The Longest Day

A couple of weeks ago was the 70^th anniversary of the Normandy Landings, which meant the opening of the Third Front by the allies against the German Third Reich (the first two being the Eastern and Italian Fronts) and would lead a few months later to the Liberation of France. Even though the real importance of this event is smaller than what many people believe, D-Day is clearly one of the most important events of the 20^th Century. It was the greatest amphibious attack in history, with nearly 160,000 Allied troops crossing the English Channel in 5,000 ships from southern England to the Normandy coasts (the famous five beaches, Utah, Omaha (attacked by the USA), Gold, Sword (both attacked by the UK) and Juno (by Canada)), while another 24,000 soldiers were airdropped behind the enemy lines, and more than 1,000 planes established aerial supremacy over the region's skies.

The result was a great victory for the Allied Forces, although German resistance and several mistakes consequence of the lack of experience in this kind of attack complicated the attempts to reach the military operation main objectives, such as the liberation of the cities of Carentan, St. Lô, Bayeux and Caen or the connection of all beachheads (only Juno and Gold managed to achieve this objective in the first day). It would not be until several more days after the landings that said objectives were reached, and by the time the landings ended, the Allies had suffered around 12,000 casualties (4,414 of them deaths), while the Germans lost between 4,000 and 9,000 soldiers out of 50,000 that were defending Normandy.

There are many factors that helped in the success of Operation Neptune (codename for the landings), the careful planning of every move that was to take place (although several troops ended up well away from the place where they were supposed to land), the great support of the Allied ships and planes, the coordination with the French Resistance, the few defenses established by the Wehrmacht in the zone, the development of new technologies like the Mulberry docks and, particularly, the effects of Operation Bodyguard, developed by the British Secret Services to make the Germans believe that the invasion would take place somewhere else (among the suggested objectives were Norway, the Balkans, southern France and the most important of all, Pas de Calais, which was the most credible option, given that it was the nearest point of the continent to Great Britain) and which made Hitler send many divisions to all of those points, easing up the Western Allies' advance. This latter point became even worse when Hitler did not give permission for the troops in Normandy and in inner France to reinforce the positions in Normandy until it was too late to stop the attack.

The only problem is that too many people give this battle a greater value than what it actually had. It is true that it was a great victory, but if there is something most historians agree with is that, whatever the result of the fighting in the French coasts, Germany's defeat would have arrived at some moment or another: a few kilometers to the east (a few thousand, of course), was the Red Army, ready to launch Operation Bagration, which only required five weeks to wipe out the entire German Army Group Centre and allowed the Soviets to reach Warsaw after kicking the Germans out of the Soviet Union. This detail is one that is many times ignored by alternative history writers, who act as if World War Two was only an effort carried out by the Western Allies against Germany.

A failure of the landings was something everyone had in mind, including Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, who even had prepared a speech he would read in this case, but fortunately, it was not necessary. However, what if it had not happened this way? What if the Allied troops were forced to retreat back into England, much like it had happened two years before in Dieppe?

As I have already said, it would not have meant Germany's victory. Right then, the Germans were already in the middle of a tough fight in two fronts, and a German victory in Normandy would haave just pushed back what was unavoidable, although the way this would have been shown would have been very different. To begin with, the Soviets would have probably found a greater resistance to their advance (all those soldiers that would not be defending the Western Front), but the Reds' advance would have been unstoppable. They would have surely "freed" all of Germany, instead of just the eastern half, and then they might have continued pushing west into the Benelux, Denmark and France. Of course, this would mean breaking all agreements made with the other Allies, and resistance to their advances would be extreme. If this were the case, it is very probable that the German troops would rather surrender to the Western Allies rather than to fight the Russians. And that was if the Allies simply did not just launch another invasion to open the third front.: as they had already planned for Operation Dragoon to liberate Southern France, maybe the Allies would choose that path to face the Nazis and later facilitate a less intensive invasion in the north.

By the same rule, it would have been sligthtly less than impossible for this to take towards a possible peace treaty. As agreements with the Soviet Union had established that none of the fighting nations would reach a separate peace with Germany, the hope some German officers had of allying with Great Britain and the United States against the Soviet Union (one of the actual expectations by the members of the July 20^th Plot, that of Operation Valkyrie fame) was clearly in vain.

Still, there are many stories in which the point of divergence is, precisely, the failure of the Normandy Landings, but few take into account the Soviet Union's presence, as I mentioned earlyer, but there are, eh? Let's see...

Example number 1: the French graphic novel series Jour J. This uchronic graphic novel series (which deals with many potential events) deals, in its 2^nd number ("París, Soviet Sector"), what would have happened if a storm had taken place while the Allied ships were reaching the Normandy coast. Complete operational failure is the main consequence, and France's liberation does not begin until three weeks later, in the south (the aforementioned Operation Dragoon). This difference in time means that Stalin's Red Army manages to take over all of Germany and in the end the Soviet troops are the ones that free Paris. The Iron Curtain, instead of crossing Germany, goes through France, and Paris is the city that ends up divided in different occupation sectors, with the Seine as the dividing line. The story itself speaks about the effects a mysterious serial killer is having in the Cold War, and about a detective from the Allied French zone and his efforts to find said killer while keeping his brothel-based spy ring safe.

And example number 2: the film "Fatherland" of 1994, based on the novel of the same name, written in 1992 by Robert Harris. In the novel, the point of divergence is in 1942, when Reinhard Heydrich manages to survive the attack that was organized against him in that year, but in the film this event is replaced with a defeat in Normandy, which inexplicably leads to the United States retiring from the war, the United Kingdom surrendering and Churchill going into exile. Germany unifies the European continent into a nation called "Germania" and continues the war against the Soviet Union. When the film begins, it is 1964, as the first preparations for Adolf Hitler's 70^th birthday, and in which one of the events will be a visit of the President of the United States, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. (father to John Fitzgerald Kennedy) for a high level meeting. The main characters are an SS Major called Xavier March and an American journalist, Charlie McGuire, and the former becomes involved into the investigation of the murder of a high officer in the Nazi Party, while the latter finds a similar case when she is invited to find another Nazi officer, that also appears dead. I will not reveal the end, in case someone decides to read the novel, but I can tell that the result is the discovery of a secret the Nazi Party leaders want to keep secret forever.

Something that is a bit stranger is to think on the possibility that the invasion became much more successful than what it was, which would have depended a bit on luck and a bit on strategy. For example, taking Caen in the first day would have eased enormously the later advances, as the city's deep water docks would have allowed to unload great quantities of war material, so advancing towards the south and the east would have been faster. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find anything based on this premise. Maybe someone could have written about this? Someone could be able to pull a great story out of it, surely...

Well, I hope that, in spite of how brief this post was (and the fact that it arrived a day too late), you liked this. Hopefully, next Friday's post will arrive on time. See you!