Carlo D'Este Transcript

Speech to the Eisenhower Institute 29 April 2004
By Carlo D'Este

"You will enter the continent of Europe and undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and destruction of her armed forces." Given the military's fondness for being long-winded, this order ranks as one of history's classic orders.

These unambiguous words initiated the most monumental challenge faced by any military commander in history. That commander was Dwight David Eisenhower.

Operation Overlord, the cross-Channel invasion of Normandy was his responsibility and it was the most massive and complex military plan ever conceived and carried out. Its problems dwarfed any other single event in military history.

With the dedication of the World War II Memorial and the anniversary of D-Day barely over a month away, I thought it appropriate to talk to you this evening briefly about both Ike and D-Day.

Eisenhower's challenge in 1944 was fourfold:

(1) How to plan and successfully carry out the largest amphibious operation in the history of warfare.

(2) How to land 156,000 troops on D-Day by sea and by air on a strongly defended hostile shore.

(3) How to accomplish this while at the same time deceiving the Germans over where the Allies would invade.

(4) How to accomplish this extraordinary operation when - until the very last minute - the place of invasion (Normandy) was the most heavily guarded secret on the planet.

Not even the units conducting the initial assault landings knew the location of their landings. Fake names were substituted on maps used in training exercises and pre D-Day map studies. Only at the very last minute was it revealed that the landings would take place in Normandy.

In all, there were an estimated 2,000,000 soldiers, sailors & airmen, who were involved Operation Overlord in some capacity or other. (Including the US, British and Canadian formations scheduled to fight in Normandy after a bridgehead was secured.

Let me give you some idea of the magnitude of the greatest amphibious operation in the history of warfare.

On D-Day, June 6:

6,939 naval vessels of 43 separate types ships - 1,200 of them warships - manned by 195,000 naval personnel, including 15 hospital ships at sea to treat the wounded

At sea and in the UK there were:

- 8,000 doctors
- 600,000 doses of penicillin
- 100,000 lb. of sulfa & 800,000 pints of plasma

An estimated 17,000,000 maps were produced to support Operation Overlord

During the build-up to D-Day in the UK:

- Seven (7) million tons of supplies (37 billion lbs.) were delivered by sea from the USA, including: 448,000 tons of ammunition.
- 400 million man-hours were employed to: Build 126 USAAF airfield; Construct 270 miles of railroads; 43 million square feet of hardstand; & 19 million square feet of covered storage.

Air operations & their contribution to the success of Operation Overlord are too often overlooked:

- Between 1 April and 5 June 1944 the Allied air forces flew 14,000 missions and lost 12,000 airmen & 2,000 aircraft.
- 127 Allied aircraft were lost on D-Day.
- By the end of the Normandy campaign Allied losses totaled 28,000 aircrew.

In the months before D-Day Winston Churchill was powerfully influenced by the stalemate in Italy and the near disaster at Anzio - and pessimistic Overlord might turn out the same way. He had nightmare visions that the Channel might run red with the blood of Allied soldiers and sailors. And, he let Ike know about it. One of his tasks turned out to be babysitting Churchill by reassuring him Overlord would work out.

For his part, Churchill had also begun to grasp that things he had no control over would probably make the difference between success and failure. He would later complain that:

"The Destinies of two great empires seemed to be tied up in some God-damned things called LSTs." [Landing Ship Tank]

The shortage of landing craft remains to this day one of the untold tales of World War II. There were never enough and to even carry out Overlord, it was necessary to appropriate LSTs from the Mediterranean.

Which brings me to the most critical moment in Eisenhower's career: the decision to launch Overlord. The advent of bad weather forced Eisenhower the morning of June 4, 1944 to initially postpone the cross-Channel invasion, then set for June 5, for at least 24-hours. The question facing Ike and the Allied commanders was whether or not the operation could be launched on June 6. For months Eisenhower had been working closely with Group Captain J.M. Stagg, the chief SHAEF meteorologist, practicing various weather scenarios, and getting to know one another to the point where Ike had full confidence in Stagg. When Stagg reported early on June 5 that the weather would clear just enough for the invasion to launched on June 6, Eisenhower unhesitatingly made the critical decision to "go:"

- Ike's preparations with the SHAEF weather team were in contrast t German meteorologist got it wrong & Rommel went home to Germany for his wife's birthday)
- Ike has to make the final decision. Did so without hesitation. "OK, We'll go."
- Once made the commander is helpless to impact its outcome. Ike's anxiety before and on D-Day.

In hindsight it seems almost simplistic and unworthy of today's made for television sound bites. There was no CNN, ABC or CBS to record the event. When Eisenhower uttered these words in the early morning hours of June 5, there were present only the weary men responsible for carrying out that fateful decision. Everyone present that day knew that for better or worse the decision was done and now it was up to the thousands of tiny components that make up armies, invasion armadas and air forces.

That single, courageous decision would have been sufficient to cement Dwight David Eisenhower's place in history. D-Day is a date, which I believe will continue to endure as one of those pivotal events, which have changed the course of history.

As I wrote this book I was struck by Eisenhower's utter honesty; his insistence on telling it like it is - and in taking full responsibility for his actions, a virtue in rather short supply these days. During WW II Ike made tough, controversial decisions, and damn the consequences.

Yet, it was never a certainty that Overlord would succeed.

On D-Day the BBC broadcast a brief speech by Eisenhower about the landings. Ike also wrote a second very brief speech that was thankfully never delivered. His naval aide found it in his shirt weeks later and saved it. It read:

"Our landings have failed and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."

This evening I'd to share with you some rather different thoughts on D-Day put forth in 1994 by a colleague, British historian, Alastair Horne.

"On reopening the files on Overlord, 1944, one's immediate reaction is: What a staggering risk! Across the years, it now comes across as a much nearer-run thing, to use Wellington's famous dictum, than one had previously realized. There was absolutely no margin for error, and the penalties for failure would have been inestimable.

Granted there was a huge preponderance of Allied materiel power arrayed against Germany by mid-1944 -- supremacy in the air, the U-boats defeated, the gigantic US military build-up since Pearl Harbor, the seemingly unstoppable might of the Soviet steamroller.

With the brilliance of hindsight it seems inconceivable today that the Allies could then still actually have lost the war.

Yet history has a way of springing surprises. There were at least three ways in which the Overlord landings could have been defeated: by misfortune, by lack of resolve or by a bad plan incompetently executed.

There was clearly no lack of resolve and the plan was the best the Allied brain trust could conceive. Misfortune (or perhaps Murphy's Law) was another matter over which no one had much control.

Consider the consequences of defeat on D-Day. Had it failed the world we live in today would be vastly different. The Allies would have lost their almost irreplaceable fleet of landing craft, which even in June 1944 was uncomfortably small.

Britain would have sacrificed her last available army. It would have taken at least another year, well into the summer of 1945, before another invasion could have been mounted -- and that invasion would of necessity have been largely American.

Hitler would have continued his development of deadly new jet aircraft & new technology would have enhanced the striking power of the U-boats. Whether or not Germany developed an atomic bomb is problematical, however, what is more certain is that Britain would have been hammered unmercifully by Hitler's V-weapons, which would have increased in numbers in the Pas de Calais and the Low Countries, largely immune to air retaliation.

By the late summer of 1944, the V-1 and V-2 attacks had left Britain's morale shakier than at any time since the Blitz. Could it have held up another year after a devastating defeat on the beaches of Normandy?

With the West temporarily neutralized, it is not inconceivable that the German Army might have fought the Red Army in East to some sort of bloody stalemate.

"If an Allied repulse on D-Day did not actually lead to some form of victory for Hitler, at best it would have meant another costly year of war, ruinous for Britain, the extinction of the last remaining remnants of European Jewry through completion of the Final Solution, culminating almost certainly with the employment of the first atomic bombs in the summer of 1945 -- on Germany, not Japan.

Sweeping through a ¿nuked' Germany, the victorious Red Army would have stopped nowhere short of the Rhine. Lost to Communism, Europe and the world, would have been a very different place today." [End quote]
(Source, Alistair Horne with David Montgomery, Monty: The Lonely Leader, 1944-1945 (HarperCollins, 1994)

I think you will agree this is a positively chilling scenario, all the more reason to reflect on the success of the incredible events that took place in Normandy that fateful June day in 1944 when France was enduring the 1,453d day of German Occupation.

A day when 156,000 American, British and Canadian troops launched the greatest battle for freedom ever fought.

There are 9,386 graves (307 of them "unknowns") in the American military cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer overlooking bloody Omaha beach. Each grave faces west toward America. Around its periphery are pine trees imported for their ability to withstand the almost daily winds that buffet the Normandy coast.

Those who visit this place of reverence and honor - nearly two million a year - leave far differently than when the arrived.

It was to this place that Dwight Eisenhower came in 1964 for the first and only time after World War II. He came to reminisce for Walter Cronkite and the cameras of CBS about the invasion of Normandy. As he sat on the wall overlooking Omaha Beach he said the following:

". . . these men came here - British and our allies, and Americans - to storm these beaches for one purpose only, not to gain anything for ourselves, not to fulfill any ambitions that America had for conquest, but just to preserve freedom. . . . Many thousands of men have died for such ideals as these. . . but these young boys. . . were cut off in their prime. . . I devoutly hope that we will never again have to see such scenes as these. I think and hope, and pray, that humanity will have learned. . . we must find some way . . . to gain an eternal peace for this world."
(Quoted from the epilogue, Carlo D'Este, Eisenhower: A Soldier's Life, p. 705.)

That was Ike: honest, plain spoken, a soldier who was also a man of peace who viewed war as something to be stricken from this planet of ours. I think he would be disappointed that his vision has not been carried out.

Yet this great soldier would, I believe, have heartily agreed with his former boss, George C. Marshall, who wrote in 1945:

"We have tried since the birth of our nation to promote our love of peace by a display of weakness. This course has failed us utterly."

Postscript:
As of 2001 there were 78,000 MIAs from WW II unaccounted for.