Stephen Ambrose on D Day: Into the Fire at Normandy

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. Stephen Ambrose was one of America’s leading biographers and historians. At the core of Ambrose’s phenomenal success is his simple but straightforward belief that history is biography and that history is about people. Ambrose passed in 2002, but his epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here at Our American Stories thanks to those who run his estate. Here’s Ambrose with the D-Day Invasion, Part Two.

Let’s take a listen. The battle over the next couple of weeks took on a form that brought great anguish to Eisenhower and posed great dangers for the alliance. This was because General Montgomery had, in the pre-Overlord planning, said that the way this battle is going to go is as follows: “We’re going in on the left, that is the closest to the city of Caen and thus to the city of Paris. The role of the Americans in this operation would be to protect the right flank of the British forces advancing on Paris.” But the Americans felt that he was being penny-wise and pound-foolish; that he was saving a few lives now by not attacking. It was going to mean more British lives would be lost later on. “We had the initiative, we had the advantage. We should have driven on,” was Patton’s attitude, Bradley’s attitude. Collins, Eisenhower, and many of the senior British officers at SHAEF felt the same way. Well, with Montgomery held up in front of Caen, it now fell on the Americans to the right under General Bradley, the U.S. First Army: the 4th Infantry, the 29th Infantry, the 1st Infantry Division, and the two airborne divisions, 82nd, 101st, to effect a breakout from the Normandy Peninsula. This was about as bad a country as there is in the world for fighting an offensive action, or turning that around, it was just ideal for the defense. This was because the Norman countryside is filled with very small fields, many of them smaller than football fields, very few of them much bigger. These fields were surrounded by hedges. I don’t think of a little hedge in England or a little hedge in front of the house on Main Street in the Midwest of the United States. These hedges, or hedgerows, were a thousand years and more old. They consisted of piles of earth as much as six feet and even more in height—a couple of meters, very broad at the base, two, three meters—with trees and shrubs planted on top of them that had been there for centuries and whose roots had made these mounds, and almost a cement-kind of barrier. There was one entry into these fields, and one only that the farmer kept. It had a gate there, and that’s; he moved his cattle in and closed the gate, and the hedgerows were perfectly satisfactory, his fences. Now, for the attackers in this kind of a situation, it was just a nightmare.

GI, in the very first days, GIs would come to the gate, to the opening, and rush into the field. Well, the Germans had prepared for this. They had their machine guns at the ready from the gate on each corner with a crisscross fire through the field. They had mortar men behind who had zeroed in on the field, and they had 88s back further to the rear that had also sighted into the field. And they would wait until a bunch of GIs, maybe even a platoon in strength, got into that field. And then they would call out the fire order and just cut him down. How do you make primes in a situation like this? And these German troops may not have been the best that ever fought for Adolf Hitler, but, boy, they sure had good positions to fight from, and they were awfully good on the defensive. And also, these fields would be strewn with land mines. Well, one technique that was used was to drive a tank right into the gate, stop it there, and turn that 75-millimeter barrel onto the two corners and fire white phosphorus shells, which put the fear of God into everyone into the corners to take care of the machine guns, and then drive the tank around in the field. And those would be anti-personnel mines out there that the tank could safely explode without injuring itself and take the field that way. But the Germans caught onto that quick and often would hit that tank when it got into the… They had field communications, mainly under buried underground telephone lines so that they couldn’t be picked up by the eyes, and they’d get on the phone at the fire in the hedgerow and say, “The tank is just coming into the opening.” Right now. They’d have an 88 a mile or two back who zeroed in on that point, and they’d blast it and blast the tank away. The tanks, when they tried to come in from the sides of the gate, right as through the hedgerow itself, would hit that hedgerow, and then they’d go up in the air, climbing the hedgerow, so that at their apex they would have their underbellies exposed to Germans with handheld anti-tank rockets on the far side. And of course, the underbelly of a tank has no armor on it, so you could blow it up with one well-placed shot. The solution to this problem of fighting in the hedgerow country on the offensive came from enlisted men. And this was a characteristic of the U.S. Army in the Second World War that I would want to dwell on for a second. In the U.S. Army, every officer from second lieutenant on up had a suggestion box, either literally or figuratively, outside his door. They didn’t do it that way in the German. And the suggestion box worked time and time and time again. As American kids, privates, corporals, sergeants would figure out the solution to a tactical problem and suggest it to their immediate superior, who would pass it on up the chain of command, and till the end. It got to Bradley himself, and he would okay or veto the idea.

There were lots of them in Normandy. Many of them worked. The most famous was to take those steel rails that had formed the beach defenses at Utah and Omaha. They were only six feet long, and weld them on to the front of a tank with two prongs, so that the tank could drive into that hedgerow and those steel rails would penetrate and that would keep the tank from going belly up, and the tank then had enough engine power to drive on through that hedgerow, and then he could start using his 75-millimeter cannon. The tank captain could to hit those German machine gun positions with the white phosphorus and open up other entryways into the hedgerows. With this ingenious device, and as I say, quite a few others, the Americans started to make progress in Normandy. It was still slow and expensive because every field had to be fought for, couldn’t bypass any of them. Still, some progress was made almost every day. Nevertheless, the mood in the Allied world was becoming more and more pessimistic as June gave way to July, and July then began to approach its end, and Mani still hadn’t taken Caen. And on the right flank, Bradley’s troops were only inching their way forward at a cost reminiscent of the battles of the First World War.

And people thought of the First World War and were afraid, afraid of a stalemate that the Germans would keep the Allies bottled up in Normandy right on through to the coming of fall and even on into winter, which, along with all the other bad things that would result from such a situation—the loss of morale, the loss of life, the loss of equipment. Stalin would undoubtedly have thought, “You’re not serious about this attack. The so-called Second Front,” he would have said, “is doing us no good at all.” Beyond all those things, a stalemate imposed in Normandy lasting into the winner would have given her more time to develop his secret weapon, more time to perfect the diesel submarine, something on which the Germans had stolen a march on the U.S. and British Navy, give him time to complete the V-1, the pilotless aircraft radio-controlled that could carry bonds. More importantly, give Wernher von Braun and his team more time to develop the medium-range rockets, the so-called V-2—V stood for “vengeance weapons”—more time to develop the jet aircraft, where Germany was two years and even more ahead of the Allies of development.

And you’ve been listening to the late, great Stephen Ambrose tell one heck of a story about the D-Day invasion. By the way, there’s a part one. Go to OurAmericanStories.com or put in Stephen Ambrose and you’ll see not just the first part of D-Day, the story, but so many countless other terrific stories told by Ambrose, not just about World War II, but so many other things, like the Transcontinental Railroad and my favorite, Undaunted Courage, about the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

And what a story we were hearing.

Now, we have to remember with history that nobody knew then what was going to happen next. Would our troops be pinned down in Normandy? Well, Eisenhower didn’t know, Marshall didn’t know, the men didn’t know. And that’s why we love to tell these stories. Bring you back into the story itself as it was happening. When we come back, more of the story of D-Day here on Our American Story, and we continue with Our American Stories and with the story of the D-Day invasion brought to us by Stephen Ambrose. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

Desperate measures were called for. Eisenhower put great pressure on Mani to attack. “You’ve got to attack.” Mani finally said, “Give me all the air forces and I will attack.” Eisenhower gave him every plane that flew in England and put him to work in Operation Goodwood toward the end of July and bombing a stripped one-mile-by-eight-mile in front of Mani’s army outside of Caen. This huge bombardment was followed by an attack that Mani called off after the first hour because his losses were too heavy. Again, the argument: Mani saying, “I’m holding the German armor in my front.” The Americans saying, “We put everything we had under this attack, and you gained one mile.” One mile was gained after the biggest air bombardment the world has ever seen, and the anger at Montgomery boiled and boiled. There were demands on the part of American officers and some British officers that Eisenhower sacked Montgomery. “Send them home, let him go be the governor of Malta. Put him in the House of Lords, get rid of them. Get somebody that will make this British army fight.” Eisenhower always resisted such pressure. He recognized something that those who were making the recommendation did not.

That Money was a national hero, that the British press had built him up after the victory at El Alamein into a general whose stature was the equal to that of Wellington. That to fire Money in the middle of this battle after the success of D-Day would be unacceptable to the British government and to the British people. Money had to stay. Instead of putting pressure on Money, much less firing money, Eisenhower began putting the pressure on Bradley. Bradley then said, “Well, we’re almost to the edge of the hedgerow country. We’re almost out into open wheat fields, places where we can use our tanks can come into play, where the trucks that we’ve brought over all the way from Detroit can become a part of the action. We’re almost there. Give me an air bombardment to open up a path in the German defenses and I’ll break through.” Well, they’d been down that path once, but decided not with Bradley, “Let’s try it again.” So, towards the end of the campaign, Operation Cobra was laid on July 28th. Another huge bombardment by B-17s, B-24s, B-25s, with the fighter bombers getting in and the fighters coming down to strait right in front of the American lines.

This time, Eisenhower ordered the air commanders to keep that bombardment right on the noses of our front-line troops so that once it lifts, they can move into an area that has just been devastated, and any German still alive is suffering from concussion so badly that he won’t be able to fight. Well, they laid it on close. They laid it on so close that we took a lot of casualties, including a four-star general, General McNair, who was there to observe. “This is the last time I used big bombers in a tactical situation like that.” Taking casualties from your own planes as a terrible thing. War is awful anyway, but when it’s your own guy’s killing you, it really just is the very bottom. But it worked. It did blast that hole in the German lines. General Collins was able to break through and take the town of Saint-Lô. And now is the time to bring George Patton in on the game.

Patton had been eager, as you might imagine—eager doesn’t even begin to describe it—to get into this battle. Now, at the beginning of August, he brought his Third Army over, and Patton began to swing down into France, with the possibility now of going all the way straight through to Paris without opposition. Now, Hitler saw an opportunity. The Americans had a whole army out in the open. Germans didn’t have the airpower to do anything about that, but they sure had a lot more tanks than I had been able to bring a forward. Yet. Now Hitler directly did a, he thought, a brilliant counterstroke to attack the Americans along the line leading toward Mortain, to break through with tanks at Mortain to get to the coast, and to cut Patent off completely from his supply line.

This would reverse the situation: the Third Army would be forced to surrender. Out of gasoline, out of ammunition, out of food, out of medicine, it would have no choice but to surrender. The Germans could re-establish their line in Normandy and impose that stalemate that Hitler counted on to provide him with time to bring the new weapons into play. Now, the German generals weren’t happy with this plan, brilliant as it looked on paper. Rommel, incidentally, by now was no longer in the battle. Rommel had been injured when his car had been shot up by a Spitfire when it was traveling to his headquarters, and it had crashed, and he had cracked his skull and had a bad concussion and gone home to recuperate. Hitler’s relations with his generals by this time were in dis, to say the very least of it, because on the 20th of July, 1944, the German conspirators against Hitler had gone into action. Stauffenberg had set off a bomb in Hitler’s headquarters designed to eliminate Hitler so that the German generals could take over the German government, and then what they hoped would happen, would be that the Allies would embrace them, that they could have peace on their Western Front, and that they could then turn all of their forces to the east to stop the Red Tide that was coming in through Poland.

They even hoped, in their wildest fantasies, that the Americans and British would join them, and that you would have the spectacle of the German, American, British, and French army lining up to stop the advance of the Red Army into Central Europe. I say fantasy, and it really was. But you think about it, that’s basically what NATO is. That’s what ultimately happened. It wasn’t possible with Hitler’s Nazis. The German generals thought, hoped, prayed, dreamed, speculated that it might be possible with the Germany run by the General Staff. There was no way that was gonna happen. None of the Allied leaders were prepared to make peace with the German General Staff. There was going to have to be a revolution in Germany first, with not only Hitler overthrown, but militarism discarded, and a new democratic Germany could then emerge with whom we could do business, and eventually, obviously, we did, as they became the most important European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and nobody was ready for that in July of 1944.

But in any event, the plot against Hitler failed. Came that close. It’s one of the great what-ifs of all world history. And it’s the damndest story because Stauffenberg had his bomb and his briefcase and he had set it down on the side of the table leg with Hitler right next to it. Standing at this briefing table, they were all looking at maps, and Stauffenberg then had excused himself to go out and make a telephone call. “Look, there’s why I gotta go make a call back to the headquarters.” As he left, the officer standing on this side knocked over his briefcase accidentally with his foot, picked it up and set it down again on the side away from Hitler, with the big heavy wooden leg between the bomb and Hitler, so that when the bomb went off. Although Hitler suffered some injuries, he lost hearing in one of his ears, his arm was pretty badly hit. He suffered a bitter in the way of internal injuries. He survived, and of course he carried out vengeance against the conspiratories, which really included almost all the high-ranking officers in the German army.

Although some of them managed a duck and dodge. Rommel didn’t. Hitler had deep suspicions about Rommel’s involvement in the conspiracy. Actually, although Rommel was informed about it and was prepared to take advantage of it, he had advised against it. Rommel took the position that we ought to arrest Hitler and put him on trial; we shouldn’t kill him. “If we kill him, were going to make him into a martyr, and Germany, you’ll have another stab-in-the-back legend,” which was pretty good political thinking on the one side. But on the other side, the idea that in a totalitarian state run by people as ruthless and as shrewd and as determined as the Nazis, that these politically naive generals could get away with arresting Hitler and putting them on trial. That was nonsense. That was never gonna en.

And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to the Ambrose Estate for allowing us to share this audio with you. And by the way, go to Amazon or wherever you get your books, pick up Band of Brothers, pick up Undaunted Courage, pick up, well, just about anything Ambrose ever wrote. And by the way, what a story he tells. There are two things that…