Citizen Soldiers_ The U.S. Army from the - Stephen E. Ambrose [7]
Normandy was a soldier's battle. It belonged to the riflemen, machine gunners, mortarmen, tankers, and artillerymen who were on the front lines. There was no room for manoeuvre. There was no opportunity for subtlety. There was a simplicity to the fighting-for the Germans, to hold; for the Americans, to attack.
Where they would hold or attack required no decision-making. It was
'always the next village or field. The real decision making came at the battalion, company, and platoon level: where to place mines, barbed wire, machine-gun pits, where to dig foxholes-or where and how to attack them.
The direction of the attack had been set by preinvasion decision-making. For the 1st and 29th divisions that meant south from Omaha towards St. Lo. For the 101st Airborne that meant east, into Carentan, for a linkup with Omaha. For the 82nd Airborne that meant west from Ste. MereEglise, to provide manoeuvre room in the Cotentin. For the 4th and 90th divisions that meant west from Utah, to the Gulf of St. Malo.
The objective of all this was to secure the port of Cherbourg and to create a beachhead sufficiently large to absorb the incoming American reinforcements and serve as a base for an offensive through France. So strong a magnet was Cherbourg that the initial American offensive already in Normandy headed west, away from Germany.
Eisenhower and his high command were obsessed with ports. Only a large, fully operating port could satisfy supply needs, or so Eisenhower assumed. Therefore the planning emphasis had been on Cherbourg, and Le Havre next, with the climax coming at Antwerp. Only with these ports in operation could Eisenhower be assured of the supplies a final fifty-division offensive into Germany would require. Especially Antwerp.
The Germans assumed that the Allies could not supply divisions in combat over an open beach. The Allies tended to agree. Experience had not been encouraging. Churchill was so certain it couldn't be done he insisted on putting a very large share of the national effort into building two experimental artificial harbours. The harbours were moderately successful: their contribution to the total tonnage unloaded over the Normandy beaches was about fifteen per cent.
But as it turned out, it was the LSTs (landing ship tank), supported by the myriad of specialized landing craft, that did the most carrying and unloading LSTs at every beach, their great jaws yawning open, disgorging tanks and trucks and jeeps and bulldozers and guns and mountains of rations and ammunition, thousands of jerry cans filled with gasoline, crates of radios and telephones, typewriters, and forms, and all else that men at war require. The LSTs did what no one had thought possible. The LST was in fact the Allies' secret weapon.
Through June the Germans continued in the face of all evidence to believe LSTs could not supply the Allied divisions already ashore, and therefore Operation Overlord was a feint, with the real attack scheduled for the Pas-de-Calais later in the summer. A continuing campaign of misinformation put out by SHAEF reinforced this German fixed idea. So through the month, Hitler kept his panzer divisions north and east of the Seine River.
Hitler had recognized that his only hope for victory lay on the Western Front. His armies could not defeat the Red Army, but they might defeat the British and Americans, so discouraging Stalin that he would make a settlement. But after correctly seeing the critical theatre, Hitler completely failed to see the critical battlefield. He continued to look to the Pas-de-Calais as the site where he would drive the invaders back into the sea, and consequently kept his main striking power there. To every plea by the commanders in Normandy for panzer divisions in northwestern France to come to their aid, Hitler said no. In so saying, he sealed his fate. He suffered the worst humiliation of all-he had been outwitted.
THE MISSION of the 101st Airborne Division was to take Carentan and thus link Omaha and Utah into a continuous beachhead. One of the critical actions