I shoot, I shoot!

In June​ 1944, Field Marshal Rommel, widely regarded as Hitler’s most capable military leader, got caught out. Ever since his arrival in France, the Desert Fox had worried about the physical and mental preparedness of his troops. Like other senior military figures, he had criticised the luxurious lifestyle of German officers in Paris: their Etappengeist, the ‘spirit of the rear lines’, was in contrast to the Kampfgeist, or ‘fighting spirit’, of those dying at the front. He had grumbled to Hitler that there were more soldiers in Paris clutching beautifully wrapped parcels than carrying rifles. On 3 June, however, Rommel himself left a Paris boutique carrying a parcel. It contained a pair of handmade grey suede shoes, size three and a half. Many Nazi officers in Paris bought expensive gifts for their French lovers, but the shoes were for Rommel’s wife, Lucie Maria. He delivered them to her in Germany, as a surprise, on 6 June, a date that has gone down in history as ‘the longest day’, but was also Frau Rommel’s fiftieth birthday.

Rommel was due to spend six days away from Normandy, where he had been stationed since late 1943, tasked with bolstering the Atlantic Wall against a possible Allied invasion of Western Europe. The Atlantic Wall was a line of steel and concrete coastal fortifications that stretched from Norway to South-West France. In Nazi propaganda Goebbels boasted about the strength of these defences, reassuring the German public that its army would destroy any Allied attack. Rommel saw that the reality was very different. Although the sea defences were strong in the Pas de Calais, in other places the Atlantic Wall hardly existed. He became convinced that an Allied victory was on the cards unless the invading enemy was defeated when still vulnerable, in the water and on the beaches, within the first 48 hours of landing. He began a programme of rebuilding the defences, adding bunkers, mines, underwater obstacles to wreck landing craft and ‘Rommel’s asparagus’ – tall poles designed to tear to shreds any aircraft attempting to land. The steel used in these schemes could have built 160 Eiffel Towers.

One of the final elements of his strategy was to request extra Panzer divisions from Hitler, which were to be moved close to the Normandy coast. Hitler was notoriously paranoid about the loyalty of his senior generals, whom he played off against one another, and Rommel knew that such a request had to be made in person. As he noted in his diary, ‘the most urgent problem is to win the Führer over by personal conversation.’ He planned to meet Hitler at the Berghof in the Bavarian Alps and broke his journey with a visit to his wife and son at their new home in Herrlingen, a small town near Ulm, where they had been given a villa by the Nazi state after its 150 elderly Jewish residents were deported to the extermination camps. But Rommel didn’t make it to the Berghof. In the early hours of 6 June, Allied airborne troops began dropping behind the Normandy beach defences. D-Day had begun and Rommel was six hundred miles away, setting out flowers and a pair of shoes in his drawing room. Frau Rommel later said that the shoes didn’t fit.

The German high command had known for months that an Allied invasion by sea was imminent. They also knew that an attack needed good weather and calm seas. No attempt had been made in late May, when heat records were shattered in the South of England, and German officials were confident that there wouldn’t be an invasion in early June either. The German forecasters told high command that there would be rain and gale-force winds in the English Channel for three days from 4 June. The weather was so bad – the worst storms for twenty years – that on 5 June the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine cancelled reconnaissance and patrols around Normandy.

An invasion could take place only when a moonlit night and a low tide coincided. These conditions would be met on 5 and 6 June, and Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces, made plans to invade on 5 June. But after receiving a weather report from an unlikely source on the morning of 3 June, he thought again. Maureen Flavin was a 21-year-old assistant postmistress on the west coast of Ireland, whose job also involved recording hourly weather readings. Along with the crew of a ship stationed off the coast, Flavin was the first to spot the incoming storm. She sent her report to the Irish Met Service in Dublin, who shared it with the Allies in London. The next day, the meteorologist James Martin Stagg’s team of forecasters identified a break in the storm on 6 June, a narrow window of opportunity over the Channel that would allow the landings to begin.* German forecasters, without any access to Atlantic weather stations, didn’t know the change was coming. Eisenhower delayed the operation by 24 hours; some convoys set out in strong winds on 5 June, ready to take advantage.

On 4 June, when Rommel left for Germany, scores of other senior German officers also left their posts. General Friedrich Dollmann, the Seventh Army commander directly in charge of defending Normandy, had arranged a two-day Kriegspiel (war game exercise) for all divisional and regimental commanders a hundred miles away in Rennes, in order to test responses to an Allied landing. As the commanders prepared for imaginary scenarios using large maps, the Allies began to attack.

In the first hours of 6 June, the Germans failed to appreciate the magnitude of the invasion. Hitler and some of his leading generals had always believed there would be two landings, one pretend and one real: any airborne attack on Normandy would be a distraction from the ‘real’ invasion, which they were convinced would take place in the Pas de Calais – the obvious target since it was so close to Britain and the invaders needed to seize a major port. In fact, the Allies had gone to extraordinary lengths to encourage this misinterpretation. Eisenhower’s Operation Fortitude used fake armies and dummy landing craft to give German reconnaissance planes the impression of a build-up of troops and materiel near Folkestone and Dover. Radio transmissions and diplomatic channels were used to leak false information to the Germans via embassies in neutral countries.

The deception worked. Germany’s initial response was slow and uncertain. Hitler decided not to send in the Fifteenth Army, his most prized fighting force, and to wait for the ‘real’ invasion. He gave the order to move only in July. His failure to attack the Allies when they were at their weakest proved costly. As Omar Bradley, commander of the US First Army, later said: ‘Had Hitler thrown these forces against us within the first few days or within the first week, he might well have overwhelmed us.’

In the event, shortly before dawn, Allied bombers and warships began an intensive bombardment of five beaches along a fifty-mile stretch of the Normandy coast. The target beaches had been given the code names Utah and Omaha for the Americans, Gold and Sword for the British and Juno for the Canadians. From 6.30 a.m., the designated moment of attack, or ‘H-Hour’, Allied troops began to appear out of the Channel mist, to take part in the largest ever amphibious invasion.

Most oral histories of D-Day have focused on the soldiers who stormed the beaches, beginning with the troops disembarking from the landing crafts. The story of the transport of troops and arms across the Channel has been more or less a footnote. But as Nick Hewitt recounts, the Allied sailors weren’t passive facilitators, ferrying troops across the sea: they played a crucial role in ensuring the success of the operation. The sleep-deprived sailors – many were given Benzedrine to keep them awake – swept for mines, protected the flanks of the invasion from attack and bombarded shore targets. Sailors and combat engineers landed alongside thousands of seasick and exhausted assault troops to clear beach obstacles.

Preparation of the invasion force, an armada of more than seven thousand naval vessels, including four thousand landing craft and twelve hundred warships, had begun years before. From early 1942, planners were readying an operation that could take place only after enough US troops and equipment had crossed the Atlantic and the men had gained combat experience. If they were to land an army safely and keep it supplied, there was much for the sailors to learn, including the geography, geology and gradients of the Normandy beaches. It was vital to work out whether the beaches would be suitable for heavy vehicles and equipment. The Royal Navy was charged with putting small survey parties ashore, known as the Combined Operations Pilotage Parties, to collect geological samples. Throughout the first months of 1944, COPP surveyed many areas of the target beaches under the nose of the enemy, collecting samples by night and storing them inside condoms before swimming back to their small boats.

On 5 June, Eisenhower wrote a message to be delivered if the landings failed. Problems arose shortly after midnight. Hundreds of paratroopers landed a long way from their designated drop zones and were killed by German snipers, or found themselves in marshes that Rommel had flooded so that the invaders would drown under the weight of their equipment. Many bombers missed their targets and were unable to take out German emplacements. Confusion, challenging weather and shaky communication plagued the initial phases of the land invasion. Strong currents meant that many seaborne units missed their landing spots. The rising tide reduced the size of some of the beaches and dozens of tanks sank after being released from their ramps. To add to the misery, the Allies suffered heavy casualties as German forces fired at landing boats and beaches. The greatest carnage was at the heavily defended Omaha beach. Enemy fire was so intense that Bradley started to consider abandoning the operation. As the hours passed, however, the Allies began to achieve their objectives. There were more than ten thousand casualties, but that was fewer than had been predicted. By the time the sun went down, the Allies had gained a foothold in Occupied Western Europe: German beach defences had been neutralised and nearly 160,000 troops were on shore.

Garrett Graff’s​ D-Day, the Oral History brings together excerpts of accounts from more than six hundred people – interviewed mainly in the 1980s – who lived through the invasion. Some of the most striking are from those who didn’t bear arms. The book throws light on the workings of the segregated US army: Black Americans were largely confined to service and supply roles, and even the supplies of blood plasma taken to Normandy – 800,000 pints of it – were separated according to the race of the donor. Despite being wounded, Staff Sergeant Waverly B. Woodson Jr, a medic in the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, the only unit of African American soldiers to land at Omaha, worked under fire continuously for thirty hours, treating more than two hundred of the injured. Woodson’s commander recommended him for the nation’s highest military award for valour, the Medal of Honor, but he was given only the Bronze Star. None of the 1.5 million Black Americans serving in the Second World War received one of the 443 Medals of Honor awarded at the time.

Many Allied soldiers were surprised to discover that some of their adversaries were not German. The German army in Normandy included Hilfswillige (willing helpers) or Hiwi, Soviet deserters from the Red Army and men who had been taken captive. Some German troops were seasoned veterans of the Eastern Front or the North Africa campaign, but others were young and inexperienced recruits. D-Day was the first time that Private Franz Rachmann had handled a machine gun outside of training: ‘I shoot, I shoot! For each American I see fall, there came ten hundred other ones!’ In the days after the invasion some German soldiers massacred captured Allied troops, but Graff doesn’t fall into the trap of portraying SS men solely as sadists. Thirty-year-old Hubert Meyer, a senior general staff officer with the Twelfth SS Panzer Division, had organised a visit to Normandy for his wife, Irmgard, for the night of 5 June: ‘It was totally illegal, but I hadn’t had any leave for ages.’ After news of the invasion was announced at 5 a.m. on the 6th, Meyer arranged for his wife to slip away without anyone seeing.

Neither Hewitt nor Graff’s account strays very far from the fighting. The operational story of Normandy is mostly familiar, but over the past few decades a number of historians have combined the study of tactics, strategy and weapons with an examination of the social and cultural contexts of military masculinity. For many men, sex and sexual fantasies – both heterosexual and homosexual – served as a means of coping with the strains of war. Yet Hewitt’s book, which claims to convey ‘only … a flavour of the huge range of experiences which made up D-Day for sailors’, contains more references to wardroom etiquette and napkin-folding than to sex and sexuality. Graff’s collection suffers from a similar shortcoming: the idea that sex might have been on soldiers’ minds is implied to be far-fetched, and the only reference to Allied soldiers having sex is sexless: Rifleman Patrick Devlin recalled that he was ‘asked to take three condoms. We had never been given these before. I was [Roman Catholic] and refused them.’

To leave out sex and sexual violence from an account of D-Day is to ignore a great deal. US troops stationed in Britain had a huge number of sexual encounters with local women, and sometimes men. On D-Day, as ten thousand sailors of the Royal Canadian Navy took part in the attack on Juno beach, 19-year-old Raymond Paul Lindstrom, a Canadian sailor, was convicted in Derry in Northern Ireland of ‘gross indecency’, after an encounter with a US army officer in the city’s Melville Hotel. More than 6.5 million men and women served in the British armed forces and, as Emma Vickers suggests in Queen and Country: Same-Sex Desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939-45, it’s possible that as many as 1.1 million experienced some form of same-sex intimacy.

Both Hewitt and Graff portray the victors as beyond reproach. Many soldiers, airmen and sailors conducted themselves well, but the Allied invasion was not a ‘gentlemanly war’. Research into soldier-civilian relations has redrawn the image of the gallant GI, self-disciplined, chivalrous and sexually well-behaved. Sexual interactions were usually consensual: women were attracted to the well-mannered, well-dressed GIs, who brought with them new dance steps and novel ways of being courteous. But many women became victims of sexual assault: as the well-known grumble went, GIs were ‘overfed, overpaid, oversexed, over here’. American servicemen’s searches for sexual encounters often involved propositioning women in the street or in air-raid shelters. As one woman wrote in October 1943, ‘it’s not safe for us to be out unless we go together. I’d hate to be out in Derry alone after dusk, believe me. These Yanks are positive fiends for women and should all be in homes (mental ones).’

For decades after the Second World War, very little public or historical attention was paid to cases of rape and murder committed by the Western Allies. Stories focused chiefly on the sexual assaults carried out by Soviet troops during the liberation of Berlin. But recent work has shown that British and Canadian troops also raped and assaulted women as their armies advanced through France, the Low Countries and into Nazi Germany. The US army, as Mary Louise Roberts argued in What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War Two France, ‘appeared to be out of control’. More than four hundred sexual offences by GIs in the UK, including 126 rapes, were documented, though the sociologist J. Robert Lilly has argued that only 5 per cent of rapes were reported: he estimates that between 1942 and 1945 US military personnel raped almost 2500 women in Britain, more than 3600 in France and more than 11,000 in Germany. Anti-Black racism meant that African American soldiers were convicted and executed in disproportionate numbers.

Many GIs arrived in France expecting to have lots of sex: American war coverage portrayed French women as hypersexual. The army newspaper Stars and Stripes suggested that they would offer sexual favours out of gratitude. The paper printed helpful French phrases: ‘I am not married’ and ‘Are your parents at home?’ GIs were also in a position to buy sex. Countless women and girls, some as young as twelve, traded sex for soap, cigarettes and Hershey’s chocolate bars. With the market for paid sex also growing quickly, brothels became overwhelmed. In Le Havre, American soldiers had sex in public places – parks, alleyways and graveyards. Three US soldiers terrorised a town on the Cotentin Peninsula early in August 1944, raping local women. In Saint-Lô, a Normandy prefect reported that ‘the liberators have turned into looters, rapists and killers.’

As many as 19,890 French civilians were killed by Allied bombing during the invasion. The images of Allied soldiers being welcomed as liberators and given flowers, wine and Calvados told only part of the story. For many, the costs borne on D-Day and the weeks that followed were worse than those of four years of Nazi occupation. French civilians reported disruptive and criminal behaviour by Allied soldiers: excessive drinking, theft, black-market profiteering, reckless driving. In early 1945, Life magazine reported that 2500 GIs had deserted and turned to crime in Paris.

D-Day didn’t change everything. The Allies had gained only a narrow foothold in Normandy, and Germany remained dominant across the rest of Western Europe. From his hiding place in an apartment in Occupied Paris, the journalist Léon Werth wrote in his diary the day after the invasion:

They’re in Le Havre and Caen – so near. And for us, everything is just as it was. No more than if they had landed on some Pacific island … it is only a mental object. Nothing palpable connects it to us yet. We’re trying to find perceptible evidence for it, the way you hold out your hand before a storm to feel the first raindrops.

The anticipation of liberation could become a matter of life and death. On the night of 6 June, a group of volunteers from Capestang and Montady, near Béziers, set off in two lorries to join the Maquis, stopping at a boulangerie to gather supplies. At a turn in the road, they encountered a vehicle carrying German soldiers. Five of the volunteers were shot on the spot, the rest were arrested and shot the next afternoon. The binary of before and after a particular military event is often misleading when it comes to the experience of those who lived through it. For Jews and members of the Resistance, the days and weeks after D-Day were the most dangerous time of the occupation. News of the landings offered hope to Europe’s Jews that the days of intense persecution, mass round-ups and deportation to unknown destinations in the East would soon end. A week before her fifteenth birthday, after hearing about the D-Day attacks, Anne Frank wrote in her diary that ‘hope is revived within us; it gives us fresh courage, and makes us strong again.’ But as spring turned to summer, it became clear that the Allied landings wouldn’t stop the hunt for Jews in Western Europe. On the contrary, it intensified. Collaborators in France used the landings as an opportunity to take revenge. Between June and August 1944, the French Milice hunted down and arrested Jews. On 29 June at Rillieux-la-Pape, near Lyon, Paul Touvier, head of Milice intelligence for the region, picked seven men to be executed in reprisal for the assassination by the Resistance of Vichy’s minister for propaganda, Philippe Henriot. All were Jews. Before they were shot, one of the men sang ‘E lucevan le stelle’, the death aria from Puccini’s Tosca.

German forces were stretched thin as the Allies advanced rapidly towards France’s northern and eastern borders. Even so, many Nazis allocated their dwindling resources to finding and deporting as many Jews as possible. The Germans were not going to surrender: there was still a long way to go. D-Day might have marked the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany, but this was of no consequence for the thousands who would not live to see the liberation. Born in the Drancy internment camp in Paris, Alain Blumberg was two weeks old when on 31 July 1944 he was put on a train to Auschwitz. On arrival he was kicked to death by an SS guard.