From endless disagreements between Allied forces to a military rehearsal that took a deadly turn,
there are plenty of dark facts about D-Day that you were never aware of.
The idea of invading France was
first considered as early as 1942. The invasion is often portrayed as a triumph
of careful planning and incredibly brave soldiers — and it certainly was both of those things. But
that overlooks one key fact: It also came close to being a horrifying disaster for the Allies.
Americans sometimes think that because General Dwight D. Eisenhower was Supreme Commander of the
Allied Forces that means America was in charge — but it was a partnership. As History notes,
Eisenhower's staff was full of British officers, and the British themselves did
much of the planning and logistics work. One of the reasons Eisenhower was chosen for his
role was his ability to get combative personalities to work together — but
he threatened to quit and throw the whole operation into disarray when the British
pushed back on "no-brainer" plans to bomb the German lines prior to the landings.
In fact, as NPR reports, Eisenhower was so painfully aware of how easily it could
go wrong he wrote out a statement to be issued if it went badly. And things did
go wrong — nearly everything, in fact. As Engines of Our Ingenuity notes, the
bombs Eisenhower fought for mostly missed their targets, naval bombardments were ineffective,
amphibious tanks turned out to be not very amphibious at all, and the weather wasn't ideal,
scattering Allied forces. The amazing thing about D-Day is that it succeeded at all.
It was no big secret that the Allies
were planning to invade France. As History notes,
Hitler and his military advisers began planning for it as far back as 1942.
"The Germans had been preparing for this invasion
as long as the Americans and the British had been, and they had been digging in."
It was the obvious way to force the Nazis to spread their forces thin and ease the pressure
on Russia in the East. In fact, Hitler ordered a huge string of fortifications to be built that
same year, creating what came to be known as the Atlantic Wall, a network of bunkers,
gun emplacements, and landing obstacles that covered 2,400 miles of the French coastline.
So the Germans knew the Allies were coming, and they had the weapons,
men, and fortifications in place to repel those forces. The chances of failure would
have been pretty high, actually, except the Germans got one crucial
aspect of their intelligence wrong: Where the Allies planned to invade.
Through a brilliant deception campaign, the Allies managed to convince Hitler and
his high command that the invasion would hit at Calais, about 150 miles northeast of the actual
invasion site. The Nazis couldn't be sure, but the possibility forced them to split their forces,
a big reason D-Day succeeded. The brilliant part of all this is that
Calais is actually the better choice for an invasion, which made it very believable.
D-Day wasn't just a logistical
nightmare, it was a literal nightmare. If you've seen "Saving Private Ryan"
you have some small idea of what the first wave of invaders experienced—the
D-Day landings were brutal. In fact, they were probably worse than you can imagine.
"Every inch of this beach has been presighted! If you stay here, you're a dead man!"
Estimates of exactly how many men died on those beaches vary pretty significantly,
and it's impossible to know precisely how many died in the first wave—but it was a bloodbath.
The Guardian notes that thousands of troops were killed by punishing machine gun fire
as they stormed the shore. Some entire companies of soldiers were devastated, like A Company, 1st
Battalion, 116th Infantry, which lost 60% of its men in 20 minutes. Men in supposedly amphibious
tanks drowned, trapped inside, when the tanks hit the water too soon and sank like metal coffins.
The worst part was that this was accounted for. The generals planning the invasion knew incredibly
high casualty rates were unavoidable. Author G.H. Bennett notes that it was estimated that
13% of all troops would drown before making it to shore, and the assumption was that
25% of Allied forces would die in a successful operation. And History reports that the Allies
expected to lose 75% of the paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines just before the invasion.
Ultimately, the true number of how many men died that day will never be known.
Considering what was at stake,
you might imagine that the military leaders planning Operation Overlord
and the Normandy invasion would want to be solidly in agreement before giving the
order. The fact is, they argued over just about every detail right up until the end.
HistoryExtra notes that the British and the Americans went back and forth over the details
for years. The British even delayed the invasion twice, opting to direct resources to an invasion
of Northern Africa and later an invasion of Sicily — Operation Torch and Operation Husky,
respectively. There were good military reasons for these decisions, but the Americans suspected
the British were trying to undermine the Normandy plan. As UVA Today explains,
the British thought invading through Normandy would be too difficult, and weren't afraid to
express this opinion. In the end, the British only agreed because they worried the Americans would go
their own way otherwise—but Prime Minister Winston Churchill continued to argue over every detail.
History reports this bickering led to incredible chaos right before D-Day. Supreme Allied Commander
General Dwight D. Eisenhower actually threatened to resign when Churchill opposed having Allied
bombers pulled out of Germany to bombard the defenses in France—which Eisenhower couldn't
believe. The threat worked, and the bombers were moved, but it's kind of incredible to think that
shortly before the largest amphibious invasion in history the leadership team was in such disarray.
The Allied forces knew that any attempt to
invade Europe via the Normandy beaches would meet stiff resistance. As Time notes, the German army
spent more than three years and incredible resources building a series of impressive
defenses called the Atlantic Wall. This series of bunkers and gun emplacements was just the outer
edge of German defenses. They'd been in France for years at this point, and there were real concerns
that armored divisions and reinforcements from France's interior would lead to an Allied defeat.
"Beyond the formidable sea defenses,
an army, battle-hardened on the Eastern front, lies in wait."
As a result, a key part of D-Day involved dropping thousands of paratroopers behind
enemy lines shortly before the attack. The 101st and 82nd U.S. Airborne
Divisions were dropped on the Cherbourg peninsula and ordered to secure areas,
seize bridges and other important transportation links, and sabotage the German defenses.
It was a disaster. According to History, bad weather led to the paratroopers being dropped
wildly off-target, leaving them scattered and vulnerable to snipers and easy capture—only
one-sixth of the men actually reached their rally points. In the darkness and chaos,
many paratroopers were forced to form ad-hoc units on the run. Many drowned
when they accidentally landed in flooded ditches or in rivers. The
fact that the paratroopers still managed to carry out their mission is nothing short of incredible.
When we think of D-Day and
the Normandy invasion, we think of guns and bullets, tanks and bombers. We think
of the high number of casualties and the immense bravery required to step off those
landing craft in the face of withering fire. But there was another aspect to
the invasion that was just as crucial—and just as effective: Psychological warfare.
As History Today notes, there was literally a Psychological Warfare Division within the Supreme
Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, and the British Political Warfare Executive and
the United States Office of Strategic Services collaborated on several psychological warfare
operations. As noted by author David Welch, one of their main projects was Nachrichten für die
Truppe — or News for the Troops. This was a newspaper designed to look like a legitimate
news publication that mixed actual news and other stories with blatant propaganda designed to lower
German morale—close to a million copies were dropped in France just before the invasion.
Smithsonian Magazine notes that the British also broadcast a regular radio program hosted
by Gustav Siegfried Eins, who presented himself as a dedicated Nazi who was outraged at the
behavior and failings of the Nazi hierarchy. As Coffee or Die notes, the psychological warfare
was deemed a success because Nazi officers complained about their effect—and because so
many German prisoners of war were found with the newspapers and other leaflets in their pockets.
Mainstream history imbues D-Day and Operation
Overlord with supreme importance when it comes to ending World War II. The usual narrative is that
the Nazis were embedded in Europe, and the only way to end the war was to open up a second front.
But as historian William Hitchcock notes, the Allies had been perfectly
happy for years to let Russia absorb Nazi aggression on the Eastern front,
though they couldn't say so publicly. And as the History News Network argues,
the Germans were more or less doomed to lose the war ever since they failed to capture Moscow in
the Winter of 1941, which transformed the war from an aggressive invasion to a slow war of attrition.
"The Germans kept on fighting when we thought that they shouldn't do."
Put simply, in a grinding war of attrition the math wasn't on Germany's side. The Nazis
were already in retreat and doomed. In fact, just a few weeks after D-Day the Soviets and
their allies spearheaded an operation on the eastern front – Operation Bagration,
which involved a staggering 2.3 million men – saw forces strike the Nazi’s at the Belorussian front.
So if it wasn't crucial to ending the war, why put so much effort into D-Day?
One reason was Allied worries that the Red Army would simply roll over Europe—in fact,
this was the stated strategy of the Soviet Politburo in 1944. Operation Overlord was
as much about stopping the Russian takeover of Europe as it was the defeat of the Nazis.
The Allied forces knew the Normandy invasion
was far from a sure thing. The Nazis built an impressive defensive line that stretched 2,400
miles of French coastline, and they 100% knew the invasion was coming. If they guessed the location
correctly, the chances of failure would be much higher. So the Allies created one of the greatest
deception campaigns of all time. Operation Bodyguard involved placing the very real General
George Patton in charge of a very fake army called the First U.S. Army Group in order to convince
the Germans that any invasion of Normandy would actually be a feint to draw Hitler's forces away
from the real invasion, which would take place at Calais. Patton was chosen precisely because the
Nazis knew him very well, and he was a believable choice to lead a major invasion of Europe.
As Sky History TV reports, an entire fake army and navy was created in order to cloud Nazi
intelligence and add credence to the Calais ruse. Inflatable tanks and fake boats were constructed,
as were fake military installations that looked plausible in grainy spy photos. Entire teams
were dedicated to generating convincing radio chatter for the Nazis to pick up.
The ruse worked. Hitler hedged his bets, which softened the resistance
at Normandy—and even kept several army divisions near Calais for days after D-Day,
still worried the invasion was just a trick.
Operation Overlord and the Normandy
invasions Americans refer to as "D-Day" took years and years of careful planning. So it isn't
too surprising to learn that the Allied forces planned a dress-rehearsal to test out equipment
and training. What might be a little surprising is how disastrous that rehearsal ended up being.
As BBC News explains, the operation was code-named Exercise Tiger. On April 28,
1944, eight ships designed to convey and land tanks on the beaches of Normandy were sailed
with full cargoes to Slapton Sands near Devon, England, where the beach had been fortified
similarly to Normandy. The Allies arranged to have live artillery fired near the ships to make the
landings as realistic as possible. History reports that 23,000 troops were loaded onto the ships,
which headed out to sea, then turned around and returned to stage the practice landing.
But the radio chatter attracted German vessels, which launched an attack on the Allied forces.
A British Destroyer was supposed to have accompanied the ships, but had been ordered
elsewhere at the last minute, leaving the tank ships undefended. Three ships were hit by German
torpedoes. When the sailors hit the water, they discovered to their horror that they were
wearing their life jackets incorrectly, leading many to die of hypothermia in the frigid water.
The disaster cost 800 lives, but the families of the army covered it all up to maintain security.
War is ugly and violent, but over
the decades the narrative of D-Day has been established via movies and TV shows to be
one of heroism and sacrifice. The soldiers landing on the beach that day are usually
depicted as humble men drafted into one of the most important and dangerous invasions,
reluctantly practicing violence. The Nazis, naturally, get a less positive spin.
"Nein, nein, nein, nein, nein, nein!"
The truth is there were war crimes on both side—massacres, sexual assaults, torture,
and worse. HistoryNet reports many incidents where Nazi soldiers outright murdered Canadian prisoners
of war, including more than 150 who were killed while trying to surrender. After the war the
German officers involved in the incidents were identified, but only one, Kurt Meyer, was tried
for war crimes. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, but only served five years.
As The Washington Post notes, the Allies weren't immune from atrocities. After
the Normandy landings, many American troops were accused of sexual assault. General Omar
Bradley warned the Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower about "looting,
pillaging, wanton destruction, rape, and other crimes" being committed by
Americans. But almost none of these crimes were reported or prosecuted.