Operation Overlord

11 Key excerpts on "Operation Overlord"

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  War Stories III

  The Heroes Who Defeated Hitler

  • Oliver North, Joe Musser, Joe Musser(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Regnery History

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 11 Operation Overlord: NORMANDY 1941 Our landings in the Cherbourg-Le Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air, and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to this attempt it is mine alone. T hat was the kind of message no general would ever want to send. It meant that Operation Overlord—the biggest military maneuver ever conducted—had failed. General Dwight David Eisenhower penned the brief communiqué by hand on a small sheet of notepaper late on 5 June 1944, and put it in his pocket. He knew that the monumental effort to cross the channel and breach Hitler’s Atlantic Wall across Normandy’s beaches was that uncertain. Eisenhower was supreme allied commander and he shouldered that responsibility. He kept the note with him throughout D-Day, 6 June, and all of the next day. Thankfully, it remained in his pocket. Overlord, a name chosen by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, had been in the planning stages for more than two years. Churchill had done all in his power to delay or even avert the operation altogether—fearing a repeat of the carnage the British army had endured in the trenches of France during World War I

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  D-Day 1944 - Air Power Over The Normandy Beaches And Beyond [Illustrated Edition]

  • Richard P. Hallion(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Tannenberg Publishing

    (Publisher)

  D-Day 1944 — Air Power Over the Normandy Beaches and Beyond

  June 6, 1944

  Operation Overlord, the Normandy invasion—like William the Conqueror's before it or the Inchon landing afterwards—will long be studied as a classic in military planning, logistics, and operations. OVERLORD depended to a remarkable degree upon the use of air power in virtually all its forms. A half-century ago, aircraft were primitive vehicles of war compared to the modern attackers of the Gulf War era, with their precision weapons, advanced navigational, sensor systems, and communications. Yet, the airplane still had a profound impact upon the success of the invasion. Simply stated, without air power, Normandy would have been impossible.

   

  Planning for OVERLORD

  By D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Allies had been planning for the invasion of Europe for more than two years. In August 1943, the Combined Chiefs of Staff had approved the general tactical plan for the invasion, dubbed OVERLORD. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commander of the European theater since February 1944, would be responsible for carrying off this bold gambit. The Allies' main strategy, in Eisenhower's words, was to

  . . . land amphibious and airborne forces on the Normandy coast between Le Havre and the Cotentin Peninsula and, with the successful establishment of a beachhead with adequate ports, to drive along the lines of the Loire and the Seine rivers into the heart of France, destroying the German strength and freeing France.

  The Allies believed that the enemy would resist strongly on the line of the Seine and later on the Somme, but surprisingly, once ground forces had broken through the relatively static lines of the bridgehead at Saint-Lô and inflicted heavy casualties on enemy troops in the Falaise Pocket, Nazi resistance in France disappeared. British and American armies swept east and north in an unimpeded advance which brought them to the German frontier and the defenses of the Siegfried Line.

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  Gunners in Normandy

  The History of the Royal Artillery in North-west Europe, January 1942 to August 1944

  • Frank Baldwin, Will Townend, Major Frank Baldwin, Lieutenant Colonel Will Townend(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  1

  Background to Overlord

  Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. – Winston Churchill, 4 June 1940

  The Beginnings

  The campaign to liberate Europe can be traced back to June 1940, and the period when Britain, its Empire, and Dominions stood alone. For the next four years the Western Front was defined by the Channel and North Sea, which offered no scope for other than anti-aircraft or coastal artillery units to see action. However, individual Gunners played a significant role in the events that led to D-Day and the Normandy campaign.

  With seventy years of hindsight, the success of Operation Overlord may appear inevitable. Yet it was very a risky operation. The English Channel is a formidable obstacle. Some of the most powerful armies of all time have baulked at making an opposed Channel crossing. Throughout British military history, British expeditionary forces typically entered the continent through friendly ports. British expeditions to an occupied shore usually failed dismally, as at La Rochelle, Saint-Malo, Walcheren and Bergen op Zoom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The twentieth-century experiences of Gallipoli, Dar es Salaam and Diego Suarez (now Antsiranana) were hardly encouraging. The development of the plans that lead to the success of Operation Overlord were in the hands of two senior gunner officers. General Sir Alan Brooke (the future Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke), as the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), was Churchill’s senior military advisor and shaped the timing and command of D-Day. Lieutenant General F.E. Morgan, as the Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (Designate) (COSSAC), would play a key role in determining that D-Day would take place in Normandy, and the plans for this most complex and successful operation.

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  War Stories for Readers Theatre

  World War II

  • Suzanne I. Barchers(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Libraries Unlimited

    (Publisher)

  Preparing for the Invasion of Normandy D-Day, June 6, 1944 Summary Hoping to bring an end to the war in Europe, the Allies plan a major invasion of the coast of France. To be successful, a complex plan of deception is put in place. The Allies use every possi- ble strategy from spies to misleading radio broadcasts to the development of a ghost army. Oper- ation Overlord, led by Dwight D. Eisenhower, proves to be a brilliant—but costly—undertaking. Ultimately, however, it launches more than an invasion—it launches Hitler’s downfall. This script describes the preparations and anticipation of the invasion through the voices of key Allied and German leaders and four paratroopers of the 508th parachute infantry regiment. The dialogue has been adapted from a variety of oral histories, reports, and reference books. All of the characters are real with the exception of Ben Collins, Carl Armstrong, Phil Duncan, Tom Wright, the Kingston family, and the lieutenant. Reviewing the coast of Normandy and its relationship to England on a map will help with understanding the geographic strategy and its re- lationship to the deception undertaken by the Allies. Books Ambrose, Stephen E. D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. Brinkley, Douglas, director, and Michael E. Haskew, editor. The World War II Desk Refer- ence. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Buell, Hal, editor. World War II Album: The Complete Chronicle of the World’s Greatest Conflict. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 2002. 133 Giangreco, D. M., with Kathryn Moor. Eyewitness D-Day: Firsthand Accounts from the Landing at Normandy to the Liberation of Paris. New York: Sterling, 2005. Swanston, Alexander, and Malcom Swanston. The Historical Atlas of World War II. Lon- don: Cartographica Press, 2007. Web Sites http://www.army.mil/D-day. Includes an abundance of photographs. http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com. Includes information on a variety of wars.

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  A War To Be Won

  Fighting the Second World War

  • Williamson Murray, Allan R. Millett, Allan Reed Millett(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  A WAR TO BE WON THE INVASION OF FRANCE 15 TH E I NVASION OF FRANCE 1944 In a radio speech to the French in October 1940, Winston Churchill ended with a promise: “Good night then: sleep to gather strength for the morn-ing. For the morning will come. Brightly will it shine on the brave and the true, kindly upon all who suffer for the cause, glorious upon the tombs of heroes. Thus, will shine the dawn.” 1 Dawn finally came on the 6th of June 1944, four long years after the Germans had expelled the British Army from the Continent. Operation Overlord, the cross-Channel landing on the shores of Normandy, represented four long years of preparation. The scale of its success placed the democratic powers back in Central Europe, a politi-cal position of critical importance in the second half of the century. The in-vasion of France was to be the most operationally complex offensive of World War II, and on its results hung the political and strategic outcome of the war. The Opposing Sides Although the Wehrmacht had sustained crippling losses on the Eastern Front for three years, its soldiers remained formidable opponents. Through to the end of 1943, the Germans had believed that an invasion of France was unlikely. As a result, they embarked on relatively few defensive prepa-rations, mostly along the Pas de Calais on the Channel coast north of the River Seine. In 1942 and 1943, German units occupying France were ei-ther divisions recuperating from fighting on the Eastern Front or third-line, badly equipped divisions with little mobility. But by early 1944, the OKW and Hitler had recognized that a major cross-Channel invasion would soon occur, and they proceeded to upgrade the western theater of operations. Now, units reconstituting from heavy losses in the east or newly forming 411 units would remain in the west to meet the invasion.

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  D-Day: Preparation for Overlord

  • Will Fowler(Author)
  • 0(Publication Date)
  • Amber Books Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Men and equipment are off-loaded from a US landing craft on a beach in Devon during a training exercise. The beaches of Devon were chosen for their similarity to the beaches of Normandy, with their long, sloping sands running gently into the sea.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE ROAD TO OPERATION OVERLORD

  The Americans pressed for an invasion of Northern Europe as early as 1942, but it would take two more years for the plans and training to reach fruition. US, British, Canadian troops and men and women from the occupied countries of Europe were now massed on a crowded island, as the Allied air forces pounded communications and defences in preparation for the invasion. Now these soldiers awaited the order to go.

  BY THE SPRING OF 1944, the Western Allies and the Soviet Union knew that the war in Europe was moving, at times slowly, towards the defeat of Nazi Germany and her partners. However, they had not always enjoyed this confidence.

  In September 1939, under its leader Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany attacked Poland, and France and Britain declared war. Poland fell in a month. To secure her northern flank, Germany then invaded Denmark in April 1940 and had a tough and costly fight for Norway. In June that year, the defeat of France followed after a six-week ‘blitzkrieg’ (‘lightning war’) campaign. France was divided into a Nazi-occupied north and west and a southern ‘neutral’ pro-Nazi Vichy zone. In April 1941, Germany and her allies overran Yugoslavia in 11 days. Greece fell after a tough fight, and by the end of May, German paratroopers had seized the island of Crete. The Soviet Union was still bound by a 1939 non-aggression treaty it had signed with Nazi Germany, while the United States, though sympathetic to Britain, was reluctant to become embroiled in a European conflict. In the spring of 1941, Britain stood alone.

  German gunners back fill sand and soil against the concrete gun pit of a 15cm (5.9in) K 18 gun in a coastal artillery position. On the right they are putting turf in place to landscape the pit, which is camouflaged from the air by a netting frame suspended over the gun.

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  Fighter Pilot

  The First American Ace of World War II

  • William R. Dunn(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940–41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!

  I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory! Good luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.”

  The paper was signed by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, AEF. (I still have the copy I was given that morning of 6 June 1944, a treasured memento to remind me of those desperate and glorious days.)

  “Well I’ll be damned,” said I, “Ike really means it. Today we finally go–but couldn’t he have picked some better weather for the beginning of our great and noble crusade? It’s raining like hell; even the ducks are walking.” According to the latest bulletin on the weather board I noted the clouds were solid from 1,500 to 15,000 feet in our part of England.

  “Maybe it will blow over before dawn,” commented L.C. “Let’s get to work on this frag. We haven’t got too much time before we all become heroes.”

  The frag order for “Operation Overlord,” the code name of the invasion plan, listed a large number of fighter groups assigned the mission of beach cover that day, all in timed relays so that fighter support for the ground troops would be immediately available. There were a lot of new code words to be memorized. Special communications between air groups, naval ships, and army units had been set up, as well as lateral communications between the Allied forces landing on the several designated invasion beach areas. Recce photos of the Normandy battle zones were studied so that we could positively identify our assigned patrol area. Antiaircraft defenses–ours–were plotted on maps. Anyone who flew into those defense zones, friend or foe, would be shot at. Orders were issued to Captain Wilbur Smallwood, the group armament officer, to rapidly up-load the required munitions–machine gun ammo and rockets–on our aircraft. Major Larkin, intelligence officer, dug through his files to compile all enemy reaction data available. Group operations was soon a madhouse, activity of all sorts being generated to prepare the 406th for its D-Day participation. A full-scale briefing of all pilots was now scheduled for 3 a.m.

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  Voices from D-Day

  • Jonathan Bastable(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Greenhill Books

    (Publisher)

  In January 1943 Churchill and Roosevelt met in Casablanca to discuss once more the prospects for a second front. They appointed Lieutenant-General Frederick Morgan to come up with a workable plan for invading France. He was designated the position of COSSAC – Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander – even though there was at that time no supreme commander. By June, the COSSAC team had chosen Normandy as the target area for the invasion. It had broad beaches where troops and armour could get ashore; it was within range of British fighter cover; and it was not a completely obvious choice – the Germans, who knew an invasion must come eventually, were expecting the strike to be in the Pas de Calais. This, the closest point to the English coast, was where they had concentrated most of their defences.

  American troops were already massing in Britain. This feat of organization and diplomacy was managed by the arch administrator Eisenhower, by now well-known and well-liked by the British high command. In August 1943 Churchill met with Roosevelt again, and they set a date for the invasion of Europe: May 1944. They also assigned the undertaking a codename: Overlord. In December, Eisenhower was summoned to a meeting with Roosevelt in Tunis. He had no idea what the president wanted of him until he walked into the room and Roosevelt greeted him with the words, Well, Ike, you are going to command Overlord’. He was absolutely stunned.

  Eisenhower went back to London with a new title, Supreme Allied Commander. He appointed a senior staff consisting mostly of British commanders, and set them to work on Overlord. For the position of commander of the land forces he chose (somewhat reluctantly) the British general, Bernard Law Montgomery.

  General Montgomery was vain, prickly, fastidious and completely lacking in diplomatic skills. He was unspeakably rude to the Americans –up to and including his boss Eisenhower – because he thought they were all amateurs. But Montgomery was also a brilliant military strategist, an experienced fighter and a born leader of men. He also had experience of the German commander in charge of the defence of France, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel. They were old adversaries: Montgomery’s Desert Rats had defeated Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the desert war of 1942.

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  Escaping with His Life

  From Dunkirk to D-Day & Beyond

  • Nicholas Young(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 21

  Operation Overlord

  B y the end of D-Day, all five of the landing beaches had been taken by the Allies, but connecting them up took another six days, and none of four towns that were to have been captured on D-Day itself (Carentan, St Lo, Caen and Bayeux) had been taken. Although the German defensive line along the Channel coast was incomplete, and the Allied deception plan had been successful in causing confusion about the timing and location of the invasion, the Allies themselves faced difficulties in coping with the narrow roads and bocage countryside of Normandy, with its landscape of small fields enclosed by high banks, deep ditches and thorny hedges. Furthermore, Caen itself, which was a key road and rail junction, was strongly defended, and Montgomery’s chosen tactic of encircling it to the west, rather than risk a direct assault, was criticized as allowing the Germans vital time to build up their defences.

  Within a week, all hope of the swift capture of further ground in northern France disappeared, and what remained was weeks of grim attrition, as the Allies fought to wear down the defending forces in a series of tactical manoeuvrings over small meadows and copses and through a succession of ruined villages.

  Leslie, meanwhile, was somewhere in England, being held in reserve and probably chafing at the bit to get back into the fight. On 30 June, D+23, his name was finally called, and he boarded a requisitioned ferry and crossed the Channel, escorted by a small protective naval convoy and preceded by a minesweeper. They were heading for the Mulberry Harbour at Arromanches, newly-constructed from concrete prefabricated sections towed across the Channel in the wake of the invasion fleet, and he went ashore there the following day, to join a million Allied troops already fighting in France.

  The scene as he landed was awe-inspiring. At sea, dozens of warships patrolled the Channel and the Normandy coast and approach routes, maintaining a regular bombardment on enemy positions inland; closer in, dozens of block ships had been sunk, their funnels and masts protruding from the sea, whilst scores of cargo ships lay offshore, protected by barrage balloons, awaiting their turn to tie up and unload at the encircling concrete arms of the Mulberry Harbour, or to disgorge their cargo of supplies, weapons, tanks and ammunition on to the countless landing craft that scuttled to and from the beaches. The rapidly-growing Allied army required more than 20,000 tons per day just to keep it in action, and the pace could not be allowed to flag. From troopships, mostly commandeered ferries, more landing craft brought hundreds of men ashore by the hour, day and night, returning to the UK filled with wounded soldiers by the score, or with file upon file of dejected German prisoners.

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  Lead Like Ike

  Ten Business Strategies from the CEO of D-Day

  • Geoff Loftus(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • HarperCollins Leadership

    (Publisher)

  3 MANAGE YOUR PEOPLE

  • Choose managers to fit your mission. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But Michael Eisner didn’t do that when he pushed Jeffrey Katzenberg out and recruited Michael Ovitz to Disney. FDR, sorting through all of his personal impulses and desires, did make the right choice, based on fulfilling D-Day Inc.’s mission.

  Roosevelt announced the appointment on Christmas Eve 1943. Eisenhower’s title was a surprise: Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Forces. Michael Korda wrote that FDR intended to reassure Stalin and to send a message to Churchill and Hitler that nothing would “interfere or delay the supreme operation of World War II: the invasion of Europe and the conquest of Germany.” With the title of Supreme Commander, FDR was reaffirming the mission of D-Day Inc., and he couldn’t have picked a better man. With the exception of George Marshall, no one had focused more intently on Overlord as the main operation against their German competition than Eisenhower. Korda said of FDR, “He achieved the objective that was most important to him: the concentration of the full power of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France in the hands of one man, who would use it for the sole purpose of defeating Germany.”4

  Operations in Italy were turned over to a new CEO for Mediterranean operations, General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, with British general Alexander and American general Mark Clark in charge of the ground forces. The long, hard slog toward Rome continued even after Italy officially surrendered on September 8, 1943. The Italians would have preferred that the hostilities stop, but when two large foreign competitors have control of your entire country, your surrender doesn’t do much to end the competition.

  Eisenhower immediately began assembling his executive staff for Overlord. He had wanted Alexander to continue in his role of deputy commander. During both Husky and Torch, Alexander had functioned as Ike’s No. 2 and

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  D-Day Volume 1

  Then and Now

  • Winston Ramsey(Author)
  • 1995(Publication Date)
  • After the Battle

    (Publisher)

  Operation ‘Overlord’ By General Dwight D. Eisenhower SUPREME COMMANDER, ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCE

  In early December, I had received word that the President would return to the United States through our area. I went to Tunis to meet him. During the remainder of the afternoon, we made arrangements to conduct the President to Malta and to Sicily.

  A few hours before his arrival, I received a somewhat garbled radiogram from General Marshall that discussed some administrative details incident to my forthcoming change in assignment. When he wrote the message, General Marshall apparently assumed that I had already received specific information concerning the new assignment through staff channels. But, lacking such information, I was unable to deduce his meaning with certainty. The President arrived in mid-afternoon and was scarcely seated in the automobile when he cleared up the matter with one short sentence. He said: ‘Well, Ike, you are going to command “Overlord”.’

  Because I had to discuss with him, at once, details of his next day’s plans, we had no opportunity, at that moment, to talk further about the new assignment; but I did manage to say: ‘Mr. President, I realize that such an appointment involved difficult decisions. I hope you will not be disappointed.’

  During his visit, the President on several occasions discussed matters in connection with my imminent transfer to London. He was quite concerned with two points that did not seem particularly important to me. The first of these was the timing of the announcement. It was finally decided that the President would do this from Washington; in the meantime, my change in assignment would be a closely-guarded secret. The second point was my title as commander of ‘Overlord’. He toyed with the word ‘supreme’ in his conversation but made no decision at the moment. He merely said that he must devise some designation that would imply the importance the Allies attached to the new venture.

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