A young grenadier lies on the road, blood jetting from his veins.

 

“Murder! Murder!” cries an old French woman who comes running towards Meyer.

 

Unable to speak, the panzergrenadier dies in Meyer’s arms. Nearby a Schwimmwagen carrying ammunition explodes, blocking the road. Plumes of smoke and fire rocket up into the sky. The SS gather their wounded, push the rubble aside and move on. To stop is to invite death.

 

None among the Germans knew with any certainty what was going on. There had been scattered reports of firefights with paratroopers the night before when the engine noises of hundreds of unknown aircraft had punctuated the darkness. With daylight had come reports of thousands of Allied ships gathering in the early dawn gloom of the bay. Then the Allied bombers and fighters had come, gnat-like and ferocious. Bombs and cannon shells had pockmarked what appeared to be the whole of northern France. The worst hit was the capital city of Caen. By dusk, Meyer would be writing that the city was a sea of flames. But that was later. 

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The Germans did not know that the city was the primary objective of British forces streaming off the beachhead, nine miles to the north. Senior commanders were befuddled by the landings. Some believed they were a feint. Only the Allies knew with certainty and with a sense of retrospection that the landings were the culmination of two years of stuttering and pioneering amphibious operations in Europe and the Mediterranean. They had refined their naval landings to an art, turning it into an orchestral undertaking where land, sea and air forces operated as one.

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Two years of combined operations had taught the Allies how to set up a beachhead, but what happened inland was the great gamble. The Allied generals believed that if they pushed enough men ashore with enough armor that the day could be won. But Caen, the primary objective of D-Day, was a heap of rubble. The Germans would later recognize that it had been egregious mistake to the bomb the city. They moved quickly to fortify the wreckage of the urban sprawl where bombed-out streets would hinder the progress of tanks and infantry. Other German forces moved to occupy the fields, the hedgerows and the picturesque Norman country towns and villages as night fell.

 

The German dictator, Adolf Hitler, was strangely euphoric when told about the landings. “The news couldn’t be better. As long as they were in Britain, we couldn’t get at them. Now we have them where we can destroy them,” he said, and began issuing orders to mobilize his army for battle. Soon a ferocious contest was in the making.

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The Allies had arrived in Normandy, but there would no easy victory here. Only something wrapped up in bloodshed, sacrifice and the stuff of mythology.