Analysis

It had been a grim fight. Six weeks of battle had left the Germans disheartened and susceptible to any farther blow the Allies might deliver. 'It was casualty reports, casualty reports, casualty reports wherever you went,' Rommel told his son Manfred from his sickbed. 'I have never fought with such losses...And the worst of it is that it was all without sense or purpose.' Indeed, Rommel continued, on some days the equivalent of a regiment of his men had fallen in Normandy—more than in a whole summer of fighting in Africa during 1942.

The days had been filled with mud, heartache, and pain for the Allies as well. From the very beginning, little had seemed to go right. The airborne assault on the night before the landing had sown confusion among the enemy and had provided an important diversion, but too many of the men had landed too far from their targets. As a result, the effort had only a marginal effect on the developing battle. Over the days that followed, rather than withdrawing beyond the Seine as Allied planners had expected, the Germans had hung on tenaciously, taking brutal losses but inflicting them upon the Allies as well. Meanwhile, Montgomery's careful plan for the attack had begun to unravel on D-Day itself. His forces failed to take Caen, the key to further operations in the open country to the south. Attacking time and again as the campaign developed, they had nonetheless held the cream of the German force in place, absorbing pressure that would almost inevitably have fallen upon Bradley's forces in the bocage.

As for the Americans, the landing on OMAHA Beach had been a near-disaster averted only by the courage of unsung sailors and soldiers. When air attacks and naval gunfire had failed to silence German guns and the momentum of the assault had begun to lag, those heroes had pushed their frail landing craft to shore despite the traps and obstacles blocking their way. Rallying to the directions of their commanders, they had then climbed the bluffs overlooking the beach and advanced inland, often at the cost of their own lives. In the same way, although Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins' VII Corps captured the port of Cherbourg on 29 June, the American advance bogged down in the hedgerows. Bradley's First Army absorbed forty thousand casualties while slowly advancing twenty miles to St. Lo.

Even so, enough went well for the campaign to succeed. Roosevelt, Marshall, Eisenhower, Churchill, and Montgomery were master communicators who bonded an unwieldy coalition into an extraordinary fighting machine. The plan they and their staffs devised failed to foresee every circumstance that would occur on the battlefield, particularly the difficulties Bradley's forces would encounter in the bocage, but it was still a masterpiece of innovation that provided ample means for Allied commanders to prevail. Cunning deceptions kept the Germans transfixed on the Pas de Calais until long after the real invasion had occurred; Allied airmen swept the skies clean of the enemy fighters and bombers that might have imposed a heavy toll upon the landing force; and the effort to build up the stocks of supplies and munitions necessary for an effective attack succeeded beyond the most optimistic expectation. In the end, notwithstanding, it was the heroism of infantrymen such as Major Howie, who rose day and night to the challenge despite almost overwhelming fear and fatigue, that afforded the critical margin for success.

A barely failed assassination attempt upon Hitler's life, implicating Rommel himself, brought about a purge of officers in Germany that would, for a time, strengthen Hitler's control over his armed forces. Although the Germans would fight on with resilience and determination for another ten months, their line in France would soon break, Patton's army would swing clear, Paris would fall, and Allied forces would approach the Rhine. The loss of France would deprive Germany not only of a major source of Mod, raw resources, and labor but also of seaports that had long sheltered its U-boats and of radar sites that had afforded early warning of Allied bomber attacks. More important, it would provide the Allies with the secure base they needed to launch their final offensive against the German heartland. As Rommel told his son, the future was clear and inevitable. The end of Hitler's Reich was at hand: 'There is no longer anything we can do.'