Recalling, or not, Operation Overlord (D-Day)
One of the major syndicated columnists has an article in today's paper decrying the lack of knowledge that college graduates in the United States have of World War Two. Having noted this myself in the past, and having found it even more profound in regards to World War One, I can understand his frustration. It isn't right that there can be college graduates who lack at least a basic college level understanding of history, and for that matter literature and science. I've stated here before, I'm sure, the basic point that for most people college is a type of training program for an anticipated job, but still broader knowledge should be held by college graduates in any field. Ironically, this may be even more the case today than it was in earlier eras prior to the Internet, as a certain level of easy information allows the ignorant to become really ignorant, by informing themselves with erroneous information easily. In prior eras when information was harder to come by there was probably actually a higher chance that a person seeking out information would get the correct information, as it's just harder to publish in print than electronically.
U.S. Troops on the hotly contested Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944.
Anyhow, this topic came to my mind in a slightly different context given as June 6 of this year is the 70th Anniversary of Operation Overlord, that being the operational name for the Allied landings on the Norman coast of France in 1944. Given as I was at work, I didn't catch all the stuff running on television, but I caught some and caught some of the print stuff here and there that was out recalling the event.
I appreciate that this great event, the largest amphibious landing ever accomplished in warfare, and the largest one that shall ever occur, is still recalled. Still, I think that there are a few things that somehow get misrepresented that are important, and that those recalling the events should be aware of. So, in that spirit, here goes.
Operation Overlord was an Allied, not an American, Operation
There seem to be some people who labor under the belief that D-Day was an American operation. That's frankly absurd.
Canadian troops landing at Juno Beach, Operation Overlord.
The major troop contributors for Operation Overlord were the US, the UK, and Canada. The US, by 1944, had become the largest single western Allied nation in the war in Europe by that time, but the British effort was huge and the French effort would soon expand enormously.
In addition to the US, UK and Canada, at least France had ground troops involved in the form of some special units of Free French troops. Polish paratroopers were to have been committed to followup airborne operations in the British sector of operations (where Canadian paratroopers did participate in landings) but the followup drops were cancelled, something very common in airborne operations.
At least the US, UK, Canada and France contributed ships to the operation. In the air, the air forces of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were all in action.
The US effort was huge, no doubt, but the Canadian one was enormous in the context of the size of the Canadian population, and unlike the American effort nearly 100% of the Canadian troops had volunteered for service in Europe. The British effort at that point in the war was so vast that the UK had truly gone down to the absolute bottom of its manpower reserves, a massive effort.
Something this taps into which some people seem to be jingoistic about is the following.
The United States did not "win World War Two".
There's a certain type of jingoism out there that asserted the US won World War Two. No, the Allies did.
The US effort, as noted, was massive. But for some reason some people simply fail to grasp how big the Allied effort as a whole was, and the extent to which other nations were impacted.
The British effort was so deep that it basically wrecked the British economy and put an end to the British Empire. Rationing in the UK would extend into the 1950s as a result of World War Two. The Free French effort expanded from 1943 forward, even if it would never see the restoration of a French army the size of the of the one defeated by the Germans in 1940.
The Soviet effort was colossal, and is something that Americans simply tend not to look at. Over 80% of all German battlefield deaths were sustained fighting the Soviets. That doesn't mean that our effort was unimportant (which I think some people secretly fear would be the result of looking at the Soviet effort) and the USSR could not have sustained its effort without first British, and then American, material support. But this just goes to show the extent to which the war was an Allied effort.
It should be noted that when we look at the war against Japan, the equities of who did what are quite different. In the war against the Japanese, the US, UK, India, New Zealand, Australia, and China were the major Allied powers. The USSR did come in at the end, to be sure, but the US has a better claim really to being the singularly most important nation in the war against Japan, although the other Allies were indeed major contributors. Japan had more troops committed against China during the war than against any other power, which makes sense given that it was fighting in China prior to 1939 and had never failed to achieve a negotiated peace with Nationalist China, like it had hoped to.
The basic point is, however, that when looking at the Second World War, it isn't really possible to look at one nation and claim that it won the war. Without the British refusing to surrender in 1940, the Soviets likely would have been defeated by the Germans (with Italian, Hungarian and Romanian assistance) in 1941 (with the likely assistance of the Japanese, who didn't abandon plans to take on the Soviet Union until well into 1941). Without the massive Soviet contribution of ground forces in 1940 to 1945, it'd be difficult to see how the western Allies could have dislodged the Germans in 43 to 45 from western Europe. Without the huge material contribution to the Soviet Union by the British and the Americans, it is difficult to see how the USSR could have sustained its war effort in those years. It was truly an Allied effort.
D-Day brought the Allies back to Europe.
This is a historical canard that goes back to the early histories of Operation Overlord. Its never been close to true, and its odd how it's persisted.
U.S. troops crossing the Rhine in assault boats.
The western Allies returned to Europe with the invasion of Sicily, a joint British and American operation, which took place in August 1943, just under one year prior to Operation Overlord. The successful capture of Sicily from the Germans and Italians was followed up by Allied landings in Italy in September, 1943. The US captured Rome coincidentally with Operation Overlord.
There's a tendency to overlook the Italian campaign for some reason, and that's likely because it didn't have the obvious impact that landing in France did. Landing in Normandy actually positioned the main force of the western Allied effort within striking distance of Germany. That was hugely significant. It was quite clear that there was no earthly way that the Allies were ever going to be able to push up from Italy into France and then up into Germany, and some have even questioned if the entire Italian campaign was a waste of time, effort and blood. It probably was not, but what is actually the case is that landing in Normandy gave the Allies a straight, if bloody, path into the Third Reich. The war would last less than a year after that and while it saw a lot of hard fighting, the landings were indeed a critical factor, perhaps the critical factor, in ending the war in May 1945.
It wasn't, it might be noted, the last amphibious operation in Europe during the Second World War. Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France, started a couple of months later in August, 1944. Like the invasion of Italy, Operation Dragoon has been criticized as unnecessary, but it probably wasn't. Dragoon allowed the Allies to commit troops to France from the Mediterranean, where the Allies had a massive effort already underway, and in the end troops committed to Dragoon advanced so far that they caught up with the forces that landed in Overlord and formed the right flank of the Allied advance into Germany, when the time came. Dragoon was a big operation, which, like Overlord, featured the deployment of airborne troops and landing craft.
Operation Overlord is often regarded, and probably rightly, as the opening of the second front in Europe that resulted in the final German collapse. But to the extent that it is truly a second front there can at least be a debate. The Germans, British and Italians had never really ceased being engaged in some ground combat due to the war continuing on in North Africa with the Germans and Italians being too over extended to be able to bring on a concluding result there. With the commitment of American troops to that effort in 1942, that front became a bigger one. The war had returned to the European mainland in the west by 1943. Operation Overlord, however, allowed the drive in Europe to form a campaign that undoubtedly sped up the end of the war and which made it possible for the Allies to win in 1945.
The French are a bunch of chickens
One persistently irritating comment that seems to get inserted into anything concerning France, including landing on it, is that the French are weenies. This is simply incorrect.
As I've noted elsewhere on this blog, France has a martial record which is pretty significant, including a large number of fights they've gotten into, not all wisely, since World War Two. We can accuse the French of being many things, but cowards is something they are not.
In regards to D-Day, the common theme is that we saved the French from the Nazis, to whom they'd cowardly surrendered, and they should be eternally grateful. Well, that just doesn't accurately reflect the record, for good or ill.
France did of course surrender to the Germans in 1940. But it isn't as if they just gave up. France found itself to be the battleground against an army that was highly mobile and had already proven itself in battle. Basically, France was outfought.
While it may be naive, most of the armies of early World War Two expected a new war against Germany to repeat the experience of World War One, and didn't take battlefield mobility to be a foregone conclusion. France planned on fighting behind the Maginot line, and in fact the line did really hold well. France had failed in its desire to extend it into Belgium, and so the Germans were able to do an end run around it, repeating the early history of World War One. The difference this time is that the Germans retained battlefield mobility, which they hadn't in 1914. France was flat out defeated on the battlefield.
Even at that, however, a remarkable number of Frenchmen kept on fighting. Sure, there were French collaborators, and that's a story that itself has never been fully developed. But quite a few Frenchmen decided to illegally take up arms and keep fighting with the British, either over the channel, or in France itself. That's pretty darned brave and quite remarkable. Following Operation Torch in North Africa those numbers grew, as the standing French army began to defect to the Allies.
That it was a defection tends not to be noted. France was a defeated nation, under partial occupation, and at peace when the Allies landed on French colonial soil in 1942. The legal obligation of French troops in 1942 was to fight the Allies, and some did, but not for long, and by and large French units defected wholesale to the Allied cause.
For that matter, some French forces, including naval forces, had years earlier.
There was no fighting on the British and Canadian beaches.
It's unfortunately the case that there is very little attention paid, in some American treatments of the landings, to the British and Canadian beaches and air landings, and there is by extension a belief that the Americans had the hard beaches and nothing occurred on the other ones.
In reality, the landings overall were amazingly successful, which is a tribute to the extremely effective overall nature of the planning, naval bombardments, etc. But all the landings were opposed.
It may be the case that the perception exists that the Americans had the hard targets as it turned out that Omaha Beach featured the toughest fighting, and it was really the only beach where the Germans were able to set the Allies behind for some time. Omaha was an American beach. The fact that it was stoutly defended turned out to be bad American luck, but it doesn't mean that there was no fighting on the other beaches, there was.
Additionally, one thing that's somewhat overlooked by Americans is that the British and Canadians were the beneficiaries of experience in landing on coast France due to the enormous Canadian raid at Dieppe. The scale of the raid was so huge that it's difficult to actually conceive of it as a raid. The British landed Canadian troops at Dieppe in such numbers that they actually landed vehicles and armor on the beaches, a far greater operation than a conventional raid. The goal of the August 1942 raid was to actually seize a port on a temporary basis. While it was a failure, the lessons learned in the huge effort were not lost on the British or the Canadians, who had effectively participated in what amounted to a seaborne invasion of France on a prior occasion. As part of this, they equipped themselves with specialized armor that they also offered to the US, but which the US largely rejected. The equipment they deployed was accordingly unique and very effective, resulting in very effective beach operations. Contrary to what some might suppose, this also aided the British and Canadian forces in moving rapidly off the beaches, a goal that they very much had in mind given their prior experience in amphibious operations.
Montgomery didn't know what he was doing.
This is a matter of opinion, rather than a "fact", per se, but having said that, this common American belief is ill founded in my view.
In the American folk view, and in quite a few historical works as well, Field Marshall Montgomery, the commander of the British forces, was slow moving in his command style and as a result British troops moved slowly. In the most romantic view of this topic, American generals, particularly Gen. George Patton, were quick thinking, quick moving commanders, and the British reluctance to follow our lead caused the war to last longer than it should have.
In reality, American generals like Patton (and Patton wasn't alone in favoring high mobility) were a minority. Nearly ever American general who favored speed was a cavalry office, and cavalry officer formed a minority of high ranking American officers. The Army was dominated by infantry officers.
Most American infantry officer believed that the war in France would resemble that of World War One, with advances being slow moving, slowly developed affairs. They opposed cavalry branch officers who thought that the way to progress was to dash forward and exploit any opening.
This is important in the context of this story as it is well known that the Allied advance ground down to a slow moving one only shortly after D-Day. This is commonly blamed on the Norman bocage, and on Montgomery. The bocage did prove to be a huge problem, but Montgomery was no more slow or fast moving that U.S. senior commanders were.
Indeed, Montgomery had a proven ability to bring around combat results, but his style required careful planning and training. This was largely because Montgomery was used to working with much thinner resources than any American commander was, and he was required to do so. He was very effective on the offensive, but he couldn't afford to waste anything in one, and didn't. He operated in this fashion in Europe as he had in North Africa and the Mediterranean. He didn't "break out" of Normandy, but then the American infantry commanders didn't either.
It was the armor that did break out, under Patton's command. The difference here, however, was that Patton was a cavalryman and when he got rolling it tended to panic his fellow infantry commanders who often wished he, and those who shared a similar view, would slow down. He deserves a lot of credit, but not to Montgomery's discredit.
The Operation wasn't named "D-Day"
As a minor note, operation which we often hear called "D-Day" wasn't called that. It was called Operation Overlord, as noted above, and the operation can be best described as a large scale amphibious landing in Normandy.
"D-Day", in military parlance, is the day on which an operation is to occur, with days before and after it being referred to in relation to it. The day an operation occurs is D-Day. The day after it commences is "D+1", the day before it occurs is "D-1". And so on.
Likewise, the hour a military plan commences is H-Hour. It's just the way these periods of time are referred to. June 6, 1944, became D-Day as it was the day Operation Overlord did commence for the ground forces landing on the beaches (for the air element, it commenced in the very late night of the day prior). There were a lot of D-Days during World War Two, however, as every Allied operation commenced on some day. The fact that we remember it as D-Day shows what a big operation this particular one was
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