In Europe

Britons, 359 Canadians, 37 Norwegians and 19 Frenchmen. Not only was the taking of the beaches a huge task, but the invasion also had to be synchronised to keep all those army units from getting in each other's way. The whole thing was planned to the minute: the military engineers were to land at zero hours plus two, supply troops at zero hours plus thirty, and the first journalists were allowed to come ashore at zero hours plus fifty-seven.
    The weather remained disastrous, even after the landing. Between June 18–21 there was actually a hurricane in the Channel, the worst storm since 1900, which swallowed up 800 ships and landing craft. Four times as much military material was lost during that storm as on D-Day itself, and the Allies continued to feel the effects all summer. Still, one month after the invasion there were already a million men on the continent.
    Two huge artificial harbours were towed across the Channel, one of them went down during the storm on 18 June. The third port on which the Allies had their eye, Cherbourg, was initially blocked with mines and hundreds of wrecked ships; within a few weeks, working day and night, the American 333rd Engineer Special Service Regiment succeeded in restoring the harbour installations to something like working order. Then the flood of troops and war material began rolling onto the continent.
    The Belgian and French Resistance had been closely involved in thepreparations for D-Day, ever since May 1942 when a French Resistance fighter was able to purloin a German map of the Atlantic Wall, an invaluable source of information for the Allied planners. At 9 a.m. on 5 June, the BBC began broadcasting lines of poetry by Verlaine, the signal that told the Resistance groups that the invasion would take place the next day, and they could begin taking their own measures. Later, Eisenhower estimated – perhaps a bit too flatteringly – that they had contributed at least fifteen divisions.
    ‘The place of the invasion was no surprise, but the moment of the invasion was,’ said Winrich Behr, Rommel's adjutant at the time. ‘Those of us on the Western staff had always suspected that there would be a landing at Normandy, but Hitler and his strategists were taken completely by surprise. For a long time they believed it was a tactical feint. They refused to send reinforcements for the first three or four days, convinced as they were that the main body of the invasion would arrive at Calais.’
    The meteorologists of the
Kriegsmarine
had predicted that, in view of the weather and the tides, an Allied landing during the first days of June could virtually be ruled out. Rommel, therefore, saw no reason not to go on holiday on 5 June. He had to return in very short order.
    Behr: ‘Of course, our intelligence was flawed. Remember, it had been four or five months since a German reconnaissance plane had been able to cross the Channel. We were blind. The radio broadcasters on both sides were constantly playing games with misleading information via news reports, radio plays, music programmes, all peppered with codes and messages. Later on I heard that a Scottish station had accidentally broadcast the pre-recorded announcement of the invasion, one day early. Our intelligence people picked up on that as well. But they didn't do anything with it. They thought it was just another ruse.’
    Once the Allies had finally established their bridgehead, they still had to penetrate the German defence. That went much slower than expected; the German resistance was tough, experienced and effective, the Allied losses were huge, the destruction in the countryside and the cities – Caen, Bayeux, Cherbourg, Saint-LÔ – enormous. The battle for Normandy lasted two and a half months, rather than the three weeks originally planned. It was not until 21 August that the road to Paris and the rest of Western Europe was clear.
    From that moment on, troops and supplies were pumped from Normandy to the fronts on a massive scale along the Red Ball Express, the Allies’ lifeline, an improvised, one-way road to Brussels. The fuel needed for all these army units was brought in from the Isle of Wight, a hundred kilometres from Cherbourg, through the Pluto pipeline. Pluto, built with breathtaking speed, was the world's first undersea oil pipeline, and by late 1944 it was transporting a million litres a day.
    Winrich Behr spent days driving with Rommel along the Normandy fronts. ‘I was twenty-six at the time, he