D-Day and the War in Europe at the Normandy Landing Beaches, France

The American Cemetery above Omaha Beach

In recognition of the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings today, I am posting this chapter from my upcoming history of the U.S. from places where history actually happened.

  

      Unlike the Pacific theater, the European battles in World War II have no National Park Service sites to commemorate the combat. We therefore turn to the American Battle Monuments Commission to recount the brutal conflict that liberated Europe.

Granted Japan had attacked the U.S., but President Roosevelt decided America’s main focus should be Nazi Germany. Even before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had allied with Prime Minister Churchill to support Great Britain in its hour of need. Lend/Lease supplies helped England withstand Hitler’s onslaught during the Battle of Britain in 1940-41, and U.S. destroyers attacked U-boats in an “Undeclared War” during the summer of 1941 to protect merchant ships transporting those supplies.

Allied forces launched Operation Torch against North Africa in November 1942. Troops fought their way west from Morocco and after some reverses, crushed Rommel’s Afrika Corps between the British forces coming out of Egypt.  By mid-May, Allied troops there had won the first military success of the European theater.

They then quickly targeted Sicily and invaded in July 1943. After capturing the island by mid-August, the Allies leapfrogged up the boot of Italy with landings at Salerno and Anzio in the west and at Taranto, Bari, and Foggia on the Adriatic Coast. That winter saw some of the most vicious fighting by U.S. forces in Europe in the Apennine Mountains running up the central spine of Italy.

In particular, Japanese-American soldiers of the 442^nd Infantry Regiment (some volunteering from American internment camps) assaulted mountain tops held by Germans. The 14,000 soldiers in the 442^nd earned 9,486 Purple Hearts, eight Presidential Unit Citations, and twenty-one Medals of Honor. They are the most decorated unit in U.S. military history.

            The landing of Allied troops on French soil is known by various names. In the U.S., it is D-Day. In France, Le Débarquement or Le Jour J. Some Germans call it the Invasion, except when they say that to some Frenchmen like actor Pierre Trabaud, who corrected them by saying “Oh, you mean the Liberation.” D-Day began the last chapter of the Nazi regime and the reestablishment of human rights in many countries.

Whatever name it goes by, this was the largest amphibious military movement of troops and supplies in world history. On the first day alone, 155,000 troops hit the beaches, along with 20,000 jeeps, trucks, artillery, tanks, and assorted materiel. Some 5,000 ships moved these men and materiel across the channel. More soldiers and supplies landed each day afterwards.

Preparations for D-Day began in earnest a year before. Military planners took a page out of Germany’s blitzkrieg tactics and trained airborne light infantry to jump behind enemy lines, developed a highly mechanized ground force, and pursued dominating air power. To choose a coastal landing site, to plan for all the logistics needed (including manufacturing all the arms and armaments), to gather all the ships for the channel crossing, and to train the millions of soldiers, airmen, and sailors for their missions was an enormous undertaking.

            Germans knew the attack was coming. They used 300,000 workers to build “The Atlantic Wall” on the French coast across from England. Some 15,000 concrete reinforced structures housing everything from 155 mm cannons to small machine guns nests guarded the coast. Take for example the Longues-sur-Mer Battery. Here four large casements held 155 mm guns at the confluence of the future landing zones of the American and British forces. These batteries had a range of fourteen miles, posing a serious threat to any Allied ships bringing in troops. The casements had six foot thick walls, and each used 600 square yards of concrete and over 8,000 pounds of steel reinforcement.

German fortifications at Longues-sur-Mer

On the cliff’s edge 300 yards in front of the guns, an observation post hid. Protected by barbed wire and mines, the whole complex held barracks, ammunition storage bunkers, and mortar and machine gun pits. To neutralize such formidable fortifications, from May 28 to June 3 Allied bombers dropped 1,500 bombs on the ten biggest batteries along the coast. Some explosions created craters twenty feet deep. As I approached the Longues-sur-Mer bunkers photographing them, it reminded me of walking around the ruins at Chaco Canyon, phantom relics of a past civilization.

During the night of June 5, another 1,200 RAF heavy bombers targeted Longues-sur-Mer and the other nine batteries. At day break, 1,400 U.S light and medium bombers took over to pummel the sites. Despite the 124 planes that hit Longues-sur-Mer with 600 tons of explosives, its four guns remained operational. Then German batteries and Allied warships blasted each other. By late morning, three of the guns had been knocked out but the fourth continued harassing the fleet. On June 7, the German gunners and their crews surrendered to British forces which had landed on nearby Gold Beach.

            On June 5, paratroopers loaded onto planes and headed to the continent. In all, an armada of 2,350 aircraft and 850 gliders carried troops across the channel, spread out over 300 miles in the sky. For Americans, the first combat action started around midnight on June 6 when over 13,000 paratroopers of the 82^nd and 101^st Airborne Divisions landed behind Utah Beach. Hostile anti-aircraft fire and clouds had scattered the planes, and so drops often went awry, some men landing fifteen miles from their targets. Nonetheless, groups of paratroopers gathered and liberated Sainte-Mère-Église, the first French city freed by Americans. Stephen Ambrose documented their exploits in Band of Brothers, his history of Easy Company of the 101^st Airborne.

Counterattacks by German troops challenged Allied troops although Nazi high command was not convinced that this was the real attack. Hitler and his generals believed that would occur at Calais, a shorter crossing from England. German officers on the beaches had no doubt though. Col. Von der Heydte, the senior German officer at Utah Beach recalled: “All along the beach…were these small boats, hundreds of them, each disgorging thirty or forty armed men. Behind them were the warships, blasting away with their huge guns, more warships in one fleet than anyone had ever seen before.”

Remnants of a bunker overlooking Utah beach.

At 6:30 a.m., soldiers started hitting Utah Beach. The bluffs behind the beachhead were low, but German guns, both in bunkers and inland, targeted troops. When paratroopers secured the roads over marshes behind Utah, soldiers quickly spread into the French countryside.

The landings at Omaha Beach were more difficult and deadlier than those at Utah. Men scrambled onto a five mile stretch of shore with 200 to 300 foot hills towering over them. Chaos and carnage swept across the sand as German pill boxes poured machine gun fire, mortar rounds, and heavier ordinance onto the landing zone. Some men died as they exited their landing craft and floated in the surf as successive waves of soldiers rushed past.

One of the most difficult objectives was the massive fortifications at Pointe-du-Hoc between Omaha and Utah. At 5:30 a.m. on June 6, naval bombardment lashed the point of land, including guns firing from the battleship U.S.S. Texas. Over 200 men from 2^nd Ranger Battalion hit the narrow beach around 7 a.m. and started to scale the 100 foot cliffs with ladders, ropes, even using their bayonets to ascend. Once on top of the cliff, fierce hand-to-hand combat, “more deadly than the climb itself, started in a lunar, crater-strewn landscape.”

Seventy-five years later, the cratered landscape of Pointe-du-Hoc still testifies to the massive bombing attack prior to June 6.

Capturing the bunkers, the Rangers saw logs painted like 155 mm cannons. On April 15, after an intensive bombing raid that destroyed one of these massive guns, the Germans had removed the others to save them. Rangers combed the region and found the surviving four cannons, which they disabled with thermite grenades. Over the next two days, Rangers threw back German counterattacks. Of the 225 Rangers who assaulted Pointe-du-Hoc, only ninety could still fight when they were relieved at D-Day +2 by troops from Omaha Beach. The rest had been killed or wounded.

Naval bombardment played a key role in D-Day. From battleships like the U.S.S. Texas to the landing crafts, all used whatever armaments they had to pummel the German defenses. On my road trip in the states, I visited the battleship Texas, now a museum outside of Houston. My grandfather, Arthur Hoffman, served on her during World War I, and because I donated a copy of his diary to the ship, I got a private tour. I even stepped into a gun turret of one of her 14” guns. These large guns fired 1,400 pound projectiles as far away as thirteen miles. With my back pressed against the wall of the firing chamber, I realized I had only inches between me and the gun as it recoiled after a shot. An inattentive position on the gunner’s part would cripple and even kill him.

German gun fortification protecting the route off of Omaha Beach.

           At Omaha Beach, I wandered at low tide at Saint-Laurent-sur Mer. Two bunkers framed the beach so that a deadly crossfire caught the G.I.s. Eventually, a group of soldiers climbed the steep hills to the west, came down behind one of the pillboxes, and captured it. This then became the first road off Omaha and hundreds of troops scrambled up the small valley away from the killing fields. On top of the bluff, engineers built the first airstrip on D-Day +1, which evacuated many wounded to England.

            On top of the bluff above Omaha, about a mile from Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, is the Normandy American Cemetery. I walked the aisles of gravestones and read the names, units, states, and dates of death of the interred. The 9,385 burials pay silent tribute to the sacrifices that these men and their families made. The day I visited, during the taps ceremony, the lowered American flag was handed to Mr. Weber, who had landed in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and then on June 6, 1944, at Omaha. Several hundred people gathered around and thanked him. A gentle rain mingled with my own tears at the ceremony.

Mr. Weber, a D-Day veteran, receiving the flag during the Taps ceremony in October 2018.

Once beaches were secured, a massive supply effort landed more soldiers and supplies. Just at Utah Beach, “between D-day and the end of the month of October 1944, 836,000 men, 220,000 vehicles and 725,000 tonnes of supplies were landed on the beaches.” At Arromanches, the British constructed an artificial harbor. Engineers sank old merchant ships as a breakwater, supplemented by 115 “Phoenix” caissons (concrete structures made in England and towed over). Some were 200 feet long and as high as a five story building. Once in place, this breakwater provided a five mile long line of protection for the harbor. Jetties on stilts, also towed over from England and dropped behind the breakwater, served as wharves for ships. Floating causeways connected the floating jetties to land, sometimes a half mile away. Until Cherbourg was liberated at the end of June and that port restored as an operational harbor, supplies to troopers in Normandy came off of the initial landing beaches. In particular, at Arromanches, seven ships docked simultaneously, unloading up to 18,000 tonnes a day. 

The sunken ships and Phoenix caissons which created the artificial harbor at Arromanches. 

Oil drove the machines of war, and so at Port-en-Bessin in between the American and British beaches, the Allies created a fuel port. British commandos came overland from Gold Beach and captured this small harbor. Once in Allied hands, the British constructed a seventy mile undersea pipeline called “Operation PLUTO” (Pipe Line Under The Ocean). This delivered fuel to the highly mechanized Allied armies.

            It caught me by surprise that the landing sites were not a continuous beachhead. They occurred along a seventy mile stretch of the Normandy coast with some large gaps in between the landing zones. From Utah Beach and Omaha Beach, a twenty mile break occurs which avoided steep cliffs. As I drove from one beach to another, I realized that this was the largest and densest  historical landscape I have ever encountered. Almost everywhere I went, a cemetery, museum, roadside marker, or stele marked the events of the D-Day campaign.

            These are sacred places but today at the Landing Beaches, villages thrive, farmers plant crops right up to the ruins of the German bunkers, vacation homes crowd the shores. Scattered among all of these normal human activities, tourists tramp over fields in a new invasion as U.S. and British flags fly alongside French ones.

            On the American beaches of Utah and Omaha, 57,500 landed on D-Day with 8,100 killed, wounded, or missing. On the British and Canadian beaches, 75,315 landed on June 6 with 3,120 casualties. Of the almost 22,000 Allied paratroopers that jumped that day, 3,000 were killed, wounded, or missing. In the campaign to liberate Normandy, over 209,000 Allies were killed or wounded while the Germans suffered perhaps twice as many causalities. Estimates of civilian deaths in Normandy range from 15,000 to 20,000, mainly from Allied bombings, especially in Caen.

            The Allied armies faced stiff resistance moving beyond the beaches, but on August 25, Free French forces liberated Paris. By then a second front had opened with the invasion of southern France on August 15. The soldiers sped up the Rhone River Valley, putting more pressure on Germany. After a brutal fall and winter of fighting in France, Belgium, and Germany, VE Day finally came on May 8. Focus then turned to the Pacific.

            The surviving veterans returned to the U.S., mostly jubilant. While many, like my father, had PTSD, they grabbed life. They made America into a robust economy and world power, similar to the contributions of the veterans after the Civil War. In Ambrose’s book on the 101^st Airborne, he writes of their postwar experiences: “They were remarkably successful, primarily because of their own determination, ambition, and hard work, partly thanks to what they taken from their Army experience [where] they had learned self-confidence, self-discipline, and obedience, that they could endure more than they had ever thought possible, that they could work with other people as part of the team.” What Ambrose wrote about the 101^st applied to many other returning veterans from World War II.

            Despite Ambrose’s conclusion about the legacy of the war on the U.S., the renowned journalist Ernie Pyle offered a more sober view in a draft found in his pockets after he was killed by a sniper on an island near Okinawa: “There are so many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches. . . . Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous. Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them. Those are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France. We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference.”

The American Battle Monuments Commission operates twenty-six cemeteries and twenty-nine memorials in sixteen countries around the world. Just for World War II, at cemeteries in France, Italy, Belgium, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, and England, there are 68,137 graves of the U.S. dead. Additionally, in Tunisia, 2,841 U.S. soldiers are buried, and in the Philippines, another 17,202 graves mark the final resting place of the U.S. troops who died fighting in New Guinea and the Philippines. For the U.S., over 418,000 (mostly military men) died during World War II.

The French government transferred Pointe-du-Hoc to the American Battle Monuments Commission on January 11, 1979 for “Perpetual care and Maintenance.” The Normandy American Cemetery holds 9,385 burials and has a wall that lists the 1,557 men missing in action. It is the site of the first American cemetery for World War II in Europe, established on June 8, 1944. Around 1,000,000 people visit it each year.

A map showing the Allied landings at the American Cemetery in Normandy.

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