ENGLAND

All over the south of England, on the night of the fifth of June, people awoke, or else, if they were going late to bed, stopped what they were doing and went outside to listen. Those who had lived there for the past four years were used to noisy nights. The noise at nights had changed through the years, from the distinctive beat of German bombers and the din of airraids, to the sound of British bombers outward bound at dusk and homeward bound at dawn. But people who heard the noise on the fifth of June remember it as different from anything that had ever been heard before. Life in war had made them adept at guessing what was happening from what they could hear, and as they listened that night, with increasing excitement and pride, they knew that by far the greatest fleet of aircraft they had ever heard — and therefore the greatest fleet that anyone had ever heard — was passing overhead from north to south.

Nobody had much doubt of what the noise implied; even those who had nothing to do with military secrets had known it would happen soon. They simply said to themselves or to each other "This is it"; and probably most of them heard the sound with such deep emotion that they did not try to put their feelings into words. It was the invasion, as everybody either knew or guessed; and the invasion, if it succeeded, was to be the redemption of the defeat of Dunkirk, and the justification of the British refusal to admit defeat when everyone else in the world believed they were finished. It would be a reward for the four years' grinding labour by which they had dragged themselves up from the depths of 1940 to a state of national strength which made them an equal partner of the United States. And personally, to the British, it had a significance like a first gleam of sunshine after rain; it would be a sign, if it succeeded, of hope that the worst was over, the first glimpse of the beginning of the end of the sorrow, boredom, pain and frustration in which they had lived for so long.

That was to be its significance if it succeeded: what if it failed? People could not bring themselves to imagine what would happen if it failed; but they knew that failure would be a military disaster which at best would take years to retrieve, and in the back of their minds they doubted their own ability, exhausted by war as they were, to survive such a disappointment and start again, as they had at Dunkirk, and build everything up anew.

They went to sleep that night, if they slept any more, with a sense of great events impending, and of comradeship in a vast adventure, knowing the day would bring news of a battle which would influence all their lives for ever more. On the whole, they were certainly thankful the time had come to put everything to the test; but of course they thought anxiously of the thousands of their own people who even then, in the night, were on their way to battle, and of the Americans, whom many of them had met for the first time in the past few months. And many of these people, perhaps most, thought with special anxiety of one man who they imagined, rightly or wrongly, was on his way to France by air or sea.

In the morning, the main news in the papers and on the radio was still of the fall of Rome, which had been announced on the day before, and nothing was said of events which were nearer home. But just after nine o'clock the bare announcement came: "Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval forces supported by strong air forces began landing Allied armies this morning on the coast of France." Within a few minutes, this news, which the people of southern England had anticipated, was repeated all round the world.

The purpose of this book is to give an impression of what happened in the English Channel and on the coast of France that morning, roughly between the time when the aircraft were heard over England, and the time when the news was given. But to make the impression clear, one must start with a summary of eighteen months of concentrated thought and work which preceded the invasion, and of the reasoning which decided when and where it should be made, and the plans of what the high commanders intended to happen that morning.

The idea of an invasion of the continent from England could be said to have started at Dunkirk in 1940, when the more far-sighted British soldiers, struggling across the shore to escape from the German army, already knew that a British army would have to cross the shore of Europe in the opposite direction before the war was won. At that time, it seemed a very distant project: distant, but never impossible. In that same year, while most of Britain was preoccupied with improvising its own defence, the organisation called Combined Operations had already been founded, and was studying the technique of landing on hostile coasts. Eighteen months later, when Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten took over command of Combined Operations, Churchill told him "to plan for the offensive." When Russia and America joined Britain in the war, the prospect had become less distant; and in January 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt, meeting at Casablanca, agreed to appoint a joint staff to make a definite plan for the invasion. The head of this staff was Lieutenant General F. E. Morgan, who was appointed Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander — COSSAC for short — although the Supreme Commander himself had not yet been chosen.

For six months in 1943, COSSAC studied the coasts of Europe, and the Allied and German forces which might be joined in the battle, and the complicated technical details of the project. It was in that period — a year before the invasion — that the question of where to land in Europe was decided: a decision which had to remain an elaborately guarded secret till the very moment when the invasion fleet was sighted from the shore.

Many considerations were weighed and balanced in this decision: beaches suitable for landing, and country suitable for deploying an army behind the beaches; weather and tides; the distances from bases for short-range fighter aircraft, and from foreign ports which could be captured to help to support the army; and of course, the German defence. Of the whole of the coast of Europe from Norway to the Bay of Biscay, strict military logic narrowed the choice to two places: the district of Calais, or the coast of Normandy between Cherbourg and Le Havre. In the choice between these, there was room for opinion. Of course, Normandy is much further than Calais from English ports, but that made very little difference. The fleet which was planned was so large that all the ports from the Thames to the Bristol Channel would be needed to load it, and so most of the ships would have a long crossing wherever the landing was made. The Americans favoured Calais, although it was the most strongly defended part of the whole of the coast, because it offered a more direct route to Germany. The British rather more emphatically favoured Normandy, because its defences were weaker and because it could be cut off from the rest of Europe by bombing the bridges over the Seine and Loire. In the end, the...