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REVISING D-DAY

The British Spitfire swooped in low, only a few feet above the waves as it flew towards the Normandy coastline, armed not with cannon but with camera. This was a reconnaissance sortie, not a fighting one. Once over the shoreline the pilot banked the aircraft to starboard (right), gained height and careful not to maintain a continuous straight flight path, instead a swerving irregular one, continued on his course. The cameras capturing image after image of the landscape and what it contained: the architecture of the Atlantic Wall, the coastal defence constructions of ‘Fortress Europe’. Gone before the Germans realised the Spitfire was flying overhead or could otherwise react, the pilot and his valuable cargo headed back across the Channel towards England.

The Spitfires of No. 4 Squadron and the American P-51 Mustangs of No. 2 and No. 268 Squadrons, all of No. 35 (Reconnaissance) Wing RAF, conducted over 3,000 (3,200) low-level oblique and high-level vertical ‘photo recce’ sorties in April and May 1944, all along the northern French coastline and beyond. They were careful to ensure that as many passed over the Pas-de-Calais as ventured over Normandy and so continued to feed German uncertainty about where exactly the imminent invasion point would be. It was important to maintain a state of confusion and keep the Germans guessing in order to keep their troop disposition dispersed, their tank divisions not concentrated and their eyes not centred on where the invasion would actually appear.

The main objective of the ‘recce’ sorties was, of course, to provide photographic images for the eyes of the interpreters who, with their stereoscopes, could render a 3D view from two overlapping photographs of the same image. This revealed details not otherwise perceptible and unlocked raw intelligence from 30,000 feet. The information gathered in turn underpinned the planning and provided a wealth of information about gun positions and types, construction of coastal batteries and bunkers, strong points, minefields, flooded areas, roads and hinterlands. It allowed intelligence from other sources (resistance agents, etc.) to be confirmed and supplemented, facilitating better planning options, recommendations and decision making about where to land to best penetrate the Atlantic Wall and secure a lodgement in areas suitable for expansion and reinforcement.

This was a valuable activity and helped create a substantial overview of German defences in specific detail and facilitated comparisons in relative terms, and from which recommendations resulted. Not that the photo interpreters always knew exactly what they were looking at. One alert intelligence officer noticed something unusual, and correctly sensing it might have importance brought the curious discovery to the attention of his superior officer. The image was examined, discussed and reconsidered, but it still remained a mystery. What was apparent, though, was that this mysterious object was along the coastline the Allies were planning to assault, and they needed to know what it was. It was for this scenario, among others, that the new warriors were created, Churchill initiating the ‘Commandos’ to be ‘trained to act like packs of hounds’. Under the command of Combined Operations, paratroopers were inserted covertly from above, or commandos by amphibious means (submarines and canoes), to skilfully, stealthily and daringly execute a raid to capture whatever they were looking at. The successful raid recovered radar equipment and a detector that would provide the Germans with a warning of aerial attack. It was a significant discovery to learn that such apparatus was in their possession.

Not that this technology would make up for the lost air parity the Germans had suffered as a result of their losses at the Battle of Britain and since. The RAF, with some thirty-three Irish pilots among them, the most famous being Pat Finucane from Dublin, inflicted a significant defeat on the Luftwaffe sufficient to persuade Hitler and his generals to postpone Operation Sea Lion (Unternehmen Seelöwe), their planned cross-channel invasion of the United Kingdom and Fall Grün (Case Green), the subsequent invasion of Ireland. The invasion, if ordered, was to take place by sea, with five to six German divisions landing on a broad front between Cork and Waterford. The area between Cork and Cobh was listed as a specific ‘gateway of entrance’ and described as: ‘Offering itself especially for the case of a peaceful or completely surprise landing, in which the considerable natural obstacle of the hinterland can be overcome before the development of any strong enemy counter-operation.’

Some of the German bombers that flew over Ireland after dropping their bombs on Britain during the early years of the war did not do so as a result of navigational error or because they were forced out over the Irish sea by the RAF. It is clear that these aircraft flew over Ireland on photoreconnaissance missions as part of the preparation for a possible invasion. At the very start of the war, on 4 September 1939, the day after hostilities began, 23-year-old pilot officer William Murphy, the son of William and Katherine Murphy of Mitchelstown, County Cork, was shot down and killed as he led a wave of RAF bombers in an attack on the German naval port of Wilhelmshaven. All four bombers were lost. The sole survivor was Irishman Laurence Slattery of Thurles, County Tipperary. Willie Murphy’s death was thus both the first Irish and British military death of the Second World War and Laurence Slattery became the first and longest serving western Allied prisoner of war.

In the event, Germany invaded neither England nor Ireland, but Russia instead and now Allied troops were massing along the south coast of England to invade northern France. And so it was, in Marrakesh, Morocco, on the last day of December 1943, a month after the Tehran meeting of the ‘Big Three’, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, with General Dwight D. Eisenhower, subsequently appointed Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force, and General Bernard Law Montgomery, appointed 21st Army Group (the land component commander for the invasion of northwestern Europe). Monty was one of the best known British generals of the Second World War, distinctive for his appearance and his delivery of victory in North Africa over Rommel at the Battle of El Alamein (October–November 1942). From a family with deep roots in Moville, County Donegal, he was a professional and very serious-minded soldier who had seen service in the First World War, where he was decorated (DSO), shot and left for dead. He returned determined that the army could do better, only to be posted to ‘Rebel Cork’ during the Irish War of Independence (1919–21) as brigade major of the 17th Infantry Brigade stationed in Victoria Barracks (now Collins Barracks), whose conduct he considered worse now than in the Great War.

He considered the vicious underground counter insurgency of IRA ambush, Black and Tan reprisals and Auxiliary assassinations, ‘lowered their standards of decency and chivalry’ and was happy when the truce came. At the outbreak of the Second World War he commanded a Division in France in 1940 prior to Dunkirk (Operation Dynamo), was among the last of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), over 225,000 men, to be brought back across the English Channel – the last to be successfully evacuated on 4 June 1940 – leaving the Axis Powers to control the European continent and poised to invade England and Ireland. Major events since had propelled Monty to the fore in the war and so it was that Churchill handed him a copy of the COSSAC Plan for Operation Overlord to review.

‘Impracticable’, was his immediate verdict. The Allied assault needed to be strengthened and widened. His essential revisions included more troops, more space, the US and British troops to be kept separate, that there must be a port for each and the air battle to be won before the operation was launched. The ‘Plan’ needed to be reworked to allow for more troops on the initial landings and the invasion front be widened, from three to five beaches, and an additional air division was required.

The COSSAC Plan and its planners were to be absorbed in the SHAEF Plan, that of the newly established Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force under General Eisenhower. At the end of January 1944, having analysed and re-examined the COSSAC Plan in more detail, it was decided to put the invasion back one month to June 1944. This was not necessarily disadvantageous as it allowed for more of the vitally needed landing craft to be manufactured and crews trained. The COSSAC Plan had wisely taken into account what was available; the SHAEF Plan planned for what was needed, and Eisenhower had the authority to get it; the increased strength, ships and schedule (more time). Montgomery had stressed that the military strategic objective of Overlord was, after all, the main mission, that of attacking and neutralising the German military–industrial complex in the Rhine–Ruhr heartland. The question remained: by removing the ‘source of danger’, the means by which Germany waged war, would Hitler and the Germans be defeated? Operation Overlord would not end with a successful invasion onto northwestern Europe, but merely begin. So begin you must, as you mean to continue, and to continue the plan must include more men, more materials and greater width (attack the beaches on a broader front).

Armies work backwards. The wished-for outcome of operations, the desired ‘end state’, must be kept in mind from the very beginning; it is a necessity to decide the development of the operation before ever initiating action. In other words, you must know strategically what you wish to achieve – how tactically it is to come about – before you ever cross the ‘start line’. It is essential to relate what is strategically desirable to what is tactically possible with the forces at your disposal. Montgomery, reviewing the ‘COSSAC Plan’ in light of his experiences in the stern school of active fighting, made his revisions on the basis that the first need to be decided was how the operations on land were to be developed and then to work backwards from that to ensure that the Allies landed on the beaches in the way best suited to the needs of the achievement of the overall strategic objective.

There were those generals, British RAF Bomber Command’s Commander-in-Chief Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris and USAAF General Carl Spaatz among them, who believed firmly in the cause of independent air power and were also strong in the belief that the strategic objective could be achieved from the air alone and that Operation Overlord was therefore an unnecessary and likely costly risk. Instead, they wished to persist and indeed intensify the aerial bombing of Germany. Operation Pointblank, a specifically designed bombing campaign in support of and in advance of D-Day, diverted their attention and resources to hitting transport networks, railway junctions, stations and bridges over the Seine River to impede the reinforcement capability of the Germans to counter the Allied D-Day invaders.

The targets also included German aircraft manufacturing factories, in order to maintain the air superiority they enjoyed and remove any further German threat from the air on D-Day and thereafter. Harris and Spaatz remained unconvinced that the full weight of Allied air power should be made available to provide whatever support was required to the invasion efforts by their commanders, and General Eisenhower had to insist that Churchill direct that such be the case. Interestingly, when giving fighter support to Allied bombers during Pointblank, the US P-51 Mustang fighter, rejuvenated with the refitting of a Rolls Royce Merlin Engine (it was previously powered by the Allison engine), shot down so many of the Luftwaffe’s fighter interceptor aircraft – held back from the front but now having to deploy to defend targets specially selected to draw them out – that the Luftwaffe’s fighter and bomber air capability for D-Day, and particularly more so its pilots, was seriously decimated. Come 6 June 1944, very few German aircraft (318) and pilots were left and the air superiority identified by Montgomery as necessary for D-Day was achieved, albeit indirectly.

Prior to Operation Pointblank, RAF heavy bombers, sometimes up to a thousand British aircraft at a time, bombed the industrial complexes in Germany’s cities. The aim of this continued concentration of saturation ‘area bombing’ was to drive Germany to a state of devastation, to become dispirited and depleted to such an extent that surrender would be inevitable. Take out their industrial capacity to make war and they would have to make peace. At the same time, only at a much safer distance on the other side of the Atlantic, the American military–industrial machine was in full swing, having been cranked up to a great extent by Irish-American Henry Ford, whose father was from County Cork. Famed for introducing the use of moving assembly belts into his Model T car-manufacturing plants, this enabled an enormous increase in production to be realised. With this vertical integration, he developed mass assembly and revolutionised the manufacturing industry in America. If ever vast quantities of machines were needed in a hurry it was now. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor motivated Ford to begin a tremendous all-out manufacturing effort. In May 1942 in his giant Willow Run plant, Ford began to build and produce B-24 Liberator bombers on an assembly line a mile long at a rate of one plane per hour; with several hundred a month being produced. By the war’s end, nearly 90,000 (86,865) complete airplanes, plus 57,851 engines and 4,291 gliders, as well as engine superchargers and generators were produced, along with tanks, armoured cars, jeeps (‘Willys’) and trucks, among other war materials. In all the Allies were supplied with more than one million fighting vehicles from Ford Operations in the US, Canada, UK, India, South Africa and New Zealand. Engines for the British Mosquito and Lancaster Bombers were manufactured in Ford Plants in the United Kingdom.

Another Irish-American who contributed significantly to the war effort, through his crucial supply of the ‘Higgins boat’ landing craft, was New Orleans based Andrew Jackson Higgins. ‘Surprise’ would be provided by carefully chosen and orchestrated invasion location; ‘supplies’ by the huge military–industrial complex; and the third necessary element for success, ‘speed’, was provided by Higgins’s ‘Landing Craft, Vehicle and Personnel’ (LCVP). ‘He is the man who won the war for us,’ Eisenhower said in 1964. ‘If Higgins had not designed and built the LCVP, we never could have landed over an open beach. The whole strategy of the war would have been different.’ It had not always been possible to put men and materials onto beaches at speed, hence the Higgins boat design and development made it feasible to do so instead of having to land only at ports and harbours. Each boat could hold up to thirty-six infantry personnel or a number of tanks; the bow ramp development allowed them to disembark forward at speed. Over 23,000 boats were produced during the Second World War.

Of Irish ancestry, Higgins was characterised as the stereotypical straight-talking whiskey drinking ‘Irish’ man. Surprise, supplies and speed were regarded as essential elements to achieve success in the D-Day Plan, so that the Allied Troops going ashore could outmanoeuvre and overwhelm their German opponents. That they were able to land an overwhelming number of troops, tanks and equipment in the first few days especially, was due in no small measure to the ingenuity of the life-long boat builder and designer Andrew Jackson Higgins. His LCVP transformed the options open to military commanders in the then ‘modern war’, allowing for amphibious landings of soldiers and equipment along enemy shorelines with both more pace and precision.

Nonetheless, once a foothold was established, in order to bring the necessary supply line into play in time, access to a port or ports would be necessary. Only there were none in Normandy. Cherbourg had been identified and targeted but realistically – militarily – it would take time to seize. Normandy as a landing site for the invasion had the disadvantage of not having port facilities available, and the planners toiled over this dilemma until they imaginatively – and initially it seemed far-fetched – suggested bringing the harbour with them. Making that idea a reality became the work of John Desmond Bernal from Nenagh, County Tipperary, a scientist and Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College, London. At the outbreak of the war, Bernal joined the Ministry of Home Security and began working on proposals for ‘artificial harbours’. He was convinced of the necessity for such ‘floating harbours’ and persuaded Churchill of the need for them and that he could contribute to making them a reality. He suggested these could be prefabricated in sections and towed (slowly) across the Channel, then carefully positioned and sunk so that the upper sections of their reinforced concrete caissons could support, above water level, piers along which ‘roadways’ leading to the beaches could facilitate the rapid offloading of supplies. Similarly constructed floating breakwaters and scuttled merchant navy ships provided protection from wind, waves and bad weather. Codenamed ‘Mulberry’, two floating harbours were constructed requiring huge amounts of resources (including concrete from Drogheda, County Louth), a large workforce and effort. ‘Mulberry A’ was for use by the Americans on Omaha Beach at Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer and ‘Mulberry B’ was for use by the British and Canadians on Gold Beach at Arromanches-les-Bains. The Merchant Navy ships scuttled to act as breakwaters were codenamed ‘Gooseberries’.

Shore to ship, then ship to shore, Operation Neptune was the naval element of Operation Overlord and it was at the High Water Mark of Ordinary Spring Tides (HWMOST) that was regarded as the established point at which the naval responsibility for the assault ceased and that of the army commenced. Warships and transport ships (including landing craft), mostly in the first wave, would be joined by supply ships and more transport ships. The warships provided naval gunfire support on the invasion and later to disrupt German counter-attacks on the beachhead. The bombardment of the beaches included counter-battery fire against German shore artillery. John Joseph Taft from Booterstown, Dublin, Royal Navy, was to be lost off the Normandy beachhead in the summer of 1944. His brother Anthony (18) was one of the very first Irish victims of the war on board the aircraft carrier HMS Courageous, on which were some three dozen or so Irish crew. The Courageous was torpedoed and sunk by German submarine U-29 on 17 September 1939 off the coast of Ireland, going down with more than 500 (519) of the crew.

The vast armada of Operation Neptune, the amphibious invasion fleet of over 6,000 (6,330) ships, had to be protected from German submarine U-boats and surface E-boats. Operation Cork, a plan to prevent U-boat packs setting sail from Brest and their bases in the Bay of Biscay and reaching the D-Day landing and support convoys was launched, whereby a 20,000 square mile area of sea from the south coast of Ireland to the mouth of the River Loire was subdivided into twelve overlapping areas, each one patrolled every thirty minutes by depth-charge dropping anti-submarine planes from Coastal Command. This would force the U-boats, known to have concentrated in their bases in anticipation of an invasion, to run submerged, deplete their batteries and reduce their top speed. In the event, fifteen U-boats set sail from Brest on the afternoon of D-Day followed by others from the Bay of Biscay. Twenty-two sightings were made by Coastal Command and over the next six days, six U-boats were sunk and six badly damaged. Their commander withdrew the remainder and no loss due to U-boats was recorded by the D-Day fleet for the entire month of June. Other forms of protection of the D-Day preparations were made to ensure that Operation Overlord remained a secret. Civilian travel between Britain and the Republic of Ireland (Éire) was stopped and a belt of coastline to a depth of ten miles (16 km) from Land’s End to the Wash was sealed off to the public.

War is organised confusion, and Operation Overlord was highly dangerous and its outcome far from certain. Despite the views of the Allied ‘Bomber Barons’, Harris and Spaatz, wars can only be won on the ground, and one of the ways to cope with some of the confusion that war brings is to sow seeds of confusion yourself. Actuality and deception are powerful agents, especially combined with surprise, delivered with purpose, pace and precision. To achieve surprise and confusion, deception had to be deployed. The Allies mounted a programme of deception to convince the Germans what their methodical minds and logical thinking would rationally make them believe – that the invasion would be landing at Pas-de-Calais. Operation Fortune created a dummy army on the south east coast of England complete with dummy tanks, planes and ships. They created ‘an army that never was’ led (thus adding to the delusion) by a very real, well-known leader: Lieutenant General George S. Patton.

The First United States Army Group (FUSAG), with eleven divisions (150,000 men) were the main characters in this ‘pantomime of pretence’. A false force, facilitated by a fake network of radio traffic and information supplied by agents who had been ‘turned’ and were now double agents, in fact working for the British as part of the Double Cross System (XX System) fed fictional intelligence through a completely imaginary network of agents. One agent in particular, codename ‘Garbo’, created a network of twenty-seven fictional agents, all providing information to German intelligence that the Allied invasion force would land much further up the coast than the Normandy beachhead. The aim was to keep the Germans convinced enough to weight their main defence effort opposite Pas-de-Calais, both for the D-Day landings itself and thereafter. Indeed, Allied planners believed that this fiction could be maintained even after the landings had taken place and that the Germans would believe that the Normandy landings were a feint, a diversion and Pas-de-Calais would witness the Allies’ mass effort, and so the German Army would keep the bulk of their forces and tanks fixed there and away from Normandy, and not be involved in the counter-attacks on the Allied Normandy bridgehead.

To ensure they were not being triple crossed, the Allies were able to confirm their misinformation campaign was working because cryptographers at Bletchley Park had broken Germany’s highly complex, supposedly impregnable, Enigma code, a stunning achievement for the Allies in their intelligence war. What is little known is that the Irish had a German codebreaking cell all of their own, led by Dr Richard J. Hayes from west Limerick. Hayes, the Director of the National Library, was a totally unassuming and mild-mannered man, albeit a colossus in cryptography. Colonel Dan Bryan, the head of Ireland’s intelligence service, G2, led the secret counter-intelligence war to decode wireless messages being covertly transmitted through Morse code from a house in north Dublin owned by the German Embassy. Hayes had been seconded to Colonel Bryan’s counter-intelligence programme during the Second World War for his intellectual prowess. Speaking several languages, including fluent German, Hayes was also a highly skilled mathematician.

He worked for months each day after completing his own work at the National Library, cycling to McKee Barracks on Blackhorse Avenue, trying to solve the ‘Goertz Cipher’ – an intricate, highly convoluted cipher similar to a code that had baffled staff in Bletchley Park. Such was its importance that the British Intelligence Service MI5 had an entire section of sixteen staff working on breaking it. However, some of the greatest code breaking minds there remained stumped. It was a code used by German spy Dr Hermann Goertz, who having been parachuted into County Meath in Ireland was detained by the Irish police (Gardaí) and held in Arbour Hill Prison where he was visited weekly by Dr Hayes. During one such visit, Hayes tricked Goertz into getting an X-ray, in the course of which he took the opportunity to search through Goertz’s trouser pockets and found his cipher, proceeding thereafter, following months of effort, to crack it. He and Colonel Bryan intercepted messages from the spy and sent their own messages back to hoodwink and outwit him into revealing more information. This was then passed on to Bletchley Park. This quiet campaign contributed in no small measure towards winning the longer war.

The plan revised, the programme of deception well under way, and the provision of necessary supplies had now opened the possibility of a surprise attack, and so the opportunity for success. However, opportunity is only as great as the use made of it and it must be grasped before circumstances change. So, if the moment was not to elude them, the invasion must proceed. It was time for the fighting to start.