A rising tide afterwards to allow landing craft to leave the beaches.
June 6, 1944, provided all those things on the coast of Normandy.
So when Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower learned a break in the weather was coming, he ordered the Allied invasion of Europe.
Peter Mansoor told an attentive audience of 100 at the Clark County Heritage Center on Thursday that by June of 1944, the Allied High Command had two other crucial pieces in place as well: The P-51 Mustang had given them near air superiority over the Germans, and the industries of the Allied nations had built enough landing craft to put a critical mass of boots on the Normandy beaches.
On the 69th anniversary of D-Day, the Gen. Raymond E. Mason Jr. Chair of Military History at the Ohio State University didn’t underplay the heroism of the undertaking. But the retired Army colonel did delve into the details of strategy and logistics that made the day a success.
Because the British were not far removed from “a lost generation of men” sacrificed in World War I, Mansoor said, Churchill had advocated a series of “peripheral campaigns” against Axis power rather than a direct assault.
When he was overruled by Josef Stalin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Tehran in 1943, the Allies began planning an attack across the English Channel.
Among the possible targets, Normandy emerged as what Mansoor called the “Goldilocks solution” — “just right” because it was in range of British air support, provided access to a supply port at Cherbourg and remote enough from German divisions stationed elsewhere in France.
Although some have argued the invasion should have come earlier, Mansoor said, the “worldwide shortage” of landing craft, which also were being used in the Pacific, made that impossible.
“Most of the landing craft used were produced in the six months before the invasion,” he said, some after the Allied command decided to beef up the numbers in the invasion.
Air superiority also was critical, he said, something the Allies didn’t have when they suspended daytime bombings in 1943 because of heavy losses, and that was established only after the arrival of the P-51, he called “this great hero of the war.”
Designed in 90 days by an American company that lied about already having plans in hand, the plane got its power after a British test pilot suggested a bigger engine, and once equipped with drop tanks was able to accompany heavy bombers all the way to Berlin.
By May of 1944, under pressure of the P-51, “the Luftwaffe had cracked,” Mansoor said, and Eisenhower commandeered this new Allied advantage to disable the railway system in France in preparation for D-Day.
Eisenhower thought destruction of the railroad marshaling yard was so critical to delaying German response to the planned invasion he said “I will request relief from this command” if not given full power to direct the air forces to that end.
That rail destruction would force German troops rushing to the the coast to do so on roads vulnerable to Allied bomber attacks.
By June of 1944, the bombing campaign had cut the rail system to 10 percent of its original capacity, Mansoor said, and “Normandy was, for all practical purposes, an isolated island.”
He said the eventual success of the landing was also advanced by a sophisticated and coordinated Allied deception campaign that:
• misled German air reconnaissance by using inflatable tanks and armor.
• faked an attack at Norway, the very kind of peripheral maneuver Churchill may have preferred;
• controlled intelligence to the extent that “there was not a single (German) agent in Great Britain that was not controlled by the British”; and
• played to the German belief that Gen. George Patton would attack at the Pas-de-Calais to the extent of having Patton purposely shout across a ballroom to Eisenhower, “I’ll see you in Calais.”
When D-Day arrived, the attack on Normandy came against a German command divided on how best to counter an invasion of Europe, flat-footed because it was unaware of the clearing weather, and unable to respond quickly because of an unwillingness to wake Adolf Hitler from his sleep.
The German Army was “not at their best” on June 4, 1944, Mansoor said.
For Americans, he added, the day was mixed.
The attack on Utah beach, where bombers pierced the cloud cover and in “very precise” targeting knocked out “the key German fortifications,” went well.
There, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. famously found himself on the wrong beach but decided to fight there and, for his effort, was awarded the Medal of Honor.
In contrast, “almost nothing went right on Omaha Beach.”
First, in cloud cover, Allied bombers overshot their targets and “completely missed the German defenses. Second, Gen. Omar Bradley had decided not to follow the British lead of having tanks travel with troops as they landed.”
Without the armament, Mansoor said, American troops were outgunned on the beaches in a scene replicated in “Saving Private Ryan.”
One lasting result is the location of the national D-Day memorial in Bedford, Va., the hometown of a 200-soldiers unit that took 196 casualties.
A riptide offshore got some boats out of the fire zone, and the day was saved by infantry leaders finding a way to get their troops off the beach and a bombardment by destroyer captains who provided support with deck guns.
But the 2,500 American dead on the beaches of Normandy was twice the awful sacrifice at Tarawa in the Pacific Theater six months earlier.
Mansoor said “American troops would pay the price for (Bradley’s) lack of vision.”
Much was yet ahead, including hedgerow fighting, the crisis caused when tanks advanced so far in front of supply lines that they ran out of fuel.
Still, in a half day, 155,000 Allied troops had gained foothold on the European continent at a cost of 12,000 casualties, two thirds of them Americans in what Mansoor called “a down payment on the half a million American men killed or wounded” in World War II.
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