced the stiffest resistance. The A Company was known as the "suicide wave" as the first scheduled to land though its carefree teenagers all expected to survive. Their jokes and banter ended abruptly as they prepared to leave landing crafts and noticed the bombardment from the ships had overshot their targets (it also left no bomb craters on the beach to hide in). Their mood was not helped by tanks crafts supposed to have landed ahead of them stuck in the water.

They disembarked in good order with no gunfire but as soon as they hit the exposed beach, Germans opened murderous fire. They fired in short bursts aiming 15-20 cms above the ground. "It was so easy to kill, it took so little energy," one German defender said. With its leaders dead, A Company ceased to assault and the remaining rabble became a rescue party bent on survival. When the second wave arrived, they were shot down as soon as the landing ramp opened. Fountains of sand were kicked up by explosions. There were "men with guts hanging out of their wounds and body parts lying along our path", one said. Though most were killed, a handful reached the sea wall and they had to scale the bluffs and attack the strongholds.

Between Omaha and Utah beaches lay the forbidding cliffs of Pointe du Hoc. On top lay six 155mm cannons that could lob shells 25,000 metres and hit both beaches. The US Army Ranger Assault Group had to knock it out. The Germans fortified the land side believing the 30m vertical cliffs made it impregnable from the sea. Lt Col James Rudder believed it could be done using grapnels, ropes and ladders. He brought a bunch of misfits (prototype of another war film The Dirty Dozen) with him who trained at the Needles cliffs on the Isle of Wight under live fire.

Their task was made harder when their crafts could not land on the shingle beaches ruling out their 25m extending ladder. One of Rudder's men swung on a smaller ladder, shooting with his machine gun before swaying back to land. They climbed up the cliffs using ropes and steel grapnels fired into the cliffs from rocket guns while the Germans above cut the ropes. They fought firefights at the top only to find the gun placements empty. They eventually found them hidden nearby and destroyed them with grenades.

Gold Beach offered its own problems. It was 15km long but its western end had crumbling cliffs unsuitable for tanks and jeeps while jutting offshore reefs were a hazard. Rommel fortified the only landing spot between Le Hamel and La Riviere with machine gun nests, bunkers and underground mines. It was the treacherous job of frogmen, ferried to the beach at 4am, to disarm the mines before soldiers arrived. They strapped explosive charges to each mine allowing the aerial bombardment to create a safe passage ashore.

The Canadians landed at nearby Juno Beach amid a screeching gale and freezing spray. The inhabitants of nearby Bernieres were about to be plunged into war, with most ignoring the BBC directive to move away from the coast. When the first tank commander arrived in town he approached a local with gun in hand, asking him was he German. "No, I'm not Boche, but you're speaking French," the man said. "Oui, we are French Canadians," the commander replied, offering chocolates and cigarettes.

The incongruities continued on Sword Beach where Brigadier Simon Christopher Joseph Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat, known by his men as "the mad bastard", insisted his piper Bill Millin play a tune (Road to the Isles) as they landed amid shellfire and mortar explosions. When Millin continued playing on the beach, his sergeant reproached him. "What are you fucking playing at, you're attracting all the German attention." Millin learned later from two captured Germans they didn't shoot him because they couldn't believe their eyes what this dummkopf was doing. Lovat pushed on under heavy fire to link up with a beleaguered force at Benouville (Pegasus) and Ranville Bridges.

Watching the carnage from the bridge of USS Augusta was General Omar Bradley. Omaha was the biggest concern with hundreds of landing crafts stuck at sea because the beach was so full of junk. He considered abandoning the beach but instead made the inspired move of sending brigadier general Norman Cota and colonel Charles Canham to save the landing. They arrived on Omaha in the same landing craft narrowly avoiding death when a mine they hit failed to detonate.

What happened next was the start of Saving Private Ryan. Canham charged up the beach shouting at officers to get out of the pillboxes they were taking cover in and Cota joined him at the sea wall. The Germans were targetting the wall with mortars. Cota supervised the firing of a tubed Bangalore torpedo to blast a gap and he was the first man through alive under a cloud of smoke. Texas Rangers blew more gaps in the barbed wire and began advancing to the bluffs. Canham was wounded but established a command post at the foot of the bluff. The Rangers scrambled up the bluffs taking out machine guns and hidden bunkers. Cota and Canham broke the stalemate and accepted the first German surrenders. They also brought a dozen radio operators who contacted the USS Harding offshore to send accurate fire to the church steeple in Vierville to take out dangerous snipers.

Lovat's men also dodged snipers as they closed in on Benouville Bridge defended by John Howard's paratroopers. Howard's exhausted troops lost communication and had no idea how Sword was going 8km away. The Germans ideally wanted to recapture the bridge but blowing it up would stymie the Allied advance too. They brought up a gunboat which Howard destroyed with morters. Then a lone low flying Dornier aeroplane bombed it, but the bomb hit the superstructure, bounced off a metal girder and splashed harmlessly into the canal. German snipers closed in but were no match for one of Howard's men with an anti-tank gun.

Five commandos were first to arrive from Sword on bicycles, dodging the snipers. But their low-key arrival was outdone by the showy Lovat a few minutes later. Again he had Millin pipe them (playing Blue Bonnets over the Border) through mortar fire and flaming houses. When Lovat met Howard he looked at his watch and said "sorry, we are two and a half minutes late". "About bloody time," Howard replied with a grin.

Omaha was well behind schedule although soldiers were moving inland on the other four beaches. American paratroopers around Utah were rebuffing German counter-attacks including a surprise attack on Neuville-au-Plain near Saint-Mere-Eglise to stop the western landing zone. At 1.30pm 56 Allied Liberator bombers targetted Caen's roads and railways with 156 tonnes of explosives. That morning the Allies dropped leaflets exhorting people to leave their homes but few took the warning seriously. Most of its 60,000 citizens were trapped in the bombardment. In 20 minutes the town was destroyed and many civilians were dead. It was another 33 days before the city was liberated.

By mid afternoon Lovat linked up with Howard, the Juno Canadians had taken Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer and the British at Gold were tackling Le Hamel. Utah Beach suffered only 200 deaths - a fraction of the 749 that accidentally died in the live ammunition rehearsal in Exercise Tiger in Devon. The race was on to retain Sainte-Mere-Eglise which they and the Germans knew was a vital transport link. The paratroopers were greatly outnumbered but Vandervoort's men grimly defended the northern road as a German battalion arrived. Forces from Utah were stuck in battle at Neuville. The Germans taunted the paratroopers as they retreated to the centre of town, but the Americans had done their job and held on with the support of tanks from the beach.

Battlefield doctor Treadwell Ireland arrived on Omaha on the same boat as Ernest Hemingway. Ireland noted Hemingway was the only one in a trench coat and the only one with binoculars, "which everyone else has got rid of so German snipers wouldn't think you were important". Surgery was impossible while the soldiers were pinned on the beach but they eventually set up a makeshift infirmary at a bunker with only morphine, plasma, dressings and penicillin to deal with obscene injuries. A lone Messerschmidt dropped a bomb at the entrance knocking Ireland off his feet but in a ward overflowing with casualties carried down from the cliffs covered in wounds and summer flies, he had no time to consider his own misfortune. "The pillbox became the focal point of all the suffering on the invasion beach," he said.

Up above, Cota's men captured Vierville but as they approached the coastal road they ran into the trouble that plagued the Allies for weeks to come. Normandy's bocage terrain with a landscape of submerged lanes and tangled hedgerows were ideal for holes the Germans dug for machine gun nests and fighting positions. When Cota came forward smoking a cigar to find out why the hold-up, he hissed at his men, "there aren't any snipers here" only for a shot to barely miss his head. "Well, maybe there are!" he said. They dug in for the evening creating the outermost frontier of Omaha beachhead on D-Day.

Meanwhile, two portable Mulberry Harbours were being towed in sections across the Channel. These were needed to land the one million troops waiting to get to France as well as massive amounts of supplies, weapons and tanks. The first was to land at Omaha, the second at Arromanches west of Gold. But Arromanches had to be captured first. The town along with Bayeux and the road to Caen was one of three main targets for soldiers from Gold.

The German strategy was for the 20th Panzer Division exploit the weak link of an 6km gap between Sword and Juno. Colonel Hermann von Oppoln-Bronikowski knew speed was critcal and was frustrated by the delay in orders from Supreme Command. When orders did come through, they were conflicting. He was initially directed towards Benouville Bridge only to be countermanded and ordered north to wedge Sword and Juno. He attacked via Caen which he noted was a "complete shambles". They crossed the river Orne between bomb attacks. They were headed to the high ground at Periers but the Staffordshire Yeomanry lay in wait. British anti-tank fire soon found its mark and Oppoln-Bronikowski knew he was outnumbered and outgunned and the attack ground to a halt. Germany's last hope of pushing the invasion back into the sea ended.

As twilight descended on D-Day the inimitable Lovat was handed the task of taking the hilly ground beyond the Orne to cordon the left flank of the beachhead and prevent a German advance west during the night. They were helped by a second wave of airborne paratroopers, 250 gliders carrying 2000 men plus a vast quantity of ammunition, mortars, jeeps and armoured cars. One of the biggest carried 17,500 pounds of petrol for the tanks. Deathly tired invaders cheered at the sight before snatching some desperate sleep.

Erwin Rommel immediately rushed back to Normandy on hearing of the invasion. Contemplating the end he cursed the slowness of the orders of the Panzer division and lack of Luftwaffe support. Others remembered his words of a few months earlier. "If we don't throw them back in the sea within the first 24 hours we are lost. When this happens, the day will be the longest day and perhaps the final day."

At the end of D-Day, the Allies had not achieved their larger objectives - only Gold and Juno had linked up and Bayeux and Caen remained in German hands - but the 11,000 invaders who were killed that day (8200 in the American sector alone) did not die in vain. The beachhead was small but allowed the influx of huge quantities of men and machines in the coming days. In three weeks there were 850,000 Allied troops in France. They were needed. It took 11 weeks to take Normandy in ferocious fighting. Paris was liberated on August 25 and it took six more months to cross the Rhein. In all it took 335 days for the war to end after D-Day. But Rommel, then a long dead suicide for his supposed role in the Hitler assassination plot, was proved right. It was not the final day, but the longest day made all the difference.