Regarding the slow advance on Caen, (or through Normandy, in general), one thing that has not been mentioned were the hedgerows. The Allies were simply not prepared for the way that the French fields were laid out in that region. They tended to look at aerial photos and presume that the fields were simply separated by heavy privet or something. In fact, each field was a miniature natural fortress in which the roads were sunken paths overlooked by the fields that were bounded by heavily grown vegetation used to keep cattle from straying (or entering). The Germans would deploy weapons dug in to the hedgrows with support troops dug in on the opposite side of the field, so that when allied troops broke into a field, they were still facing a heavy defensive position on the opposite side. That is why the various “Rhino” field modifications to Shermans are often lionized. It was not simply “Yankee ingenuity” showing off, but a necessary tool that was never envisioned by any theorist regarding armored warfare.
Very interesting; Thank you!
The origin of the modifications also seems interesting. From that Wiki article:
It was a little bit of both - Huff Duff triangulation was one thing and helped tactically, but reading the messages was another and helped strategically by letting the allies know where in general the concentrations of U-boots were or were going, what areas of the sea were relatively safe, where to concentrate air patrols and so forth. Dönitz communicating all the time also helped code breakers immensely because it gave them a flood of messages to ply their trade, so for example the 4 rotor naval Enigma could be broken in as little as 10 months despite being a massively more complex cypher. I’m also led to believe that Dönitz blabbing made looking for the “milk cows” (resupply submarines) easier.
Finally, the constant back-and-forth also made ascertaining the effect of a given attack easier - if a skipper radioed back home shortly after an encounter it was probably to warn the old man that some damage had been done, and thus that the sub was headed home and the area relatively safe for shipping. Had Dönitz not insisted on being informed of every minutiae of every cruise, the fog of war would have been more blinding.
I think “main credit” goes too far. The Poles did the original work on which everything that followed was based but it was the teams at Bletchley Park that turned these insights into the decryption factory that produced the Ultra material quickly enough for it to be of tactical use. It was also Bletchley that broke back into the naval Enigma when they added the forth rotor.
True enough that they were not prepared for the hedgerows of the bocage but they should not have been surprised by it. Most of the American assault troops had been based in South Devon where much of the countryside is very similarwith small fields divided by sunken lanes, banks, and hedgerows.
I think the lack of equipment was down to other factors - at tactical level an almost total emphasis on getting ashore at the expense of thinking about the aftermath and, at command level, over-optimistic assumptions about the progress to be made before the German line stiffened up with the expectaion that the Allies would get through the bocage and into better tank country on the bounce. One other possible factor might be the American reluctance to make use of specialised armour - Hobart’s “funnies”.This was certainly true on D-Day itself but I am not clear how it related to days after the invasion.
Unfortunately, while the troops might have been mucking about in similar terrain, the planners were not being informed of any similarities by Intelligence or the reconnaissance units.
A few comments.
1.) U.S. troops were draftees not ready to invade Europe and take on the Germans, who were superbly trained, equipped and experienced. North Africa was a safe blooding where disaster would not be too costly to the war effort and we could try out our equipment and landing techniques against an enemy not as committed as the Germans. In fact, green U.S. troops were routed by experienced German armored forces at Kasserine Pass, in Tunisia, much to the rage of Patton. I had a friend whose father was in that battle. “I never ran so hard in my life,” he told his sons. We learned from it.
2.) Churchill was a Great political leader but not a strategist. He could look at a map and see an advantage but he had no idea of the practical problems of carrying it out. The disaster at Gallipoli in WW I was his plan as, what, First Sea Lord, I think? After North Africa he wanted to invade Greece and work up into Eastern Europe, the “soft underbelly of Europe.” His appalled Generals managed to get him to settle for Italy, which became a slogging disaster, in which a German air force general, Albert Kesselring (Air Force controlled paratroops, a key force in Italy) brilliantly stalled us at every turn. Churchill also wanted to skip Normandy (as I understand it) and go directly to the Atlantic Ocean western coast of France. Again, his appalled generals pointed out the practical insanity of it. Thank God for strong advisors.
3.) Pressure was on by Stalin for a “Second Front” to ease pressure on the Red Army (probably a lot more political and strategic cunning involved in this demand, but I haven’t done my homework on it). We had to do something to be good allies and to have a military force presence on the Continent at the end of the war.
4.) I’ve never heard of a Plan B, but we also invaded Southern France (the Rivera) along with Normandy, and were successful there, so plan B might have started there as well and something might have been made of our position in Italy. Certainly, a failure at Normandy would have been one of the great disasters of history, fully harvested by Stalin.
5.) Irony to consider. We got into the war because the Japanese bombed our fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Our first action in the war was to attack the officially neutral French Vichy in North Africa on the other side of the World. And it WAS a good strategic move.
I don’t think that’s correct. The WWII troops had a whole lot of volunteers. They enlisted by the thousands on Dec 8, 1941. (My father was one of them. He and his 3 best friends showed up at the enlistment office at 8am on that Monday morning (skipping school) and found there was already a line. Despite their reservations, Dad persuaded his friends they should be paratroopers; he failed the physical, they passed & were inducted.)
What? Six months before that, we had sent the Doolittle teams in a bombing raid on the capitol of Japan – something they had assured their public would never happen.
Three months before that we defeated their naval fleet at the Battle of Midway, often considered the turning point of the Pacific War. From this point on, Japan was just falling back toward their home islands.
It would be closer to accurate to say that the war with Japan had been essentially won, and was in the mopping-up phase, before we landed troops in the European theater.
It’s even less excusable than that – the Allied command was in constant contact with people like LeClerc and DeGaulle, experienced tank commanders who knew all about the terrain difficulties of France…not to mention the Resistance forces, whose direct military assistance was insignificant, but who could have informed them in detail about the thousand-year-history of the hedgerows. Come to think of it, the public library could have helped.
John Keegan has called the failure of planners to account for the hedgerows possibly the greatest intelligence failure of the war.
There is a well-known and important 20th century genius who did important work at Bletchley; how very important it was may sometimes be overlooked.
I have to agree that Bletchley Park having systematized, mass-produced and made available in near-real-time the Ultra decrpyts was the critical factor in transforming the cryptanalysis from a neat idea into war-winning potential. Still, it’s worth some credit that the Poles broke into Enigma in the first place solely by using intuition and mathematical analysis – without the “bombes” and large-scale analytical resources the British would bring to bear. It remains one of the most stupendous feats of practical mathematics. in history.
As it can as easily – and as meaninglessly – said that the moment Hitler invaded the USSR the war was lost and it was just cleaning up after that.
But that isn’t the same – the Germans were still advancing at that point. The battle of Midway was the high point of Japanese advances in the Pacific – from then on they were falling back.
The similar turning point in Europe would probably be Stalingrad, or possibly Kursk, I’d think.
P.S. There is a wonderful video of the US Civil War in 4 minutes, showing the territory controlled by each side, with each weeks shown as one second on the video. Is there anything like this for WWII? It would be really interesting.
Not for the whole war… but hereis a great equivalent for the East Front.
Ok, U.S. troops were GREEN, civilians taken into the military: draftees AND volunteers with fast and limited training. The professional units in the U.S. military were limited and we were creating and expanding new units, turning out new weapons (like the basic Garand M1 rifle), and creating theoretical new ways of doing things, like airborne and amphibious operations. Germans and British had weapons production fully up, reserves activated, training procedures well established, and a lot of practical experience fighting in the two years since 1939. Ditto the Japanese, who’d been fighting bitterly in China for some time.
By first action of the war I mean the first major offensive military undertaking to get into it and make a difference.
–Bombing of Tokyo was a propaganda stunt aimed at Japanese psychology and to boost American civilian moral–and all involved knew it. In that sense it was highly successful. It did almost no military damage.
–Midway was a defensive island battle that we turned into an offensive naval ambush (the real damage was done by U.S. carrier planes, not land-based). It critically hurt the Japanese navy and was of great strategic importance to the Pacific war, but it did not involve a major military offensive and the war was not won after Midway by a long shot. Historians say that kind of thing more than those who had to fight it.
–You might argue that Guadalcanal was our first major offensive action in the war, but that was a Navy-supported Marine Corps landing intended only to stop the Japanese from building an airbase to threaten our lines of communication with Australia. It got really nasty only after the Japanese decided to double down by reinforcing with a small elite military force, and then triple down after we caught and annihilated it. The way the Japanese fought at Guadalcanal became a strategic disaster for them, self-inflicted.
–Crossing the Atlantic with a large, highly organized invasion fleet to take North Africa from the “neutral” Vichy French government was a major offensive and strategic undertaking, coordinated with our allies as a first step to get into the war in way that would tell. The Pacific was run as a secondary theater until much later (allowing for MacArthur’s successful demands for more and a few critical moments where more was badly needed).
While I don’t disagree, it’s worth mentioning that the Japanese war strategy since before Pearl Harbor had been predicated on seizing a network of “barrier” islands which would be heavily fortified and defended. The theory was, US Fleet would have to advance into this perimeter, taking damage all the way, and once it was whittled down to size the Japanese fleet would finish it off in the decisive battle.
My point is that the Japanese plan did not involve “advancing” once they held their perimeter. Midway was not initially going to be part of that perimeter, but was added after the humiliation of the Doolittle raid. Thus, it’s fair to say that the Japanese had decided to stop advancing on their own, even before Midway.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a shattering blow, of course. But don’t gauge its effectiveness by whether or not Japan later advanced aggressively.
No sorry,it wasn’t a code, it wass an encryption machine.
The Poles gave us an Enigma m/c, though not a military one ,and Bletchley spent a good part of the war working the codes out.
Not a code ,but a machine ,sorry!
The Enigma was a machine that produced code.
There was nothing particularly secret about the machine itself. You could buy them if you wanted to.
The problem was breaking the codes created by the machine. And that was what the Poles did.
Cipher, not code. Codes have a symbol (multidigit numbers count) to represent a concept, perhaps even an entire long paragraph. Ciphers have 1 character directly substituting for the original character in the original message. In a code, you can’t say it if it isn’t in the codebook already. With a cipher, you can say anything you can write in plain text. [/cryptonut nitpick]
there are those who say the normandy landings could have been done two years earlier and the germans would probably have put up a weaker defense than in 1944. but then, the allies weren’t that impressive in 1942.