The Great Crusade

click image to enlarge D-Day — the early June day when the United States and its allies launched a massive attack on the shores of Normandy in a bid to liberate western Europe from the Nazis. It's been long enough for most people who still remember the date to have come to think of its success as natural and foreordained. But of course it was neither of these things. Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower himself gave it no better than a 50-50 chance of success, even if the weather was good and everything went right. As it turned out, the weather was so bad that he had to postpone the invasion by 24 hours once the troops were already aboard the ships and boats. Battalion after battalion was forced to land miles from where they were supposed to be, facing terrain totally unlike what they had trained for. High seas and nervous coxswains under fire for the first time "landed" many troops into water that came over their heads. Men laden with more than 100 pounds of equipment and ammunition sometimes sank to the bottom and drowned, their bodies eventually washing ashore to join those who had been killed the moment their feet touched the beach. When we think of the forces under Ike's command on the night of June 4, as he faced the question of whether to postpone the invasion once more, they seem in these days when placing 40,000 combat troops somewhere is a huge political and military decision overwhelming: he had over a million men, 5,000 vessels of all sizes, including battleships, and 10,000 aircraft. On the morning of June 6, if he decided to go on that date, he would land 73,000 Americans, 66,000 Britons, and 20,000 Canadians on the shores of Normandy. These were big numbers, but facing them was a German army still better trained, more experienced, better armed, and motivated by a high degree of fanatical zeal; an overwhelmingly strong armored force that could reach the invasion beaches in 24 to 48 hours; formidably well-planned fortifications; and, in the person of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, one of the war's most daring and brilliant battlefield commanders. Victory was no sure thing. On the morning of June 6 it was still just possible for Hitler to win the war, however slim the margin. Failure on D-Day and the withdrawal of the surviving troops might have encouraged Stalin and Hider to embrace, might have cost FDR the election in November, and might have led to making the defeat of Japan America's first priority. Certainly D- Day could not have been easily or quickly repeated. British manpower was strained to the utmost, and a whole new army could hardly have been formed. Ike could not know that Hitler had kept the four strongest German armored divisions under his control, to be released only on his explicit command. Nor could Eisenhower know that he had succeeded in fooling the Germans into believing that the invasion would come in the Pas de Calais, and that any landing in Normandy would be a feint, intended to draw German forces away from the real invasion beaches. He could not know that Rommel had gone home on leave to celebrate his wife's birthday. Had Rommel been at his headquarters in Normandy on the morning on June 6 he would have realized that this was the real invasion, and his prestige might have been sufficient to persuade the Fuhrer to release the four Panzer divisions from the Pas de Calais in time to bring them to the beaches of Normandy on the morning of June 7, while the Allies still had no meaningful amount of armor or artillery on shore. But it was not to be. Rommel raced back to Normandy too late: by the evening of June 6 the Allied beachhead was far enough in shore to survive, and Hitler had lost his last chance. Ike's decision to proceed on June 6 was perhaps the single most crucial decision of the war, and it was up to him to make it. He did not call Washington or London for advice, although he had a scrambled line to 10 Downing Street and another to Washington in his trailer. He chain-smoked, drank coffee, in between rainstorms walked restlessly around the trailer, and at 9:30 p.m. British Summer Time, after listening to Group Capt. James Martin Stagg give him the latest, slightly more optimistic weather report, sat silently for five minutes in front of his ground commander Gen. Bernard Montgomery, his air commander Sir TraflOrd Leigh-Mallory and his naval commander Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, and then said: "I am quite positive I must give the order. . . . don't like it, but there it is. . . . I don't see how we can do anything else." Then he stood up and walked back to his trailer in the rain. The order had been given. The invasion would take place on June 6. Nothing could stop it now. Shaef Patch Pronunced "Shafe". Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (abbreviated as SHAEF, pronounced "shaf"), was the headquarters of the Commander of Allied forces in north west Europe, from late 1943 until the end of World War II. General Dwight Eisenhower was in command of SHAEF throughout its existence. The rank itself shares a common lineage with Supreme Allied Commander Europe and Atlantic, but they are different titles.

June 6, 1944, 160,000 Allied troops landed along a 50-mile stretch of heavily-fortified French coastline to fight Nazi Germany on the beaches of Normandy, France. General Dwight D. Eisenhower called the operation a crusade in which “we will accept nothing less than full victory.”

More than 5,000 Ships and 13,000 aircraft supported the D-Day invasion, and by day’s end on June 6, the Allies gained a foot- hold in Normandy. The D-Day cost was high - more than 9,000 Allied Soldiers were killed or wounded - but more than 100,000 Soldiers began the march across Europe to defeat Hitler.

On the eve of D-Day, the feeling of history hung in the June air like summer humidity. The course of World War II in the West hung in the balance, and just about everybody sensed it.

Each soldier carried in his pocket a copy of a letter from Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, reminding even the lowest-ranking private that he was embarking on a "great crusade" to reconquer Europe from the Germans.

That sense of grand history wrapped itself around a British major, C.K. King. As his landing barge lurched toward France's Normandy coast, King thought of an earlier battle in France, and of the words Shakespeare had given it:

He that outlives this day,

and comes safe home

Will stand a tip-toe

when this day is named.

A great invasion force stood off the Normandy coast of France as dawn broke on 6 June 1944: 9 battleships, 23 cruisers, 104 destroyers, and 71 large landing craft of various descriptions as well as troop transports, mine sweepers, and merchantmen - in all, nearly 5,000 ships of every type, the largest armada ever assembled. The naval bombardment that began at 0550 that morning detonated large minefields along the shoreline and destroyed a number of the enemy's defensive positions.

To one correspondent, reporting from the deck of the cruiser HMS Hillary, it sounded like "the rhythmic beating of a gigantic drum" all along the coast. In the hours following the bombardment, more than 100,000 fighting men swept ashore to begin one of the epic assaults of history, a "mighty endeavor," as President Franklin D. Roosevelt described it to the American people, "to preserve - our civilization and to set free a suffering humanity."

The attack had been long in coming. From the moment British forces had been forced to withdraw from France in 1940 in the face of an overwhelming German onslaught, planners had plotted a return to the Continent. Only in that way would the Allies be able to confront the enemy's power on the ground, liberate northwestern Europe, and put an end to the Nazi regime.

As the day of the invasion approached, the weather in the English Channel became stormy. Heavy winds, a five-foot swell at sea, and lowering skies compelled Eisenhower to postpone the assault from 5 to 6 June. Conditions remained poor, but when weathermen predicted that the winds would abate and the cloud cover rise enough on the scheduled day of the attack to permit a go-ahead, Eisenhower reluctantly gave the command. Expecting casualties of up to 80 percent among the airborne forces, he traveled to an air base at Newbury to bid farewell to the members of the 101st Airborne Division before their tow planes and gliders carried them off to battle. A newspaper man who accompanied Eisenhower later told friends he had seen tears in the general's eyes.

Once ashore, of course, the grand sweep of history gave way in a hurry to here-and-now reality. Take the experience of Ralph R. Burnett of Granite City, who assaulted Omaha Beach with the 1st Infantry Division. As he tells it: We had been given lifebelts that you inflated. We were instructed not to put them on too tight, because we wouldn't be able to get them off when inflated. But I was 19 years old and scared to death of water, so I got mine too tight. When I got to the beach, I couldn't get it off. Every time we hit the dirt, the inflated belt made me feel as if I was 10 feet off the ground. I just knew my butt was going to get shot off. I made it across the beach and hit the ground up the hill a little way. Right next to me was a combat engineer with a knife in his boot. I asked him to puncture that damned belt, and he did. I was never so glad to get my face - and my butt - all the way down in God's good earth.

That's hardly standing a-tiptoe with pride. Yet, even butt down in the earth of Normandy, Burnett was a part of something big - so big that the war in the West hinged on it. Fifty years later, we know, of course, that, it worked. But on June 6, 1944, men waded ashore into history with no idea how things would turn out.

Most recall D-Day as a very narrow affair, reaching no farther than the eye could see through the sights of an M-1 rifle. Those who parachuted from airplanes or splashed ashore from landing craft thought about trying to stay alive, not about making history.

Still, even close up, the sheer scope of the thing made a lasting imprint. Few have expressed it with quite the simple eloquence of the late William O. Schock of St. Louis, a B-26 pilot who landed in Normandy with the Ninth Air Force staff. Shortly after D-Day, he wrote: "Such a sight! I'll never forget it. D-Day off the French coast was something I would not have missed for the world. … Everything was on such a colossal scale that nothing will ever seem large to me again, or important."

It is hard to conceive the epic scope of this decisive battle that foreshadowed the end of Hitler's dream of Nazi domination. Overlord was the largest air, land, and sea operation undertaken before or since June 6, 1944. The landing included over 5,000 ships, 11,000 airplanes, and over 150,000 service men.

On the four-meter swells of the English Channel, Allied troops transferred to landing craft, some twelve miles off the French coast. British troops headed left toward Caen, the Americans right toward Utah and Omaha beaches nearer Cherbourg, and the Canadians to Juno Beach.

After years of meticulous planning and seemingly endless training, for the Allied Forces, it all came down to this: The boat ramp goes down, then jump, swim, run, and crawl to the cliffs. Many of the first young men (most not yet 20 years old) entered the surf carrying eighty pounds of equipment. They faced over 200 yards of beach before reaching the first natural feature offering any protection. Blanketed by small-arms fire and bracketed by artillery, they found themselves in hell.

For the Americans, Omaha was a near-suicide mission. First, a powerful undertow swept away lives and weapons; ten landing craft with twenty-six artillery guns and twenty-two of twenty-nine tanks were swamped. Then, they faced a maelstrom of bullets. Within ten minutes of landing every officer and sergeant of the 116th Regiment was dead or wounded.

Leaders of all ranks asserted themselves. "Two kinds of people are staying on this beach," the commander of the 1st Division's 16th Infantry Regiment, Col. George A. Taylor, exclaimed to his men, "the dead and those who are going to die. Now let's get the hell out of here." The sergeants were especially abrupt. Resorting to curses they had hoarded for years, they exhorted their men to get off the beach.

As the invaders reorganized, Allied destroyers moved close to shore. Risking grounding and almost point-blank fire from enemy batteries, they raked the cliffs with their guns. More and more landing craft also pushed their way to the beach, bringing new troops, heavy weapons, radios, and ammunition. Americans received the first news of D-Day, 300 men had struggled through mortar fire, across the body and equipment strewn beach, and up a bluff to attack the German defenses.

By nightfall, Allied power had prevailed all across the Normandy beachhead, the Allies had a toehold on the continent, yet, on "Bloody Omaha" alone, 3,000 Americans lay dead. When it was over, the Allied Forces had suffered nearly 10,000 casualties; more than 4,000 were dead. Yet somehow, due to planning and preparation, and due to the valor, fidelity, and sacrifice of the Allied Forces, Fortress Europe had been breached. More than 100,000 men had come ashore, the first of millions who would follow.

All the articles in this section were researched and written by Harry Levins (52) of the Post Dispatch staff who has wide experience reporting military affairs and history. He was one of the principal writers of the Post-Dispatch coverage of the Persian Gulf War and was among the reporters invited by the Pentagon in 1991 to sail on the Missouri, America's last battleship, as it journeyed to Pearl Harbor for the ceremony with President George Bush marking the anniversary of the Japanese attack. In 1964-65, He served as an infantry lieutenant with the 4th Armored Division in Germany. He was part of an American Army that is in Europe still today because of what began on the beaches of Normandy, France, June 6, 1944. St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Sunday, June 5, 1994.

D-Day: The Lost Evidence As dawn broke on June 6, 1944, allied leaders used aerial reconnaissance photographs to reveal the true story of D-Day's life and death struggle. But after the war, these once-classified images were scattered to archives and collections around the world. Now, painstakingly tracked down, pieced together and digitally enhanced using the latest imagery technology, this lost evidence of D-Day is finally available for all to see.

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