Operation Overlord from the Inside
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
Operation Overlord from the Inside D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II By Stephen E. Ambrose Simon & Schuster. 655 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of...
...American democracy was no less a factor, for it had produced men whose spirit and initiative could not be matched by opponents serving a dictatorship...
...Rommel reasoned that once ashore the Allies could not be driven off because supporting naval gunfire would break up his counterattacks, and therefore the invaders had to be stopped on the beaches...
...Take the following observation by a former ranger who survived the landing and 11 more months of combat...
...I could hear the cries of the wounded, smell the stench of death...
...In particular, dropping two airborne divisions at night behind the Atlantic Wall??the chain of fortifications defending France's coast...
...on D-Day, but they were not authorized to counterattack until early afternoon when it was easy for naval gunners to turn them back...
...The 50th anniversaries of many famous World War II events??the Battle of Midway, Guadalcanal, victory in North Africa, even Pearl Harbor??have passed practically unnoticed in the last two and a half years...
...On D-Day the Atlantic Wall was pierced at all five points of attack, mostly within the first hour...
...Had he taken the safer course the attack would not have been mounted until two weeks later, when, as it happened, one of the worst storms in many years struck the English Channel...
...Had Runsted's strategy been followed, Ambrose speculates, the Allied advance would have stalled at the Somme-Seine barrier...
...Ike staked Overlord on his belief that the 36 hours of decent weather his chief meteorologist was predicting would arrive on schedule...
...Its first advantage is the author himself, Stephen Ambrose, one of the best and most widely read of contemporary military historians and biographers...
...The next 21 chapters establish that, if posterity owes much to Eisenhower, it owes even more to those who were called upon to carry out the operation...
...caused immense confusion and needless casualties that a dawn drop would have avoided...
...Moreover, Hitler's insistence on directing the battle himself paralyzed his officers at every level...
...But Rommel lacked the means to do so, and probably still would not have succeeded with all seven Panzer divisions at his disposal...
...This was a smaller number than many had expected, but D-Day was only the beginning of America's crusade in Europe...
...To cite one instance, the vitally important Panzer divisions deployed close to the beaches achieved full readiness by 2:00 a.m...
...The subsequent rout was so complete that one terrified German unit actually surrendered to the U.S...
...In contrast, the best American commanders knew that in battle flexibility is everything, and they had the freedom to act accordingly...
...During the War American families who lost loved ones overseas displayed gold stars in their windows...
...There are at least two reasons why D-Day, June 6, 1944 stands out in what is now a crowded field...
...The German Navy and Air Force failed utterly to interfere with Allied movements...
...He dismisses Rommel's argument that counterattacks well inland would still fail because of Allied air power...
...Yet if plans meant little after the attack started, they were critical before...
...The Allies did make a few mistakes...
...Historians will of course always disagree on one or another point...
...I could not sleep: I closed my eyes and thanked God for victory...
...It is unlikely, though, that any will produce a book like D-Day, June 6, 1944, with its wealth of detail, absorbing vignettes and rich anecdotal material...
...As Ambrose sees it, Runsted was right...
...405th Fighter-Bomber Group...
...He was correct, especially about Omaha Beach, the most difficult of the five invasion sites, where almost everything did go wrong...
...But in remembering D-Day we should not forget the cost of victory...
...D-Day alone holds a place in our collective memory of America's role in World War II...
...He brings to his new work the narrative drive, thorough research and muscular prose he is justly famous for...
...author, "A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II" CORNELIUS RYAN'S classic The Longest Day, though still a wonderful read, came out in 1959 when much vital information about Operation Overlord remained classified or was otherwise unavailable...
...Ambrose is scornful of the Atlantic Wall...
...Ambrose begins by setting the stage in 10 chapters that describe the rival armies and commanders and the problems facing each side...
...There ain't anything in this plan that is going to go right...
...Absent either of those conditions, the Allies' overwhelming air and naval superiority, together with the vast stretch of coast to be defended, assured Germany's ruin...
...Either it would have wrecked the invasion or forced another delay, jeopardizing the element of surprise on which everything depended...
...There seem to have been only two things that could have caused D-Day to go wrong: bad weather or German foreknowledge of the Allied landing sites...
...Thus a need existed that many historians were eager to fill, and early this spring books began pouring off the presses to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the momentous event...
...The sequence ends with Eisenhower's decision, one of the most critical of the War, to move out on June 6 despite a heavy rain...
...Hitler split the difference, giving Rommel three Panzer divisions and Runsted four??although none of them could move without the Fuhrer's authorization...
...After D-Day, and because the fighting in the Pacific had gotten fiercer too, entire constellations of such stars came out all across America...
...The grim figures haunted me...
...Indeed, a coherent response was impossible under these circumstances...
...By the time it ended, General Omar N. Bradley recorded in his memoirs, "586,628 American soldiers had fallen??135,576 to rise no more...
...Nobody demonstrated this better than Colonel Paul Good, who led the 175th Infantry Regiment...
...At the conclusion of a briefing he picked up the operation plan for D-Day, which was thicker than a big phone book, tossed it over his shoulder and told his officers: "Forget this goddamned thing...
...You get your ass on the beach...
...Yet when the Germans launched a Panzer counterattack on August 6 against the Americans who had broken out of Normandy, it was destroyed by rampaging tank-killers of the American tactical air arm...
...The best the Germans could do was buy time...
...There is a good deal of exciting battle narrative here, but Ambrose never loses control of the argument he is making virtually from the first page to the last: American productivity alone is not what won the War...
...This suggests that Rommel was right...
...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers...
...He wanted to concede the beaches and mass his forces inland beyond the range of the naval guns...
...This important collection, the largest number of firsthand accounts of a single battle in existence, has made it possible for him to fill his story with details and observations that could only come from men who had been there...
...Only Americans, Ambrose believes, could have done this...
...the outcome of the invasion was never in doubt...
...I'll be there waiting for you and I'll tell you what to do...
...But the Germans, Ambrose notes, committed far more numerous and costly errors than the Allies...
...They had contradictory defense plans, uncertain writs of authority, and were subject to constant interference from Hitler??who personally retained control of the all-important Panzer (armored) divisions...
...At the top, Eisenhower had complete charge of every aspect of the offensive, while the defense of Normandy was conducted by two field marshals, Erwin Rommel and Gerd von Runsted...
...And Stephen Ambrose's compelling book reminds us very graphically of the great things this country once accomplished...
...The anniversaries yet to come, it appears, will be similarly neglected...
...Second, as the director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, Ambrose has been able to draw on some 1,400 oral histories and written memoirs contributed by D-Day veterans...
...The Allied High Command, he remarked in his oral history, was right to ensure that "there be no experienced troops in the initial waves that hit the beach, because an experienced infantryman is a terrified infantryman, and they wanted guys like me who were more amazed than they were frozen with fear, because the longer you fight a war the more you figure your number's coming up tomorrow, and it really gets to be God-awful...
...Brilliantly executed deception moves??including a superb air campaign that virtually isolated Normandy from the rest of France while doing damage elsewhere??kept the Germans from knowing where the assault would take place and prevented Hitler from marshaling his numerically superior forces to repel it...
...And an Allied failure would have dragged out the War in Europe for another year at the minimum...
...Runsted, Rommel's nominal superior as Commander in Chief West, disagreed...
...Nevertheless, determined men in small uncoordinated groups, relying largely on their own ingenuity, managed to prevail...
...If the Allies could be stopped at all, it had to be on the beaches...
...By the time darkness fell on June 6 some 175,000 men had gone ashore, of whom about 5,000 became casualties...
Vol. 77 • June 1994 • No. 6
