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Allies Target Normandy

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Its Flat Beaches Offered Best Compromise

One day in March 1943, Britain's top general, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, strode into the office of the general tapped to plan the details of D-Day. Brooke plopped the invasion directive onto the planner's desk and said, "Well, there it is; it won't work, but you must bloody well make it."

Brooke's pessimism was anchored in facts. First among them was shipping, or rather the lack of it, especially in landing craft. The U.S. Navy wanted aircraft carriers to fight the Japanese, while Britain's Royal Navy wanted destroyers to deep-six German submarines. Neither navy sluiced many resources into landing craft like the LST - the landing ship-tank, basically a seagoing shoebox, ungainly and inglorious.

As a result, many Allied plans ran aground on the lack of landing craft. Winston Churchill himself once sputtered, "The destinies of two great empires seem to be tied up in some goddamned things called LSTs."

The D-Day planner, British Lt. Gen. Frederick Morgan, did what he could with the shipping they gave him. He laid out a three-division assault along 30 miles of coast, plus a division or so of paratroopers. It was the best he could do. But against 60 German divisions in France and the Low Countries, Morgan's best wasn't going to be good enough.

The plan appalled the British general who would lead the assault, Bernard L. Montgomery. He wanted at least five divisions along 50 miles, plus three more of paratroopers.

He got them, mainly by persuading the Americans to:

1. Delay until August a simultaneous invasion of southern France, thus stealing that operation's shipping.
2. Push back D-Day itself by a month, into June, thus picking up another month's production of landing craft.

Now the question became: Where to land the landing craft?

U.S. soldiers sharpen their assault tactics on a British beach. In one such exercise less than six weeks before D-Day, fast German torpedo boats attacked the Allied ships, sinking two large landing craft and badly damaging another. Over 700 American sailors and soldiers were killed.

An Option of Difficulties

Hobby-shop shelves teem with military board games that let players reenact D-Day. The Allied player can land wherever he pleases along 2,000 miles of German-occupied coastline. But real life is no board game. Morgan found himself fenced in by harsh realities. Among them:

Air power.

The Allies had to stay within reach of their English-based fighter planes. Because most of those fighters were short-legged British Spitfires, the leash was short indeed.

Logistics.

The Allies had to land near a good-sized port. (Ideally, they'd land at a port, but an ill-fated raid on Dieppe in August 1942 proved that a fortified port was too tough a nut to crack - and by 1944, all the ports were fortified.) Until the Allies could seize a port or two, they'd need sheltered, hard-packed beaches to supply themselves across, plus a decent road network inland.

Proximity to England.

A short haul across the English Channel would mean quick turnarounds, which in effect would multiply shipping. A long haul - to the Brittany peninsula, say - would keep ships at sea longer, cutting the total tonnage.

Proximity to Germany.

The Allies could have taken a chance on air power and outfoxed the Germans by landing far on the German flanks - say, in Norway. But once ashore in Norway, they'd face a long haul to Germany. The Americans wanted to take the shortest feasible route.

Enemy defenses.

The shortest feasible route lay across just 20 miles of the English Channel, to the Pas de Calais. But what was obvious to the Allies was equally obvious to the Germans, who stocked the Pas de Calais with every soldier and gun they could lay hands on.

Morgan's men played process of elimination. They whittled away potential sites until all that remained was the best - or at least the best compromise. Normandy was the best compromise. Normandy's beaches sat reasonably close to English ports and airfields, yet not too far off the main road to Germany. Normandy had a decent port (Cherbourg), plus beaches suitable for offloading until Cherbourg could be taken.

American soldiers march past London's famed Big Ben tower clock in a parade March 30, 1944. In the months leading up to D-Day, U.S. troops blanketed southern England, often leaving a lasting impact on local manners and morals.

Inland, the terrain beyond Caen looked flat enough for airfields. Best of all, Normandy wasn't the Pas de Calais, with its strong defenses. Which wasn't to say Normandy looked like a piece of cake. One four-mile stretch of beach looked especially ugly. It butted up against high bluffs - and from up there, the Germans could hose the beach with bullets and shells. But war comes down to hard choices, and the planners needed this stretch. They code-named it Omaha Beach.

The Defender's Dilemma

The German defenders had their own problems, most of which boiled down to one question: Do we fight them on the beach, or do we defend in depth?

Defending in depth was classic German doctrine, and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was nothing if not a classic German general. Rundstedt commanded Germany's armies in the West and he wanted to keep them well back until the Allies committed themselves. Then, Rundstedt would roll his massed tanks at the attackers like a bowling ball.

On the other side stood Rundstedt's main field general, Erwin Rommel. If all things were equal, Rommel said, we'd defend in depth. But his experience against the Allies in North Africa had taught him that all things wouldn't be equal.

Rommel warned that the Allies would unleash air power of a lethality that generals like Rundstedt had never seen. Once the shooting started, he said, any tank that wasn't at the beaches would never get there. "We must stop him in the water, not only delaying him but destroying all his equipment while he is still afloat," Rommel said.

Otherwise? "If we do not succeed in ... hurling them from the mainland in the first 48 hours, the invasion has succeeded - and the war is lost."

D-Day The Total Story. From tense war room strategies to unmitigated combat, this 2-disk DVD set includes five films that present the entire arc of this great battle. You get: D-Day: The Total Story; Eisenhower: Commander In Chief; The True Story of the Screaming Eagles: The 101st Airborne; Dear Home: Letters from World War II; and Sherman Assault. B&W and color with extensive in-depth interviews and never-before-seen footage.

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