Fowler D-Day: Preparation for Overlord

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-909160-50-7
Verlag: Amber Books Ltd
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 129 Seiten

Reihe: D-Day: The First 24 Hours

In any military operation throughout history, few 24-hour periods have been as crucial as that of 6th June 1944. With the aid of specially commissioned maps, D-Day: The First 24 Hours series gives the dramatic history of the first 24 hours of the Normandy landings, and explains in detail the events that occurred in each landing zone. In this first volume of the series, the book describes the build-up to the landings themselves, the German preparations for defending the French coastline, and the reasons behind the final Allied decision to attack in Normandy on 6 June 1944.

With colour and black & white photographs, the book is a guide to key events in the first 24 hours of the D-Day landings that saw the Allies successfully achieve a foothold in Northern Europe.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fowler, Will

Leseproben

Following the Allied landings in June 1944, many men who had been uncommitted joined the Resistance, forming groups like this one in a French courtyard. They carry a mixture of British-supplied and captured German small arms. CHAPTER TWO
INTELLIGENCE
AND
RESISTANCE
Before the first Allied soldiers had landed in France, the war was already being fought on land. The French Resistance gathered intelligence, sustained national morale and launched attacks against German forces. Allied intelligence officers from the American OSS and British SOE assisted in these operations and would later ensure drops of weapons and explosives to remote areas. Resistance came at a price, and many men and women were executed or transported to concentration camps by the Germans. THE ALLIES ENJOYED a unique intelligence advantage over the Germans since they had constructed copies of the German electronic encryption machine known as Enigma and broken the codes used by the German Armed Forces. Intercepted traffic included such routine messages as unit strengths, ration and ammunition requests. With this information, the Allies were able to build up a good picture of the German Army’s order of battle on the other side of the Channel. They were also assisted by reports from the French Resistance and by USAAF and RAF reconnaissance missions which provided high- and low-level photographs of the obstacles and fortifications under construction. Low-level sorties, which were far more hazardous than the fast, high-altitude flights, produced photographs which were taken from an oblique angle that allowed seamen and soldiers to analyse coastal features and routes off designated beaches. As part of the deception plans, for every mission flown over Normandy, two were flown over the Pas de Calais. Once the invasion was launched, air reconnaissance became intense – on the night of 6–7 June, the 10th Photo Reconnaissance Group alone handled 10,000 prints. For the German forces in Europe in early 1944, there were two simple questions to which they needed answers: where would the Allies land, and when would this happen? The Allies were not only helped by the Ultra intercepts but by the Japanese embassy in Berlin, which sent regular detailed reports about the German work on coastal defences by radio to Tokyo. Their codes had been broken and Allied intelligence teams were able to build up a very detailed picture of the Atlantic Wall, in some cases down to the location of machine gun and mortar positions. The knowledge, learned via Ultra, that U-boats were now being kept in port in France in preparation for an Allied invasion, allowed the US to send bigger convoys across the Atlantic in 1944. Better still, the Kriegsmarine had transmitted details of the offshore minefields that had been laid in the Bay of the Seine. With this information, safe lanes could be identified for the invasion fleets to pass through. So the armies on both sides of the Channel knew that 1944 would be a decisive year. In the middle of April, the Allies learned that the Germans were convinced that an attack would be launched in the next four weeks. However, the staff officers with the Kriegsmarine were adamant that the Allies would need five consecutive days of good weather. Moon, tides and weather, as well as the perceived strength of the Anglo-American armies in Britain, pointed to mid-April as the most likely date and to the relief of the German garrisons, this date came and passed without incident. General Heinz Guderian in his half-track command post during the invasion of France in 1940. His half-track carries a variety of radios and an Enigma encryption machine, seen in the bottom left of the photograph. The Germans were convinced that Enigma was completely secure. On 8 May, a decoded message from Luftflotte III caused Allied planners real worries when it identified from the pattern of Allied bombing that the likely area for landings would be the coast between Le Havre and Cherbourg. The German Army, however, continued to believe that landings would be further north, near Dieppe or Calais. ENIGMA The Enigma was a highly sophisticated mechanical encryption system that superficially looked like a typewriter. The German engineer, Arthur Scherbius, developed it in 1923 from a design by a Dutchman HA Koch. The German Army and Navy saw its potential and bought it in 1929. They believed that it would make the transmission of radio messages faster and completely secure. In its simplest form, for every letter it sent there were hundreds of millions of possible solutions. However, the Germans forgot how few letters there are in the alphabet; that no letter could stand for itself; and that the machine had no number keys, so figures had to be spelled out. The Polish Army began reading some signals in 1932, the French intelligence services in 1938 and the British in February 1940. For the British, the secrecy of the project was at such a high level that they classified it as ‘Ultra Secret’ and so it became known as ‘Ultra’. On 1 June 1944, the Anglo–American team at Bletchley Park began to use the world’s first computer to break German codes. Developed at the Post Office Research Laboratory at Dollis Hill, it was code-named ‘Colossus’ because of its enormous size. It came into service just in time to speed up operations on D-Day. The secret of where and when the landings would take place, was, of course, closely guarded. ‘If the enemy obtains as much as 48 hours’ warning of the location of the assault area, the chances of success are small,’ warned Lt Gen Frederick Morgan, Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC) planning team. He concluded: ‘Any longer warning spells certain defeat.’ All the maps and plans of the invasion beaches were marked ‘Bigot’. This was a classification higher than Top Secret. Officers who had been cleared to work on the plans were given a special security clearance – ‘Bigoted’. This curious code word was an anagram of the words ‘To Gib’ that had been stamped on the papers of officers destined for Gibraltar and the subsequent invasion of North Africa in November 1942. However, even the strictest security precautions can have unexpected leaks. Sidney Dawe, a 54-year-old man who created crosswords for a British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, started using clues for words that worried Bigot security staff. They were all code names in Operation Overlord. On 2 May, the word ‘Utah’ appeared, two weeks later ‘Omaha’, then ‘Mulberry’ and when he offered ‘Neptune’ he was arrested and interrogated. He was no enemy agent, only an innocent school physics teacher who appeared to have stumbled on the words by chance. Forty years later, it was revealed that the words had been picked up by one of his pupils, who, as an inquisitive small boy, had loitered around US camps and bases near Leatherhead. Amazingly, he had picked up the words, but unaware of their significance, offered them to his teacher as unusual words for the crossword. As a further aid to security, civilian travel between Britain and Eire was halted and from April, a coastal belt 16km (10 miles) deep stretching from the Wash to Land’s End and either side of the Firth of Forth was closed to all but authorized travellers. ICI LONDRES
In Britain, soldiers rehearsed amphibious and air landing tactics exhaustively but had only a vague idea of where they would be landing. With only a few reconnaissance aircraft, the Germans were forced to rely on intercepts of Allied radio traffic in southern Britain to provide intelligence. They learned a lot about real units, but also picked up false radio traffic. However, the most critical piece of intelligence came through the interrogation of captured French Resistance workers. The Germans knew that among the messages personnels broadcast to occupied France by BBC Radio-Londres were two parts of a poem by Verlain: Les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne It would be followed by the words, Blessent mon coeur d’une langeur monotone. The first alerted Resistance groups that the landings were imminent, and the second told them to begin operations that night, including attacks on road and rail communications. The Germans, notably the signals intelligence unit at Gen Salmuth’s Fifteenth Army headquarters at Tourcoing, knew that the two-part message was significant. The message was hidden among many others including such cryptic sentences as ‘Mathurin likes spinach’, ‘Acid makes litmus paper turn red’ and ‘My wife has sharp eyesight’. Some of these were secret instructions and others were invented and included to confuse the Germans. Cradling his Bren Light Machine Gun, a member of the French Resistance strikes a pose after D-Day. The robust reliable Bren LMG was an ideal weapon for the Resistance. Though it had a slow rate of fire, it was very forgiving of rough handling and dirt. At the Fifteenth Army headquarters, the signallers had logged the first message, broadcast on 1 June and repeated on the following three days. Then on 5 June, the second message went out on the BBC at 12:15, 21:20, 22:00 and 21:15 hours. Most German officers thought that the messages were only a general call for attacks by rail workers in France. Field Marshal von Rundstedt simply did not believe that, in his words, ‘General Eisenhower would announce the invasion over the BBC!’ In Admiral Krancke’s naval...