The night before the invasion

On the night of 5/6 June 1944 Operation Overlord – the Allied invasion of occupied France – began. Before the first landing craft reached the Normandy beaches at dawn on 6 June, a battle had been raging in the dark for several hours over the coast and its hinterland. According to the operational diary of RAF Bomber Command, more than a thousand bombers dropped some 5,000 tons of bombs on ten coastal artillery batteries between Cherbourg and the mouth of the Orne. At the same time transport aircraft and gliders carried three airborne divisions inland: the British 6th Airborne Division east of the Orne, and the American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions on to the Cotentin peninsula. Other aircraft and small vessels simulated landings where none were to take place, and the French Resistance, alerted by prearranged messages broadcast by the BBC, set about cutting railway lines and telephone cables.

Popular chronologies record under 3 June daily bombing of the Cherbourg peninsula and the Normandy area, and under 5 June two things: that Operation Overlord began when more than a thousand British bombers dropped 5,000 tons of bombs on German batteries, and that the first Allied troops landed in Normandy, with paratroopers scattered “from Caen southwards”. The first two entries agree with the sources, though they need some qualification. The third must be corrected: the paratroopers landed north-east of Caen and on the Cotentin peninsula, far to the west of the city, not south of it. The aircraft carrying them took off from England on the evening of 5 June, but the first paratroopers and gliders were on the ground at a quarter past midnight, that is, already on 6 June. The night therefore belongs to both dates.

The last days of bombing

The entry about “daily bombing of the Cherbourg peninsula and the Normandy area” describes the final phase of an air campaign that had been going on since the spring. From March heavy bombers had been smashing the French and Belgian railway network, and in May fighter-bombers hunted locomotives and brought down the bridges over the Seine. In the last days before the invasion the weight of the attacks shifted to the coast itself: to coastal artillery batteries, radar stations, road junctions and airfields within reach of the beaches. Bombers of the US Eighth and Ninth Air Forces attacked by day and RAF Bomber Command by night, while all tactical air operations were directed by Air Chief Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, commander of the Allied Expeditionary Air Force.

The daily raids on Normandy were not as straightforward as the terse chronology entries suggest, however. The planners had to bomb the defences of the future landing area without giving it away to the Germans. Therefore – according to the official history of the US Army Air Forces, a collective work edited by Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate – for every target attacked in the invasion area at least two were attacked outside it, mainly in the Pas-de-Calais, where the Germans expected the main blow. The same principle applied to the raids on radar: most of the stations on the Channel coast were destroyed or damaged at the end of May and the beginning of June, but some sites north of the Seine were deliberately spared. They were meant to “see” the phantom fleets of the invasion night.

On the Cotentin peninsula, where the American divisions were to land, the main targets were the batteries at Saint-Martin-de-Varreville, Crisbecq and La Pernelle, which dominated the future Utah Beach, together with anti-aircraft positions and barracks further inland. Between 3 and 5 June the stormy weather that led to the postponement of the invasion restricted flying but did not stop it. The bombing also claimed victims among French civilians living near the targets; its full scale came only in the days and weeks after the landings, when bombs fell on the towns of Normandy themselves.

The decision and the take-off

In the early hours of 5 June, at another conference at Southwick House, General Dwight Eisenhower confirmed that the invasion would take place the following day: the meteorologists were predicting a brief improvement in the weather on the night of 5/6 June. Throughout the day convoy after convoy left the ports of southern England, and minesweepers began clearing ten channels across the Channel to the Bay of the Seine.

In the evening Eisenhower drove to Greenham Common airfield near Newbury, from which men of the US 101st Airborne Division were taking off, and talked with the paratroopers. At the end of May Leigh-Mallory had warned him that the airborne landing on the Cotentin would end in slaughter – according to Eisenhower’s memoirs, he predicted the loss of half the paratroopers and 70 per cent of the gliders. Eisenhower heard the warning but did not change the plan, because without the paratroopers the landing on Utah risked disaster. That same day he wrote a short note in case of failure, taking full responsibility for any withdrawal of the troops from the coast. He got the date wrong in it, writing “July 5”. The note never had to be used.

Verlaine’s poem

On the evening of 5 June the BBC’s French service broadcast – as it did every day in its programmes for occupied France – a long series of “personal messages”: sentences with no apparent meaning that served as prearranged orders for particular Resistance networks. That evening there were exceptionally many of them. They set in motion sabotage plans prepared months in advance: Plan Vert provided for cutting railway lines, Plan Violet telephone and telegraph lines, and Plan Tortue for delaying German columns on the roads.

The most famous of these messages came from Paul Verlaine’s poem “Chanson d’automne” (Autumn Song). The opening lines – about “the long sobs of the violins of autumn” – had been broadcast by the BBC on 1 June, and the continuation, “wound my heart with a monotonous languor”, on the evening of 5 June. According to most accounts it meant that the invasion would come within 48 hours. M. R. D. Foot, historian of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), pointed out that these lines were in fact an order for one particular network, not a general signal to the whole French underground – but legend made them the symbol of the entire night.

The Germans knew what the message meant, probably thanks to agents within the Resistance. The Fifteenth Army’s signals intelligence section, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Hellmuth Meyer, picked up the second part of the poem at a quarter past nine in the evening and reported it to higher command. The Fifteenth Army, defending the coast from the Seine to the Pas-de-Calais, went on alert. The Seventh Army, in whose sector Normandy lay, received no alarm. After many earlier false alarms, the higher commands drew no conclusions from the report.

Fleets that did not exist

The invasion deception plan, Fortitude, had for months been persuading the Germans that the main blow would fall on the Pas-de-Calais and that Normandy would at most be a diversion – one of the key strands of the preparations for D-Day. On the night of the invasion it was supplemented by tactical operations intended to confuse the German defences in the decisive hours. In Operation Taxable, Lancasters of No. 617 Squadron RAF – the same squadron that a year earlier had breached the dams of the Ruhr – circled over the Channel for several hours on precisely calculated courses, each circuit edging closer to the coast, dropping strips of aluminium foil (“Window”). On German radar screens the cloud of foil looked like a large convoy moving at the speed of ships towards Cap d’Antifer near Fécamp, north of the mouth of the Seine. Beneath it sailed small motor launches with balloons that reflected radar waves and transmitters imitating the radio traffic of a fleet. Operation Glimmer, flown by Stirlings of No. 218 Squadron, simulated in the same way a convoy heading for Boulogne, while Big Drum jammed radar on the western flank of the real fleet, off the coast of the Cotentin.

At the same time Operation Titanic was under way. Aircraft of the RAF’s special duties squadrons dropped hundreds of dummy paratroopers – known as “Paragons”, and to the soldiers as “Ruperts” – together with devices imitating the sound of gunfire. The largest drop, Titanic I, simulated the landing of a whole division north of the Seine, around Yvetot. Smaller drops fell east of the Dives and west of Caen, and Titanic IV – some two hundred dummies and two small teams of the British SAS – near Marigny and Saint-Lô.

The effects of these operations are assessed differently. According to British studies, Taxable and Glimmer provoked only a limited response – searchlights, sporadic fire, a few reconnaissance aircraft – which some historians attribute to the bad weather and the complexity of the operations themselves. The effect of Titanic IV is better documented: a battle group from the 915th Grenadier Regiment, the reserve of the German 352nd Infantry Division, spent the morning of 6 June combing the woods for a non-existent landing instead of moving towards the beaches where the Americans were coming ashore.

A thousand bombers over the batteries

The heaviest blow that night was struck by Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris’s Bomber Command. According to the command’s operational diary, compiled by Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt, 1,012 aircraft – 551 Lancasters, 412 Halifaxes and 49 Mosquitoes – were sent against ten coastal batteries: at Fontenay-sur-Mer, Houlgate, La Pernelle, Longues-sur-Mer, Maisy, Merville, Mont Fleury, Pointe du Hoc, Ouistreham and Saint-Martin-de-Varreville. Of these, 946 dropped their bombs; three aircraft were lost. The load, estimated at some 5,000 tons, was the largest the RAF had yet dropped in a single night. In all, including the deception operations, radio countermeasures and raids on other targets, Bomber Command flew more than 1,200 sorties that night.

The reference to “more than a thousand British bombers” and “5,000 tons” agrees with these figures, although not all the crews were British – Canadian, Australian and New Zealand squadrons took part in the raid, as did two French heavy bomber squadrons from Elvington. Yet neither the raid nor its tonnage decided the fate of the batteries. Most of the targets were obscured by cloud; according to the same sources, the crews had good visibility only over La Pernelle and Ouistreham. The concrete casemates proved resistant even to heavy bombs, and many bombs fell in the fields and on the villages behind the coast. Some guns fell silent only under naval gunfire or after assaults by infantry and paratroopers.

Paratroopers east of the Orne

In Operation Tonga Major General Richard Gale’s British 6th Airborne Division was to cover the left flank of the invasion: to seize the bridges over the Orne and the Caen Canal, destroy the bridges over the Dives to hinder the approach of German reserves from the east, and knock out the Merville battery, which could shell Sword Beach. The first to strike was Major John Howard’s force from D Company, 2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. Six Horsa gliders cast off over the coast; the first three landed at about 12.16 a.m. right beside the swing bridge over the canal at Bénouville – later Pegasus Bridge – two beside the bridge over the Orne at Ranville, and one, through a navigational error, some 11 kilometres away on the Dives. After a few minutes’ fighting both bridges were in British hands, intact. In the attack on the canal bridge Lieutenant Den Brotheridge was killed; he is often named as the first soldier of the Allied ground forces to die in the invasion.

The main body of the division jumped from about 12.50 a.m., and here bad weather, anti-aircraft fire and navigational errors scattered the paratroopers over a wide area; many came down in the meadows of the Dives valley, which the Germans had flooded, and some of them drowned. The worst affected was Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway’s 9th Parachute Battalion, assigned to capture the Merville battery. Of some 600 men, only about 150 had reached the rendezvous by 2.50 a.m., without heavy weapons and most of their explosives. Otway attacked nonetheless. The battery was taken, but after the fight only about 75 of the attackers were still on their feet. It turned out that the casemates held not heavy 150 mm guns, as intelligence had believed, but older Czechoslovak 100 mm howitzers. The paratroopers disabled the guns as far as their remaining explosives allowed and before 5 a.m. withdrew from the battery, on which the cruiser HMS Arethusa was to open fire at dawn. On the German side some 22 defenders were killed and a similar number taken prisoner.

Despite being scattered, the division had accomplished its main tasks by morning: the bridges over the Dives at Troarn, Bures, Robehomme and Varaville had been blown, and the bridgehead between the Orne and the Dives, with the bridges at Bénouville and Ranville, was held until commandos and infantry arrived from Sword Beach.

The Americans on the Cotentin

On the western flank, far from Caen, two American divisions jumped. Major General Maxwell Taylor’s 101st Airborne Division was to seize the causeways leading inland from Utah Beach across the flooded meadows and to cover the Carentan area from the south. Major General Matthew Ridgway’s 82nd Airborne Division was to take Sainte-Mère-Église and the crossings of the River Merderet. According to American studies, in two parachute missions, Albany and Boston, some 800 C-47 aircraft carried more than 13,000 paratroopers, and before dawn they were joined by more than a hundred gliders carrying anti-tank guns and equipment. The first pathfinder teams jumped at a quarter past midnight; the men of the 101st Division jumped from 12.48 a.m., those of the 82nd from 1.51 a.m.

Over the west coast of the Cotentin the transport formations flew into an unexpected bank of cloud and immediately afterwards into anti-aircraft fire. The formations broke up; the pilots – many of them without combat or night-flying experience – changed course and altitude, and many dropped their men too early, too late or at too high a speed. Of twenty formations, nine went into the cloud, and these were the most widely scattered. Paratroopers landed many kilometres from their designated zones, some in the sea or in the flooded meadows along the Merderet and the Douve, where they drowned under the weight of their equipment. The 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment landed most accurately, the 508th worst of all. According to American studies, after twenty-four hours the 101st Division’s headquarters controlled only about 2,500 of the 6,000 men who had jumped.

The scattering had another side, however. Small groups of paratroopers, gathered by chance, cut telephone lines and attacked patrols and vehicles, while German commanders received reports of landings from all over the peninsula and could not judge their scale. At about 4.30 a.m. the 3rd Battalion of the 505th Regiment, guided by a local Frenchman, took Sainte-Mère-Église – often described as one of the first towns in France liberated during the invasion. The bridges over the Merderet at La Fière and Chef-du-Pont could not be taken and held on the first day, but by morning the exits of the causeways behind Utah Beach were largely in American hands, which made it easier for the 4th Infantry Division to get off the beach.

The Germans in the dark

The German side entered that night unprepared more because of circumstances than for lack of fortifications. Luftwaffe meteorologists, deprived of data from the western Atlantic, concluded that the storm would make a landing impossible for days. The Kriegsmarine cancelled its night patrols in the Channel. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commander of Army Group B, who for six months had been strengthening the Atlantic Wall, had left his headquarters at La Roche-Guyon on 4 June for his home in Herrlingen near Ulm – his wife’s birthday fell on 6 June – and then intended to ask Hitler to move additional panzer divisions closer to the coast. The headquarters of General Friedrich Dollmann’s Seventh Army had scheduled a staff exercise at Rennes for 6 June, so some divisional and regimental commanders spent the night away from their troops. One of them, Generalleutnant Wilhelm Falley of the 91st Infantry Division, turned back to his headquarters during the night and was killed in an ambush by American paratroopers near Picauville – the first German general to die in the invasion.

The first reports of paratroopers reached German headquarters shortly after one in the morning. The Seventh Army headquarters declared the highest state of alert, and its chief of staff, Generalmajor Max Pemsel, believed as early as about 2.15 a.m. that the main operation was beginning. At Army Group B headquarters and at Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Command West, however, the prevailing view was that this was a diversion before the real blow in the Pas-de-Calais – and the reports of dummy “landings” and radar “fleets” only reinforced it. Before dawn Rundstedt asked for the release of two panzer divisions from the High Command reserve, but Adolf Hitler’s headquarters did not give its consent; the divisions were released only in the afternoon of 6 June. Rommel learned of the invasion by telephone in the morning and got back to the front only in the evening.

Its place in the war

The night of 5/6 June 1944 determined the conditions in which the assault on the beaches began. The bombing of the batteries achieved less than it promised, and the paratroopers were scattered more widely than any plan had foreseen. Even so, both flanks of the invasion were covered by morning: the bridges over the Orne and the causeways behind Utah were in Allied hands, and the German command – surprised, dispersed and convinced that the real blow was still to come – failed to send its armoured reserves to the coast in the critical hours.

At dawn on 6 June, after naval bombardment and further air raids, American, British and Canadian divisions began landing on the five Normandy beaches. The Battle of Normandy had begun; over the next twelve weeks it broke the German defence in the West and opened the Allies’ road to Paris and the frontiers of the Reich. The flanks covered during the night – the 6th Airborne Division’s bridgehead and the area around Sainte-Mère-Église – saw heavy fighting in the following days, and the American airborne divisions, which were to have stayed in the line for a few days, fought on the Cotentin for more than a month. The French Resistance, called to action that same night, hampered the movement of German reinforcements throughout the summer – and paid a high price for it, including reprisal atrocities committed by German units against the civilian population in the weeks that followed.