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Normandy Won The War In The West

American infantrymen display a Nazi flag captured at the Falaise Gap area, August 20, 1944. Ahead lay much hard fighting, and the Germans would give the GIs a violent shock three months later in the Battle of the Bulge. But ten months after this photograph was taken, the 82nd Airborne Division would be assigned to occupation duty, in Berlen. Thirty-three days of action without relief, without replacements. Every mission accomplished. No ground gained ever relinquished ... Combat efficiency: Excellent; short 60 percent infantry, 90 percent artillery. 82nd Airborne Division, after-action report for the Normandy campaign

On D-day Montgomery did not get his troops well inland; in most places they advanced only four to six miles along the 60-mile beachhead. He did not seize Caen the first day; in fact, he did not occupy the whole city until July 20, after it had been pounded to rubble by Allied bombing. As men and supplies poured across the Channel, Montgomery could not seem to push through the German armored divisions blocking the road to Paris. American troops farther west were fighting their way very slowly through farming country lined with dense hedgerows - tall earth embankments complete with trees, shrubs and Germans.

Montgomery was always slow and cautious in mobile fighting, but this was a set-piece battle of the sort he was expected to win. As he remained at a standstill week after week, Churchill was worried that Normandy would turn into a replay of the ghastly trench warfare of World War I. Many senior officers, including Eisenhower's British deputy, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, thought Montgomery should be either forced to attack or fired. Some Americans suspected Montgomery was trying to conserve his strength and let U.S. units take the casualties.

Much of the 50-day battle of Normandy was a reinforcement race: Could the Germans bring in enough armored divisions to destroy the Allied army before it was strong enough to break out of the peninsula? By the beginning of July the Allies had landed more than 1 million troops, 566,000 tons of supplies and 171,000 vehicles. Having failed to drive the Allies back into the sea, Hitler chose to throw all he had into a decisive fight in Normandy rather than withdraw to another defense line along the Seine. But when U.S. forces under Bradley did finally surge out of the peninsula at the end of July and sweep south and east, 21 German divisions were outflanked and almost destroyed. Their retreat over the Seine became a rout, and the victorious Allies reached Paris in a week.

In August 1944, the United States Army came of age. To this day, the breakout from Normandy and the dash across France lodge in the Army's institutional memory. That month's combat remains the way the Army wants to fight its battles - horsepower plus firepower, overdrive and overkill, a Desert Storm on the horizon of history.

That battle in '44 ended before the Army wanted it to. The Germans got a breathing spell because the Allies quite literally ran out of gas. But while the battle flowed, what a wonder it was. As Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. wrote home on Aug. 6, 1944: We are having one of the loveliest battles you ever saw. It is a typical cavalry action in which, to quote the words of the old story, `The soldier went out and charged in all directions at the same time, with a pistol in each hand and a sabre in the other.'

Adolf Hitler had ordered his generals in Normandy to hold at all costs. The cost turned out to be most of his army in the West; when the hard-presses Germans finally broke, they broke wide open. The Americans jammed in the wedge. Heavy bombers blew open a hole, and the Sherman tanks poured through, heading south. When the tanks hit the bottom corner of the Brittany Peninsula, they turned east and stomped on the gas. They didn't stop until they hit the German border.

As the arrows traced the southward path of the tanks, the German generals saw disaster. Hitler saw opportunity. He ordered his generals to roll their own tanks against the stretched-out American flank. There was a time when it might have worked, but that time had passed. The Allies had won the battle of the buildup; now, they had more than enough men and material to win the battle of France. Still, Hitler persisted in his folly. German tanks lurched toward the Atlantic.

They got no farther than Mortain, where doughty riflemen of the 30th Infantry.- Division stopped them cold. Now, Hitler had his tanks stretched out - and now, the Allies saw an opportunity. If the Allies could snap the door shut behind the Germans, they could trap most of the enemy's military power. They tried. The Canadians formed the upper half of a jaw closing on a town called Falaise, with the Americans grinding up as the bottom row of teeth.

Alas, the only thing bloodier than losing to a German army is surrounding one. With desperate violence, the Germans held the door open at Falaise just long enough for key staff officers and a cadre of soldiers to scoot. To the frustration of the Americans, the Canadians just couldn't shut that door.

Some historians insist that if the Allies could have trapped the Germans, the war in the West would have ended right then and there. At the time, the Allies shrugged it off: Tough luck, but we'll get 'em down the road. Down the road was the Franco-German border, where the escapees caught their breath, dug in and prolonged the war until the following spring. "The Miracle of the West," the Germans called it. Well, partly. Mainly, it was that old bugaboo, logistics.

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To help the Allied quartermasters map out their work, the D-Day planners had drawn arbitrary "phase lines" - lines on a map, showing day by day where the Allied advance should be. These phase lines gave the quartermasters some idea of where to stockpile the goods, and when. The phase lines also told the quartermasters what to stockpile. (For example, an army that's dug in needs lots of ammunition and not much gasoline, while an army that's on a roll needs lots of gasoline and not much ammunition.)

All through June and July, the Allies lagged far behind the phase lines. When the breakout finally came, those combat units rolled with a vengeance, zipping over the phase lines far ahead of schedule. As one American correspondent would later write, "Suddenly the war became fun. It became exciting, carnivalesque, tremendous. It became victorious and even safe."

And within a month, it became logistically impossible. Tanks broke down from sheer overwork. Without a rail network - you'll remember that before D-Day, Allied air power had savaged the French rail system - gasoline had to move by trucks, which drank more and more of it themselves in a self-defeating cycle.

British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery hectored the supreme commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Give me all the fuel (plus an American field army), he said, and I'll push all the way to Berlin. That galled Eisenhower's American subordinates, who wanted all the fuel for their end of the battle. In truth, Monty showed an alarming degree of political naivete. With the Americans doing the war's heavy lifting, no British general would carry off the main honors. So the Allied armies moved jointly, with one never getting far ahead of the other. Early in September, along the West Wall - the border of Germany itself - the armies outran their supplies. The grand campaign had finally petered out.

Although victory would have to wait until May 1945, Normandy made it possible. Normandy won the war in the West. And in a way, Normandy also won the peace. The landings put the Allies in Western Europe ahead of the Soviets; the Cold War that followed put the Americans in Western Europe to stay. Even with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Europeans look to an American military presence as a force for stability. They want us there. The GIs who landed in Normandy put us there. What they did on June 6, 1944, not only counted; it still counts. That's a good day's work.

Normandy This lavishly illustrated book presents the Battle of Normandy as you've never seen it before, from the German occupation of France through the building of Hitler's Atlantic Wall; the D-Day invasion and the breakout; Patton's opening of the road to Brittany, the Mayenne and the Loire; and De Gaulle's triumphant return to Paris.

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