James Holland
Yes, the casualties were tragic, sa brilliant planning, superior firepower a British chiefs, made the longest day ou
IN POPULAR understanding, D-Day remains firmly entrenched as the single most pivotal moment of the Second World War. It conjures up images of men leaping under fire from landing craft, of Robert Capa’s iconic grainy photographs of Omaha Beach and, perhaps especially, of Tom Hanks’ trembling hands as he attempts a sip of water minutes before the ramp goes down on his Higgins boat.
We all know what happened next, depicted so vividly in the opening 20 minutes of the film Saving Private Ryan: chaos, confusion and carnage as US soldiers were machinegunned to their deaths.
It’s a brilliant piece of film-making but it is also incredible how that one, long, bloody scene has hijacked much of the narrative of D-Day.
It’s not Steven Spielberg’s fault – he was just making a very good film – but it has undoubtedly overshadowed the true story, just as did The Longest Day before it.
In fact, much of our understanding of the war as a whole is rooted in Hollywood, and while it is great that movie-makers still want to portray that extraordinary time, it has badly skewed our historic understanding of what really happened.
It may surprise many to know all three service chiefs on D-Day were British, that 892 of the 1,213 warships were from the Royal Navy, that two thirds of the 3,500 aircraft involved were British, that 3,261 of the 4,127 landing craft involved were British, and that two-thirds of the men landed on D-Day itself, 76 years ago today, were British and Canadian. It’s also not widely known that the scenes depicted in the opening of Saving Private Ryan were not replicated across the entire five-mile stretch of Omaha Beach – plenty of assault platoons landed and reached the bluffs with minimal or no casualties.
DEFENDING Omaha were no more than 350 Germans, armed with just 32 guns, the largest of which were two 88mm calibre (the diameter of shell they fired) flak guns. By contrast, the Allied warships against them could bring to bear 183 guns of 90mm calibre and larger, along with hundreds of smaller, quick-firing cannons.
It was true the Germans had heavier field guns further inland but, even so, in terms of weight of numbers and firepower, it was a total mismatch.
Some 842 Allied troops lost their lives at Omaha – a lot, but not, I suspect, as many as most think and not as many as on the worst day Britain has suffered with Covid-19.
I mention these statistics not to diminish the sacrifice, which was, of course, considerable, but to underline just how dominant the Allies were on D-Day and how well-planned and prepared was the entire undertaking.
Today, we live in a more fractured world but in 1944 the Western Allies were united in a way coalition partners rarely have been before or since.
There was no
‘Some 842 Allied troops died at Omaha – a lot but not as many as on Britain’s worst Covid day’
formal alliance between
Britain and her Dominions and the United States, yet the levels of coordination and cooperation were astonishing, brought together by one goal: to defeat the Axis forces. Historians have also been rather in awe of German tactical chutzpah too, from their Tiger tanks to their highvelocity 88mm guns to the rapid-firing machine-guns their troops used. German soldiers have traditionally been depicted as tougher, meaner, and, man-forman, better at combat than their Allied adversaries. It’s odd this view should have taken root, as it is absolute nonsense.
The Allies had great kit and for the most part were better trained. In part, this distortion is because we’ve been looking at the war from the wrong perspective.
The land battle has dominated the narrative yet the Allies always planned to fight the war as a brotherhood of air, land and sea power; to use machinery, technology, industry and a vastly superior global reach as much as possible, and, by the same token, limit the number of young men flung into the brutal meat-grinder of war. This was the “steel not flesh” strategy and was a very good idea superbly well executed.
By D-Day, the Allies had complete air superiority over all of north-west Europe, thanks to a long and intensely prosecuted air campaign.Allied aircraft were better and their pilots vastly superior in terms of training and experience to their Luftwaffe counterparts, operating with greater coordination, intelligence and rapidly improving radar and navigational instruments.
Quite simply, this control of the skies made D-Day possible because, in the run-up to the Allied invasion, transport networks across France and north-west Europe had been hammered by air power with bridges, railways, marshalling yards and radar stations destroyed.
That meant the Germans would not be able to reinforce Normandy any time soon.
It also meant that when they did try to move mobile armoured units to the front, they would be relentlessly pounded from the air as