D-Day: Preparation for Overlord

By Will Fowler

In any military operation throughout history, few 24-hour periods have been as crucial as that of 6th June 1944. With the aid of specially commissioned maps, D-Day: The First 24 Hours series gives the dramatic history of the first 24 hours of the Normandy landings, and explains in detail the events that occurred in each landing zone. In this first volume of the series, the book describes the build-up to the landings themselves, the German preparations for defending the French coastline, and the reasons behind the final Allied decision to attack in Normandy on 6 June 1944.

With colour and black & white photographs, the book is a guide to key events in the first 24 hours of the D-Day landings that saw the Allies successfully achieve a foothold in Northern Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amber Books Ltd
• Release date: Jun 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781909160507

Book preview

Battle

Men and equipment are off-loaded from a US landing craft on a beach in Devon during a training exercise. The beaches of Devon were chosen for their similarity to the beaches of Normandy, with their long, sloping sands running gently into the sea.

CHAPTER ONE

THE ROAD TO

OPERATION

OVERLORD

The Americans pressed for an invasion of Northern Europe as early as 1942, but it would take two more years for the plans and training to reach fruition. US, British, Canadian troops and men and women from the occupied countries of Europe were now massed on a crowded island, as the Allied air forces pounded communications and defences in preparation for the invasion. Now these soldiers awaited the order to go.

BY THE SPRING OF 1944, the Western Allies and the Soviet Union knew that the war in Europe was moving, at times slowly, towards the defeat of Nazi Germany and her partners. However, they had not always enjoyed this confidence.

In September 1939, under its leader Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany attacked Poland, and France and Britain declared war. Poland fell in a month. To secure her northern flank, Germany then invaded Denmark in April 1940 and had a tough and costly fight for Norway. In June that year, the defeat of France followed after a six-week ‘blitzkrieg’ (‘lightning war’) campaign. France was divided into a Nazi-occupied north and west and a southern ‘neutral’ pro-Nazi Vichy zone. In April 1941, Germany and her allies overran Yugoslavia in 11 days. Greece fell after a tough fight, and by the end of May, German paratroopers had seized the island of Crete. The Soviet Union was still bound by a 1939 non-aggression treaty it had signed with Nazi Germany, while the United States, though sympathetic to Britain, was reluctant to become embroiled in a European conflict. In the spring of 1941, Britain stood alone.

German gunners back fill sand and soil against the concrete gun pit of a 15cm (5.9in) K 18 gun in a coastal artillery position. On the right they are putting turf in place to landscape the pit, which is camouflaged from the air by a netting frame suspended over the gun.

So at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the name of the German attack on the USSR in June 1941, and the Japanese air assault on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Axis partners of Germany, Japan and Italy enjoyed considerable military successes. In December 1941 however, the German forces were halted outside Moscow, but the following spring, four armies thrust deep into the Caucasus and reached the Volga at Stalingrad. By the winter of 1942, the German Sixth Army was embroiled in fighting at Stalingrad, while hundreds of miles to the south, at El Alamein, in the deserts of Egypt, Rommel’s Afrika Korps had been fought to a stop by the British Eighth Army. Late 1942 was the high water mark of Nazi Germany’s territorial expansion.

The British counter attack at El Alamein in October 1942 and the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in early 1943 marked the ‘end of the beginning’. Germany and her allies were now being pushed onto the defensive. North Africa was cleared of Axis forces by May 1943. British and US forces invaded Sicily in July 1943 and at about the same time, German tank forces were defeated in a massive armoured battle at Kursk in the Soviet Union.

In late 1943, the British and United Forces launched a three-pronged assault on mainland Italy and Hitler’s fascist ally, Benito Mussolini, was forced out of power as Italy surrendered and re-entered the war on the side of the Allies. Fighting northwards through Italy, a country which Churchill had called ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’, was incredibly tough, as the Germans used natural and man-made obstacles to delay the Allied advance.

By 1944, the Allies were bogged down in front of Monte Cassino and only just holding the beachhead at Anzio. On the Eastern Front, the Germans were fighting a slow withdrawal to the borders of Poland, delaying the Soviet advance with local counter-attacks. On March 28, in grim echoes of Stalingrad, the First Panzer Army, commanded by General Hans-Valentin Hube, was trapped in the Ukraine by the combined armies of Gens Zhukov and Konev. Two days later, helped by attacks by two Waffen-SS divisions, they broke out and reached safety by 7 April.

FORTRESS EUROPE

Immediately after the fall of France in 1940, the German forces occupied French naval installations and with them, the local defences. Later, after Britain had failed to sue for peace, field defences had been dug along the French coast and barbed wire entanglements and minefields had been positioned blocking beaches that might be used by amphibious raiders. They were not the concrete bunkers that were constructed in 1942–44, but many were zigzag slit trenches that would be dug by soldiers with their own resources and defence stores after capturing enemy territory.

In 1941, the Organisation Todt (OT) (see box below) had concentrated on building reinforced concrete U-boat pens, Luftwaffe airfields and bases and coastal gun positions in the Pas de Calais. The four batteries in the Pas de Calais covered the narrows of the Channel and could subject Dover, Ramsgate and Folkestone on the British mainland to periodic shell fire. The biggest guns, the three 40.6cm (16in) weapons in the Lindemann battery at Sangatte, could shell all three towns. ‘Hellfire Corner’, as this area of England was known, remained under threat until the late summer of 1944. Some of the guns had originally been emplaced to give supporting fire for Fall Seelöwe (Operation Sea Lion), the proposed invasion of Britain in 1940.

Thirteen coastal artillery batteries were eventually constructed along the French coast, as well as one each in Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway, three in Germany and three in Denmark.

In Britain, the US and British land, sea and air forces waited for orders to open a ‘Second Front’, and the invasion of occupied northern Europe would begin. Like any military operation, the day was designated D-Day, and the hour of attack, H-Hour. Though many of the naval and air forces had already been in action in the Mediterranean and over Europe, for many of the soldiers D-Day would be the lethal validation of three or more years of training.

COMFORTABLE POSTING

For the German Army, garrison duty in France – and particularly Paris – was a comfortable posting and was used to allow units exhausted by combat on the Eastern Front time to recover. Relations were often reasonable between the Germans soldiers and ordinary Frenchmen and women. For 21-year-old Gefreite Klaus Herrig, a wireless operator with the Kriegsmarine Signal Corps based in Le Havre, ‘Our relationship with the French was more correct than friendly. We used to go to the local café for a beer, but there were no strong personal connections. Our discipline was good and the German troops, in general, behaved themselves.’

Monsieur Cassigneuel, a farmer near St Aubin, concurred. ‘Our Germans were fine. We had no problems at all. We had horses on the farm and they had horses too. Many of the Germans were farmers and we were all the same age, we did the same kind of work, and we talked a lot about the way things were done. They told us about German methods and we told them about the way we did things in France. We swapped information. It was quite good really!’

German officers inspect a concrete bunker built on the seafront of a northern French town. The embrasure for the machine gun or light artillery piece inside is angled to give covering fire across the beaches. Barbed wire blocks the seawall.

However, not everyone was happy, and Resistance groups were formed, sponsored and assisted by Britain and the United States, to collect intelligence on, for example, the design and layout of the coastal defences and to sabotage the Nazi war effort in occupied Europe.

BUILDING PLANS

Between June and September 1942, no major construction work was undertaken on defences, but in 1942 the situation began to change. On 23 March, Hitler issued ‘Führer Directive 40’ that anticipated both limited and large scale enemy incursions along the western coast of Europe. The British raid at St Nazaire in 1942 and the disastrous attack at Dieppe later that year gave added impetus to construction work on defences that were named by Hitler Atlantikwall (the Atlantic Wall). In the planned construction programme, 15,000 bunkers and emplacements of Types ‘A’ and ‘B’ – like the