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Rouen, France - When your correspondent was eight years old and living in Cuba, my parents talked about emigrating to America on the Freedom Flights that started in 1965. Accordingly, this new nation became my research project, even though your correspondent could not yet read the English language. My parents owned a modest library, which included Selections from Reader’s Digest translated to Spanish. One of the abridged books syndicated by Reader’s Digest around that time was Cornelius Ryan’s “The Longest Day,” published in 1959. The movie version was released in 1962.

This book told the story of the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944. Field Marshall Rommel, commander of the German defenders of their Atlantic Wall, had written to his officers in April that: “The first 24 hours of the invasion will be decisive….For the Allies, as well as Germany, it will be the longest day.”

Most of the heavy fighting that day took place in the American sector, so the book had a focus on that part of the battle. Around 60% of Allied casualties on D-Day were Americans. Reading through the book, it was clear even at my young age that a nation willing to send its young men to fight and die for the cause of freedom back in Europe could not be as bad as they told me in my Communist public school.

This spring your correspondent had a precious opportunity to visit the battlefields of Normandy, starting by driving west from Rouen, the capital city of that region:

Pegasus Bridge

This was the code name for the Benouville bridge over the Caen canal on its way north to Ouistreham, a small port on the English Channel. The bridge was located on the eastern-most end of the Allied landings, and was important to capture in order to prevent German reinforcements from reaching the landing beaches. It was captured around midnight, before the landings started, by a platoon of British commandos, who had flown in on gliders. Their 24-year old Lieutenant was killed leading the assault, but his men captured both ends of the bridge.

The taking of Pegasus Bridge was followed early that morning by the drop nearby of the British 6th Airborne Division. This was one British operation that did not result in a bridge too far.

Sword, Juno and Gold Beaches

These beaches were the objectives for British and Canadian troops landing a short way north of the city of Caen. Every invasion of France from England since the Middle Ages had occurred on the Pas-de-Calais region northeast of Normandy, at the shortest distance across the English Channel. In May and June 1940, the defeated British Expeditionary Force had been evacuated from the beaches around the city of Dunkirk. This evacuation was covered by the British garrison in the city of Calais, which fought to the last man in order to buy time for the boat-lift. In August 1942, the Canadians had staged an unsuccessful raid in the city of Dieppe. All those three cities are located in the Pas-de-Calais region.

To provide some misinformation to the German defenders, General Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, had created a fake United States 3rd Army based around the city of Dover, across the English Channel from Calais. This army was commanded by General Patton, who the Germans recognized as the ablest Allied general. Its headquarters conducted a continuous and lively radio traffic, and it even had fake rubber tanks set up to confuse spies.

Accordingly, the Germans expected the Allied invasion to come in Pas-de-Calais and to be led by General Patton. The Allies concluded, however, that this location was too obvious, and instead chose Normandy. There the landing beaches were further from the embarkation ports in England, but the German defenders could be isolated by aerial bombardment to destroy the bridges across the Seine and Loire Rivers. During most of D-Day, the German commanders thought that the landings in Normandy were a diversion.

Caen

The British and Canadian landings were relatively uneventful, but once they drove inland, they met fierce resistance. The village of Tilly-sur-Seulles, around six kilometers west of the city of Caen, changed hands some 20 times. It took the British army over a month to take Caen, and then only after pulverizing it with artillery and air bombardments. Collateral damage and civilian casualties were high, but the French never complained or asked for reparations. This city had been the hometown of William the Conqueror, but the British troops showed no sentimentality. The city was demolished. Fighting at point blank range with modern weapons is brutal.

Bayeux

During the Middle Ages, this small town west of Caen produced a long tapestry describing the conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in the year 1066 by William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy. It was through this conquest that the medieval French language, with its basis in Latin, influenced the Anglo-Saxon language, and therby started the formation of the modern English language. This influence is particularly marked in legal language and other administrative terms. For example, the English word “curfew” comes from the French words to cover your fire, and the English word “culpability” comes from the Latin word “culpa,” which means fault.

On D-Day, Bayeux was an objective of the British troops that landed on Gold Beach a short way to the northeast. This was the first town liberated after the landings. On the second day of the invasion, the British Navy started installing an artificial harbor, called “Port Winston,” west of their landing beaches and across from the seashore village of Arromanches north of Bayeux. The failed raid on Dieppe had shown the Allies that they had little chance of capturing a city and its harbor during the initial invasion. They were too well defended. Accordingly, as Lord Mountbatten observed, the Allies had to bring along their own harbors.

This artificial harbor, together with another built in the American sector, were used to unload ammunition, supplies and vehicles, as well as more troops, for the Allied forces on the ground. Winston Churchill would have called for whiskey and cigars.

Omaha Beach

Farther west was the landing beach for the United States 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions. The first division was nicknamed the “Big Red One,” a veteran unit that had fought in North Africa and Sicily, and the second was made up of National Guard units. The first wave suffered 95% casualties, and break-throughs did not start until the sixth wave. The German defenders, firing from entrenched positions overlooking the beach, poured machine gun and artillery fire on the American infantry disembarking from their landing craft below. The movie “Saving Private Ryan,” released in 1998, starts with a good depiction of the scene that morning on the beach. Nevertheless, no one called back to ask to be taken off the beach. The soldiers knew that there were only two ways off the beach: victory or death.

The pre-invasion naval and aerial bombardments, by long-range guns and high-altitude bombers, proved ineffective against deeply-entrenched defensive positions. This was before smart bombs. More effective were the direct fire from destroyers and rocket boats close to shore, and medium bombers, like the B-26 Martin Marauder.

Yogi Berra served as a seaman in the United States Navy aboard a rocket boat shooting to suppress the shore batteries. He was wounded and awarded a Purple Heart medal. Nearly half of the casualties suffered by the Allies on D-Day occurred on Omaha Beach.

Pointe du Hoc

This strong point overlooking Omaha Beach from the west was taken on D-Day by the 2nd battalion of United States Army Rangers, who climbed up the cliffs under fire. Once on top of the cliffs, however, they found that the defenders had moved the six 155-mm howitzers previously there further back. Ranger patrols pushing inland later that day found the guns and spiked them.

In 1984, President Reagan delivered a moving speech there, titled “The Boys of Pointe du Hoc,” at the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Upon watching that speech, the political advisors to former Vice President Mondale, who was running against Reagan, were despondent of winning the election. The Gipper had taken an insurmountable lead in the campaign with a patriotic speech at a historic location for American exceptionalism.

Utah Beach

This was the western-most landing beach, and it was the objective for the United States 4th Infantry Division. It was quickly captured because it was defended not by Germans, but by draftees from Czechoslovakia, Poland and Russia. This division had suffered more casualties during their practice landing in England.

Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Junior, Assistant Commander of the 4th Infantry Division, arrived on the beach with his troops in a landing craft. Due to the strong current, all the landing craft were carried over a mile east of their objectives. Nevertheless, when his staff informed him of their position, he replied that they would start the war from where they were. He died later during the Battle of Normandy and is buried there in the American military cemetery.

It was a short way to the drop zones inland for the American paratroopers.

St. Mere Eglise

This small town a short way inland from Utah Beach was an objective for the United States 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, nicknamed “All-American” and “Screaming Eagles,” respectively. One American paratrooper got stuck on the church steeple and played dead for two hours until he was released. Other paratroopers landed on intentionally-flooded fields beyond the town, and some were not able to get out of their harnesses before drowning. The transport aircraft for the paratroopers had flown in tight formations from their airfields in England, but once the German flak started exploding around them, combined with a shifting cloud bank, the pilots took evasive action all over the place. As a result, most paratroopers were dropped nowhere close to their objectives, but they started the war from wherever they landed.

Lieutenant Dick Winters of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, landed outside St. Mere Eglise. He collected a platoon of paratroopers and was ordered by his Battalion staff to silence a previously undetected battery of four 105-mm howitzers. This battery had opened fire on Utah Beach from an entrenched position near Brecourt Manor, south of town. The charging paratroopers surprised the enemy, firing their Garand semi-automatic rifles and Thompson submachine guns, while tossing grenades. They overran the enemy position and spiked the guns. Winters was nominated for a Congressional Medal of Honor, but instead received the Distinguished Service Cross. The television mini-series “Band of Brothers,” released in 2001, portrays the fighting by Easy Company.

The paratroopers landed scattered all over the fields and towns beyond Utah Beach, but they followed a basic military principle repeated by Napoleon: march to the sound of the guns.

By the end of D-Day, the Allies were firmly entrenched in all their beach-heads. The German counter-attacks the following morning failed to drive them back into the sea. The failure of the German defenses can be explained by their ignoring the advice given around 1740 by Prussian King Frederick the Great. He said that if you defend everything, then you defend nothing.

The Atlantic Wall from Norway down to the Pyrenees mountains was a static defensive system which attempted to defend the entire coast line. It was similar to the Maginot Line from the Swiss Alps up to the rolling hills, valleys and dense forests of the Ardennes on the Belgian border, which failed to defend France in 1940. Both attempted to defend the entire coast line or frontier, respectively, while leaving the initiative to the enemy. The best defense is always an active defense.

Bocage

The fighting beyond the beaches turned into another challenge for the Allies. Normandy is honey-combed with hedge-rows (called “bocage”), which created formidable defensive positions for the Germans and their powerful guns. Finally, however, American ingenuity carried the day. An Army sergeant welded two pieces of metal pointed out in front of the tanks, like on a fork-lift truck, and they plowed through the hedge-rows. Once the German defenses were overcome, they were forced to retreat.

General Charles De Gaulle was the highest-ranking French officer to refuse to surrender to the Germans after the Allied defeat in the Battle of France during May and June 1940. Instead, he flew to London and started delivering uplifting messages via BBC radio to his occupied countrymen. In these messages, he observed that:

1. The Allied defeat occurred due to the application by the enemy of innovative tactics combining tank and aircraft attacks. The Allies had to master those tactics in order to counter-attack effectively.
2. The Battle of France was only an initial phase of what was sure to become a global war, the Second World War. Accordingly, the war was not over, but only getting started, and the French defeat was not permanent.
3. American manufacturing capacity would eventually enter the war on the side of the Allies, as America had done in the First World War.

It took four years for all his observations to be confirmed by the Allied landing in Normandy during June 1944. London calling indeed!

Anglosphere Strikes Back

David Hume, a lawyer, historian and philosopher, was a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment during the XVIIIth century, together with Adam Smith. He was part of the legal team that advised the British government in negotiating the treaty to end the French and Indian War in 1763. He realized that with North America becoming subject to British rule, the audience for the English language was expanding. Thereafter, he advised his young friend, Edward Gibbon, to write his upcoming “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” the first volume of which was published in 1776, in the English language instead of French, as Gibbon initially intended.

Around 1880, German Chancellor Bismarck had warned his countrymen that the most important geopolitical fact of contemporary Europe was that North America speaks English. The Normandy invasion represented Britain, with its two English-speaking North American colonies - - America and Canada - - striking back against the German Reich for supremacy on Continental Europe. Almost every member of the Allied Expeditionary Force was a native speaker of English.

St. Lo

This crossroads town further inland from Utah and Omaha Beaches was finally captured by American troops on July 19, thereby opening the gate for a drive to Paris. Upon achieving this breakthrough, General Eisenhower activated the real United States 3rd Army, under the command of General Patton. Patton was ordered to lead an old-fashioned cavalry charge, this time on tanks, armored vehicles and trucks, with full air support, into the heart of the German Reich. The staff officers relied mostly on Michelin road maps for directions.

Patton’s motto was: “Toujours, audace!” (Every day or always, audacity!). He did not believe in attacking entrenched positions, but instead ordered his soldiers to go around them, and leave them isolated to be engaged by the infantry and artillery units following their mechanized advance. The Germans had tanks with heavier armor, and also more powerful guns on their tanks and in their artillery units. However, they had much fewer of them than the Allies. The advantage of the Allies was that they had more tanks, more aircraft, more artillery, more fuel, more ammunition and more supplies of everything, thanks to American manufacturing capacity. Detroit was indeed the “Arsenal of Democracy.” The United States Army’s “Red Ball Express” was a convoy of trucks, driven mostly by African-American troops, that delivered supplies to the front-line troops.

In addition, the Allies controlled the air. On D-Day, the Allies flew over 10,000 sorties, while the Germans flew only around 300. There were effectively no German aircraft flying over France after D-Day. The Allied aircraft were free to strafe German columns, so that those columns could barely travel during the day, and sometimes not at all.

Serving under a commander like Patton, who kept you moving all the time, was safer than serving under a more cautious commander, who might make you a sitting target for the powerful German guns. Patton implemented the observations made by De Gaulle.

Falaise

The Germans launched a counter-attack around the village of Mortain against the American breakthrough, but their counter-attack bogged down and they were forced to retreat east to around the town of Falaise. There the British and Canadian troops attempted to shut the door to their escape. The powerful German guns, however, took a deadly toll on the attacking Canadian tanks, and a good portion of the enemy was able to avoid encirclement and retreat further inland.

The Normandy campaign ended when General Patton’s 3rd Army arrived at the outskirts of Paris in mid-August. They let General Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division of Free French troops lead the liberation of the city on August 19. The city’s entire police department barricaded themselves in their prefecture headquarters (“La Conciergerie”) on the original city island (“Isle de la Cite”) near Notre Dame cathedral, in order to support the liberating troops.

Hitler (German Chancellor Adolph Hitler from his bunker in Berlin, not any Republican President of the United States) ordered the German commander to set Paris on fire, but he declined. He surrendered the city a week later at Montparnasse train station, where today high-speed trains (“trains a gran vitesse--TGV”) connect Paris with Toulouse and the southwest of the country. The Battle of Normandy claimed at least 25,000 American lives and more wounded.

From there, Patton’s 3rd Army drove east for Lorraine and the Rhine River, with a detour around Christmas Day north to Bastogne in order to relieve the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division defending that road junction during the Battle of the Bulge. General Patton was killed in a suspicious car crash after the end of the war the following year. He is buried in the American military cemetery of Luxembourg.

Back in Normandy, near Omaha Beach, the American military cemetery holds almost 10,000 graves marked with Crosses and Stars of David.

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