Ambrose on D-Day

Robert Capa, June 6, 1944

Most of the time soldiers under fire knew what hit them.  They knew their guts were coming out of their stomach and they were trying to stuff them back in. They cried out for mother, water, cigarettes and morphine. The plan was, at Omaha Beach, to go up the draws, up the ravines. Little dirt roads ran up them. The bluffs were too steep for a vehicle. A man can hardly get up them. So everybody was supposed to go up these ravines.

In Zanuck's The Longest Day the whole movie turns on this incident, with Robert Mitchum in the end encouraging a couple of lieutenants to get up there and get those torpedoes under that barbed wire and then get the TNT up to the antitank obstacles at the head of the ravines and blow them up.

And that happens as a climax in the movie, and Robert Mitchum says, "Let's go on up that hill," and it's like the cavalry to the rescue. Guys from all over the beach start yelling like banshees and start moving up that draw. It's a great movie scene, but nothing remotely like that ever happened in fact. What happened in fact was much more like what is in Saving Private Ryan. Those ravines were much too well-defended to get up. The tanks that the infantry were told were going to be coming in with them, beside them -- these swimming tanks, these Shermans that had the inflatable rubber skirts around them, 32 of the 35 of them sank. There was no way to get up the ravines, and the true story of what happened at Omaha was much more inspiring than the way Zanuck presented it.

The true story is, junior officers and noncoms who had been college students two years before and had ROTC commissions were pinned down at that sea wall and couldn't retreat, couldn't go back -- it was just chaos back behind them -- couldn't, as the plan called for, go up the draws. They were getting butchered where they were all the sea wall because the Germans had it all zeroed in with their mortars that were coming down on top of them. And, "Over here, Captain," "Over here, Lieutenant, over here." A sergeant looked at this situation and said, "The hell with this. If I'm going to get killed, I'm going to take some Germans with me." And he would call out, "Follow me," and up he would start. Hitler didn't believe this was ever possible. Hitler was certain that the soft, effeminate children of democracy could never become soldiers. Hitler was certain that the Nazi youth would always outfight the Boy Scouts, and Hitler was wrong.

The Boy Scouts took them on D-Day. Joe Dawson led Company G. He started off with 200 men. He got to the top of the bluff with 20 men, but he got to the top. He was the first one to get there. John Spaulding was another. He was a lieutenant. Many of them are nameless. I don't know their names. I've talked to men who've said, "I saw this lieutenant and he tossed a grenade into the embrasure of that fortification, and out came four Germans with their hands up. I thought to myself, hell, if he can do that, I can do that." "What was his name?" I will ask. "Geez, I don't know. I never found out his name. I never saw him before, and I never saw him again, but he was a great man. He got me up that bluff."

'The Atlantic Wall' must be regarded as one of the greatest blunders in military history. It was the greatest construction project of all time. This was way bigger than the Great Wall of China, way, way bigger than the Maginot line. People who go to Europe today aren't aware of it because so much of it was underground, and some of it had been blown over with sand, but it's still there. It will be there forever.

It goes from the North Sea down to the Spanish border, and at every conceivable site of a landing -- that is, any place where the cliff wasn't absolutely vertical -- they had out to sea underwater obstacles with mines on them to blow up the landing craft at the water line, antipersonnel mines, antitank mines, barbed wire, antitank ditches, more barbed wire, more mines.

Looking down on all of these beaches where it was possible for a landing craft to come in, they had big fortifications. I mean, concrete 24 inches thick, with steel reinforcing rods running all through them. People who have been to that coast in Normandy know, they took direct hits from 14-inch shells and survived. Beautifully built fortifications, set up to fire enfilade down the beach. They had holes in the ground surrounded by cement, and they could set mortar crews in there. So those mortar crews were invulnerable. They had a spotter who was right up on the edge, and he'd call out the coordinates -- they had zeroed all this in advance -- and drop that shell in there, and off it goes and they knew where it was going to hit. That only begins to describe the complexities of the Atlantic Wall.

The problem with the Atlantic Wall was, it had no depth to it. Once through, you were through. There wasn't anything behind it. And once through, the guys to the left on the Atlantic Wall and to the right were immobile. They didn't have organic transportation. They didn't have trucks, they didn't have Jeeps, they didn't even have bicycles. They were just stuck in the thing. So once through you were through, and that was the victory on D-Day. We got through the Atlantic Wall. Not very far. The British were supposed to get to Cannes on D-Day. They didn't get there until July, but they got through the Atlantic Wall. The Americans at Omaha were supposed to get seven or eight kilometers inland. They got less than a kilometer inland, but they got through the Atlantic Wall. Germany put such a tremendous effort into the thing, and it didn't hold up the allies for even a morning. We paid a price, 10,000 casualties, but we got through.

You know, you can't exaggerate it. You can't overstate it. It was the pivot point of the 20th century. It was the day on which the decision was made as to who was going to rule in this world in the second half of the 20th century. Is it going to be Nazism, is it going to be communism, or are the democracies going to prevail? If we would have failed on Omaha Beach and on the other beaches on the 6th of June in 1944, the struggle for Europe would have been a struggle between Hitler and Stalin, and we would have been out of it. If Stalin had won, the Iron Curtain would have been on the English Channel. If Hitler had won, I don't think he would have been able to take Britain, at least not in the immediate future, but he would have gone all the way to the Urals. Hitler's plan was to turn the problem of conquering America over to the next generation, utilizing the resources that he intended to have as a part of the greater German Reich as a result of victory. It really did turn on getting ashore and penetrating that Atlantic Wall.

Now, once that Atlantic Wall was penetrated and we had a beachhead and you could begin to move from England into the continent, this tremendous outpouring of America's factories that we had managed to get over to England by winning the battle of the Atlantic in 1943, if you penetrated the Atlantic Wall then it was no longer a question of who was going to win. It was when is the end going to come. Germany could not possibly prevail against -- but if Rommel stopped them cold on the beaches -- this was an all-or-nothing operation. Eisenhower, when he took command in January of 1944, said, "This operation is being planned as a success. There are no contingency plans." Had they stopped him -- and they came very close to stopping him -- we would not have been able to mount another operation in 1944. This was Hitler's great chance to win the war -- stop them in June of 1944 on the Atlantic coast, then he can move 11 panzer divisions to the east. Eleven panzer divisions might well have swung the balance on the eastern front, or they might have had another effect. They might have led Stalin to conclude, "Those blankety-blank capitalists. They're up to their old tricks. They're going to fight till the last Red Army soldier. To hell with that. I'm going to cut a deal with my friend Adolph again, just like we did in 1939. We'll divide Eastern Europe between us." That wouldn't have lasted. Sooner or later they would have clashed, but the democracies wouldn't have been in on it anymore.

In his best-selling book D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (Simon & Schuster), Ambrose writes of the four Niland brothers. On D-Day, Sgt. Bob Niland was killed at his machine gun in France. A brother in the 4th Division was killed the same morning at Utah Beach. Another was killed that week in Burma. Their mother received three telegrams from the War Department announcing their deaths on the same day. To keep her from getting another, the Army snatched a fourth son, Fritz, of the 101st Airborne out of the front line.

But as to Saving Private Ryan, Mr. Ambrose adds, "I don't think the Army would have sent out a squad to look for one guy. Now there is this kernel of truth (in the film as) to the story of Fritz Niland, but they found him right away and flew him out."

On June 6, 2000, Mr. Ambrose, the founder of the National D-Day Museum, will open its doors in New Orleans. "We have artifacts in hand and it's all go. I can't tell you how wonderful it is. I've been after this for eight years and there were times when I thought it was never going to happen. I could write a hell of a good book on how to build a museum."

For more on the story of D-Day and Saving Private Ryan, there is an outstanding web site by Encyclopedia Britannica, Imagining D-Day: The history behind Saving Private Ryan.  Don't miss it!

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