D-Day Was Won by Sergeants and Privates When the Plan Fell Apart on the Beaches

The plan for the invasion of Normandy ran to thousands of pages, and it was a masterpiece. It specified the tides, the moon, the order of the ships, the timing of the bombers and the number of the lifeboats. By breakfast on June 6, 1944, much of it was in the water. The paratroopers had landed miles from where they were supposed to be. The bombs meant to wreck the German defences above Omaha Beach had fallen in empty fields. Tanks that were supposed to swim ashore had sunk. Landing craft had been pushed off course by the current and put their men down in the wrong places.

And the invasion succeeded anyway. It succeeded because the men on the beaches, young, frightened, and in many cases leaderless, looked around, understood what was in front of them and did the next thing. That is the story of D-Day that I think is the true one, and it is a story about the difference between a free army and every other kind.

The decision to go

Start with the one man at the top, because he deserves a paragraph. General Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander, had set the invasion for June 5. The weather turned foul, with high winds and rough seas, and he postponed it by a day. His meteorologists then predicted a short break in the weather for June 6. It was a narrow window. If he missed it, the next suitable combination of moon and tide would not come for weeks, and the secrecy of the operation could not be guaranteed. After consulting his commanders in the early hours of June 5, he gave the order to go.

Then he wrote something that I find deeply moving. In case the invasion failed, he drafted a short note, to be released only if needed, in which he took the full blame upon himself, saying that if any fault or blame attached to the attempt, it was his alone. He never had to issue it. But think about the character that wrote it before the first boat had touched the beach. A republic needs leaders who put the responsibility on their own shoulders when they send young men into the fire. A great many leaders in great many times and places have done the opposite.

The night: scattered paratroopers

The invasion began in the dark. In the early hours of June 6, thousands of American paratroopers of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions climbed into transport planes in England and flew across the Channel to drop behind the beaches in Normandy. Their mission was to seize the roads and bridges and causeways that the seaborne forces would need, and to disrupt German reinforcements.

The drop went badly wrong. Clouds and German anti-aircraft fire scattered the formations; pilots, flying low and fast, released their paratroopers far from the planned drop zones. Many men came down miles from their units, some in fields that the Germans had deliberately flooded, where soldiers weighed down with equipment drowned in water that was only a few feet deep. Officers could not find their men. Men could not find their officers. Soldiers from different companies, battalions and even divisions ended up in the same hedgerow, with no idea where they were.

What happened next is an American story. Men who had never met found each other in the dark, by using small metal toy clickers that they had been given as signals, and they formed ad hoc groups under the senior man present, whoever he was. A lieutenant would lead twenty strangers. A sergeant would take charge of a squad from three different companies. They then went for the nearest objective they could identify. Many of the objectives were taken by makeshift groups whose members would not have recognised each other the day before. The 505th Parachute Infantry took the town of Sainte-Mère-Église in the early morning.

And here is a fact that I find remarkable. The scatter, which was a failure of the plan, was also a weapon. German commanders, receiving reports of paratroopers landing across a huge area, could not tell where the main drop was or what it was aimed at. The confusion that the Americans suffered was visited, with interest, on the Germans.

Omaha: where the plan broke

The deadliest ground that day was Omaha Beach, a crescent of sand about five miles long, backed by steep bluffs. The task of taking it fell to the 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions, with the Rangers on the flank. The plan relied on three things: a heavy air bombardment to destroy the German defences, a naval bombardment to finish the job, and amphibious tanks to land with the first wave and support the infantry.

All three failed. The heavy bombers, flying through clouds, were told to guard against hitting their own men, and they overshot; the bombs fell well inland and almost none hit the beach defences. The naval bombardment was too brief to destroy them. Most of the amphibious tanks that were launched, far from shore in rough seas (27 of 29 in one battalion), were swamped and sank, and the infantry lost the armour they had counted on. The currents pushed landing craft off course. Units landed in the wrong sectors, mixed together, in front of defences that were almost entirely intact. The Germans had a full, battle-tested division in the area that the Allied planners had not expected.

The first waves stepped off the ramps into machine-gun fire, and into water up to their chests. Men hid behind the low sea wall or behind the obstacles that the Germans had planted on the beach. For hours, the American assault on Omaha was stalled and in danger of failing completely.

The sergeants and privates take over

This is the point at which the plan stops mattering, and the men do. Reports from those hours, and the testimony of the survivors, come back to the same picture. The officers had been killed or lost their units. Small groups, five or ten men at a time, began to move.

A sergeant would notice a gap in the wire and crawl through it. A private would blow a hole with a Bangalore torpedo, an explosive tube used to cut barbed wire. A group would reach the foot of the bluff and find that the Germans could not fire down at them because of the angle, and they would climb. Others followed. Once there was a handful of men on a bluff, the Germans in the trenches below faced a threat from behind, and their positions began to fall.

Brigadier General Norman Cota, assistant commander of the 29th Division, came ashore with the early waves and walked along the beach under fire, finding clusters of men pinned behind the sea wall and organising them to move off. He pressed the leaders to get their men through the wire and up the draws. His presence did what no plan could: it showed the men that someone was in charge. Cota's example was an example of the thing the Army calls leadership by presence. But the men who moved, and who did the climbing and the killing, were the privates and sergeants who got off the beach because it was the only way to live.

By the end of the day, the Americans had a foothold on Omaha. It was shallow and precarious, held at a terrible price. But it held.

Pointe du Hoc

A few miles west of Omaha, a different kind of improvisation took place. Pointe du Hoc is a headland about a hundred feet high, and the Allied planners believed the Germans had placed a battery of heavy guns on top, which could fire on both Utah and Omaha Beaches. The job of taking it went to the 2nd Ranger Battalion, led by Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder.

The Rangers landed under fire at the foot of the cliffs. Their landing was late, because the craft had been off course, and the Germans were waiting. The Rangers fired grappling hooks with ropes up the cliff face and climbed, and some used extension ladders borrowed from London's fire brigade. They climbed under fire. When they reached the top they found the gun emplacements empty. The big guns had been moved. But small groups of Rangers, pushing inland on their own, found the guns in an orchard and put them out of action. They then held the position against German counterattacks until relieved, at a heavy cost. It was a tiny battle with huge stakes.

Utah: a general's decision

At Utah Beach, the westernmost of the American beaches, the story was different. The landings were comparatively light in casualties, but the currents had carried the landing craft roughly a mile south of the planned landing site. The assault force found itself on a stretch of coast with fewer defences than expected.

Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the assistant commander of the 4th Infantry Division, was among the first on the beach. He was fifty-six, walked with a cane, had a bad heart and was the eldest son of President Theodore Roosevelt. He had asked to land with the first wave. When he saw where they had landed, he made a decision on the spot: the force would not try to re-embark and land at the planned place. They would begin the attack from where they were, and he organised the men to move inland. It was a sound call, and it saved time and lives.

Roosevelt died of a heart attack a few weeks later, on July 12, 1944, and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions on D-Day. The citation records that he moved from unit to unit under fire, steadying his men. The story of Roosevelt at Utah is one of the best illustrations of the principle I want to put in front of you: when a plan collapses, the army that survives is the one whose junior leaders know they are expected to think.

The cost

By the end of June 6, the Allies had landed roughly 156,000 troops from sea and air (sources say more than 150,000) on five beaches, and the German coastal defences had been breached. The cost was heavy. The research of the National D-Day Memorial Foundation has documented about 4,400 Allied dead on that day (its count has been given as 4,414, with 2,501 Americans, and as 4,413, with 2,499). The number of wounded and missing was far higher, and the figures for the whole day depend on how you count. I will give you the documented figure and urge you not to inflate it. The truth is heavy enough.

What a free army does

Now let me put the argument in order.

One: the German system was built on obedience from above. The German army had a long tradition of initiative at the junior level, but by 1944 the command structure in the west was tied up in a chain that ran up to Hitler. The armoured reserves that might have thrown the Allies back into the sea on the first morning were, by the usual account, held back pending his authorisation, and he was slow to give it. A system where one man's approval is required for the decisive move is a system that fails when speed matters.

Two: the American army was built on the assumption that a private could be asked to think. This was not an accident. It came out of a society in which people were used to making decisions for themselves, running their own businesses and farms, forming their own churches and clubs, choosing their own governments. A country that has been governed for a hundred and fifty years by consent of the governed produces men who do not wait to be told what to do. They look around and act.

Three: that capacity is a product of liberty. Tocqueville noticed it in the 1830s. In Democracy in America he observed how Americans, in the absence of a strong central authority to tell them what to do, formed associations to solve their own problems. The habit of self-government is not just a political arrangement. It is a character. And on June 6, 1944, that character ran straight up a bluff in Normandy.

Four: leaders should trust it. The officers who took responsibility, from Eisenhower down to the lieutenant leading twenty strangers, were doing something the Founders expected of free men. The principle that responsibility rests with individuals is built into the Constitution, which assigns power and accountability to named offices and refuses to let anyone hide behind a committee. For more on the Founders' thinking, see the Founders page.

The objection: materiel won it

The strongest objection to my thesis, from historians who study the logistics of the war, goes like this. D-Day was won by overwhelming material superiority: the Allies had enormous air power, naval power and industrial capacity, and the Germans were fighting on two fronts with their best divisions elsewhere. Talk of initiative and character is sentimental. If the Allies had landed the same men with half the shipping, they would have been thrown back, and no amount of grit would have prevented it.

I accept most of that, and I want to be fair to it. The Allies did have an advantage in air power, in shipping and in industrial strength. The Home Front Built Ships in Days and Became the Arsenal of Democracy describes how it was built. Without it, the landing would not have been attempted. Nobody should say that initiative alone beat the Wehrmacht.

But the objection proves too much. Materiel got the men to the beach; it did not get them off it. The bombs missed, the tanks sank and the naval fire fell short, and the plan's whole material apparatus had partially failed by the time the infantry arrived. What was left was people. If material superiority guaranteed the outcome, Omaha Beach would not have been in doubt for hours. The fact that it was shows that the human factor was decisive at the margin where the battle was won. Industry delivered the opportunity, and the men on the sand turned it into a victory. A free country is good at both.

What we owe them

The Americans who landed in Normandy were, in the main, citizen soldiers. They had worked in factories and on farms and in offices; they had gone to school and church and played baseball. They were not professionals in the European sense, and they did not think of themselves as heroes. They did what they were asked and, when the plan broke, what the moment required.

We owe them remembrance, and we owe them more: the preservation of the kind of country that produces such men. That means teaching our children the history without embarrassment, restoring the habits of self-government and keeping faith with the veterans who are still with us. The Four Chaplains Gave Away Their Life Jackets When the Dorchester Went Down and Sergeant York Captured 132 Germans in the Argonne and Went Home to Tennessee are other chapters in the same story, and Iwo Jima in Thirty-Six Days and the Two Flag Raisings on Mount Suribachi shows the same pattern in the Pacific.

The case in brief

1. On June 6, 1944 the invasion plan failed in many places: the airborne drops were scattered, the bombing at Omaha missed and most of the amphibious tanks sank.
2. Small groups of privates and sergeants, with a few officers like Norman Cota and Theodore Roosevelt Jr. acting on their own judgement, improvised their way off the beaches, and the Rangers climbed Pointe du Hoc.
3. The documented Allied dead for the day number about 4,400, including about 2,500 Americans, a figure that should be stated plainly and without exaggeration.
4. A free society produces soldiers who are used to deciding for themselves, a habit that Tocqueville traced to the American practice of self-government.
5. Material strength gave the Allies the chance, but the human factor turned it into a victory, and we owe it to the men who did it to preserve the country that made them.

What you can do: ask a veteran, or the family of one, for an hour of their story, and write it down for your own children.