At times, 20th century warfare seems to be nothing but statistics. Here is a random sampling of numbers from the Allied buildup to D-Day.
1,087: Transportplanes to carry American and British paratroopers into Normandy on June 6.
5,333: Vessels in the Allied armada - 2,727 ships crossing the Channel on their own bottoms, and 2,606 landing craft aboard the ships.
10,521: Allied warplanes supporting the invasion. Of the total, 3,467 were heavy bombers, 1, 654 medium and light bombers and 5,409 fighters.
54,000: Men required just for housekeeping chores in the final staging camps in southern England.
124,000: Hospital beds stockpiled by the Americans in Britain before the invasion.
175,000: Assault troops landed on D-Day, June 6.
450,000: Tons of ammunition stockpiled in Britain before the invasion.
600,000: Doses of penicillin stockpiled by the Allies for the invasion.
1,000,000: Gallons of gasoline needed each day by the Allies in their sweep across France.
1,450,000: Allied soldiers landed in Normandy in the first seven weeks of the campaign; 812, 000 of them were Americans.
3,500,000: Allied servicemen gathered in Britain in 1944 to invade Europe or support the invasion.
60,000,000: Three-meal K-ration packages shipped to GIs in Normandy in the invasion's first three weeks.
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
Air Power
Before D-Day, the 8th Air Force's B-17s helped isolate German coastal forces by pounding the French railroad system. U.S. Mustang fighters shot down so many German planes that the Luftwaffe in France could do almost nothing to oppose the landings. The C-47s, military versions of the DC-3 airliner, carried the paratroopers. The Wacogliders, some built in St. Louis, also carried troops but were a disappointment. Many soldiers perished in crash-landings and accidents. The black-and-white "invasion stripes” were recognition symbols, so nervous Allied troops wouldn't shoot down their own aircraft.
D-Day Puzzler
In the five weeks leading up to D-Day, Allied intelligence stumbled onto a nightmare. A crossword puzzle in London's Daily Telegraph was leaking invasion secrets to the enemy - or so it seemed. Over the five weeks, those who finished the puzzles penciled in five highly secret code names. Allied security officials thought this was too much coincidence. The clues, the answers and the military meaning were:
Four letters, "One of the U.S." - UTAH, one of the American landing beaches in Normandy.
Five letters, "Red Indian on the Missouri" - OMAHA, the other American landing beach.
Eight letters, "This bush is a centre of nursery revolutions" - MULBERRY, the artificial harbors to be installed at Normandy.
Seven letters, "Britannia and he hold to the same thing" - NEPTUNE, the naval part of the D-Day assault plan.
Eight letters, (part of a two-part answer), "But some bigwig like this has stolen some of it at times" - OVERLORD, the incredibly secret code name for the entire invasion.
Scotland Yard detectives finally determined that the code-word answers had, in fact, been a coincidence, however unlikely.
D -Day Codes
World War II produced a dizzying variety of code names. Here are some of the names that bear on the Normandy invasion:
Bolero:
The buildup of men and material in the British Isles for the invasion of France.
Dragoon:
The final name for the invasion of Southern France; it was changed from "Anvil" at the order of Winston Churchill, who grumbled that he had been dragooned into agreeing to it.
Fortitude:
The deception operation aimed at fooling the Germans into thinking the Normandy invasion was a mere diversion.
Gold:
The westernmost British invasion beach.
Juno:
The Canadian invasion beach, between the two British beaches.
Mulberry:
The artificial harbors built in Britain and towed to Normandy, there to be set in place to sustain the assault forces.
Neptune:
The naval plans for the D-Day invasion.
Omaha:
The easternmost American landing beach.
Overlord:
The overall name for the D-Day assault.
Rankin:
The code name for a hasty return to the Continent should the Germans suddenly collapse before Overlord.
Sledgehammer:
A desperation plan in 1942 - a sacrificial invasion in case the Russians seemed to be on the verge of defeat.
Sword:
The easternmost British invasion beach.
Utah:
The westernmost American invasion beach.
Capa Photos Were Almost Casualties
Some of D-Day's famous photos show GIs pinned down underfire behind German obstacles off Omaha Beach, trying to avoid becoming casualties. Curiously, the photos themselves almost become casualties. The photographer was Robert Capa of Life magazine, who went into Omaha with the first wave. Under mortar and machine gunfire, he snapped off 106 frames, then jumped aboard a landing craft heading back to the fleet.
Capa got back to England that day and handed his film to a lab technician. The technician, eager to see the pictures, turned up the heat to speed the drying of the negatives. He turned it up so much that the emulsion melted on all but eight of the frames. Still, those eight blurry and grainy frames conveyed to the American people the hellishness of D-Day on Omaha Beach.
D-Deja Vu
Richard Todd went through D-Day three times - once as a soldier and twice more as an actor. Todd jumped into Normandy on June 6, 1944, as a 24 year old lieutenant with the British Army’s 5th Parachute Brigade. Twelve years later, he played a fictitious British officer in "D-Day, the Sixth of June.” And in 1961, he signed up again for "The Longest Day," the best known of the D-Day movies.
In "The Longest Day," Todd played the real-life British Maj. John Howard, whose gliderborne infantry company seized a key bridge shortly after midnight. They held it until relieved early in the afternoon.
The news couldn't be better. As long as they were in Britain, we couldn't get at them. Now we have them where we can destroy them.
Adolf Hitler on getting word of the D-Day landings
What If D-Day Had Failed?
At the time, with so much at stake, the Allies refused to think about failure. They went into Normandy with no plans for getting back out if things went wrong. But ever since, military historians have dabbled in speculation about a D-Day gone awry.
The pessimists say a disaster would have maimed the Allied cause. Certainly, a failure would have scuttled the war in the West for 1944. Putting together a second invasion would have taken too much time.
The pessimists say the demoralized British would have shied from another attempt in '45. They say the Soviets would suddenly have faced German divisions rushed from the West. They also say a setback would have given the Germans time to perfect their wonder weapons: rockets to bombard the British, a new generation of submarines to keep the Americans at home.
Allies - especially the Americans, with their seemingly limitless resources - would have attacked again and again until they got it right. They say the Soviets would have held out, no matter what, because they had no choice. In the end, they say, the war would have ended the way it actually did - with Germany in ruins.
One of the more pungent notes comes from Stephen E. Ambrose in a new book, "D-Day: June 6, 1944." He states an obvious but often overlooked point: Even if the Germans had repulsed the Allies on D-Day, the atomic bomb would have soon squared the account.
There was thousands of ships, and we could see landing boats of American troops. Then came thousands of men at one time coming on land and running over the beach. This is the first time I shoot on living men, and I go to the machine gun and I shoot, I shoot, I shoot! For each American I see fall, there came ten hundred other ones!
German Pvt. Franz Rachmann recalling Omaha Beach
In 28 years of service, three wars, 14 overseas tours of duty, only Normandy and D-Day remain vivid, as if it happened only yesterday. What we did was important and worthwhile, and how many men get to say that about a day in their lives?
U.S. Seabee Charles Sullivan
Eisenhower Center Seeks D-Day Stories
If you're a veteran of D-Day, your story can become a part of the big historical picture. As military historian Stephen E Ambrose notes in his new book, "D-Day: June 6, 1944," the Eisenhower Center in New Orleans is collecting "oral histories and written memoirs, artifacts and wartime letters, from the men of D-Day, from all services and nations, so long as there are survivors." They will be stored in the archives of the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans.
For instructions on preparing individual histories, veterans can write to the Eisenhower Center in care of the University of New Orleans, New Orleans, La. 70148.
Area Paratrooper Hung In There
One of D-Day's best-known soldiers is buried today in his hometown of Metropolis, Ill. But a bit of him remains behind in Normandy - hanging from a church steeple. The soldier was John Steele, who jumped into Normandy as an airborne infantryman with the 82nd Airborne Division. His unit's objective was the village of Ste.-Mere-Eglise - and Steele, then 21, jumped right into the middle of a firefight.
As he twisted his chute to avoid a burning building, his parachute snagged on the steeple of the village church. Unable to free himself, he played possom until the fighting ebbed. Those who have seen the movie "The Longest Day" may recall Steele as the character played by Red Buttons. After the war Steele became an accountant and first settled in Indianapolis. In 1958, he moved to North Carolina. There, on May 21, 1964, cancer took his life at the Veterans Administration hospital in Fayetteville - just outside the gates of Fort Bragg, the home of his beloved 82nd Airborne.
Steele went back home to Metropolis for burial at Masonic Cemetery on North Avenue. But to this day, the church in Ste.- Mere-Eglise has a mannequin dressed like the GI Steele, hanging from a snagged parachute on its steeple of gray stone.
Bibliography
The following works were used to compile these articles:
Ambrose, Stephen E., The Supreme Commander (1970), a wartime biography of Eisenhower by the premiere Eisenhower scholar, and D-Day: June 6, 1944 (1994), a look at the common soldier's side of Overlord.
Baldwin, Hanson, Battles Lost and Won (1966). D-Day provides a poignant chapter in the sprightly history of the war's high points.
Blumenson, Martin, The Battle of the Generals (1993). An American historian argues that Allied infighting and indecision in Normandy ruined a chance to end the war right then and there. This book lionizes Patton. Also, by the same author, "A Deaf Ear To Clausewitz," in Parameters, Summer 1993. This article says Eisenhower sought to conquer ground instead of the enemy.
Botting, Douglas, and the editors of TimeLife, The Second Front (1978). D-Day gets the Time-Life treatment - lots of pictures, a breezy text.
Boyne, Walter J., Clash of Wings (1994). This history of WW II in the air makes the point that only air superiority made D-Day possible.
Bradley, Omar, with Blair, Clay, A General's Life (1983). Bradley's second autobiography, often bitter, always revealing.
Calvocoressi, Peter, et al., Total War (revised edition, 1989). A deep, literate look by a team of Britons at the entire war.
Cawthon, Charles, "D-Day: What It Meant," in American Heritage, April/May 1994. A historian argues persuasively that D-Day proved decisive long after war's end.
Chalfont, Alun, Montgomery of Alamein (1976). A brief and tart biography by a British historian, with special attention to personalities and their impact on coalition warfare.
Churchill, Winston S., Closing the Ring (1951) and Triumph and Tragedy (1953). Readers can almost hear Churchill's eloquent frustration at having Overlord override his Mediterranean approach to defeating Germany.
D-Day Museum, Portsmouth, D-Day (undated). Among other things, this slick booklet offers photos of D-Day's leaders, weaponry - even its shoulder patches.
D'Este, Carlo, Decision in Normandy (1983). This American historian takes Montgomery to task, severely.
Drez, Ronald J. (editor), Voices of D-Day (1994). Snippets of oral history from those who there on June 6, 1944.
Dupuy, R.E., and Dupuy, T.N., The Encyclopedia of Military History (1977). D-Day in context, with World War II and with the entire history of war.
Dupuy, T.N., A Genius for War (1977). Why was the German army so damned good? Mostly leadership, says this American military historian.
Eisenhower Foundation, D-Day: The Normandy Invasion in Retrospect (1971). Essays by various experts take the longrange look at such topics as logistics.
Ellis, John, Brute Force (1990). The war as an exercise in the statistics of industrial might.
Hamilton, Nigel, Master of the Battlefield (1983). This is Volume II in a three-volume set of Montgomery worship. But it's invaluable for its inside detail.
Harrison, Gordon A., Cross-Channel Attack (1951). The U.S. Army's own D-Day history, warts and all. It's dry but indispensable, and its maps are wonderful.
Hastings, Max, Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy (1984). A Briton examines what he calls "some unpalatable truths" about the Normandy campaign.
Hoyt, Edwin P., The Invasion Before Normandy (1985). The dress-rehearsal massacre at Slapton Sands and the lessons it taught the Allies.
Jutras, Philippe, Operation Overland (undated). This pamphlet, put together by an expatriate American who runs the Airborne Museum in Ste.-Mere-Eglise, is a statistical mother lode.
Keegan, John, Six Armies in Normandy (1982). An eloquent Briton studies the Americans, Canadians, Britons, Germans, Poles and French who fought the battle.
Longmate, Norman, The G.I.'s (1975). A warm, affectionate look at the social impact of the American GI on wartime Britain.
Maule, Henry, Normandy Breakout (1977). A detailed look at the British army's travail in the fighting for Caen.
McDonough, John, "The Longest Night: Broadcasting's First Invasion," in The American Scholar, Spring 1994. How CBS Radio set new standards with its D-Day coverage.
Ruppenthal, R.G., Utah Beach to Cherbourg (1947, reprinted 1990). The Army's own history, minutely detailed and splendidly mapped.
Ryan, Cornelius, The Longest Day (1959). Despite its limited scope, it's still the most readable popular history of D-Day itself.
Stokesbury, James L., A Short History of World War II (1980). Brief, pithy and fun to read.
Taylor, Charles H., Omaha Beachhead (1946, reprinted 1989) The Army's own official history of the landing, with all its foulups, frustration and gallantry.
Weigley, Russell F., Eisenhower's Lieutenants (1981) and The American Way of War (1973). The former offers keen insights into the campaign for northwestern Europe; the latter tells why the Americans fought it the way they did.
Weinberg, Gefiard L., A World At Arms (1994). This long slog of a book covers the war as a geopolitical struggle; its chapters on Normandy sum up the issues nicely.
Wilmot, Chester, The Struggle for Europe (1952). The first of the popular histories - and one that argues the British point of view.
Young, Brig. Peter, ed., The World Almanac Book of World War II (1981). Its chronology keeps an untidy war in order.
