Overlord

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By the late fall of 1943, the Western Allies and the Soviet Union have dealt the third Reich multiple blows.

The Allies have dislodged the Germans from North Africa, and Sicily, and are fighting their way up the Italian boot. While the Red Army, after victories at Stalingrad and Cursed, which is West, towards Germany. The next step for the Allies is the long anticipated invasion of Northern Europe.

This is World War II with Tom Hanks, episode 13, Overlord.

“Wings over the mountains by Baghdad and the Dead Sea.”

Replayings from the Supreme Headquarters of Britain, the United States and the USSR, bring to the capital of Persia the leader of the war against Germany. This is for the three-way conference, so long-expected, so up in the postpone.

Tehran is a hugely important conference, it's the first time the big three get together in person.

You've got Joe Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union. You've got Roosevelt, President of the USA, and you've got Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the Warlord of the British Empire. This is the central organizing brain for the Allied War effort. And they're going to establish at this conference, the roadmap, the blueprint,

for how they're going to defeat the Axis and the Second World War.

“Since the US entry into the war, American and British military strategists have debated the best way to defeat Nazi Germany.”

The British want to prosecute this war as they have prosecuted past ones. The mastery of the sea, control of commerce, raids around the periphery until the enemy simply collapses. The British advocate for campaigns in North Africa and the Mediterranean, but American military leaders, along with the Soviets, want the Allies to directly attack. The Red Army's been carrying the burden of a land war for years.

Millions, literally millions of casualties on a thousand-mile front,

and so to the big concern for Stalin, is when are you going to open a second front?

So the Americans are looking at the map and saying, "We can cross the channel from Britain, hit France, why wouldn't you just do that?" For the British Empire, they could think of nothing worse. Churchill's entire generation of British politicians either fought in or commanded in the first World War and was scarred. And so the idea of gambling everything on a cross-channel invasion in France,

the exact place, by the way, that so many terrible things happened in trench warfare back in the first World War, all that mattered was we don't do that again. Winston Churchill is thinking maybe we land in Greece and Yugoslavia, maybe we push up through Slovenia, maybe we land in Norway. Stalin says, "I don't care about any of this stuff, it's nonsense.

Get in some ships, cross the English channel, land in France, and open up that proper second front against the Germans." If you think about Allied leadership, it looks as if it's the big three. But what Roosevelt understands, what Stalin understands, and what Churchill, to his great anguish, is coming to understand, is that there's only room for two people at the summit, and that the fate of his nation was to be somewhat in a clips.

At Tehran, the Americans and the Soviets finally get their way. A big American dominated invasion of Western Europe, Operation Overlord. Operation Overlord will be a massive coordinated invasion by air, land, and sea, scheduled to launch in May 1944, a mere six months away. If it succeeds, the Western Allies and the Red Army will be able to advance on Germany from two fronts.

But who is to command this enormous effort? The obvious choice is George Marshall. George Marshall is the Army Chief of Staff, and he is unquestionably the most respected military man, certainly in the United States and maybe even the world.

What becomes clear, though, is that Roosevelt realizes that he can't have Marshall out of Washington.

“He needs him too much to be sort of running the entire war effort.”

And so then the question is who? Montgomery, Churchill star general, is absolutely certain that there is one man perfectly suited to be supreme command of the Allied effort. And that is Montgomery himself. But with the American contribution and men and material about to dominate the Allied effort,

it's clear that an American must be placed in command. President Roosevelt selects General Dwight Eisenhower, a protege of George Marshall, and the successful commander of the campaigns in North Africa and Sicily. Roosevelt sees in Eisenhower the kind of political skill and savvy that's going to be necessary to keep the alliance together and to pull off what is going to be one of the most high-risk military operations in all of human history.

At the same time, Eisenhower did not have a huge severe combat experience.

He hadn't served in France during the First World War.

“And so many of his competitors looking around going, how did this guy get the job?”

British general Montgomery may be encapsulates the criticism of Eisenhower when he says, "Nice chap, no soldier." Hitler and his hiker man know the western Allies are going to invade Northern Europe, but they don't know when, and they don't know where. Hitler is not surprised that an invasion is coming.

He said so at the end of 1943, they'll be here next year, we have to be ready to meet them. In his own mind, he was willing this cross-channel invasion because he said, "Whenever they come and wherever they come, we're going to beat them." An amphibious landing is a very demanding operation, and so he thinks he will throw his reserves to the west and push the Allies back into the sea.

He'd then be able to win the war by turning everything he has against the Soviet Union in the east. Under the direction of Field Marshal Earl Enrom, the Germans accelerate the construction of the Atlantic War. A network of bunkers, minefields, and beach obstacles stretching several thousand miles from France to Norway. Much of the work is performed by conscripted French labor.

Rommel is already a known commodity he's beloved by the German people. He's young, he's unorthodox, he's energetic. He's a man very much to the Fuhrer's taste, he waits up early, he works hard all day, he gets the job done. And choosing Rommel tells the west. You've got your work cut out for you.

By January Operation Overlord, the joint British American plan to invade northwest Europe has been largely mapped out. The coast of Normandy is chosen as the landing site because of its long flat beaches. Numerous access roads and proximity to the deep water port of Sherbrook. When Eisenhower and his staff take control of Overlord, they look to expand the scale and scope of the entire operation. From the very beginning, it was clear to Eisenhower that a three division invasion in northern France would not be adequate.

The Allies used six divisions to invade Sicily. Eisenhower realized, if you've got one shot of this, you've got to cross this brutal stretch of water and land on a heavily defended coastline, manned by one of the best armies in history. You need to bring overwhelming force. You go for the king, you best not miss.

But he has to somehow get the bridge to come around and agree. His act of genius is to name Montgomery, commander of the ground forces in the invasion.

“This is Matthew, what you do, it's my suggestion, and then Eisenhower says, "But I think it's treated as a bit small.”

Shouldn't it be bigger? It should be much bigger." It's a perfect example of Eisenhower's leadership style. He gets by and from people and then get whatever he wants done done. Overlord increases to five beaches and six divisions, which delays the operation for a month. Eisenhower knows that in delaying Overlord, he's running a risk.

And the risk is, he's going to use that extra month for preparation. But of course, so is his adversary. With each passing day, German defenses are going to get stronger.

Field Marshal Erwin Ram will believe the first 24 hours of the invasion will be decisive.

He will say to an aid, the fate of Germany depends on the outcome.

We're all things that you have to defeat the Allied invasion when it comes at the water's edge.

“But the thing is, there's so many points that the Allies can invade.”

They've scattered fortifications, Erwin. So he's like, "How do I take this incomplete Atlantic wall and fill in the gaps?" And the way you do it is you do it with things that are relatively cheap, like tank obstacles, like mines. The Rommel strategy is to stop the Allies on the beaches. He can then bring in his panzers where necessary. Rommel has a lot of experience fighting the Western powers. He knows this isn't going to be easy.

Every minute he prepares, he believes, is a minute closer to a German victory. In Britain, the Allies amass resources for Operation Overlord. The United States and Soldiers, tanks, aircraft and large amounts of supplies.

“You have to coordinate this massive Allied coalition, which by now is entirely dominated by the Americans, you know, on the supply side, right?”

Gotta ship over all the oil, all the material, all the vehicles. The scale of Operation Overlord is just enormous. You're talking about nearly 7,000 vessels involved. You're talking about tens of thousands of artillery pieces. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of men. But what that means is that Britain, for the last two and a half years, has just been turning into one huge great big military camp. To deceive the Germans, the Allies devise and execute a deception plan.

Operation 4-2 is a false army operation created to trick the Germans into thinking the Allies will land at Padakale, which is the shortest route across the English Channel. The elements that were involved in trying to convince the Germans that the attack was coming in another place, another direction, another location, it's massive. False radio traffic, the creation of false armies, they use dummy vehicles, balloons and rubber tanks and aircraft. This is all part of the deception campaign to keep the Germans guessing into the last second.

Eisenhower hopes fortitude will prompt the Germans to concentrate their forces near Kelle, rather the Normandy. The Germans have about three quarters of a million men who are poised to be able to mobilize to wherever the Allies invade in northern Europe.

And so he knows that this is going to be a race. It's going to be the Allies over water and the Germans over land, and the Germans are always going to have an advantage in moving over land.

And so Eisenhower needs to slow them down. The only tool that Eisenhower has at his disposal are the bombers. Eisenhower knows from previous experience he can't pull off an amphibious invasion and keep it ashore without dominance in the air. Unless Allied air power is there for Eisenhower, this landing is never going to happen. Starting in 1944, Allied Air Force strategy focuses on destroying the Luftwaffe so the troops could land in Normandy without fear of German air attacks. But Eisenhower also wants to hit railways and transportation hubs throughout France.

Eisenhower wants the roads destroyed, he wants the bridges destroyed, he wants the railway yards destroyed. He does not want one German unit moving two miles down the road without him to build another bridge. And so Eisenhower says, "Those very valuable bomber formations need to be working to my plan." Now the bomber commands like, "No, we've got our own way of winning this war."

“Everybody wants to support the landings in Normandy, but the Allied air forces argued that the best way to do that is to continue with more heavy attacks on Germany.”

This becomes a knock-down drag-out of light.

So Eisenhower basically threatens to resign if he is not given control over all the air forces.

He's fighting day in and day out with the British, with the French, with his own bosses back at Washington on every little detail of the war and everyone is throwing up nothing but obstructions. And he just doesn't have time for this anymore, right? He is at his wits end. He needs overwhelming strength to guarantee success, because you know what? You've got one of history's most effective armies, Hitler's Panzers who will be hurled at those Allied landing forces, so they can shop you down in the shallows and turn the waters right with your blood.

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Listen to and follow history that doesn't suck in Odyssey Podcast, available mail on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Early spring 1944. Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower has now been given full command of all Allied air forces. In the end, he's got the air power weapon he needs to attack the French transportation system. That's roads, railways, and bridges that the Germans will use to move forces to oppose the landings.

And so he wins and we take that for granted, but it wasn't easy.

“He had to like wrestle with all these powerful figures and powerful egos, not only within the US military, but the British military as well.”

It's another example of Eisenhower's real quality as a leader. And so for 90 days before D-Day, you've got thousands of sorties by P-47s and B-26 Marauders that are flying behind the German lines. In the Padakalei, in Normandy, it's just absolutely punishing the road and rail network.

Defending multiple fronts, the resources of Hitler and his third Reich are stretched thin.

For the Germans in 1944, their last big Trump cart are the tanks. Romus plan is to deploy them as close as possible to the beaches.

“The advantage is that you can bring them in much quicker as reinforcements, but this idea runs against traditional German doctrine is totally the opposite.”

The Orthodox approach amongst German commanders is to group your tank divisions into a concentrated mass. Let the Allies land, and then as they stumble into the French interior, hit them at a time and place of your choosing. Romus is like realistically, we can't maneuver against them when they come inland because of their total air superiority. The only person who can decide which option will be the better one is Hitler himself.

But Hitler never wants to give too much power into one hand.

"Srespecting that the Allies will land near Kalei, Hitler spreads his panzers along northwestern France. But he reserves operational control for himself. They can only be released into combat by Hitler's express order, which is probably the Achilles heel of that plan. In the spring of 1944, there are over 2.5 million troops from multiple Allied nations crowded into Southeast England. The invasion would send us your combat experienced troops who had participated in landings previously, as well as troops who had never done it before.

So the way you prepare is you have exercises you have rehearsals just like in a play. So a series of exercises are undertaken to include something called exercise tiger. Exercise tiger is going to invade a beach called Slapped in Sands. And Slapped in Sands is a British resort town that remarkably looks exactly like parts of the Normandy coast. Secrecy is vital for this training mission. Three thousand British citizens are evacuated from the area.

Operational securities absolutely paramount. The Allies have to have tactical surprise on the morning of the day, so the Germans must be completely blindsided. It's a practice run for the day, but from the start things go horribly wrong. Because of a breakdown in communication, the Navy fires on its own men. As if that tragedy wasn't bad enough, the next day, something even worse happens.

In the middle of the night, the LST is these large ships that have personnel and tanks in them are preparing to do their part in exercise tiger and circling about to do the second landing wave.

And the Germans began firing and tracer bullets are flying across the ships and some of them in on board thought, wow. This is a pretty realistic exercise. And it wasn't really until the torpedoes began to explode against the sides of the LSTs that they realize this is not a realistic exercise. This is an attack. They sink three LSTs, which are really precious by this point.

They need everyone. More than 700 men were killed in exercise tiger. So this was a very costly loss of life. If a well-controlled dress rehearsal goes this badly under the best of possible conditions.

“What's going to happen when they can't just stroll or on a British resort town or being fired at by German guns?”

Operation Overlord has been planned down to the closest detail.

But there's one crucial element no one can anticipate.

The weather. They have a three day window, June 5th, June 7th. If they delay the invasion past that window, the moon is no longer going to be right for the airborne operation. The tides are no longer going to be right for the landing forces. And this delicate ballet of air, ground, and naval forces won't have the necessary weather conditions to coordinate and hit the beach with full force.

Eisenhower and his staff rely on group captain James Stag and his team of meteorologists to provide the most accurate advice possible. The weather leading up to the original D-Day is gorgeous.

“And it's so good that it almost feels like an element.”

It's two days before the invasion, they're gearing up to launch on June 5th as scheduled. And James Martin Stag comes to Eisenhower as part of the command conference and says, "There's been a turn in the weather. A storm is a ruin." It's just frankly terrible news. Fifteen foot waves in the channel, high winds, unpredictable seas, rolling fronts coming in from all directions. And it's just the last thing they can possibly deal with.

And Fibious operations are a total nightmare. And on top of that, the English Channel is a rough stretch of water. You get winds that hole up that channel that kick up a swell, that make it impossible to operate ships near the coastline. Eisenhower had to consider what that meant. And he said, "Well, we'll postpone making a decision until 4 o'clock in the morning when you'll know more."

4 o'clock in the morning on the 4th, Stag came in looking not happy. And said, "It's going to be worse. We'll have to postpone until the 6th of June." The pressure is really there now, to well, we really want to try and get this done in this window, or that we're going to wait again for all the situations to coalesce. The weather and the tides and the moon might be a few weeks, it might be months.

And the problem is, you've got all these hundreds of thousands of men in camps,

who can sharpen to this edge of ready to go in and get their job. Then you've got to say to them, "I actually know, sorry, Lars, we're going to back down again." Even the Germans think the conditions are unsuitable for an invasion. Romal gets his weather report on the 4th of June, and doesn't look very good. And he thinks there will be no opportunities for the Allies to land for the coming days.

And so he decides to go to Germany and celebrate his wife, birthday. The problem, though, is that the Germans don't have meteorological stations in the Atlantic

“in contrast to the Allies, and where does the weather in Europe mostly come from from the Atlantic?”

Later in the evening on June 4th, the Allies receive a report from a weather station in Ireland. Captain Stag is going to come in and go, "All right, the weather conditions look like they're going to improve such that in the afternoon on Tuesday, June 6th, you might be able to pull it off." Eisenhower pulls his commanders, but the final decision is his along.

Eisenhower will ultimately reflect on this 20 years afterward, and he'll say that he felt like the lonelyest man in all of England.

And what must have run through that man's mind was, "Well, the gliders are not going to do well, and when's that of this?" The pair of troops are all going to be blown off, of course. He had to recognize all of the things that are going to go wrong, not things that might go wrong,

But at the same time, I can't come back next month. I can't come back in August. It's now or never. And he's sitting there listening to the wind howling around, and he says, "Okay, let's go." Operation Overlord, D-Day, is the largest amphibious invasion in history,

and is being attempted by a coalition of many nations. Some of which have lived under the Nazi Yoke for years. The whole world awaits the outcome. As the invasion got closer, Eisenhower got more tense. He's smoking four packs of cigarettes a day.

He's barely sleeping. He has nothing left to do, but wait. To hear whether or not he made the right call. In the middle of the night, sleep deprived.

“But the most important thing, though, I think he does in that period,”

is he goes out and personally visits the hundred and first airborne.

The 101st Airborne, along with the 82nd Airborne, and the British 6th Division, will be the first to land behind enemy lines. The job of the airborne is to seize the causeways and cover the flanks of the landing troops. They will be the first soldiers to fight the Germans in Normandy. Eisenhower, with no fanfare, just walks among all these young men.

All of whom are no older, really than his own son. And he makes a point of looking each one of them in the eyes, he shakes their hand. He gets an estimate of about 50% of the paratroopers are going to be killed. And so as he's shaking hands, every other soldier is someone who he has every reason to believe he has sent to their death.

“Most important thing he could do in that moment was just be there for them.”

And he spends all night doing that goes up to the roof nearby watching the whole thing take off. That's how he begins today. Under a full moon, paratroopers including the 101st Airborne start dropping behind enemy lines. Before dawn, landing crafts are lowered into the water and troops start to board. At sunrise, a fleet of warships launch a naval barrage.

Ultimately, the ground troops are going to land on five beaches.

Two American beaches, Omaha and Utah, a Canadian beach Juno, and then gold and sword, the British beaches. They're then going to try and link up those different beaches. And then push inland to take on and destroy the might of the German army in France. The morning of Juno's sick, the weather patterns are still dropping about and the wind is still blowing. It's not an ideal situation to start powing these boats towards the coast there.

Right from the jump, though, whether it's a huge issue. I mean, there's a six-foot swell on the day. Waves are swamping over the sides, or standing in freezing cold water. You're there with 30 other guys. If one vomit, you all vomit. The sea spray is lashing into your face there. You can't see your eyes are stinging.

“The longer that goes on, the more you're thinking to yourself, what is going to happen when that ramp goes down?”

Omaha is the largest of the beaches. A strip of the Normandy coast, six miles wide. It's different from all the other beaches, and that it's almost like an amphitheater. You've got these high bluffs overlooking the beach, almost like an extended bowl. You've become in gray skies, smoke, noise, ramp would drop, and then this absolute mass of fire.

85 machine guns laying down 100,000 rounds a minute. People start getting shot and killed. You see dead people floating in the water. You're soaking wet. You don't run up the beach. You stagger up the beach. Guys are trying to clear obstacles. You're trying to move ahead. Your senses are overwhelmed with all the things going around you.

That first wave is getting moaned down in great numbers.

It's roughly 85% killed and all wounded in the assault waves on Omaha. Eisenhower is receiving only intermittent reports,

While he tried to project a confident demeanor, you know that inside him he's just roiling with concern.

“Failure is another done current. Failure is the loss of all your equipment.”

Failure is your troops being marched off into captivity. If everything goes wrong, it means a longer war. The day before the landings, general Eisenhower, knowing the risks and understanding the responsibility, penned a brief note. My decision to attack was based upon the best information available.

The troops did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault is attached to the attempt, it is mine alone.

On the morning of the Normandy invasion, the first wave of American troops at Utah Beach land almost a mile south of their target,

but quickly regroup and manage to take the beach and push inland. The British landings at gold and sword beaches go better than expected. But at Juno Beach, the first wave of Canadian troops meets tough German resistance. And at Omaha Beach, rough seas and intense German fire wreak havoc on the first American troops. But more men are on their way.

The German defenders on the Atlantic wall, they look out that morning and they're stunned by what they see. I mean, they see the biggest fleet ever gathered for an invasion. The Germans all talked about how they were so densely packed. It looked like you could just walk from ship to ship. For the average German soldier on the day, the experience is something totally new.

This naval bombardment, it really shakes up the psyche of the German soldiers.

“There are two crucial German command failures.”

One is that Ramos isn't there. He's back in Germany celebrating his wife's birthday. When he hears that the landing has happened, he says something along the lines of how could I have been so stupid. Even more important is Hitler. The morning of the invasion, June 6, 1944, eight off Hitler is asleep.

But nobody will dare wake him up. Even though word has come in about this invasion starting.

So in the Crucial Five or Six or Seven Hours,

when the Germans might have landed some quick blow against the Allies, those Panzer divisions in the Central Reserve

“that can only be released into combat by Hitler's express order are pretty much without a commander.”

As a consequence, the Germans' reactions on the day end up a big mess. By midday, the troops at Gold, Sword, Juno and Utah have started to push inland. And momentum finally shifts at Omaha Beach. The sheer scale of the invasion helps turn the time, but it also comes down to individual acts of bravery.

At Pointo Hawk, US Army Rangers scale 100 foot cliffs under fire. At Utah Beach, Brigadier General Teddy Roosevelt, Juno, the son of former President Theodore Roosevelt, leads a division that lands south of the target. They came ashore and he suddenly realized that they were in complete the wrong bit.

And he said to however, the war stops him. Roosevelt's son, Captain Quinton Roosevelt II,

is in the first landing wave at Omaha.

They're the only father's son duo who will land on the beaches that day. Corporal Waverley Woodson, a medic with a 320th barrage balloon battalion, is wounded before he even hits the beach. But he will treat almost 200 members of the US Army Navy and British Navy as they come ashore on Omaha Beach, all the while under intense mortar and machine gun fire.

By the end of the day on June 6, the Allies have secured all five beaches and have pushed inland. In the coming days, they will link up with the airborne forces to create a continuous, connected front along the coast.

and Eisenhower decides a lot of credit.

“He's countable. He's responsible. That's what leaders do in good times and bad.”

Right man for the job. Eisenhower understands probably better than anyone. Now the real hard fighting on the continent of Europe is about to begin. And at the same time, there's a ray of hope.

Allied victory is increasingly going to become impossible.

The US theory of how you can wage war has now been proven correct. You can have a multinational alliance pull off the most complex military operation. The world I've ever seen.

“It's not just the infantry. It's all the airmen that set the conditions.”

It's all the coast guardsmen and the sailors that drew the ships. It's all the people who manufactured all the stuff back in Detroit. It's a global effort to make D-Day work. My fellow Americans, in this point in power, I ask you to join with me in prayer. Almighty God, our sons, pride of our nation.

This day of set upon a mighty endeavor. A struggle to preserve our republic, our religion, and our civilization. And to set free a suffering humanity.

“President Roosevelt says in his D-Day prayer,”

"Our forces will be thrown back. Their road will be long and hard." But we shall return again and again. And we know that by thy grace and by the righteousness of our course, our sons will triumph. On D-Day, the 101st Airborne just hours after being addressed by General Eisenhower, pair refuted into occupied France.

Despite being scattered across enemy territory, these men clear the path for American forces to emerge off Utah Beach and begin the advance on Germany.

A second front is firmly established on the continent of Europe.

In the Pacific War, the boundaries are enormous, ranging through Asia and into numerous remote islands across the ocean. Attacking this new front will require the most advanced aircraft ever built. World War II, with Tom Hanks, is produced by A&E Factsual Studios, Nutopia Limited, Play-Tone Productions, and Backpocket Studios,

in association with motion entertainment for the history channel. This episode was narrated by Tom Hanks and mixed by John Lloyd, additional voicing provided by me, Jeremy Reagan. From the history channel, our executive producers are Eli Lera and Live Fidler. For Play-Tone, executive producers are Tom Hanks and Gary Getsman.

For Backpocket Studios, our executive producer is Ben Dickstein.