D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

VII Corps, commanded by Major General J. Lawton Collins, a dynamic leader known to his men as ‘Lightning Joe’. The assault was led by the 8th Infantry Regiment in Major General Raymond O. Barton’s 4th Infantry Division. Luck certainly played a large part when the current pushed the landing craft towards the Vire estuary. Colonel Van Fleet’s 8th Infantry came ashore 2,000 yards further south than planned, but on a stretch of beach which turned out to be far more lightly defended than where they were supposed to have landed.
    The calmer waters meant also that none of the DD tanks were lost, except for four destroyed on a landing craft which struck a mine. One of the landing craft crewmen described them as ‘odd-shaped sea-monsters depending upon huge, doughnut-like, canvas balloons for flotation, wallowing through heavy waves, and struggling to keep in formation as they followed us’. In fact the light resistance presented few targets for the tanks to attack. Even the artillery was landed without loss. Altogether, the 4th Infantry Division’s 200 casualties on D-Day were far fewer than the 700 losses caused by an E-boat attack during Exercise Tiger off Slapton Sands in Devon that April.
    The first senior officer ashore at Utah was the irrepressible Brigadier General Teddy Roosevelt Jr, son of a former president and a cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Teddy Jr had named his Jeep ‘Rough Rider’ in his father’s honour. On seeing that the 8th Infantry Regiment had landed in the wrong place, Roosevelt rightly decided that it would be stupid to try to redeploy. ‘We’ll start the war from here!’ he announced.
    Roosevelt, who stalked around fearlessly under fire with his walking stick, was loved by GIs for his constant jokes with them and his extraordinary courage. Many suspected that he secretly hoped to die in battle. A major who landed without his vehicle made for the beach, where he first sought cover and then ‘met General Roosevelt, walking the beach wall oblivious to the fire’. ‘General Teddy’ was also known for preferring to wear the olive drab knitted cap and not a helmet, a habit for which he was often upbraided by more senior generals because it set a bad example.
    The assault on Utah beach against isolated German riflemen and machine-gunners was ‘more like guerrilla fighting’, as an officer in the 4th Division put it. One young officer was amused when a colonel came over in the midst of heavy fire and said, ‘Captain, how in the hell do you load this rifle?’ In contrast to Omaha, the Germans had no ‘observed fire’. Instead they just ‘walked their fire up and down the beach, always maintaining a different pattern’. But the comparatively easy fighting did not mean that men were not ready for dirty tricks by the enemy. A soldier in the 8th Infantry Regiment recorded that their officers had ordered them to shoot any SS soldiers they captured on the grounds that ‘they could not be trusted’ and might be concealing a bomb or grenade. Another stated that ‘during the briefings, we were informed that all civilians found along the beach area and for a certain distance inland were to be dealt with as enemy soldiers, shot or rounded up’.
    The beaches were cleared of Germans in less than an hour, thus creating something of an anticlimax. ‘There was little of the expected excitement and not much confusion.’ Instead of opening fifty-yard channels through the obstacles, the engineers began to clear the whole beach at once. The contrast with Omaha could not have been greater.
    The only factor the two beaches had in common was Allied air supremacy. The presence of Lightnings, Mustangs and Spitfires almost constantly overhead greatly boosted morale, but they found no Luftwaffe to attack. Only two German aircraft reached the beaches during daylight on D-Day, largely because of the huge Allied fighter umbrella inland, ready to attack any plane which took off. The wide-ranging sweeps inland of American Thunderbolt squadrons to attack German reinforcements and armour offered their pilots disappointingly few targets in the western sectors that first day.
    Frustration and the inevitable tension of the historic day produced a trigger-happy mood. Allied aircraft shot up French camionettes run on charcoal. At Le Molay, due south of Omaha, US fighters riddled the water tower with cannon fire, perhaps thinking that it was an observation post. It became a huge shower, spraying water in all