D-day was an incredible Allied achievement that hastened
victory over Nazi Germany. American
officers were unanimous in their belief that only a huge army, landed as close
as possible to the German border, to drive on Berlin,
and hang Hitler from a sour apple tree, would bring victory. Americans, backed by a large and loyal
population, endless fertile farmlands, plentiful natural resources, and the
world’s largest industrial base, felt that this was possible, If German resistance was stiffer than anticipated,
it could be crushed by sending more troops and tanks and guns, of which America
had a goodly supply.
The Brits, who put
up many of the troops for D-day and much of the airpower and shipping and naval
support, had been fighting Hitler for five long years. They had learned, first hand and to their
sorrow, how effective the German army was.
Norway, Dunkirk,
Tobruk, and The Blitz were not happy memories for the Brits. They counseled caution and thought the
Americans were reckless in their outlook.
By 1944 the Allies
had accomplished two major successes, both of which wee absolutely vital to the
success of D-day. First they had solved
the U-boat problem. In the “happy days”
of 1941 and 1942, the U-boats were sinking hundreds of merchantmen every
year. But in the winter of 1943 the
Allies got their act together and drove the U-boats out of the Atlantic. They had allocated just a few B24 bombers,
with extra fuel tanks in their bomb bays, to close the Atlantic air gap, the
black pit the merchant seamen called it.
The B24’s could supply good air cover to convoys all the way across the Atlantic. And all the destroyers had been equipped with
good radar, Talk-Between-Ships (TBS) radio, and High Frequency Direction
Finders (Huff-Duff) which gave a vector pointing right at any U-boat that used
its radio. And two years experience at
sea had trained up the escort vessels to a high pitch of effectiveness. A couple of vicious convoy battles in the
winter of 1943 resulted in the Allies sinking more U-boats than the U-boats
sank merchant vessels. For the rest of
the war U-boat sinkings remained heavy.
This victory allowed the Americans to build up a huge army on the British
Isles. Had the U-boats sunk
half of this traffic on the way across, D-day would have been impossible.
The second victory
was the extermination of the Luftwaffe.
This was done by the P-51 long range escort fighters that accompanied
the bombers all the way to the target and shot down the Luftwaffe fighters that
rose to attack the bombers. There is a
scene in “The Longest Day” where a Luftwaffe fighter pilot complains that his
was the only sortie flown against the Normandy
beaches. Had the Luftwaffe been strong,
the JU-88’s would have been dropping 500 pound bombs into the open landing
craft as they approached the beaches, and on the Allied destroyers. For larger naval targets the Luftwaffe had
Fritz-X, an early model smart bomb that had put an American cruiser out of
action at Salerno and sunk an
Italian battleship in the Mediterranean. But due to the RAF and USAF actions the
Luftwaffe no longer had the planes, or the pilots, or the gasoline to oppose
the D-day landings.
