CPhoM. Robert F. Sargent (U.S. Coast Guard)

The Strategy

It was always the Allied intention to land in northwest France, even from the early days of the war, and not to attempt a landing at Pas de Calais. There was little Anglo-American debate about the site, not anywhere near the kind of discussions that took place over the timing. The Americans favored an invasion as early as 1942. All they got, instead, was the tragic Dieppe raid carried out by the Canadians. In 1943 they attempted to deceive Hitler into thinking that an invasion would indeed be mounted in the West that summer.

Both Dieppe and the bluffing of 1943 proved invaluable to D-Day planners. From the Dieppe fiasco, they learned not to attempt a frontal assault on a channel port and that surprise was a key, perhaps the vital one, to victory. From the summer of ‘43 deceptions, which Hitler did not take seriously, they also learned that exceptional cleverness was called for to throw the Fuhrer and his generals off track.

A major aim of the Allies through late 1943 and into 1944, was to threaten as many sides of the Third Reich as possible to make Hitler spread his forces thin. For the most part, the effort worked. Hitler could not be sure that the Allies would not attempt a landing in the Balkans for a strike at the Reich from the southeast. The Americans and British were already fighting up the boot of Italy and could easily make landings (which they eventually did) in southern France.

The end result of all this was to keep the Wehrmacht divisions out of northern France. This, of course, was the Allied intention, because the German army still had the strength and morale in northern Europe to crush any cross-Channel attack.

By June of 1944, the Allies had 39 divisions available in Britain—23 infantry divisions, 12 armored and 4 airborne. Opposing these forces were the western five armies of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, deployed from Norway to the Spanish border and numbering 1.5 million men. There were about 59 German divisions in France and the Lowlands, 41 of them north of the Loire. If managed skillfully, they were enough to throw the Allies into the sea.

Charged with stopping the invasion was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the most respected military commander in the German army. He had command of Army Group B, whose area of operations extended from the Lowlands to Brittany. Its two main forces were the Seventh Army in Normandy and the more powerful Fifteenth Army, arrayed from Belgium to the mouth of the Orne and covering the Pas de Calais front.

Of the seven Panzer divisions in the West, only three were under Rommel’s direct command—the 2nd, the 21st and the 116th. Hitler retained for his own personal command and positioning the 1st SS, the 12th SS, the 17th Panzer Grenadier and the Panzer Lehr as strategic reserves and established a gain of command that infuriated Rommel. Only the 21st, stationed just a south of Caen, was close to the invasion beaches. The 12th SS was another 30 miles to the east.

On D-Day the Allies intended to land five divisions along a 50-mile front, roughly stretching from the southwestern base of the Cotentin Peninsula on the west to the mouth of the river Orne north of the city of Caen on the east. Waiting for them would be the Seventh Army’s five infantry divisions (of which only the 352nd and the 716th were in the immediate vicinity of the landings) and the one armored division south of Caen. The added element in the scenario was, of course, Hitler’s so-called Atlantic Wall.

Hitler made his Atlantic Wall declaration in December 1941 and boasted that the Atlantic coast of his western front would be “impregnable against every enemy.” Indeed, it was an astonishing effort. Through 1942 and 1943, a quarter of a million soldiers and slave laborers worked night and day seven days a week to build tens of thousands of concrete and steel gun emplacements, observation towers and other strong points. More than a million tons of steel and 20 million cubic yards of concrete sprouted up along the coast of “Fortress Europe.”

Many of the gun emplacements were cleverly camouflaged. They were made I to look like French beachside cafes, complete with painted windows and tile roofs. Some resembled summer cottages; others casinos. Some even I had painted persons “sitting in windows.” Elsewhere in cliffs, the gun I emplacements were painted to blend in with the rock.

When Rommel arrived and inspected the defenses, extolled so much in German propaganda, he immediately spotted weaknesses and called for further frenetic efforts, urging more concrete strong points, more guns and, above all, more mines. Rommel threw himself into the task with characteristic fervor, going everywhere on inspection tours (and exhausting his staff in the process)—even personally designing many of the booby traps that were then set out by the thousands. He had the beaches strewn with twisted steel beams to cut open the bottoms of landing craft, sloped logs to tip over tanks and boats, and planted as many mines as production and time would allow.

At gullies and paths leading from the beaches, Rommel called for all manner of mines and concrete pillboxes while inland, he erected upright poles strung with explosives to thwart glider landings. He also saw to it that as many fields as possible behind the beaches were flooded to disrupt paratroopers’ attacks. Even though he foresaw the possibility of Hitler’s overthrow, he was determined to stop the invading Allies, the harsher the better if a political end to the war was negotiated. As Cornelius Ryan wrote, “Never in the history of modern warfare had a more powerful or deadly array of defenses been prepared for an invading force.”

When the Allies struck, many of their hopes for German confusion were realized. Denied good weather stations in the North Atlantic, the Germans did not know a one-day break in the stormy weather was approaching for the 6th. They called off patrol boat sorties in the Channel, believing no invasion force could reasonably attack out of the storm and chop. Most senior Seventh Army commanders were away from their headquarters—as many were already in, or on their way to, Rennes for war game exercises. Rommel himself was in Germany.

Dummy parachutist dolls that set off firecrackers on landing and an effective French Resistance effort to cut communications lines added to the confusion during the parachute attack of the U.S. 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions and the British 6th Airborne Division. Despite these handicaps and the fact that Allied air strikes were thwarting motorized communications and the movement of forces, the Germans fought back fiercely—particularly the veteran 352nd Division, which (unknown to the American Command) had moved up to Omaha Beach area.

During the paratroop assault, von Rundstedt sensed the landings in Normandy would be a major assault and before dawn ordered the 12th SS and the Panzer Lehr to the coast for a knockout counterattack, believing Hitler would approve the order when he awoke. Instead, the German high command countermanded the order and told Hitler of the invasion only when he awoke at 10 that morning. Hitler agreed to hold back the two powerful Panzer divisions, and then changed his mind at 2 in the afternoon. But the panzers did not receive their orders until two hours later and none reached the battlefield by nightfall.

Only the 21st Panzer joined battle with the Allies on D-Day, and it lost precious hours, owing to indecisions at Army Group B and slow communications between command posts. Late in the day, it was able to blunt the British thrust toward Caen but not enough to exploit the serious gap between the Canadians and British or to crush the British left flank.

Although D-Day was largely a success—the Allies put some 155,000 men ashore in the first 24 hours—the battle for France was going to be a long and bitter one.

The German armor, which did not arrive at the beachhead on D-Day, would still make its presence felt in the days and weeks ahead. Indeed, as the Germans made their stand all through June and July in the hedgerows of Normandy, the battle evolved into the kind of stagnant slugfest so reminiscent of World War I.

The Wounded

From the start, how to care for casualties was a major concern of those who planned the invasion of Normandy. Quite apart from the humanitarian sentiments of the strategists, the planners were fully aware that the morale of fighting men would be highest if each was confident that he would be taken care of at an adequate medical establishment when wounded. In fact, planning for the care of the Americans in the invasion was the single most arduous undertaking in the history of the U.S. Medical Department.

Operation BOLERO, as the build-up of American forces in Britain was called, had the attention of planners from the start. Construction of medical facilities and hospitals proved to be one of the most difficult aspects of the effort. At the beginning of the buildup, plans called for hospital beds to number 3 percent of the troops in Britain. That was to expand to 10 percent when the invasion became imminent. Taking into account the numbers involved, D-Day planners wanted more than 50,000 beds at the outset and about 91,000 by the spring of 1944.

An enormous problem, to be sure, but the British agreed to turn over some of their military hospitals to the Americans. A number of these had been recently built in anticipation of likely civilian casualties from the Luftwaffe air blitz. But after the RAF had fought off Germany’s air force, the hospitals were available to be turned over to the Americans.

These efforts, however, were scant help. Many new facilities would have to be built. American medical authorities wanted solid buildings, but it quickly became obvious that Nissenhut hospitals would have to take up some of the slack. Plans called for at least ten of these 1,000-bed structures to be built in Britain and even at that, they would have to be supplemented with tents.

Even these would not be enough. More would have to do more. They decided to convert the BOLERO military camps once the troops departed for the invasion. Accordingly, engineers inspected existing camps with an eye to conversion and, as best they could, built new camps that would be converted into hospitals after D-Day. In all, conversion work provided an additional 32,500 beds once the invasion got underway.

Still, the work to provide hospital beds continually lagged behind hopes. Britain suffered from an understandable shortage of skilled labor for the construction. Moreover, building to provide medical services is more difficult than that to house soldiers or to store war materiel. The hot water, plumbing and sanitation works required all have to be of a higher standard, and operating rooms need special flooring, lighting and equipment.

Compounding these difficulties was the fact that most hastily constructed hospitals for Normandy casualties had to be built on landed estates, far from urban water systems or means of sewage disposal.

Still, by D-Day, the Americans had ready in Britain 43 general hospitals, 31 station hospitals, 60,000 hospital beds in buildings, and 25,000 in tented extensions to those buildings for a total of 74 hospitals and somewhat less than 85,000 beds.

Planners also had to consider aiding the wounded during the landings and evacuating those who could best be treated back in England. Important to their work, of course, was the task of estimating the casualties. After evaluating German defenses and the history of Allied amphibious attacks, D-Day strategists came to the grim conclusion that the D-Day first-wave regiments would likely face 25 percent casualties, 70 percent of which would be wounded with 30 percent killed, captured or missing. They expected the rate of casualties to drop in the days following the landings to about 15 percent, with 75 percent of those being wounded. Then there was the likelihood that most casualties would occur early—just when there would be the least help available.

One nightmare was that the wounded would stack up on the beach, creating difficulties for arriving troops and, most likely, depressing everyone’s morale. Quick evacuation of the more serious cases was called for, and planners settled on using the lumbering LSTs (landing ship, tank). These were the 330-foot-long ocean-going craft that could disgorge tanks and trucks off bow ramps. Proponents said the tank decks could be fitted to accept 300 litters, and that room was available for another 300 walking wounded. In fact, litter-bearing jeeps and amphibious trucks (DUKWs) could drive right up the bow ramps with wounded from the beaches. This sounded optimistic. It was probably more realistic to assume the LSTs would probably only evacuate 75 litter cases and 75 walking wounded each trip, owing to the fact that they could not stay long on the beach.

Some did not like the LST idea at all. Critics called them “rotten ships for the care of wounded American boys.” They rolled deeply in “all but the calmest seas and they could not be protected by the Red Cross, making them legitimate targets. If one were to founder, it would go down with all the wounded.

Still, they were the only means for large-scale cross-Channel evacuation. So medical authorities tried to upgrade the cavernous ships for evacuation purposes. They saw to it that about a hundred of them were altered to hold a small surgical facility on the rear of the tank deck; these would each carry two physicians and 30 medics.

Landing with the combat companies were to be combat medics. Aside from what these men could carry with them and unload from their own landing craft, and what each soldier carried by way of medical supplies, the medics were to have access to piles of supplies unloaded on the beaches by the first 200 LSTs touching shore. These would contain items most in demand—blankets, plasma and dressings.

In the hours after the first wave, battalion aid stations were scheduled to arrive, followed later by regimental aid stations and medical collecting companies from the division medical battalions. Later still would come ambulance companies and field hospitals.

A different strategy, of course, was needed for airborne troops. Expecting to be cut off for days with no effective means of evacuating wounded, they opted to parachute, or send in with gliders, the medical people and supplies needed to sustain several days of fighting. Nine medical officers and 60 enlisted men were to go in with each parachute regiment, and seven officers and 64 men with each regiment of glider infantry. Each paratrooper carried three first-aid kits and two morphine needles. The special equipment and supplies that medical personnel needed were to be carried on them, dropped in bundles or stowed in gliders. Field station equipment was to arrive later with field artillery.

With all the planning complete, the work to be done had to be performed by the men on the ground, often under the worst of circumstances.

Despite the chaos of battle, the vast planning that went into the care of the wounded largely paid off on D-Day and in the days and weeks thereafter—thanks to the men who could pull it off. First to be tested under fire were the medics and doctors going in with the l0lst and 82nd Airborne.

Although the planners had rationed a great deal of medical supplies to the airborne divisions—the 101st went into Normandy with hundreds of litters, and thousands of blankets and units of plasma—much of this precious equipment was lost in the dispersed drop, the swamps and the darkness. For three days after the drop, half the medical personnel of these divisions could not be accounted for, and most of the heavy equipment was never found. Consequently, what attention the wounded received had to be improvised.

As best they could, medical personnel organized at battalion assembly areas. They gathered carts from farmers and turned them into ambulances. The official history of the medical department in the European Theater tells the story of a dental technician in the 502nd Parachute Infantry of the 101st who fetched a cart and a horse to pull it, then drove for hours up and down the roads, always subject to sniper fire, gathering in the wounded. According to his commander, the technician’s heroism “saved countless lives.”

Just about on schedule, almost as soon as the attacking paratroopers landed, medical teams dropped from the sky, too. Personnel of the 10lst’s 326th Airborne Medical Company began arriving by parachute at 1 o’clock in the morning. They established a small hospital in a farmhouse near Hiesville, the division command post. Two hours later, two gliders touched down, carrying an auxiliary surgical team and four jeeps with trailers.

Unfortunately, both gliders crashed, injuring everyone on the surgical team. Even so, they still went to work and rescued most of their gear. By 7 a.m., team members had set up a small hospital in a chateau-previously selected as a division clearing station from aerial photographs. By early afternoon, they were performing surgery on three tables. In their first day, they treated about 300 wounded, keeping nourished and awake on D-bars and Benzedrine. Some of the wounded were evacuated through the 1st Engineer Special Brigade at UTAH BEACH, their numbers growing to more than 400 by June 8.

The medical efforts on the beaches were just as jumbled and heroic. OMAHA BEACH, of course, had it the worst. The 116th Infantry Regiment [of the 29th Division] lost its entire regimental supply of plasma when the two LCTs carrying it sank. Despite such setbacks, the medics continued to scurry up and down the beach, tending the wounded, and slog through the surf to haul up the drowning. Some hazarded minefields to bring back injured men.

Major Charles Tegtmeyer, the regimental surgeon of the 16th Infantry [of the 1st Infantry Division], landed at 8:15 a.m. He and his medical aides hauled wounded to the relative shelter of the embankment at the high-tide line and told them to holler to incoming landing craft for help and evacuation. Moving up and down the beach, in told his medical aides which casualties were most in need of treatment. By late morning, he was able to move some wounded more inland to the seaward slope of the bluffs above the beach and by sunset had 80 of them at his station.

Plans called for medical battalions to arrive shortly after the first troops and to do emergency surgery as well as evacuation. As it turned out, they could only partly do the evacuation and did not do emergency surgery at all on D-Day. The best they could manage was to join the general effort of bringing in casualties, administering first aid and fetching scattered sup- plies. Many arrived without their equipment and evacuation was tenuous at best.

OMAHA did get some relief when the hospital carrier Naushon anchored off the beach at 7 p.m. It was able to unload medical supplies, including whole blood, and take on wounded. The ship stayed through the night, with surgeons operating on emergency cases, and then set sail for England.

In all, the Army could only evacuate 830 casualties on D-Day, a fraction of those wounded. Still, the effort was admirable. The official history records that “the First Army’s decision to place as much consumable medical material—splints, litters, blankets, plasma, morphine, and other such items—as possible on shore with the first troops in a wide variety of packaging and means of transportation proved to be a lifesaver, in the most literal sense of the term. Even medics who reached dry land with little more than the clothes they stood up in seem to have been able to pick up on the beach or, in the airborne, scattered in the fields, enough supplies to do their jobs. Further, the ability of Medical Department officers and men to take individual initiative and improvise in carrying out their missions amid great danger and confusion testified to the effectiveness of the months of pre-attack training and indoctrination, both military and medical.”

Still, from an organizational standpoint, there was criticism. Some observers decried the rigidity of a landing schedule that called for sending in surgical teams and clearing companies under too much fire, exposing their valuable specialists and equipment to loss. In hindsight, they thought it better to hold these companies offshore to be called in only when they could safely land and have a better chance of completing their mission.

Despite the horror of OMAHA BEACH, overall casualties for the United States were lower than planners had feared. The Americans suffered about 5,000 casualties, of which the wounded numbered about 3,000. This was within the capacity of the medical forces dispatched to care for them had equipment arrived as hoped and treatment facilities been adequately organized.

The effort to care for the wounded had, of course, just begun on June 6. Immense work lay ahead. The first field hospitals came ashore on June 7 and 8, two at UTAH BEACH and two at OMAHA. These also brought the first Army nurses to Normandy. By the 10th and 11th, the four hospitals were operational as was the first evacuation hospital on UTAH BEACH. With each evacuation hospital set up, the field hospitals moved forward to care for those who could not be moved safely over long distances.

Out in the hedgerows, the stiffening German resistance took its toll. In the drive to Cherbourg through hedgerow country, 90 percent of the casualties were from infantry rifle companies. Medics, like everyone else, had to improvise—especially in the face of sniper fire. They learned not to jump up and run at the first call of “medic” but to wait and then crawl to the wounded. They pirated compresses from discarded gas masks and made dressings by ripping apart raincoats. With the wounds they treated, they found compresses to be more useful than tourniquets, and the GI’s sulfa powder to be exceptionally valuable.

By the end of end June, the Americans had fourteen 400-bed hospitals operating in Normandy. A month later, there were some 35,000 U.S. medical personnel working throughout the country.

The Lessons

The invasion of Europe was such an immense undertaking and of such significance that it will no doubt be re-examined and studied for decades to come. No one involved in it can say he came away unchanged. This can be no less true of commanders and strategists, who agonized over the planning, then saw the results of their decisions, for better or for worse.

To help guide their strategies for the invasion, planners naturally looked to previous amphibious invasions. They looked back, of course, to TORCH, the invasion of North Africa, and to Husky, the invasion of Sicily, both large-scale amphibious operations. They even looked back to the Gallipoli expedition of World War I for guidance on what to do right and what can go wrong when invading a hostile stretch of beach.

According to Forrest Pogue, the biographer of George C. Marshall and author of the official history of the Supreme Allied Command in Europe, one lesson learned from the earlier World War II invasions was how to control anti-aircraft units onboard ship. There had been trouble in previous landings with gunners mistaking paratrooper transport planes for enemy attackers and shooting them down. Hence, the OVERLORD planners reorganized control of the anti-aircraft units.

Carlo D’Este points out that the Mediterranean ventures taught the Americans how best to use landing craft, a skill they would put to good use along the coast of France. It also taught them much, though probably not enough, about using airborne divisions in a major battle.

The work done landing the paratroopers on D-Day was far better than during the invasion of Sicily. Perhaps one lesson of the Sicilian campaign applied well to Normandy was what to do when things go wrong. “The air- borne was a disaster in Sicily,” D’Este says, “and it would have been a disaster in Normandy except for the high caliber of soldiers who turned a bad situation to their advantage. They were so scattered that they just turned themselves into guerilla soldiers and were quite successful at that. This is something General Gavin had learned from the Sicily drop.”

One of the important lessons of D-Day was that deception on a grand scale could work. The planners, of course, had high hopes for the deception plan and feared that the invasion would fail if it did not at least partly work. But they were both pleased and amazed at how well the plan actually did work.

A GI takes cover from sniper fire in Brest.

Says D’Este, “One of the things that comes out of Normandy is how important it is to deceive the enemy of where you are going to attack him in order to preserve or increase the possibilities of your success. A recent excellent example is how we blinded the Iraqis in the Gulf War [by the air war before the ground attack] so that they had no eyes and ears about what we were really doing.”

If the Pas de Calais deception was the major intelligence success of the landings, the information on the hedgerows was the major failure. No one took enough notice of the hedgerows and aerial photographs taken of them did not disclose their impenetrable nature to photo interpreters. D’Este believes that in a post-war interview with Walter Crinite, General Eisenhower said the U.S. planners considered the hedgerows to be little more than American hedges and that armored vehicles could more or less plow right through them.

Normandy’s hedgerows were anything but that. Very often, they were high earthen mounds overgrown with tough practically impenetrable to attackers. Tanks and jeeps, at least at first, could not go through them. And they divided up the battlefield into so many pieces that the fighting turned into a kind of guerilla warfare, with small units contesting small bits of land.

GIs were slowed to a crawl when they were meant [under General Bernard Montgomery’s plan] to be the strong right punch that would break out while the British on the left held the Germans in place. One reason for this problem was that the Americans relied partly on the British to tell them about the hedgerows. But the British were not particularly focused on the western part of the battlefield, being more familiar with the French countryside they fought over in World War I and in 1940, which lay further east.

Another part of the problem stemmed from over concentration on the landings themselves. The attention given to getting the men ashore took the lion’s share of the planning. “They were so worried about the landings and what Rommel would do and the counterattacks,” says D’Este, “that they did not look seriously enough at what they might run into later. This, of course, was understandable because you have to get through the first things first. But on a scale of 1 to 10, the planners gave about a 9.5 to getting the troops ashore and about a 2 to post D-Day planning.”

The intelligence shortcoming concerning the hedgerows at least led to a further lesson for the Americans—which they could improvise when they had to. Pogue points to the improvised attachments to tanks and jeeps that enabled these vehicles to break through the hedgerows.

The Americans, as well as the British, learned not to advance their armor without infantry. William Hammond cites the fact that the Americans eventually hooked up small telephones to the backs of tanks so that the infantry outside could talk to the tankers inside. Infantry and armor could then much better support one another. “The infantry worked at knocking out the German panzer Faust (akin to our bazookas) teams, and the tankers in return would bring their guns to bear on anything threatening the infantry. A very important lesson to be learned from Normandy is that you have to be flexible and prepare yourself for the unforeseen.”

According to Pogue, much of the improvisation came, not from officers with a military background, but from men from other fields. “Persons with, say, a business background, might look at some stalled tactic and be bold enough to say, ‘This isn’t working, let’s try something new.”

Still, he believes that improvisation could have been faster and that, in hindsight, it looks better than it was. Much of the good improvisation was on a small scale and did not spread fast enough. “We got away with it because the Germans did not have any advantage at all,” he says. “They didn’t have any secondary positions.”

Pogue points out that the ULTRA operation was more or less vindicated in Normandy but that, in a way, its very success was a mixed blessing. The fact that so many German wireless communications could be picked; up and decoded by the Allies was a boon to high-ranking commanders. At first, some were suspicious that the intelligence gained was of little value, but they changed their minds in Normandy.

That caused problems, though. “They got caught off guard when wireless traffic died down, and so they were more blind than they should have been,” says Pogue. “You can see evidence of this, especially in the Ardennes.”

Still, the codebreaking helped immensely and tipped off the Americans to the counterattack at Mortain. But Pogue points to another shortcoming: “It doesn’t help to have lots of material if you can’t get it to the people who need it most—the men in the front lines. Early on, intelligence gleaned from ULTRA did not reach the fighting men fast enough and you’d often hear complaints like, ‘If I’d only known that three hours ago!’ but later intelligence from ULTRA was given out faster and was of more help.”

Hammond says that Normandy showed that logistics was critical and that the Americans were very good at making the logistics work. “Supply made that campaign,” he says. Pogue agrees and further points out that the Americans were quick to learn. They learned from previous invasions, for example, that if they were not careful about loading ships, supplies immediately needed could be loaded beneath those that were less critical. “This led to great confusion, looking through ships for what was needed right away. The Americans learned what was needed quickly and what could wait and then they loaded accordingly.”

Hammond makes the point that the supply effort kept the American fighting man far better equipped than his German counterpart. “The Germans might blow up a [U.S.] tank but the crew would usually survive, then come back the very next day in a new tank. Although the Germans had what was probably a more heavily armored tank with a better gun, they did not have the mechanical or supply systems of the Americans. The United States had tanks with Ford engines that were easy to make, reliable and readily replaceable. When the German tanks broke down—as they often did—they were not replaced. Logistics made Normandy possible.”

A German soldier surrenders, but enemy resistance was heavy.

There were other lessons, too—some of them hard. Accordingly to Hammond, Normandy showed the power of the defender. “The Germans had some good military units but many of their troops were housekeeper types and yet [on this terrain], they could fight very well. They took brutal losses, but they inflicted them as well. [Allied] commanders had to recalculate the amount of force they would have to bring into an attack.”

Some lessons that should have been learned weren’t. D’Este points out that it was very clear that airborne operations were exceptionally difficult. It was a lesson learned in Sicily and again on D-Day. “We still didn’t have it right by the time of Arnhem,” he says.

He also believes that commanders generally underestimated the quality of the German resistance. “Too often we thought that when we showed up, they would leave. You could make that case from North Africa and Sicily. We would conceive of what we wanted to accomplish and believed the Germans would think the same way. But at Anzio, Salerno and Normandy, they proved otherwise. It seemed like it went on that way to the end of the war.

“After Normandy, we suffered from a terrible problem of over optimism. Because Normandy ended so dramatically at Falaise, getting the German army on the run, the high command thought the war must be just about won. Then came Arnhem and the Ardennes.”

Apart from what lessons commanders may have learned, there were the struggles of the soldiers. “If there’s any lesson from Normandy at all,” he reflects, “it’s about what we ask young men to do. It’s simply beyond comprehension to ask them to do these kinds of things and actually function and survive. When you are put in that situation, the human spirit takes over. Commanders didn’t really have anything to do with it except at a very low level because once the landings began, it was out of their hands. They lost any control over their units. Then it’s in the hands of the squad and platoon leaders. That’s the way it was, especially on OMAHA.”