All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [336]
When news of the invasion was broadcast, across the Allied nations churches filled with unaccustomed worshippers, joining prayers for the men of the armies. On US radio channels commercial breaks were cancelled, as millions of anxious listeners hung on bulletins and live reports from the beachhead. Industrial strikes were abandoned and civilian blood donations soared. In Europe, millions of oppressed and threatened people experienced a thrill of emotion. As a Dresden Jew, Victor Klemperer had more cause than most to rejoice, but he had been rendered cautious by past disappointments. He compared his wife’s reaction with his own: ‘Eva was very excited, her knees were trembling. I myself remained quite cold, I am no longer or not yet able to hope … I can hardly imagine living to see the end of this torture, of these years of slavery.’
As for Hitler’s soldiers in France, ‘On the morning of 6 June, we saw the full might of the English and Americans,’ one man wrote in a letter to his wife which was later found on his corpse. ‘At sea close inshore the fleet was drawn up, limitless ships small and great assembled as if for a parade, a grandiose spectacle. No one who did not see it could have believed it. The whistling of the shells and shattering explosions around us created the worst kind of music. Our unit has suffered terribly – you and the children will be glad I survived. Only a tiny, tiny handful of our company remains.’ Luftwaffe paratrooper Lt. Martin Poppel, for so long an ardent Nazi, confident of victory, wrote on 6 June: ‘It turns out that this really is the Allies’ big day – which unfortunately means that it’s ours too.’ Geyr von Schweppenburg, commanding Panzergroup West, was convinced that Rommel, who directed the deployments behind Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, was wrong to stake everything on a ‘forward defence’. Von Schweppenburg had urged that the armoured divisions should be held back and massed for a counter-attack. Nonetheless, like most thoughtful German officers, he believed the outcome inevitable whatever deployments the defenders had made: ‘No landing or lodgement attempted by the Allies could ever have been defeated by us without an air force, and this we utterly lacked.’
Late in the afternoon of 6 June – much too late to have any realistic prospect of success – 21st Panzer Division staged a counter-attack on the British front, which was easily halted by anti-tank guns and 17-pounder Sherman ‘Fireflies’. At nightfall, Eisenhower’s forces were securely established, holding perimeters between half a mile and three miles inland which achieved linkage during the days that followed. In the German lines, Martin Poppel wrote: ‘We all reckon that [our] battalion has been thrown into battle alone and with few prospects of success … The men are damned jittery … Everybody is frankly shit-scared in this eerie night, and I have to curse and swear at them to get them to move.’
On the beaches, reinforcements poured ashore from shuttling landing craft, so that by the end of D+1 Montgomery deployed 450,000 men. The first Allied fighters began to fly from improvised local airstrips. The Luftwaffe was so shrunken by months of attrition over Germany that its planes scarcely troubled the invaders. Allied pilots marvelled at the contrast between their daylight view of the beachhead, where long columns of vehicles could be seen advancing with impunity, and the stillness in the enemy’s lines: the Germans knew that any visible movement they made would bring down fighter-bombers. Only during the brief hours of summer darkness were Rommel’s forces able to redeploy and bring up supplies; their commander was himself later wounded by a strafing fighter.
The D-Day battle cost only 3,000 British, American and Canadian dead, a negligible price for a decisive strategic achievement. The people of Normandy, however, suffered terribly for their liberation, losing as many dead on 6 June as the invaders. Allied soldiers