Beetle: The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith

28. Normandy Deadlock

627  28  Normandy Deadlock In August Beetle Smith pronounced the war in the west “militarily” over. In part motivated by hubris—later diagnosed as “victory disease”—his analysis, though badly timed, proved correct. Two days before launching Neptune, Clark’s forces entered Rome. Of far greater significance, the Soviets had completed the destruction of Army Group Center in Belorussia, and the Red Army poured into the Baltic states, Poland, and Romania.1 Victory in Normandy —combined with Anvil—sealed the fate of German forces in France. From a purely instrumental point of view, Germany was finished militarily. But politically—and American generals rebuffed the commingling of political and military components—totalitarian Germany was far from done. Unanticipated successes bookended the Normandy campaign. Except for the failure to take Caen and the casualties on Omaha and in the American airdrops, the landings went exceptionally well, and the breakout from the lodgments and the rush to the Seine occurred with amazing suddenness. In between, the picture was not so pretty. The lack of appreciable gains in the fighting before Caen and in the hedgerows prompted much gnashing of teeth and caviling in high places; the final outcome remained problematical. Though never actually stalemated—Allied forces made continual advances— the push inland never matched the fanciful target dates set down in the plan. Smith later admitted, “Without Monty we could never had made the landings ,” but the idiosyncratic and obstreperous British ground commander and his plan remained at the epicenter of the maelstrom of controversy that swirled around his conduct of the campaign in Normandy.2 Monty and “The Plan” After months of frenetic labors, a strange quiet descended on SHAEF on D-day. Neither Eisenhower nor Smith could do anything; the fate 628  BEETLE of Neptune rested in the hands of others, principally the common soldiers , sailors, and airmen fighting to gain, hold, and extend the beachheads . Bracketed by prior airborne drops, five divisions landed on or near their appointed beaches and, except at Omaha, secured footholds with surprising ease. Screened by Sixth British Airborne Division east of the Orne Canal, the British First Corps moved from Sword and Juno toward its objective—the Norman capital Caen. On the other flank, two badly scattered American airborne divisions landed in the rear of Utah in the southeastern shoulder of the Cotentin peninsula. Although things went unpredictably well at Utah, the American assault units on Omaha succeeded in carving out only a dangerously thin beachhead by early evening. With their coastal fortifications breached, the Germans methodically triggered their defense plans, which chiefly meant shifting reserves from one sector to another. Furious rearguard and local counterattacks prevented the Allies from advancing toward their inland objectives or closing the gaps between the beaches; the British never took Caen, and the Americans made little progress sealing the Cotentin peninsula . By the end of D-day, 133,715 American, British, and Canadian troops had come through the beaches, and construction of the artificial harbors (Operation Mulberry) and submarine pipeline (Operation Pluto) were under way—all at the cost of 10,300 casualties, nearly 60 percent American. “Raining, wind. Supplies being delayed. 1st Div held up,” Hughes chronicled on 9 June. “Not much authentic news,” he noted. “SHAEF (Beetle) doesn’t get it until late.”3 Serious holes remained between the sectors, particularly on either side of Omaha Beach. Alarmed by the overly optimistic reporting of the invasion, Smith convened an impromptu press conference and emphasized the great difficulties that lay ahead. He opened by outlining the serious logistical bottlenecks created by the adverse weather conditions. As predicted, a nasty storm had entered the Channel. On the plus side, Smith said, the Germans faced the same problems, and “the bad break of the weather [had] not been fatal.” After explaining the tactical situation in the landing zones, Smith told the journalists that Caen remained in German hands. Summing up, he asked the newsmen to exercise restraint in their reporting, so as not to inflate false hope on the home front of a painless success.4 In the days following D-day, Smith could not escape the twin bugbears that would not go away—the logistics command issue and de Gaulle. Just as he had guessed, his D-day directive on American command and organization settled nothing. On 8 June Lee went to Eisenhower, asking for “a little firmer idea of General Eisenhower’s personal desires” regard- Normandy...