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The Prelude: Sea And Air

As great events recede in time, we may forget that the armies are made up of individuals, whose faces still can speak to us over the gulf of years. These 4th Division soldiers are just hours from landing on Utah Beach. How fresh they seem! Their field jackets are pressed - even their helmets are clean. They will need the jackets. The weather in northern France in June 1944 will be perversely cool and damp.

The U-boats And Luftwaffe Stood In The Way

Shortly before D-Day, Missourian Omar Bradley mused, "You can almost always force an invasion, but you can't always make it stick." Bradley would command the U.S. First Army as it forced its way ashore. But he was less worried about getting ashore than he was about staying ashore - about making his invasion stick.

At best, an amphibious invasion is a great big exercise in logistics. The invader tries to dump soldiers and supplies ashore faster than the defender can push in reinforcements. Bradley fretted that while the Allies were struggling through the surf, the Germans would zip along highways and rail lines. He needn't have worried. Long before the first GI landed, the Allies had won the battle - and thus the war.

Taming the Atlantic Storm

In March and April of 1943, in a string of lonely and scattered clashes, the Allies turned the corner in the war against Germany's submarines. Mostly, the honors went to Britain's Royal Navy. But at the time, nobody got much credit. Submarines die one at a time, out in the trackless middle of nowhere. That kind of combat produces few headlines.

It should have. Killing the subs let the United States ship its military power across the Atlantic. The buildup in Britain made D-Day possible, and D-Day made victory possible. Adolf Hitler lost the war in large part because he put his own navy on short rations of resources. He never understood a basic truth: It all begins with sea power.

Sea power made sure that the Allies could force the D-Day invasion. Air power would make it stick.

As dusk neared on June 5, Eisenhower went to the U.S. paratroopers, waiting with camouflage-blackened faces to spearhead the invasion. At 53, he was 30 years older than most of the soldiers but was as slender as any, worn thin by the burdens of senior command. After talking to the men, he watched at the airfield until the last plane had taken off. He had done all, he could to prepare the way for their ordeal. Now all he could do was wait.

Clearing Europe's Sky

In February 1944, Allied air power - mostly the U.S. Army Air Forces - began bleeding Germany's Luftwaffe to death. Scant months earlier, German fighters had been doing the butchering. But early in '44, the bombers found a friend - the P-51 Mustang, a fighter with enough range to shepherd the bombers.

In February, as the B-17s and B-24s began blowing apart the factories that built Germany's fighters, their Mustang escorts began shooting down German fighters in gratifying numbers. To plug the holes, the Luftwaffe pulled in fighters from all across Europe. That left the sky over France empty of German aircraft. The Allies quickly filled the vacuum.

A few months before D-Day, the Allies shifted their bombers away from Germany's cities and onto the railway system of France. Steadily, to block rail traffic, the Allies built a wall of high explosive around northern France. Once the soldiers got ashore, the Allies meant to keep the battlefield isolated by throwing in fighter-bombers to hold German tanks and trucks at bay.

Rommel was right, to his own dismay, about air power. After the Allies got the techniques down pat (and it took a while), no vehicle painted in German field-gray could move without its driver looking nervously over his shoulder.

As for the Luftwaffe - well, a sardonic joke made the rounds of German soldiers in Normandy. They told one another: "If you see a white plane, it's an American. If you see a black plane, it's the RAF. And if you see no planes at all, it's the Luftwaffe."

Their rifles sheathed in plastic to protect against spray from the English Channel, U.S. soldiers wait in readiness on their journey aboard a Coast Guard-manned Landing Craft Infantry, Large. Latin for "always ready" was chosen as the US Coast Guard’s motto. Captain Francis Saltus Van Boskerck wrote the words in 1922. He wrote the music five years later on a beat-up old piano in Unalaska, Alaska. Semper Paratus

The Poor Bloody Infantry

For all the splendor of Allied sea and air power, the ultimate weapon remained what it always had been - the infantryman. But the Allies were going to the ground of Normandy with a mixed bag. On the British side, mostly, the soldiers were experienced, and thus wary. One British captain wrote home just before D-Day that his soldiers "have no great faith in the new world, they have no belief in any great liberating mission. They know it's going to be a charnel house."

Worse, the army that British Gen. Bernard Montgomery took to Normandy would be all the army he'd get. Britain was scraping the bottom for manpower. Montgomery would be hard-pressed to keep his score of divisions at full strength. In manpower, as in all else, the Americans were richer. That summer alone, they would land more divisions than all of Britain's. After that, Americans divisions would keep pouring in, 60 in all.

The British had little faith in the American GI. The GIs seemed eager enough, or as eager as soldiers get. But they were raw, and the infantry had a reputation of being uninspired at best. The Americans planned to make up for any shortcomings with air power and artillery, always American strong points. On the British side, Montgomery was packing along lots of tanks. He could squander tanks, but not men.

The Germans were also a mixed bag. A lot of them weren't even German. They were an ethnic stew of "volunteers" culled from the POW camps of the Eastern Front. Even the most Aryan of Germans wasn't necessarily his army's best. France had become the German army's convalescent home. Paunchy men in their 30s filled many of the 18 divisions in Normandy.

Many had no choice but to stand and fight, because their divisions lacked vehicles in which to flee. Even at fighting peak, most of the German army moved behind horses - and after five years of war, this army was no longer at its fighting peak. Still, few people who have fought the German army care to repeat the experience.

It was one of history's most professional - crisply led, brilliantly staffed, wonderfully flexible, armed with the world's best tanks and machine guns. Some of its - divisions in Normandy were top of the line. And the rest? Well, even a paunchy soldier in his 30s' could hunker down behind concrete and fire a machine gun at the invaders as they struggled ashore.

As for the shaky reputation of the American infantry, we're wise to remember Bradley's words: "Every man who set foot on Omaha Beach that day was a hero."

D-Day Bombers The Veteran's Story. Darlow. Looking at the contribution of heavy bombers in the success of the D-Day landings, this book combines firsthand recollections with details from primary sources to explore the tactics and strategy employed. Eight USAAF and RAF crews tell differing stories of operations before, during and after D-Day with accounts of specific raids accompanied by previously unpublished photographs.

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