Behind the Invasion: Stephen Ambrose on the Work That Made D-Day Possible

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Hbib, 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; history is about people. Stephen Ambrose passed in two thousand and two, but his epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here in Our American Stories, thanks to those who run his estate. Here’s Ambrose with the D-Day Invasion, Part One. Let’s take a listen.

00:00:49
Speaker 2: The troops going in on D-Day morning, we’re brief to expect that when they got to the bluff that code-named Omaha, they would find it just blasted to smithereens, full of craters, all the defenses along the bluff destroyed, all the German defenders in the immediate area dead or wounded or so badly dazed by the bombardment that they would be incapable of offering any opposition. The men were told that swimming tanks would come in beside them, tanks that had rubber skirts on them that could be dropped when they got to the shoreline, and that the men should get behind these tanks, and they would work their way up the draws—these little dirt roads that led off the beach through the drainage system. There were five of them at Omaha, and after they had gotten to the top, following behind those tanks, then their battle would begin. But on the beach was going to be a cakewalk thanks to the naval and air bombardments that would precede the attack. In the event, the air bombardment was delayed by the pilots and the navigators, two fatal seconds, as they crossed over Omaha Beach. They were afraid of hitting their own men, so they didn’t hit that button so that the bombs would dropped right on the beach. They delayed, and the result was that an enormous tonnage of bombs, the equivalent to the herosion of bomb—about ten thousand tons—fell four, five, and six kilometers inland, killing a lot of cows, but doing no good at all for the attacking forces and disturbing the Germans and their defenses not a bit. The naval bombardment was also long, and the swimming tanks all sunk, or at least thirty-two out of thirty-five of them did. That turned out to be a terrible idea and was never repeated, so that the infantrymen going ashore in the first wave at Omaha Beach on the sixth of June, nineteen forty-four, were greeted by a hail of bullets and mortar rounds and rocket shells and heavy artillery that was as bad as anything any men in combat I have ever seen anywhere at any time. Entire platoons—thirty men—were wiped out before they ever even got out of their Higgins boats. The carnage among the junior officers was just dreadful because they had to lead the way out of those Higgins boats. Come to that, the carnage among the men was a terrible thing to behold. Company A of the one hundred and sixteenth Regiment, because the Virginia and Delaware and Maryland Guard outfit. Company A, most of whose members came from Bedford, Virginia, suffered ninety-five percent casuals in the first two minutes without firing a shot. Those who managed in the second and third waves to get across the beaches and behind the seawall found themselves about an hour and a half after the battle began, pressing against that seawall, which was composed of small round stones called shingles, and was as much as six feet high and two or three feet across at the base. That that provided some protection from plunging rifle fire coming from the infantrymen in the trenches up on the bluff, but it provided no protection from mortar rounds or from the heavy artillery that was sighted to fire inflay down the beach. That is, the big guns and the small ones too: the seventy-five millimeters; the eighty-eight, one hundred and fives in their casements were sighted to fire straight down the beach, not out to sea. They weren’t there to get into a duel with the Navy’s gunners. They were there to destroy tanks and half-tracks and men on the beach itself. So that these guys huddled at the seawall wondering where in the hell or the tanks, and where were all those craters that the Air Force was going to create, and come to that, where was all the destruction that was going to be wrecked on the German army? Where all that was? We’re taking very heavy casualties now as they lay there at the seawall. They were disorganized. Men from different regiments, even from different divisions, were mixed together. Naval Signal Corps men were mixed in with medics, who were mixed in with artillerymen, who were mixed in with infantrymen. In some areas you had no officer leadership at all, and others you had four, five junior officers, baby a colonel, and no enlisted men. This was a great test of democracy. The question down there on that beak at about eight hundred on the morning of June sixth, nineteen forty-four, was: could a democracy produce young men tough enough to stand up to combat, to take on the Wehrmacht on its home territory? Had the division-building system that George Marshall put into effect works? Was the Twenty-ninth Division, the First Division, and over at Utah Beach the Fourth Infant Division up to this challenge? The answer turned out to be that they were. The minute Omaha Beag, one by one, came to the conclusion, “I can’t stay here, I can’t retreat. There ain’t gonna be any tanks coming in for me to follow up that bluff. I’m not gonna be able to get up those exits; they’re way too heavily defended. We got to go up the bluff on foot.” The bluff was steep enough that a vehicle couldn’t climb it, but a man on foot cut. That bluff was crisscrossed with trenches. This was as bad as World War I. Barbed wire in front of the men, minefields behind the barbed wire, and then as the bluff began, a whole series of trenches with German machine gunners and German riflemen well protected firing down on them. In this situation, then said to themselves, “Well, I ain’t gonna just die here. I’m gonna take some of them with me.” And he would look to his right and look to his left and say, “Come on, let’s go. Let’s get up this bluff.” And over here a group of five, and over there a group of seven, and somewhere else a group of ten—sometimes led by a corporal, sometimes led by a private first class, sometimes led a colonel—started working their way up that bluff. They seized the initiative and accepted the responsibility and went to war. This was the triumph of the United States Army in the Second World War. They had been high school and college students three and even just two years earlier. Now, in their first taste of combat, they had been thrown a challenge it can only be compared to World War I and that awful trench warfare. And they met that challenge, and they rose up, and they drove up that bluff, and they overcame the Germans and their trenches, and gained the high ground.

00:08:40
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to the late, great Stephen Ambrose tell the story of what happened on Omaha Beach. And my goodness, the boys had real expectations, those boys who were storming those beaches: that the beach would be clear, that the Germans would be blasted out of their positions, that these water tanks, these swimming tanks, could be up on that beachfront, and they’d be behind them. Well, none of that worked out. The swimming tanks sunk. The naval and air bombardments that were supposed to blast that beach, well, they were way off target. And then the question was: could democracy produce the kinds of young men that could storm those bluffs anyway? The answer was a resounding yes. As Ambrose said, many of them thought, “If I’m going to die here, I’m going to take some of those Nazis with me” when we come back. More of this remarkable story of these young men, just years out of high school and college. Their heroism, their attitudes—absolutely American in every respect. Their story continues, and the D-Day story continues here on Our American Stories. And we returned to Our American Stories and the story of D-Day. Let’s return to Stephen Ambrose and pick up where we last left off.

00:10:19
Speaker 2: Over on Utah Beach, they were landed a klimeter and more south of where they were supposed to be. General Teddy Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt’s son, and General Jim Van Fleet, who were both in the first wave. Teddy Roosevelt was the oldest man to go ashore on D-Day at age fifty-five. He looked at their maps, looked at the church people in front of us, and thought, “Hell, we’re in the wrong place.” If they’d have been German officers, I guarantee you they would have gotten on the radio and called out to the Ancon, which was Bradley’s command ship, and asked, “What the hell do we do now?” It never occurred to them to get on that radio and to ask for orders. They had an immediate problem to deal with, and they dealt with it. They made the decision: “We’ll start the war from right here. Let’s go move inland. To hell with the plan!” just as the men at Omahaat had to say, “To hell with the plan!” And they too seized an initiative and accepted a responsibility and drove inland. By the end of D-Day, the Americans, the British, and the Canadians and manager land one hundred seventy-five thousand men. Nowhere had they penetrated more than three, at the most four, kilometers inland, but everywhere they were ashore. And now this great logistical buildup that had taken place in England from the United States could swing into motion. Using those LSTs, all of them a year old or younger, just built for this purpose, could bring in the tanks and the trucks, and the half-tracks and the artillery, and the men land him on an open beach. This was something that the Germans had never anticipated: it would be possible to support and supply a great army over an open beach, but thanks to the LST, it was possible to do it. In the afternoon, the Germans tried to counterattack with their Panzers. It got pounded by naval gunfire and by Allied Air Forces and was stopped that afternoon. Ronald drove from Germany, where he had been visiting his wife on her birthday, and got to the battle scene as dusk fell on the night of D-Day. He immediately began bombarding Hitler for request to bring the tanks that were in the Pot of Calais down across the Seine River and into the battle. Hitler took some persuading on this. Hibber was as fooled by Operation Fortitude as everybody in the German General Staff had been, and he, like they, continued to anticipate that the real invasion was going to take place at the Pot of Calais, that what was happening in Normandy was a faint designed by the Allies to induce the Germans to bring their tanks south and west of the Seine River before the real invasion, headed by Patent coming out of dover, landed at the Pot of Calais. Ramo was insisting, “This is it, this is where the battle is going to be fought. Not get me those tanks.” We’re talking about a few thousand tanks here in numbers, Timmor. Finally, at the end of the third day, when the battle in Normandy was stalemated—that is, the Germans were unable to penetrate the Allied outer ring, but the Allies were unable to press on inland and create room to bring all this equipment across from me. With the battle in a stalemate situation, on the third day, Ramo finally convinced Hitler to release the tanks, and they began starting up their engines and preparing to move off, bringing their own bridges with him to come down and bridge the Seine River and throw themselves into the battle on the Allied left flank—that is, against the British—with every hope of success, because the Allies had not yet been able to get enough room to land very many tanks of their own and almost no heavy artillery. But as those tanks were warming up, preparing to move, a message arrived from our old friend Garble, the double agent, the Spaniard, who was working for the British Secret Service, and who had been telling the Germans right along all through the spring there was this enormous buildup in Dover. Pat was the commander for the invasion, and that it was going to come at the Potto Calais. Now, Garbo’s reputation with the German intelligence people was exceptionally high at this moment because of a very great risk that Eisenhower had taken. On the night of June five to six, after I could said goodbye to the paratroopers and gone back to his tent to spend a few hours sleeping before laying down, he had approved another message from Garbo. This one went out at midnight June five six, nineteen forty-four. In it, Garbo told his controller in Hamburg that the invasion was coming at dawn in Normandy. He named the divisions that would be involved. He even had the code names that the Allies were using for the beaches. He had it all right, and he had just given away the biggest secret of the war, even as the Allied ships were starting to cross the Channel and as Allied paratroopers began jumping out of their SEE forty-seven’s. That message had to be decoded at Hamburg. Then it had to be sent on to the fur a’s headquarters in Burke Descoten, near Salzburg. There it had to be put on paper and brought to the Furor, except someone had to make the toughest decision in Nazi Germany. First, that decision was: do we wake up the fur or not? In this case, they thought, “We’d better,” and they woke up the Furr, and he read the message, and he said, “Well, for God’s sakes, tell them in Normandy,” which was done. The message was encoded and sent on to Paris, and then telephoned forward to the regimental command post in Normandy, and finally telephoned forward to the bunkers on the Cannel coast, so that at first light on June sixth, the message would come in to these bunkers where the men would be looking out to see what their binoculars. And the message said, “Look out, the invasion is coming and is coming to Normandy.” And they looked at it, and they said, “Oh my God,” because what they saw was five thousand ships coming right at them. In short, Garbo’s message didn’t arrive soon enough to do any good, but it’s sure as hell raised the German’s opinion of Garbo. Now, three days later, Garbo sent another message, as those tanks of Romels were warming up, ready to drive to the sound of the guns. Garbo’s next message on June ninth thread, “I have checked with all of my sub agents, and we are all agreed that the attack in Normandy is a faint. The real attack is going to come in the Potta cala after you move your tanks south and west of the Seine River.” In support of this, he pointed out that Paton wasn’t involved in Normandy. In support of this, he pointed into all of the units in Dover—these fectational units that he had built in the mind of the German intelligence over the preceding months. None of those units were involved, and Shorty told him to look out for Calais, because that’s where the real attack is going to come. Piver read that message and immediately sent a stop order to Ramo: “Leave the tanks where they are!” With that, Germany lost her best chance to throw the Allies back into the scene.