II.

Origins of D-Day

In spring 1942, just months after the United States entered the war raging in Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt informed Soviet premier Joseph Stalin that he expected the formation of a second front against Germany that very year. At that point the only front against the Germans was the eastern front in which Soviet forces were fighting German and other Axis forces that had driven deep into the territory of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Roosevelt’s assurance proved wishful thinking, but it was the best the United States could offer the USSR, which was confronting the concentrated might of the German Army, known as the Wehrmacht. Russians were dying by the hundreds of thousands, and Roosevelt knew that a Soviet defeat meant the end of any meaningful resistance to the juggernaut led by German dictator Adolf Hitler.

In 1942 United States military leaders were pressing their British allies for an attack across the English Channel into occupied France by spring 1943. As the ferocious Battle of Stalingrad raged in late 1942, U.S. officials pressured the British to prepare for the invasion of France. The motive was to siphon German military strength away from the USSR. Reluctantly, the British agreed to a plan called Operation Roundup, scheduled for 1943. But later, the British demonstrated that Allied forces did not yet have the massive forces, ships, landing craft, and supplies needed for a cross-channel invasion. The British shifted the Allied focus from France to an attack on German forces in North Africa and an eventual invasion of Italy, Germany’s ally, from the Mediterranean Sea.

Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill tried to appease a furious Stalin by increasing lend-lease aid to the USSR and calling for Germany’s “unconditional surrender.” The call for an unconditional surrender was meant to assure Stalin that Britain and the United States would never agree to a separate, negotiated peace agreement with Germany. For Stalin, all this was window dressing. What he needed was a second front to relieve his blood-drained nation from the German onslaught.

The subsequent Allied victory in North Africa in May 1943 delayed the D-Day invasion in France by a year and affected it in another way as well. German field marshal Erwin Rommel, the respected strategist known as the “Desert Fox,” had lost North Africa, but in Germany he was still regarded as a hero. Hitler ordered Rommel to inspect fortifications along the Atlantic coast from the French border with Spain to the Dutch border with Germany: the defense installation known as the Atlantic Wall.

The Nazis were well aware that the Allies were considering an invasion across the English Channel, so Rommel was soon given direct responsibility for defending northern France, Belgium, and Holland against an Allied landing. It was a job better suited to a spider, who could spin a web and wait for prey, than to a fox, at his best on the move as he was as a commander of a tank corps in North Africa. Rommel diligently made improvements to fortifications along the coast and tried to anticipate the Allies’ next move.

Until the spring of 1943, the Allies were unsure when a cross-channel invasion might be possible. An effective planning team under British lieutenant general Sir Frederick E. Morgan started analyzing the possibilities in March 1943. In the meantime, the United States continued to press its impatience upon the British. They did so not through diplomacy but through massive deployment of troops and supplies.

By June 1943 German U-boats had been largely defeated by Allied antisubmarine sea and air patrols and had withdrawn from the North Atlantic where they had taken a merciless toll on U.S. merchant ships carrying supplies to Britain. After the defeat of the U-boats, the sea lane was largely safe for the flow of supplies and equipment from the United States to supply depots throughout Britain. Certain locations in Britain became one large staging area, with tanks lined up in rows literally by the mile, and fighter planes disappearing into the distance like some sort of abstract painting. D-Day was obviously coming, but it awaited a firm plan and the commanders to carry it out.

Finally, in late November 1943, a course was set at the Tehrān Conference between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in Iran, where the British finally concurred with the Soviets and the Americans that the time had come for the invasion. A D-Day offensive in Europe had become an imperative. At Tehrān, the three Allied leaders formally agreed to go on the offensive on the western front. “The history of war does not know an undertaking comparable to it for breadth of conception, grandeur of scale, and mastery of execution,” Stalin later claimed. The strategy had to encompass two major challenges: to cross some hundred miles of open water with a vast army and then fight a battle on a scale never attempted before.