D-DAY INVASION Part Two— (part two) The actual Invasion                                          

Ships comprising of the biggest armada in the world`s history left the shores  along the south coast of England in the darkness of the early hours in the morning of June 6^th 1944.

The ships

There were three American battleships and five British battleships heading towards the northern coast of France.  Their shells for their big guns ranged from 10 inches to 15 inches in diameter that were fired from a total of 54 large naval guns.

There were five heavy cruisers.  Their shells for their big guns ranged from eight inches to six inches.

When I served in the Canadian navy in the early 1950s, one of the ships I served on was HMCS Ontario that was a light Cruiser with nine 6-inch guns. Before they were fired, I was in one of the enclosed gun turrets operating the hoist that brings up the heavy shells from the deck below us to the gun turret.  

There were 17 British light cruisers that took part along with two of the Free French navy, and one of the Polish navy. All carried either 6 inch or 5.25 inch guns of varying numbers.

  

There were 39 destroyers heading towards the shores of northern  France.  They were 85 British, 40 American, 7 Canadian, and the remaining destroyers were from other countries.   

Allied Paratroopers

About 15,000 paratroopers landed in the French village of Sainte-Mere-Eglise after midnight on June 6. One American’s parachute got caught on the church’s spire, and he hung there for two hours before the Germans took him prisoner.  

German preparations

On the 4^th of November 1943, Field Marshall, Erwin Rommel became General Inspector of the Western Defences specifically tjr northern shores of France including Normandy.  He was given a staff that befitted an army group commander, and the powers to travel, examine and make suggestions on how to improve the defences.

 In April 1944, Rommel promised Hitler that the preparations would be complete by the 1^st of  May, but by the time of the Allied invasion,  the preparations were far from  being finished.  The quality of some of the troops manning them was poor and many bunkers lacked sufficient stocks of ammunition. Hitler had ordered the I SS Panzer Corps placed near Paris which was far enough inland to be useless to the Germans if the Allies attacked the northern coast of France.  Rommel believed that if his armies pulled out of range of Allied naval fire, it would give them a chance to regroup and re-engage them later with a better chance of success. 

The Attacks on the beaches

The Allied troops on the transport ships didn’t really know what they would be facing when they reached the sandy beaches of Normandy.

They faced the German’s large cannon placements, machinegun emplacements, breach obstacles to stop tanks from getting on the beaches and rolls of razor wire. The machinegun fire was disastrous and hundreds of Allied soldiers were shot with the bullets from the machine guns. as soon as they left the carriers that took them to the braches.

At the Omaha Beach, the Allied soldiers were held up because most of their tanks sank before they got onto the beach. The beach was better defended by the Germans than most of the other beaches  and it was almost impossible to advance to the sea wall where the German defenders were entrenched.

There were around 156,000 troops that attacked the German forces at Normandy. The American forces landed numbered 73,000: 23,250 on Utah Beach, 34,250 on Omaha Beach, and 15,500 airborne troops. In the British and Canadian sector, 83,115 troops were landed (61,715 of them British): 24,970 on Gold Beach, 21,400 on Juno Beach, 28,845 on Sword Beach, and 7900 airborne troops. 

you can imagine how those German officers felt with the armada of ships facing them from the English Channel and the thousands of paratroopers landing in that same area, behind the lines. You can run, but you cannot hide.     

By the time the Allied soldiers moved all their heavy military equipment over to the actual landing area, the allied troops had already established a beachhead and were now moving in the reserves. Even though they lost thousands of men that day, it was a successful mission.  

The German soldiers were incredulous and could barely believe that such an attacking force was even possible to assemble. They were quickly demoralized by the fact that their air cover and re-supply was completely ineffective due to constant allied air superiority. They were terrified by the fact that their comrades were being killed at a prodigious rate and the weapons being used against them were horrifyingly effective. They were determined to put up the most resistance they could and believed that they were defending Europe from hostile forces. They were proud and conflicted about the mass casualties they were able to inflict on the attackers. They had faith that the German main army would counter attack soon. And in the back of their minds, they also knew that the war was over and that Germany’s plans for success were doomed. 

By the time of the invasions, Germany was already on the ropes. The Russians were rolling them back and pretty much destroying the bulk of the German army in ever larger offensives. Daylight raids on German cities from the air were progressing in ever larger numbers and frequency. Effective fighter support now protected the bombers all the way to Berlin and back as they blasted anything that moved. Tactical fighters roamed the countryside shooting up anything that had a German symbol on it. In mid June, a new and massive Soviet offensive in Belarus took place that dwarfed the D-Day invasion. The Wehrmacht (Army) were losing their battles.

The defenses in Normandy were pretty formidable and the Germans also had several powerful well equipped SS Panzer divisions close by to provide vital support in a crisis. These tank forces combined with the shore defenses would have stopped the invasion at the beach. Thus, the average beach defender would have felt pretty confident they could stop the Allies. However, the ruse of an invasion via Pas De Calais so impressed Hitler that he refused to order the Panzer units into the fray until it was too late. If he had thrown those divisions in immediately, the outcome might have been very different. By the time Hitler had ordered that the tanks be sent to Normandy, it was too late to come to the rescue of the overwhelmed German forces. 

When Field Marshall von Rundstedt saw the impossible 5000 ships the Allies had assembled for the invasion he called the German High Command in Berlin to apprise them of the situation. When asked for his advice he shouted, “Sue for peace, you idiots!”. I suppose this could give an idea of how most of the Germans felt about the invasion.

The  German experience of D-Day is summed up by the account of the German Major Werner Pluskat, an artillery officer. Unable to sleep, he visited his command post just before dawn. Having shared a cup of coffee with the troops on duty, he took one more look at the empty sea before returning to his quarters and watched hundreds of ships appear out of the morning fog

He promptly called headquarters to report, only to be told the Allies didn't have that many ships. He replied, “Then come down here and count them yourself! “ Still not impressed, HQ asked him where all these ships were heading. And Pluskat, by now thoroughly frustrated, screamed, “Right at me!”

The Casualties

The First U.S. Army, accounting for the first twenty-four hours in Normandy, tabulated 1,465 killed, 1,928 missing, and 6,603 wounded. The after-action report of U.S. VII Corps (ending 1 July) showed 22,119 casualties including 2,811 killed, 5,665 missing, 79 prisoners, and 13,564 wounded, including paratroopers.

Canadian forces at Juno Beach sustained 946 casualties, of whom 335 were listed as killed.

Surprisingly, no British figures were published, but Cornelius Ryan cites estimates of 2,500 to 3,000 killed, wounded, and missing, including 650 from the Sixth Airborne Division.

German sources vary between four thousand and nine thousand D-Day casualties on 6 June—a range of 125 percent. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s report for all of June cited killed, wounded, and missing of some 250,000 men, including twenty-eight generals.

The thinking of the German soldiers at that time

To the average German soldier who was elsewhere other than the beaches of Normandy and those who were fighting the Russian armed forces  approaching Berlin was this:

“United Europe" is our universal slogan. We should remember that both the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS had huge recruitment campaigns in all the countries under Reich control, with the emphasis that people from all the countries of Europe should unite under arms and defend European unification. If we look at the Waffen SS, we see these very-effective non-German units from all over Europe: the French, the famous Belgian-Walloon people under Leon Degrelle, the Dutch, Norwegians, the Croat Muslims with their 'SS' emblems on their fez hats, and so on and advance into France so on. There was a definite sense that Europe should be united under the Reich, and an attack on France would be an attack on the whole structure."

However, I think that the  German soldiers who were fighting for their lives at the beaches of Normandy and fighting for their lives at the eastern front while facing the Russian armed forces  that were decimating them had thoughts about Adolph Hitler. It was this;

“Damn You Hitler. Go to Hell?

The next article is about the advance into France