by the spring of 1944 things were looking Grim for Nazi Germany already starved of key resources and under severe pressure in the East the Western allies were now poised to launch their long-awaited invasion of Western Europe and yet Germany's leader Adolf Hitler was despite everything looking forward to D-Day his plan was simple reinforce the Western defenses launch a furious Counterattack and throw the Allies back into the sea after that he could turn his full strength against the Soviet Union and end the war for Hitler the outcome of this campaign would be decisive in the previous episode of our dday series we looked at the air battle for Normandy this time we're covering the fighting on land that would make or break the operation why were some beaches bloodier than others why did German counterattacks fail and why did it take so long for the Allies to break out into France to answer those questions we brought in the help of the royal Armory Jonathan Ferguson to look at some of the most important weapons of D-Day but more from him later on this is leftenant General Sir Frederick e Morgan you might never have heard of him but in his role as CAC it was Morgan who wrote the first plan for Operation Overlord the Allied invasion of Europe the Allied Landing site would be Normandy but with a major deception operation to focus German eyes on the pakal Airborne forces would secure the flanks while assault forces would land with Americans on the right and British and Commonwealth forces on the left in lie of capturing a major port Morgan also settled on the ingenious solution of bringing two prefabricated Harbors across the channel to supply an Allied breakout when Dwight D Eisenhower was appointed commander of scha and Bernard Montgomery commander of the Allied ground forces in December 1943 the responsibility for Overlord passed to them but the only major change they made was to increase the strength of the air and Seaborn Landings with a wider front the first Target would be KH and after that the port of Sherborn German counter attack Montgomery expected the Germans to retreat to defensive positions on the river sen Within three months of The Landings but that did not mean that this campaign would be an easy one the divisions chosen to carry out the invasion were augmented with extra units both the British and Commonwealth and American forces were equipped with duplex drive or DD tanks which would swim to the shore while the British were further reinforced by more specialist armor rather than engage enemy tanks the tanks that landed on the beaches were primarily intended to provide fire support strengthening of the existing fortifications adding pill boxes gun imp placements Beach obstacles and millions of Mines many of them in the Normandy sector the units charged with holding these positions varied as much as the defenses themselves though there were 58 German divisions in the theater by May 1944 many of them were poor quality Garrison troops from which the fittest and most able had been combed to feed the meat grinder in the East destroying the invader would come down to the nine Panzer and one Panzer Grenadier division in the theater with a total of 1,400 tanks and self-propelled guns the only problem was roml had no control over them Field Marshal gerd Von rad commander of all German army forces in the west and general G Von schenberg commander of the armored Reserve Panza Group West disagreed with rml they argued for a defense indepth strategy holding the panzers further back raml wanted the panzers positioned much closer to the most likely Landing sites he knew that the Allies had air superiority which would significantly restrict movement in the Battle of maneuver that runet and shenberg favored not only that but if the Allies were permitted to establish a beach head their vast resources in men and material would ensure that they could wear down Germany's finite Resources by continuously feeding fresh divisions into France in the end after the argument had been taken to Hitler a tactically unsound compromise was reached of the nine Panzer divisions and one Panzer Grenadier division in the west ramu would be given three Von shenberg would get four to be held in reserve while the remaining three were deployed to the south of France as part of the new Army Group G Hitler also stipulated that Panzer Group West could only be deployed with his permission which would prove to be costly for the Germans on D-Day D-Day was scheduled for the 5th of June 1944 but in the preceding days terrible weather conditions forced Eisenhower to postpone the invasion by 24 hours this was a difficult decision any delay made it increasingly difficult to keep the operation a secret but over the course of the fourth and fifth meteorologist predicted a temporary break in the weather and based on this information Eisenhower ordered that The Invasion proceed on the 6th of June this is the letter issued to thousands of troops Bound for Normandy on the the eve of the invasion written by Supreme Commander Eisenhower in it he says that the task will not be an easy one that the enemy is well trained well equipped and battle hardened but Eisenhower also says that he has the full confidence in the troops courage Devotion to duty and skill in battle and that nothing less than Victory will be accepted for the men who received this letter there was of course a mix of feelings but the mood was captured incredibly well by then major James Robert Morgan who was second in command of the British 120th light anti-aircraft regimen in this letter to his wife written on the back of Eisenhower's message Morgan says I'm looking forward immensely to the next few hours at present I look just like Father Christmas in full equipment with binoculars dangling on my chest well my darling I'll soon be back with you both save some of the tomatoes for me and keep this letter as a reminder of a terrific event in history all my love Jim the first Allied troops into Norman were British and Canadian Airborne forces at the sixth Airborne Division Landing by glider and parachute to the east of Sword Beach their main task was to capture and hold important bridges over the can canal and river or despite scattered Landings they managed to capture their objectives but to hold on to them the lightly armed troops would have to fend off German armored counterattacks to tell us more here's the Royal armories Jonathan Ferguson hi guys Jonathan here in the National firearm Center here at the Royal armories Museum and I'm here with the pet so pet stands for projector infantry anti-tank common misconception that it's a big spring catapult thing absolutely untrue the spring there is a Big Spring in here it's to absorb the huge recoil of what this really is which is a spigot mortar normally something fired based in the ground but it's fir from the shoulder so this idea of harnessing the Monroe effect that's in here but from a shoulder fired weapon that's what makes this thing really quite remarkable and much better than people think it was although there are some pretty heavy caveats there in terms of You' got to get very close it's an arcing trajectory your first hit might bounce off if it doesn't hit just right so one of the most iconic accounts of the use of the pat um associated with D-Day is at Pegasus Bridge we have major John Howard of D company second Battalion oxer and bucking light infantry he relates this story of Sergeant Thornton wagger Thornton as he calls him who essentially saves the day with a pat he's managed to get close enough to where he thinks he's going to be able to score a decisive hit on the tank always the problem with the Pat and just as um Howard is about to order the men in with anti tank grenades to try and kill this thing Thornton lets loose with the p bomb and just knocks the tank out outright um that causes the Germans to think that there's anti-tank AR in play and to stop what they're doing and rethink and turns the tide of that that battle that bridge because they were going to get annihilated one after the other now that might have been true with the pat as well but um it's punching above its weight and it's a really uh almost unique account of a single shoulder fired weapon turning the tide of a battle to the west the1st and 82nd Airborne divisions were landing on the cotona peninsula behind Utah Beach they were to secure the exits allowing the amphibious troops Landing later in the morning to move on towards the vital Port of Sherborn as ureas to guide them in but by the time they jumped a massive Cloud bank had formed over the kotena peninsula causing many of the Pathfinders to miss their target and when they did land many couldn't get the ureas to work the result was chaos many of the drops became widely scattered for example the majority of the second Battalion 52nd parachute infantry regimen jumped over the wrong drop zone and then spent most of D-Day trying to reassemble however others that Mis landed were able to improvise and formed groups that were a mishmash of units which went on to achieve their objectives one of those to jump on D-Day was 29-year-old Sergeant Floyd Corrington an assistant squad leader in the second platoon of dog company 506 PIR 101st Airborne Division he was wearing this helmet when his c47 which also carried his platoon Commander Lieutenant Ronald Spears took off for Normandy and was wearing it when he jumped at about 1:20 a.m. little is known of what happened to coron after he jumps but he was reported to have been killed in action on D-Day his helmet was later found near the Hamlet of bass adaville just south of Drop Zone C where his unit was meant to land Corrington now lies in the Normandy American cemetery at koville Sur though the American Airborne drops didn't quite go to plan they caused chaos and confusion amongst the German Defenders and secured the exits from Utah beach by now the Allied air and sea bombardment of the beach defenses had begun the volume of fire was huge but the results were inconsistent the strong points that survived would exact a heavy toll on Utah Beach The Landings were a huge success the troops were accidentally landed well south of their designated Landing Zone in an area that was only lightly defended quick-thinking commanders exploited this and by 10:00 a.m. all enemy resistance was cleared at a cost of just 197 casualties a few miles east however the landing at Omaha became a bloodbath of the five Invasion beaches Omaha was without a doubt the most challenging most of the 6mile Long Beach was dominated by steep Bluffs around 150 ft High which gave the Germans strong points excellent fields of view and fire over an area littered with mines obstacles and barbed wire the only way through the Bluffs were through five gullies known as exits of course the Germans knew how important they were and these exits were quite literally turned into death traps to tell us more here's Jonathan once again we are looking at the infamous mg42 general purpose machine gun so this was intended to be a universal machine gun and it served in that role it's in front of me here on its bipod um for use as a light machine gun where this thing has become truly iconic is in the defensive role um and that's sort of throughout the back half of the war but especially D-Day and especially Omaha Beach so we have belt feed ideal for sustained fire for suppressive fire for defensive fire and to allow for that we have a replaceable barrel system allowing for a much lower overall weight and complexity than the old water cool system which is extremely effective for sustain fire but made for a much heavier more Awkward gun so those those two things plus some very solid engineering mean that not very many German soldiers can seriously inconvenience an a lot of Allied soldiers and this is really summed up in the experience or and the claims of um Hinrich SEO who wrote his Memoir in published it in 2000 and he claimed to have killed between a th000 and 2,000 American soldiers on omah heart Beach um strongly contested numbers but regardless you know if there are many like Heinrich and I suspect there were this thing is a sort of force multiplier and in the defensive role they're able to hold off thousands of attack attacking Allied soldiers keep heads down if they're not actively killing and wounding people if you need a gun for defensive fire whatever you think of the mg-42 it's a very capable weapon in that role the Allies had planned for a fierce Naval bombardment followed by an attack by Allied bombers that would obliterate these strong defenses before the first wave of troops hit the beach at 6:30 a.m. but the bombardment was inadequate and the bombers missed most of their targets which left most of the German defenses Still Standing to make matters worse on Omaha the concept of the DD tanks that would float and swim to shore ended in disaster the 741st tank Battalion disembarked most of its DD tanks about 15,000 ft out from the shore almost immediately 27 out of 32 tanks sunk owing to the bad weather and rough Seas things didn't quite go to plan for the Infantry either strong winds and currents put many of the landing craft off course and some got swams which drowned the heavily Laden infantry inside other landing craft hit sandb bars that forced the Infantry to Wade up the beach and sometimes neck high water greatly extending the time that they were exposed to enemy fire the situation became so perilous that General Omar Bradley commander of the American Ground Forces briefly considered halting The Landings on Omaha and diverting the assault forces to Utah Beach slowly however small groups of men began to exploit gaps in the defenses and by by the evening the situation had finally begun to stabilize 34,000 troops had landed on Omaha by the end of the day at a cost of over 2,400 men killed wounded or missing by far the highest cost in human life of any of the five Invasion beaches an hour after the Americans British Canadian and three French assault troops began Landing to their East on gold Juno and sword beaches the 50th division at Gold Beach faced strong German resistance and though they got well off the beach they failed to take all their objectives at Juno Canadian Forces made the strongest inroads into Normandy of any Allied formation after tough house-to-house fighting and likewise at sword the initial assault went mostly to plan this bombardment was carried out by the largest naval bombardment fleet of those supporting the five beaches so the weight of Firepower was immense the majority of the dd10 made it to the beach in almost the same time as the Infantry giving the ladder the fire support and cover that they needed to move up the beach the funnies immediately got to work clearing pass through the obstacles and minefields filling ditches and then engaging enemy strong points with their heavy petard mortars though many were hit and knocked out their surviving Crews dismounted and cleared obstacles by hand within 2 hours of Landing seven of eight Beach exits were cleared of course this is not to say that the assault on sword was easy one of the German strong points on sword code named Cod took 3 hours to capture with two of the attacking battalions taking 25% casualties each still though the battle for store Beach was relatively quick and by the end of D-Day nearly 29,000 troops had landed during the first hours of the Beach Landings with the exception of Omaha the Allies generally succeeded in overwhelming the largely understrength overstretched and ill-prepared German Defenders the big question was how would the German panzers respond incredible as it may seem the massive Allied invasion force that was approaching the Normandy Coast on the 5th of June went largely undetected by the Germans thanks to the poor weather in preceding days an invasion was simply not expected at the time roml was visiting his family in Germany While most senior commanders in The Invasion sector were ironically away on anti-invasion training exercise when the blow fell the first major Counterattack took place on DJ itself that afternoon the 21st Panzer Division the only German armored formation in the area drove between the British and Canadian Forces reaching the coast but thanks to poor Command Decisions confused Communications and the weight of Allied Firepower the attack was beaten back with the 21st panzers losing more than half of their 124 tanks the rest of the German armor was under Hitler's Direct Control but he was asleep until the afternoon having worked late the night before when informed he said to have reacted with Glee however both Hitler and rinstead still believed that The Landings in Normandy were a faint and that the main blow would come at C elements of paner Group West were released for use in Normandy but by then it was too late a full strength German Counterattack would have to wait instead on D-Day itself the Allies biggest challenge was Supply while the mury harbors were being constructed supplies still had to be landed directly on the beaches in vehicles like this duw or duck a six-wheel drive amphibious truck the duck was a valuable piece of the Allied War Machine however they struggled in the rough Channel Waters the steadily Rising tide also caused major problems reducing the Shore's depth which caused men vehicles and equipment to Bunch up restricting movement off the beach and providing good targets for German Gunners the impact of this is clear in the British Advance on the city of Kong what was meant to be a quick Advance was slowed by German strong points as well as the traffic jams on the beach the city and objective for D-Day itself would remain in German hands for another 6 weeks though many key objectives were not taken D-Day was undoubtedly a major success with 156 th000 Allied troops ashore on the 7th of June the Allies further expanded their Beach head meanwhile the Germans struggled to build up for their Counterattack the Allies had near total control of the skies and so as Panza Group West moved towards Normandy they were hampered all the way by Allied fighter bombers so much so that they had to abandon daylight movement elsewhere members of the French Resistance attempted to slow German reinforcements and though they found some success local people faced brutal reprisals all this delayed and dislocated the German response when it came it was the 12th SS Panzer Division from Panzer Group West who made the strongest effort attacking against the third Canadian division on D-Day plus1 but the Allies were well prepared the Canadian third division had twice the normal amount of field artillery and as many Gunners in their order of battle as infantry men this sexon self-propelled gun was one such weapon with this 25 pounder gun it was able to provide mobile fire support for British and Canadian Forces in Normandy assisted by Allied warships off the coast overwhelming Allied Firepower was able to put a stop to the German counterattacks when the Panzer lay division arrived to join the attack on D-Day plus two the momentum had now been lost and instead of counterattacking they were forced to dig in to block the Allied attempts to take Con on the 12th of June the the Allies captured karant tan linking all five beaches together with a constant stream of men and Equipment pouring into their now vast Beach head on a daily basis any German hopes of pushing the Invaders back into the sea was Folly Hitler's chance for a Counterattack was gone the Western allies had pulled off the largest AirLand and sea operation in the history of warfare a Monumental achievement it worked thanks to their skillful planning overwhelming material advantage and the heroism and sacrifice of their fighting men as well as many German failures while D-Day was by no means a turning point in the war it did Mark the beginning of a new phase within a year crushed by Allied advances from east and west the tyranny of the Nazi regime would finally come to an end
