D-DAY AND THE LIBERATION OF EUROPE
We mark the 75th anniversary from the of Operation Overlord, storming of Normandy’s beaches to the liberation of Paris
A superstar lineup of historians joins us to dissect Operation Overlord from multiple angles
The liberation of France was not a foregone conclusion. Everyone knew D-day was coming, Americans, British, French, and importantly the Nazis. For months the Allies had been working to misdirect and feed false reports of where the landing would happen, but it was inevitable. What was less clear was how successful they would be. As James Holland, author of Normandy ’44 and Big Week (among many other titles) tells us, it was a one step at a time process. “The one priority of D-day is to make sure that it doesn’t fail and that trumps absolutely everything,” he insists. “And everyone’s got terribly obsessed about D-day targets and the fact that no one actually achieved what they were supposed to do on the invasion front.”
What Holland is referring to is certain territorial targets that didn’t get met, like US forces taking Carentan or British and Canadian troops taking Caen. Those things would come in the days and weeks that followed, but they didn’t happen on day one. The German response to invasion was slow and uneven, but the terrain was challenging. And whatever griping there may have been back in London or Washington,
objective one of D-day was achieved. “Everyone got inland, everyone got a toe hold, flanks were secured,” explains Holland. “By anyone’s reckoning, D-day was an incredible success and they achieved tactical surprise.”
Foothold established, the Allied ‘Big War’ approach could be applied, having led a vanguard of 150,000 troops and now following them up with every bit of medical, mechanical, logistic, aerial and naval support that they could muster. “What you’ve got is a race because the Allies have overwhelming material advantage,” Holland tells us. “Of that there is absolutely no question. They’ve got millions of men back in the UK, hundreds of thousands of vehicles, thousands of tanks and guns and the airforce. But the limit to how much you can bring over in one go or even in two goes does matter because of the constraints of shipping.” Could the Allies get these resources to mainland France from across the Channel before Germany could reinforce and mount a counterattack?
Thankfully, bombing raids all across France had already been decimating transportation links and communications, albeit in a rather spread out fashion so as not to give away that Normandy would be the point of entry. That slowed down a German response and then from D-day onwards the Allies could be even more precise. “Once D-day arrives, the cat is out of the bag and then you no longer have to roam across a wide area to cover all bases and keep the enemy guessing. You now know it’s going to be Normandy, so therefore you can focus on the approach roads to Normandy and any German troops heading to Normandy whether they be from Le Mans or Brittany or other parts of France, the moment they start moving in daylight they’re going to be hammered by fighter bombers and bombers.” As an example of Allied success in this approach, 12 airfields were built from scratch in Normandy by Allied forces in the first two weeks of the invasion, massively cutting down on flight times for fighter bombers. All this means that the Allies are in charge of what happens next in Normandy, but the German reaction was uncharacteristically lacking in pragmatism and made the situation increasingly fraught and attritional.
“The German response ranged from bizarre to genuinely pretty bad. If you’re looking at how the Germans did, they couldn’t have done
Author and historian James Holland talks us through how the Allied invasion cemented its advantage despite unexpected setbacks
much worse, to be perfectly honest,” is Holland’s assessment. “There are some assumptions that are made before the campaign, before D-day, which are based on previous experience of coming up against the Germans, which suggest that they will retreat in stages once you’ve established an initial foothold.” But Hitler had other ideas. “The difference is that Hitler decides that the Germans have to fight close to the coast, they’ve got to fight for every yard. On one level that makes no sense at all, because for most of the Normandy campaign they remained in range of offshore naval guns, so there’s a whole range of firepower that they wouldn’t have facing them if they went further inland.” So instead of retreating in stages and giving up ground to the Allies quickly, the battle becomes much slower and dogged. “Why everyone is generally a bit down on the Allied effort in Normandy is that it looks like they’re not making much headway for the best part of June and July,” says Holland. “In actual fact, they’re doing really well because what they’re doing is they’re grinding down those all-important Panzer divisions as they’re reaching the front and they’re never giving them a chance to operate in a coordinated counterattack, which is where they’re going to be at their most dangerous.”
Despite mounting criticism at home, Eisenhower and Montgomery held things together and most importantly the soldiers on the ground showed their bravery. “The bottom line is that fighting in 1944 against an array of spectacularly violent and powerful weapons, whether German, American or British, is fraught with danger. The fact of the matter is you can have all of the fire support in the world, but your leading troops still have to take ground. They still have to get out of their fox holes, out of their places of camouflage and cover and advance across a field or across open ground and face the guns of the enemy. That is incredibly dangerous. Lots of people get wounded and killed and it is incredibly hard to make serious progress.”