The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [262]
There were nerve-wracking moments for British intelligence as well as the Abwehr, however. On 1 June an answer to the Daily Telegraph’s crossword puzzle clue ‘Britannia and he hold the same thing’ was ‘Neptune’, because the Roman personification of Britain and the god of the sea Neptune both hold tridents. Yet Neptune was also the codename for the naval part of Overlord. Since 2 May, other answers had included ‘Utah’ and ‘Omaha’ (the codenames of the two beaches the Americans were to land on), as well as ‘Overlord’ and ‘Mulberry’. The crossword setter, Leonard Dawe, a fifty-four-year-old headmaster of Strand School, which had been evacuated to Effingham in Surrey, had a brother-in-law serving in the Admiralty, and it took MI5 some time before they accepted the surprising truth that the choices had been entirely serendipitous. ‘They turned me inside out,’ recalled Dawe in a BBC interview in 1958. Various pupils of his have since claimed to have inspired the clues, using words they had overheard at a nearby Canadian military base.
‘The tide has turned!’ stated Eisenhower’s exclamation-mark-studded Order of the Day on Tuesday, 6 June 1944, distributed to all Allied troops by SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force). ‘The free men of the world are marching together to victory! I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory! Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.’11 Along with the surprise they achieved, the sheer size of the Normandy landings was key to their success. Although the first day itself – codenamed D-Day, the D simply standing for Day – involved fewer troops going ashore than Husky had in Sicily, overall they were the largest amphibious landings in world history by far, altogether comprising 6,939 vessels – of which around 1,200 were warships and 4,000 were 10-ton wooden landing craft capable of an upper speed of 8 knots – 11,500 aircraft and two million men. On the first day 5,000 vessels sailed, including five battleships, twenty-three cruisers, seventy-nine destroyers, thirty-eight frigates and other warships, as well as a reserve of 118 destroyers and other warships.12 Meanwhile over 13,000 sorties were flown, and 154,000 Allied troops (70,500 Americans, 83,115 British and Canadian) alighted on French soil on the first day alone, 24,000 of them by parachute and glider.13
The timing of the invasion was one of the greatest challenges faced by the Allied High Command during the war. Because it took no fewer than forty-five troopships, cargo ships and escorts to move a single armoured division across the Atlantic Ocean, because safety from U-boats was not assured until mid-1943, because the English Channel is impassable for amphibious assault from September to February inclusive, earlier opportunities were severely limited. The plans had been undergoing revisions and regular updating ever since the first Joint Planning Staff meetings of September 1941, when one of the earliest American planners to study the problem had been a one-star general in the US War Department’s Operations Division called Dwight D. Eisenhower. In December 1943 Eisenhower was appointed supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in western Europe and soon afterwards went to London to establish his SHAEF headquarters to oversee