Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory

By Adrian Lewis

Omaha Beach is a book that anyone interested in D-Day should read.  Unfortunately, since it focusses on military doctrine and planning, rather than the actual battle, few people will actually read it.  Lewis, in this extensively researched book, analyzes the planning of the Normandy assault, specifically looking to discover why the landings at Omaha Beach were nearly a failure.  To do this, Lewis discusses the abilities and defects of the various generals involved in the overall planning (Eisenhower, Montgomery, Bradley).  He also analyzes the different beach assault doctrines of the Americans and the British, and how those doctrines factored into the decisions the three leaders made.  Lewis clearly shows that by the time these three had thoroughly screwed up, generals Gerow and Huebner (commanders of the II Corps and 1st Infantry Division, respectively) had very limited ability to make changes.  They were, in fact, handed a flawed plan and commanded to carry out essentially a suicide mission.

Lewis clearly shows that beach assault doctrine for the British and Americans differed substantially.  The British, who controlled operational planning in the Mediterranean and Western European theaters, preferred landings that maximized surprise.  Thus, they conducted landings in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy at night with minimal shore bombardment.  The Americans, on the other hand, clearly preferred a direct daylight assault that maximized their firepower advantage (learned the hard way at Tarawa).  Thus, by 1944 and 1945, landings in the Pacific used shore bombardments that lasted not minutes or hours, but days.  Both doctrines produced successful landings.  So what happened at Omaha Beach?

Lewis argues that the near-failure occurred because new doctrine based on improper expectations was invented by Montgomery and allowed to be put in place by Eisenhower.  Bradley compounded the problem by refusing to listen to the objections of Gerow and Huebner.  This new doctrine was a bad blending of American and British doctrines.  As a result, the planning produced a daylight assault intended to achieve tactical surprise.  Essentially, two incompatible features of American and British doctrines were melded.  This was particularly a result, Lewis argues, of Montgomery's over-reliance on airpower.  It was assumed that a long naval bombardment was not necessary since heavy bombers would blast beach defenses and obstacles away in one quick bomb run.  This would preserve surprise, but of course would require daylight landings.

Since airpower in World War II was hardly accurate, it is no surprise that the bombers did not hit a single thing on the beach.  Coupled with bad intelligence and other serious planning disasters, the landings at Omaha Beach nearly failed.  The reader is left wondering how such incompetence at high levels was allowed, but is also left wondering in amazement at the achievement of the men who landed on that beach.  Lewis shows that they stormed ashore after literally 99% of the landing plan had completely failed, yet they were still able to make it.

This is a good book, one that demonstrates very well the difficulties of planning and coalition warfare.  It also takes a lot of the shine off of the records of the top commanders in Europe.  Many of the honors in the records of Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Bradley are certainly well-deserved, but this book shows that some weren't, and that the successes of D-Day were due far more to tactical leadership (division HQ and down) and the sheer willpower of the ordinary soldiers.  It certainly seems that the "top brass" set them up to fail.

In a nutshell: the best book on D-Day that nobody will read.

Email me with comments at michael.licari@uni.edu

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