A Bloody Victory. Dan Harvey
fate of the Second Front had become weather-dependent. Already Irish coastguardsman and Blacksod Lighthouse keeper Ted Sweeney, and his wife Maureen, had delivered a weather forecast by telephone from County Mayo’s most westerly point. It was one of a number of weather stations feeding meteorological data updates on to Group Captain (Royal Air Force) J.M. Stagg’s Meteorological Unit at Southwick House, southern England, to enable them to prepare and present advice to the Allied HQ on weather. The information update from Blacksod Lighthouse had given clarity to opinions of a previously divided prognosis among the US meteorologist staff – who were optimistic – and British staff – who were pessimistic – as to the effect of the prevailing adverse weather conditions: the successive depressions moving eastwards, twenty-four hours before the scheduled H-hour on 5 June. With first wave troops already aboard ships, General Eisenhower had suspended the operation; ships already out at sea had to be reversed and the fleet of ships that had not yet left harbour had to be kept quayside and the men left onboard. However, the second weather report from Blacksod suggested conditions likely to bring a brief interlude of improved weather. General Eisenhower, advised by Group Captain Stagg, launched D-Day with the famous words, ‘OK, we’ll go.’
And so started the largest airborne and seaborne invasion in history. Two hundred thousand Allied troops (Irish among them) hurled themselves headlong in a deadly onslaught against huge concrete German defence fortifications along Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. It was an irresistible force against an immoveable object.
The Allied D-Day operation involved the execution of five interlinked and overlapping phases. Phase one: airborne paratrooper and glider-borne infantry drops – between midnight and 2 a.m. – with 23,000 troops descending behind the German lines, the US on the left or western flank and the British and Canadians on the right or eastern flank. Phase two: acts undertaken, between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m., to distract and deceive, even spreading the false perception that another point of attack was occurring at Pas-de-Calais. Phase three: aerial bombardment, at 3 a.m., with a heavy concentration on German coastal defences all along the northern French coast. Phase four: naval bombardment, at 5 a.m.; heavy salvos from Allied naval ships standing off the Normandy shoreline, covering the assault troop approach to shore on landing craft. Phase five: the first waves of Allied assault troops fight their way ashore, between 6 a.m. and 7.30 a.m., on five beaches, codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword, over a fifty-mile stretch of enemy-held coastline; each was to breach the beach’s defences, force their way inland to gain a lodgement in the hinterlands, and join up together in a consolidated bridgehead. Then they were to be prepared, once reinforced, to advance eastwards towards Paris.
The Germans along the Atlantic Wall were stationed in concrete constructions behind purpose-built structures of solid stone and steel. Where there were minefields and tank traps, Rommel had them enlarged and dug deeper; already-built bunkers were further reinforced. This was all done to channel the attacking Allied troops – and especially their tanks – to within range of carefully-sited anti-tank weapons and powerful Mauser MG-42 machine guns. These weapons, in addition to being placed in bunkers, were sited on the ground floors of fortified houses, beachfront villas, farmhouses inland and other ‘strong point’ buildings. These buildings, sturdy and ideal for adaptation, had been captured by the Germans and strengthened by buttressing them with logs, sandbagged earth and concrete. In some instances, entire coastal and inland villages were manipulated towards this end. These lines of beach and inland obstacles – minefields, bunkers, gun emplacements, fortified houses and resistance points – were a serious stumbling block for any attempted assault.
It was at the beaches, however, that the holding back of the Allied assault waves would occur – not indefinitely, necessarily, but for duration enough to allow the Panzer reserves to be brought forward and deployed, and then, with all their combined fire power, push the invasion back into the sea. Rommel wanted these Panzer divisions already present at the coast, primed and prepared, during the first hours of the invasion, to drive the Allies back into the sea in what he foresaw as a violent and brutal defence. The Panzers were not available to him, however; instead they were held far back and only to be released on Hitler’s direct orders. Rommel doubted that they would not arrive on time; in fact, he believed they would not arrive at all. They would become stalled, or more likely completely destroyed, by Allied aircraft, as the Allies had almost unfettered air superiority.
Availing of this air superiority was Dubliner William ‘Bill’ Andrew Wallace; he flew a Seafire aircraft, a naval version of the Spitfire which was adapted for operation from aircraft carriers. A pilot with the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, he was part of Fleet Air Arm’s 867 Air Squadron. His D-Day log book entry records that he was spotting for HMS Warspite, calling in the fall of shot of their gun salvos to increase their accuracy. It also notes that he was shot down over a beachhead at 8.30 a.m. and landed near Russy crossroads, five miles inland, behind enemy lines! Flak from anti-aircraft guns had hit his engine and he force-landed in fields, his engine on fire. With assistance from locals, who gave him directions as to where the Germans were, he managed to avoid being captured and navigated his way to the American beachhead ‘O’, spending the night on the English Channel on board an American landing craft tank. Bill, the son of the porter of the Northern Bank on Dublin’s Grafton Street, who grew up in a flat above the bank, arrived safely back to England and survived the war; he later joined Aer Lingus, where he worked for twenty-four years, and in 1970 he became one of the first pilots to join Aer Arann. Bill died in 1985.
Another pilot who came to earth, this time on purpose, was Irish-born Oliver Plunkett Boland, a glider pilot. He was the second glider to land at Pegasus Bridge in undoubtedly one of the most daring and well-executed actions by the British 6th Airborne Division; it was a pre- H-hour ‘coup-de-main’ operation to seize and hold two bridges, keeping them intact for later use by the Allies. Crash-landing their gliders, with expert precision, immediately adjacent to the bridge, the men from 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry (the Ox and Bucks) and 249 Field Company Royal Engineers, all commanded by Major John Howard, surprised a stunned bridge guard, overwhelming them with staggering speed, grenades and small arms fire; it was no small feat. Well after the war, in conversation with Irish journalist Kevin Myers, who asked him if there were Irish men among the Ox and Bucks regiment, now-retired Major John Howard replied, ‘about ten per cent’, then adding, ‘the best ten per cent!’ Those under Major Howard were later reinforced by the 7th Parachute Regiment; together they successfully held the bridges until further reinforced on D-Day by Lord Lovat’s 1st Special Service (Commando) Brigade, who landed on Sword Beach.
Among the ranks of the reinforcements was Galwegian Private Pat Gillen, who described his exit from his landing craft in the following terms, ‘The whole thing was to move fast, not to be an object for the snipers. They used to say “if you want to see your grandchildren then get off the landing craft faster than Jessie Owens [an Olympic sprinter]”. Seemingly I was fast.’
Thousands upon thousands of Allied assault troops ran that gauntlet and diced with death, disembarking, under intense enemy fire, onto the D-Day beaches, at dawn on 6 June 1944. Many died, but the carnage was especially horrible in the opening hours on Omaha Beach. Among the first to die on Omaha was Joseph Madagan, whose mother was from Clouna, near Ennistymon in County Clare. Joseph was with the US Rangers, who, alongside ‘A’ Company 116th Infantry Regiment, were among the first wave. Weighed down with heavy backpacks and equipment, staggering and stumbling through water, those moving sluggishly were easily picked out by the enemy snipers. Earlier, Allied aerial and naval bombardments, although immense, had not always achieved the desired results, and there was plenty of fight left in the defenders.
But it was the Allies, with naval support, tank fire, air support and the sheer grit of courageous small units, that won the day; by day’s end, the Allies had a foothold on the Normandy coast. Most survived the horrors of D-Day, but many fell in the fierce fighting in bocage countryside: the small fields, high hedgerows, earthen embankments and sunken roads which were ideal for the wily and determined German defenders, who still had considerable resolve left.
The Germans had been surprised by the Allied landing at Normandy, and, significantly, continued to believe, as they had been led to believe, that the Allied invasion at Normandy was only a diversion for a still-to-be-executed main Allied effort at the Pas-de-Calais. They had become convinced