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to try to disrupt the German counter-attack and silence the German batteries on the high ground at the mouth of the River Orne, while two American airborne divisions, the 82nd and 101st, would land on the western extremity of it behind Utah beach to secure roads through the marshland behind the dunes that had been deliberately flooded by the Germans. The American parachutists landed in Normandy even more heavily laden than the infantry, each man carrying almost his own weight including jump suit, camouflage helmet, main and reserve parachutes, boots, gloves, combat uniform, life-jacket, Colt .45 pistol, Browning automatic rifle plus ammunition, knives, first-aid kit, blanket, food and change of socks and underwear. Corporal Dan Hartington of C Company, the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion in the British 6th Airborne Division recalled:

We were loaded to the hilt with grenades, Gammon bombs, flexible Bangalore torpedoes around our necks, two-inch mortar bombs, ammunition, weapons and water bottles. Our exposed skin was blackened with charcoal, the camouflage netting on our helmets was all tied up with burlap rags, and the space above the harness in our helmets was crammed with cigarettes or with plastic explosive.18

As soon as the beach-heads were secure, troops would pour into Normandy, principally Patton’s US Third Army and Lieutenant-General Henry Crerar’s Canadian First Army. The plan was to establish the 21st Army Group from the Loire to the Seine, take Cherbourg and Brest, and then liberate the rest of France and march to Germany. It was bold and imaginative and would be backed up by enormous air power, co-ordinated by Eisenhower’s deputy supreme commander, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder. One of the keys to victory was command of the air: whereas the Luftwaffe flew only 309 sorties on D-Day, the Allies flew 13,688. ‘The scene in the Channel was quite amazing,’ recalled Lieutenant-Commander Cromwell Lloyd-Davies of HMS Glasgow. ‘It was almost like Piccadilly Circus – there were so many ships there and it was incredible to us that all this could be going on without the Germans knowing anything about it. But we never saw a German aircraft the whole time.’19 In fact only a dozen German fighter-bombers ever made it to the beaches, and they could only stay long enough for a single strafing attack each before being chased off. Similarly, the German Navy posed next to no danger to the invasion, as it would have at any period before Dönitz withdrew his U-boats from the Atlantic ports on 24 May 1943. By D-Day, such was the success of the Allies’ naval war in the west that the Kriegsmarine was completely incapable of inflicting significant damage on the invasion armada. What surface ships the Germans had were concentrated on protecting the Pas de Calais area and no U-boats made any attacks against Allied shipping. On 4 July four German destroyers made a sally from Brest, but all were sunk or forced back into port. The Royal Navy’s Home Fleet meanwhile closed off any threat from Scandinavian and Baltic ports, and the Kiel Canal was mined as a precaution in Operation Bravado.20 Although three E-boats under Lieutenant Heinrich Hoffmann, based at Le Havre, made it through the Allies’ smokescreen to loose off eighteen torpedoes, a Norwegian escort destroyer was their only victim.

One major problem was the shortage of landing craft. So few were available that Operation Anvil, an attack in the south of France originally scheduled for the same day as Overlord, had to be postponed until 15 August, by which time the Germans had largely withdrawn their forces from the region. Quite why the US Maritime Commission was capable of building a 10,500-ton Liberty cargo ship in under a week (and 2,700 of them in total) but not enough basic, wooden, 10-ton landing craft is a continuing mystery of the war. Marshall suspected a Navy plot at the Bureau of Yards and Construction. Overlord did in the end deploy the necessary number of landing craft, but only at the cost of a diversionary operation that might have been strategically useful in early