Operation Neptune

The Prelude to D-Day

David Wragg

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780750999687, 9780752489223
• eBook ISBN: 9780750954815
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Long-awaited, the Normandy landings were the largest amphibious operation in history. Success was achieved by the advent of specialised landing craft, heavy naval firepower and the creation of two artificial harbours and an underwater pipeline. Operation Neptune: The Prelude to D-Day tells the story of this incredible feat using eyewitness accounts of the landings and the breaching of Hitler's famed 'Atlantic Wall'.

David Wragg explores the earlier Allied and Axis experiences with amphibious operations and the planning for Neptune and Overlord. He reveals the naval support needed once the armies were ashore and before continental ports could be captured and cleared of mines, with operations such as minesweeping off the Normandy coast, which led to one of the worst 'friendly fire' incidents of the war. This is the must-read book to understand what made D-Day possible.

1

LOOKING FOR A
SECOND FRONT

The fall of France in 1940 left the United Kingdom and the countries of the British Commonwealth, most of which had hastened to the support of the mother country, in a dire situation. Many believed that a German invasion was imminent, and in fact the Battle of Britain arose because this was indeed what Hitler had planned: it was an attempt to gain control of the air over the British Isles. The British had had to abandon the Channel Islands as, being so close to France and south of the Cherbourg Peninsula, they could not be defended. The Germans were able to simply land, after first bombing the defenceless islanders.

The one country that had hesitated to join the rest of the Commonwealth in declaring war on Germany was South Africa. For most of the population in the dominion, this was a war that was far away, a white man’s war, and nothing to do with them. These people did not have the vote, however, and the real debate was between the Prime Minister, General Barry Hertzog, who presented parliament with a motion proposing that the country remain neutral, and General Jan Smuts, a junior partner in the governing coalition, who opposed him and won by a narrow majority. There was strong Afrikaner hostility to the war, many of whom were pro-Germany and also pro-Nazi, while others were simply returning to the positions of the Boer Wars. Smuts became the country’s wartime prime minister after Hertzog resigned on losing the vote.

What is now the Irish Republic, but was then known as the Irish Free State, was neutral, although many of its citizens volunteered for the British armed forces, as did many of those in Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom but outside the scope of conscription. The United Kingdom had by treaty the right to use certain naval bases in the Irish Free States, and certainly these ‘Treaty Ports’ would have been invaluable during the Battle of the Atlantic, saving the lives of many British, American and Canadian seamen on the Atlantic convoys. The Irish Free State had no intention of allowing its neutrality to be compromised, and it was also felt by the British that a substantial force of troops would be tied down defending the ports from the Irish Republican Army, which had become very active in the years before the outbreak of war.

Standing alone, the United Kingdom soon realised that there could be no early return to Europe. The priority had to be the reconstruction of the British Army as well as absorbing into the British armed forces those from the newly occupied states who had escaped. All this had to be done while the Royal Air Force was under daily attack by a numerically superior Luftwaffe, many of whose pilots had gained valuable air combat experience serving with the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War. As noted above, even in the UK, there were those who favoured appeasement, and many Germans expected this after the diplomatic victory of Munich, which had allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, after the ease with which Austria had joined the Third Reich, and the way in which the remains of Czechoslovakia had succumbed with barely a murmur from the international community in 1939.

Even today, some believe that peace could have left Germany in charge of Europe and with the restoration of its former colonies, lost after the First World War, while the UK and the British Empire would have remained intact. Whether or not this would have been the case is a moot point as, after all, Hitler was planning war, but for 1944, not 1939, and appeasement could once again have simply delayed the inevitable. What is known, however, is that if Germany had invaded and won, the country would have been occupied and transformed. In fact, as late as April 1942, the last year in which Germany had any hope of winning the war, the Reichsminister of Agriculture, Walter Darr, made clear his country’s intentions:

As soon as we beat England we shall make an end of you Englishmen once and for all. Able bodied men and women will be exported as slaves to the continent.

The old and the weak will be exterminated. All men remaining in Britain as slaves will be sterilised; a million or two of the young women of the Nordic type will be segregated and with the assistance of picked German sires, during a period of ten or twelve years, will produce annually a series of Nordic infants to be brought up as Germans. These infants will form the future population of Britain. Thus, in a generation or two, the British will disappear.¹

While the expectation of land-based warfare in Europe had proved wrong, showing that the Second World War was not going to be an exact copy of the First, one campaign that did repeat itself was that of the U-boats against British shipping, especially in the North Atlantic, while light forces made running convoys along the east coast of England difficult and dangerous, so that once again much of the traffic was transferred to an increasingly overworked railway system. Even the U-boat campaign was to be different, however, as the Admiralty lost little time in organising a convoy system, something which they, shamefully, had failed to do until the closing months of the earlier conflict.

Another big difference was that the Mediterranean was no longer a peaceful backwater. A former First World War ally, Italy’s entry into the war in June 1940 meant that the fighting in the Mediterranean and in North Africa was intense while Italy invaded Yugoslavia and Greece, although German help was needed for victory in these countries. The occupation of most of France meant that Germany also had control over the Bay of Biscay, using the bases of the French Navy, the Marine Nationale, so that the U-boats did not have to tackle the dangerous waters around the north of Scotland but had direct access to the open sea. This meant, of course, that convoys also had to be escorted through the Bay of Biscay, often dividing at Gibraltar with some ships setting off for Malta and Alexandria, while others headed for Cape Town. This all changed once the Mediterranean became impassable and even British forces in Egypt had to be reached not by the direct route across the Mediterranean via Malta, but via Cape Town and the Suez Canal.

It would be wrong to think that the British could continue the war only in the air and at sea. From 10 June 1940 to 13 May 1943, in North Africa the British Army, with many Commonwealth troops, was locked in battle first with the Italians and then later with the Germans as the Axis powers attempted to reach the Suez Canal.

The colonial powers had a substantial interest in North Africa. France, Spain and Italy all had colonies, while the British effectively treated Egypt as if it were a colony, even though nominally independent and with its own sovereign. The start of the war in the desert, of course, marked the entry of Italy into the Second World War on 10 June 1940. Realising the danger, on 14 June, British armoured units crossed the border from Egypt into Italian-controlled Libya, taking Fort Capuzzo. The Italians in turn marched into Egypt and captured Sidi Barrani in September. British Commonwealth forces launched an offensive, ‘Operation Compass’, in December, destroying the Italian Tenth Army. This prompted Hitler to send General Erwin Rommel with the Afrika Korps to North Africa to prevent an Axis defeat. There was heavy fighting over the next two years, the British suffering a major defeat at Tobruk, and a resounding victory at El Alamein, but it was the Allied landings in North Africa, ‘Operation Torch’, that eventually saw the Axis forces squeezed between the Allies coming from Algeria and the British Commonwealth forces from Egypt. Even before this, from June 1941, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union saw German forces in particular diverted away from North Africa and the Mediterranean.

At sea, the initial effort was primarily defensive, protecting shipping. There were attacks on German coastal shipping by light forces and naval aircraft, and in the Mediterranean there was the valiant and highly successful attack on the Italian fleet in its forward base at Taranto on the night of 11/12 November 1940, which put three out of the six Italian battleships out of action. This was followed by a successful submarine campaign, with aerial support from aircraft based on Malta, which at times virtually cut off Axis forces in North Africa from their supplies.

In the air, the activity was primarily defensive at first. The Battle of Britain had to be fought and won. A combination of factors enabled this to be done. The German fighter pilots did not stick with the bombers, but instead were enticed away for dogfights with the RAF, and especially the Supermarine Spitfire fighters, so that the RAF’s Hawker Hurricanes could attack the bomber formations. British and German fighters were short on range compared to aircraft being developed in the United States at the time, so bombers operating from Denmark against Scotland suffered heavy losses. The biggest problem, however, came when the Germans switched their attention from bombing the RAF’s airfields to attacking industry and British cities. This gave the RAF the chance to regroup and rebuild. Initially, night fighters were poor, but as first the Bristol Beaufighter and then the superb de Havilland Mosquito entered service, German losses soared.

Nevertheless, the real change came with the start of Bomber Command’s operations against Germany, and also against industrial and military targets in the occupied territories. This was the most obvious means of taking the war to the enemy. At first, the heaviest bombers available were the Handley Page Hampden, known as the ‘flying panhandle’ because of its shape, and the Vickers Wellington, but true heavy bombers appeared later, first with the Short Stirling, and then the Avro Lancaster and the Handley Page Halifax. The Lancaster, when specially modified, lifted the heaviest bombs of the war, first the 12,000lb ‘Tall Boy’ and then the 22,000lb ‘Grand Slam’: huge earthquake bombs that could destroy a submarine pen or other fortification by burrowing beside it before exploding, while convention bombs simply bounced off.

The next stage was to attack in major formations, overwhelming the defences, sometimes with more than a thousand bombers, which reduced Bomber Command’s losses to a sustainable level.

There has been much debate over the value of the bombing campaign, even when the RAF and the United States Army Air Force combined, the RAF attacking by night and the USAAF by day. Part of the problem was that the bombers were moved onto new targets too soon, allowing recovery and reconstruction. There was also debate over whether civilians or key industries should be the target – the Americans preferred the latter, but raids on the oil industry in Romania were difficult, involving long flights over enemy territory and heavy fighter attack all the way. Berlin could only really be attacked during the long winter nights for the same reason.

Regardless of the controversy over the morality of bombing and its effectiveness, there can be no doubt that bombing was the most practical means of taking the war to the enemy at a time when few other opportunities existed, and there can be no doubting the courage of those involved. Almost 56,000 RAF Bomber Command personnel were lost during the Second World War.

Equally grim were the losses sustained by the convoys on the North Atlantic and North Sea, with a total of 12.8 million tons of shipping sunk or seized, but mainly the former. Another 570,892 tons were lost in the Mediterranean. This latter figure would have been higher but for the fact that the Mediterranean was avoided by most Allied merchant shipping from early 1941 until the invasion of North Africa in November 1942.

Not for nothing were these theatres of war, North Africa, the Battle of the Atlantic and the Combined Bomber Offensive, regarded by the Allies as akin to fresh fronts in the war.

SECOND FRONT NOW!

There was no call for a second front until after the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. The operation had been fatally delayed, partly by Germany’s need to help her Italian ally in Yugoslavia and Greece, but also because an exceptionally wet spring and early summer had left the ground too soft for large armoured formations and their support vehicles to move with ease. The invasion saw the USSR change sides overnight, having until the assault been an Axis ally supplying Germany with food, raw materials and fuel.

Even today, historians are still amazed at the way in which Stalin refused to accept that Hitler was planning an invasion, despite warnings from his own agent in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, warnings from Churchill, whom he did not trust, and, most blatant of all, German reconnaissance flights over the USSR. He had purged the senior ranks of his armed forces, and insisted on dismantling the USSR’s old defensive lines in favour of building new ones to incorporate newly acquired territory – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as the eastern part of Poland. This meant that the old defensive lines were broken before the new ones were completed. Like many other leaders, he was amazed and caught off guard by the speed at which the Germans overwhelmed French resistance. He continued to supply grain and oil to Germany right up to the time of the invasion, despite Germany reneging on its supply of machinery. He ignored the requests by his two most senior army officers, Timoshenko and Zhukov, to mobilise in mid-June 1941. He did not use the relief gained by Japan’s switch from operations in China to the war in the Pacific to move forces westwards.

Even when German forces surged eastwards across the Bug River on 22 June 1941, Stalin refused to order retaliation, and when he did realise that what was happening was not simply a provocative border incident, he went into a state of shock and even left breaking the news to the Russian population to Molotov, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, who made the crucial broadcast to a bemused population that believed that Germany and Russia were staunch allies. Once again, the German advance moved at unbelievable speed, some areas being overrun even before the population knew that they were at war with Germany.

It was not until 3 July that Stalin finally started to broadcast to the population, with a call to arms. Even so, during that month he also sought Bulgarian help to negotiate a truce with Germany, which would involve the USSR ceding some territory, somewhat similar to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that had taken Russia out of the First World War. The Bulgarians refused to help.

Once the initial German thrust eased, Stalin’s generals were told not to cede any further territory, an order that saw hundreds of thousands of soldiers trapped by a German pincer movement around Kiev. He also decreed that any Russian serviceman taken prisoner by the enemy would be deemed guilty of treason. The punishments would also be extended to the serviceman’s hapless family. When his own son Vasili was captured during the war, Stalin dodged the retribution that ordinary families were expected to suffer by simply disowning him.

Over the year following the German invasion, Stalin’s representatives were dispatched to meetings with his new allies. Struggling to hold the Germans on the Eastern Front, what Stalin and his advisers immediately latched on was the need for a Western Front, although increasingly this was discussed as a ‘Second Front’. By this, he meant that he wanted an Allied invasion of France. This was really another instance of the leaders in the Second World War harking back to the First World War when there had, of course, been an ‘Eastern’ and a ‘Western’ front. The geographical terminology was that of the Germans!

Stalin undoubtedly saw himself and his fellow countrymen, and women, as bearing the brunt of the war against the Axis Powers. This was to ignore the fact that the United States in particular, but also the British, Dutch, Australians and New Zealanders were heavily engaged in a battle against Japan, and in so doing had relieved the Soviet Union of any fears of a Japanese attack in the Far East, especially in Siberia. Many Americans wanted the war against Japan to have priority, which was understandable as Japan had launched a massive attack against the US Pacific Fleet in its forward base at Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, and worse, done so without declaration of war. The US Asiatic Fleet had also been attacked in the Philippines.

Nevertheless, while pursuing the war against Japan, which of necessity had to be a naval war until bases could be gained that put heavy bombers within reach of the Japanese home islands, the Americans decided that the war against Germany had to be the priority. That meant using the United Kingdom as a base for US bombers operating over enemy-occupied territory. The Americans pursued the war against Germany in the air, and in the North Atlantic, the Arctic and the Mediterranean.

Stalin’s desire for an early invasion of France was unrealistic. He had little understanding of maritime matters and no idea of what a successful amphibious operation would take. To some extent, many Americans took the same view, although they expected an invasion of France in 1943. As it happened, the first invasion in the European theatre – if one discounts the British occupation of Iceland* in May 1940, which was handed over to US occupation in July 1942 – was actually just outside Europe, the Anglo-American invasion of Vichy-held North Africa on 8 November 1942, in Operation Torch.

Invading North Africa made a lot of sense. Most importantly, there was no way that the Mediterranean could be secured and Italy invaded until any prospect of opposition from Vichy forces in North Africa had been suppressed. British, Australian and Free French forces had earlier invaded Syria on 8 June 1941, action that was prompted by the Vichy French commander in that country allowing the Luftwaffe to use Syrian bases while on their way to support an uprising against the British i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Glossary
• Introduction: Assault from the Sea
• 1 Looking for a Second Front
• 2 Planning and Preparation
• 3 The War Within – Battling Leaders
• 4 Sowing False Leads
• 5 Debacle at Dieppe
• 6 Disasters on Exercises
• 7 Invention – The Key to Success
• 8 Under the Noses of the Germans
• 9 Southwick House – The Nerve Centre
• 10 Confusing the Enemy
• 11 The Germans Prepare
• 12 The Naval Action
• 13 The Assault – The British Sector
• 14 The Assault – The American Sector
• 15 The Battle for the Channel Ports
• 16 Walcheren
• 17 What Could Have Happened
• Appendix I – Before and After Overlord: The Sequence of Events in 1944
• Appendix II – British, Canadian and ‘Free’ Warships in Operation Neptune
• Appendix III – American Warships in Operation Neptune
• Appendix IV – Allied Order of Battle
• Appendix V – German Order of Battle
• Bibliography