Inferno - Max Hastings [337]
Meticulous planning and immense armaments promised Operation Overlord’s success, but the hazards of weather and the skill of the German army fed apprehension in many British and American breasts. The consequences of failure must be appalling: civilian morale would plummet on both sides of the Atlantic; senior commanders would have to be sacked and replaced; the prestige of the Western Allies, so long derided by Stalin for feebleness, would be grievously injured, likewise the authority of Roosevelt and Churchill. Even after three years’ attrition in the east, the German army remained a formidable fighting force. It was vital that Eisenhower should confront von Rundstedt’s sixty divisions in the west with superior combat power. Yet the invaders were supported by such a vast logistical and support “tail” that, even when they reached their maximum strength in 1945, they would deploy only sixty American and twenty British and Canadian combat divisions. Air power, together with massive armoured and artillery strength, were called upon to compensate for inadequate infantry numbers.
Churchill and Roosevelt deserved their nations’ gratitude for delaying D-Day until 1944, when their own resources had become so large, and those of Hitler were so shrunken. Allied losses in the ensuing continental campaign were a fraction of what they must have been had an invasion taken place earlier. For the young men who made the assault on 6 June 1944, however, such grand truths meant nothing: they recognised only the mortal peril each one must face to breach Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. The invasion began with drops by one British and two American airborne divisions on the night of 5 June. The landings were chaotic but achieved their objectives, confusing the Germans and securing the flanks of the assault zone; paratroopers engaged enemy forces wherever they encountered them with an energy worthy of such elite formations.
Sgt. Mickey McCallum never forgot his first firefight, a few hours after landing. A German machine gunner mortally wounded the man next to him, Pvt. Bill Attlee. McCallum asked Attlee “if he was hit bad.” The soldier replied, “I’m dying Sergeant Mickey, but we are going to win this damn war, aren’t we?” “You damn well A we are.” McCallum did not know where Attlee hailed from, but thought his choice of words suggested an East Coast man. He was passionately moved that this soldier, in his last moments, thought of the cause rather than of himself. In the hours and days that followed, many other such young men displayed similar spirit and were obliged to make a matching sacrifice. At dawn on 6 June, six infantry divisions with supporting armour struck the beaches of Normandy across a thirty-mile front; one Canadian and two British formations landed on the left, three American divisions on the right.
Operation Overlord was the greatest combined-arms operation in history. Some 5,300 ships carried 150,000 men and 1,500 tanks scheduled to land in the first wave, supported by 12,000 aircraft. On the French coast that morning, a drama unfolded in three dimensions such as the world would never behold again. British and Canadian troops poured ashore at Sword, Juno and Gold beaches, exploiting innovative armoured technology to overwhelm the defences, many of them manned by Ostruppen of Hitler’s empire. “I was the first tank coming ashore and the Germans started opening up with machine-gun bullets,” said a Canadian, Sgt. Leo Gariepy. “But when we came to a halt on the beach, it was only then that they realized we were a tank when we pulled down our canvas skirt, the flotation gear. Then they saw that we were Shermans.” Pvt. Jim Cartwright