October 29, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, before Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, D-Day was a plan held together by men and machines working in silence. Few have told that story better than historian Stephen Ambrose. Drawing from years of research and interviews, Ambrose brought to life the people who turned one of history’s most complex operations into a triumph of courage and coordination. In this episode, we feature Stephen Ambrose in his own words, sharing how D-Day took shape: from the first sketches of landing craft to the final hours before dawn on June 6, 1944. Our thanks to the estate of Stephen E. Ambrose for allowing us access to this remarkable audio.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Hbib and this is our American Stories.
Stephen Ambrose was one of America's leading biographers and historians.
At the core of Ambrose's phenomenal success is his simple
but straightforward belief that history is biography, history is about people.
(00:30):
Stephen Ambrose passed in two thousand and two, but his
epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here in Our
American Stories, thanks to those who run his estate. Here's
Ambrose with the D Day Invasion Part one. Let's take
a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
The troops going in on D Day morning, we're brief
to expect that when they got to the bluff that
overlooked the beach code named Omaha, they would find it
just blasted to smithereens full of craters, all the defenses
(01:09):
along the bluff destroyed, all the German defenders in the
immediate area dead or wounded or so badly dazed by
the bombardment that they would be incapable of offering any opposition.
The men were told that swimming tanks would come in
beside them, tanks that had rubber skirts on them that
(01:33):
could be dropped when they got to the shoreline, and
that the men should get behind these tanks and they
would work their way up the draws, these little dirt
roads that led off the beach through the drainage system.
There were five of them at Omaha, and after they
had gotten to the top, following behind those tanks, then
(01:56):
their battle would begin. But on the beach was going
to be a cakewalk thanks to the naval and air
bombardments that would precede the attack. In the event, the
air bombardment was delayed by the pilots and the navigators
(02:16):
two fatal seconds as they crossed over Omaha Beach. They
were afraid of hitting their own men, so they didn't
hit that button so that the bombs would dropped right
on the beach. They delayed, and the result was that
an enormous tonnage of bombs, the equivalent to the herosion
of bomb about ten thousand tons, fell four and five
(02:39):
and six kilometers inland, killing a lot of cows, but
doing no good at all for the attacking forces and
disturbing the Germans and their defenses not a bit. The
naval bombardment was also long, and the swimming tanks all
sunk or at least thirty two out of thirty five
(03:01):
of them did. That turned out to be a terrible
idea and was never repeated, so that the infantrymen going
ashore in the first wave at Omaha Beach on the
sixth of June of nineteen forty four, were greeted by
a hail of bullets and mortar rounds and rocket shells
and heavy artillery that was as bad as anything any
(03:24):
men in combat I have ever seen anywhere at any time.
Entire platoons thirty men were wiped out before they ever
even got out of their Higgins boats. The carnage among
the junior officers was just dreadful because they had to
lead the way out of those Higgins boats. Come to that,
(03:47):
the carnage among the men was a terrible thing to behold.
Company A of the one hundred and sixteenth Regiment because
the Virginia and Delaware and Maryland Guard outfit. Company A,
most of whose members came from Bedford, Virginia, suffered ninety
(04:07):
five percent casuals in the first two minutes without firing
a shot. Those who managed in the second and third
waves to get across the beaches and behind the sea
wall found themselves about an hour and a half after
the battle began pressing against that sea wall, which was
(04:28):
composed of small round stones called shingles, and was as
much as six feet high and two or three feet
across at the base. That that provided some protection from
plunging rifle fire coming from the infantrymen in the trenches
up on the bluff, but it provided no protection from
(04:48):
mortar rounds or from the heavy artillery that was sighted
to fire inflay down the beach. That is, the big
guns and the small ones too, to the seventy five millimeters.
The eighty eight, one hundred and fives in their casements
were sighted to fire straight down the beach, not out
to sea. They weren't there to get into a duel
(05:08):
with the navy's gunners. They were there to destroy tanks
and half tracks and men on the beach itself. So
that these guys huddled at the seawall wondering where in
the hell or the tanks, and where were all those
craters that the air force was going to create, and
come to that, where was all the destruction that was
going to be wrecked on the German army. Where all
(05:29):
that was. We're taking very heavy casualties now as they
lay there at the Seawall. They were disorganized. Men from
different regiments, even from different divisions, were mixed together. Naval
Signal Corps men were mixed in with medics, who were
mixed in with artillerymen, who were mixed in with infantrymen.
(05:55):
In some areas you had no officer leadership at all,
and others you had four five junior officers baby a colonel,
and no enlisted men. This was a great test of democracy.
The question down there on that beak at about eight
hundred on the morning of June sixth, nineteen forty four,
(06:16):
was could a democracy produce young men tough enough to
stand up to combat to take on the Wehrmacht on
its home territory? Had the division building system that George
Marshall put into effect works was the twenty ninth Division,
(06:37):
the first Division, and over at Utah Beach the fourth
Infant Division Up to this challenge, The answer turned out
to be that they were. The minute Omaha Beag one
by one came to the conclusion, I can't stay here,
(06:58):
I can't retreat. There ain't gonna be any tanks coming
in for me to follow up that bluff. I'm not
gonna be able to get up those exits, they're way
too heavily defended. We got to go up the bluff
on foot. The bluff was steep enough that a vehicle
couldn't climb it, but a man on foot cut That
bluff was crisscrossed with trenches. This was as bad as
(07:21):
World War One. Barbed wire in front of the men,
minefields behind the barbed wire, and then as the bluff began,
a whole series of trenches with German machine gunners and
German riflemen well protected firing down on them. In this situation,
then said to themselves, well, I ain't gonna just die here.
(07:43):
I'm gonna take some of them with me. And he
would look to his right and look to his left
and say, come on, let's go. Let's get up this bluff.
And over here a group of five, and over there
a group of seven, and somewhere else a group of ten,
sometimes led by a corporal, sometimes led by a private
first class, sometimes led a colonel, started working their way
(08:03):
up that bluff. They seized the initiative and accepted the
responsibility and went to war. This was the triumph of
the United States Army in the Second World War. They
had been high school and college students three and even
just two years earlier. Now, in their first taste of combat,
(08:23):
they had been thrown a challenge it can only be
compared to World War One and that awful trench warfare.
And they met that challenge, and they rose up and
they drove up that bluff and they overcame the Germans
and their trenches and gained the high ground.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
And you've been listening to the late great Steven Ambrose
tell the story of what happened on Omaha Beach, And
my goodness, the boys had real expectations, those boys who
were storming those beaches, that the beach would be clear,
that the Germans would be blasted out of their positions,
that these water tanks, these swimming tanks could be up
(09:04):
on that beach front and they'd be behind them. Well,
none of that worked out. The swimming tanks sunk. The
naval and air bombardments that were supposed to blast that beach,
well they were way off target. And then the question
was there, could democracy produce the kinds of young men
that could storm those bluffs anyway? The answer was a
(09:27):
resounding yes. As Ambrose said, many of them thought, if
I'm going to die here. I'm going to take some
of those Nazis with me when we come back. More
of this remarkable story of these young men just years
out of high school and college. Their heroism, their attitudes
absolutely American in every respect. Their story continues, and the
(09:49):
D Day story continues here on our American stories, and
we returned to our American stories and the story of
(10:13):
D Day. Let's return to Stephen Ambrose and pick up
where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Over on Utah Beach. They were landed a klimeter and
more south of where they were supposed to be. General
Teddy Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt's son, and General Jim Van Fleet,
who were both in the first wave. Teddy Roosevelt was
the oldest man to go ashore on D Day at
(10:39):
age fifty five, looked at their maps, looked at the
church people in front of us, at hell, we're in
the wrong place. If they'd have been German officers, I
guarantee you they would have gotten on the radio and
called out to the Ancon which was Bradley's command ship,
and asked what the hell do we do now? It
never occurred to them to get on that radio and
(11:01):
to ask for orders. They had an immediate problem to
deal with, and they dealt with it. They made the decision,
we'll start the war from right here, let's go move inland.
To hell with the plan, just as the men at
Omahaat had to say, to hell with the plan. And
they too seized an initiative and accepted a responsibility and
(11:22):
drove inland. By the end of D Day, the Americans,
the British, and the Canadians and manager land one hundred
and seventy five thousand men. Nowhere had they penetrated more
than three at the most four kilometers inland, but everywhere
they were ashore. And now this great logistical build up
that had taken place in England from the United States
(11:44):
could swing into motion. Using those LSTs, all of them
a year old or younger, just built for this purpose,
could bring in the tanks and the trucks, and the
half tracks and the artillery, and the men land him
on an open beach. This was something that the Germans
had never anticipated it would be possible to support and
(12:08):
supply a great army over an open beach, but thanks
to the LST it was possible to do it. In
the afternoon, the Germans tried to counterattack with their panzers.
It got pounded by naval gunfire and by Allied air
forces and was stopped that afternoon. Ronald drove from Germany,
(12:35):
where he had been visiting his wife on her birthday,
and got to the battle scene as dusk fell on
the night of D Day. He immediately began bombarding Hitler
for request to bring the tanks that were in the
Pot of Calais down across the Seine River and into
(12:56):
the battle. Hitler took some persuading on this. Hibber was
as fooled by Operation Fortitude as everybody in the German
General staff had been, and he, like they, continued to
anticipate that the real invasion was going to take place
at the Pot of Calais, that what was happening in
Normandy was a faint designed by the Allies to induce
(13:20):
the Germans to bring their tanks south and west of
the Seine River before the real invasion, headed by Patent
coming out of dover landed at the Pot of Calais.
Ramo was insisting, this is it, this is where the
battle is going to be fought. Not get me those tanks.
(13:41):
We're talking about a few thousand tanks here in numbers
Timmor Finally, at the end of the third day, when
the battle in Normandy was stalemated, that is, the Germans
were unable to penetrate the Allied outer ring, but the
Allies were unable to press on inland and create room
to bring all this equipment across from me. With the
battle in a stalemate situation, on the third day, Ramo
(14:05):
finally convinced Hitler to release the tanks, and they began
starting up their engines and preparing to move off, bringing
their own bridges with him to come down and bridge
the same river and throw themselves into the battle on
the Allied left flank, that is, against the British, with
every hope of success, because the Allies had not yet
(14:27):
been able to get enough room to land very many
tanks of their own and almost no heavy artillery. But
as those tanks were warming up preparing to move, a
message arrived from our old friend Garble, the double agent,
the Spaniard, who was working for the British Secret Service
(14:51):
and who had been telling the Germans right along all
through the spring there was this enormous build up in Dover.
Pat was the commander for the invasion and that it
was going to come at the Potto Calais. Now Garbo's
reputation with the German intelligence people was exceptionally high at
(15:12):
this moment because of a very great risk that Eisenhower
had taken. On the night of June five to six,
after I could said goodbye to the paratroopers and gone
back to his tent to spend a few hours sleeping
before laying down, he had approved another message from Garbo.
This one went out at midnight June five six, nineteen
(15:35):
forty four. In it, Garbo told his controller in Hamburg
that the invasion was coming at dawn in Normandy. He
named the divisions that would be involved. He even had
the code names that the Allies were using for the beaches.
He had it all right, and he had just given
away the biggest secret of the war, even as the
(15:57):
Allied ships were starting to cross the Channel and as
Allied paratroopers began jumping out of their SEE forty seven's.
That message had to be decoded at Hamburg. Then it
had to be sent on to the fur a's headquarters
in Burke Descoten, near Salzburg. There it had to be
(16:20):
put on paper and brought to the Furor, except someone
had to make the toughest decision in Nazi Germany. First,
that decision was do we wake up the fur or not?
In this case, they thought we'd better and they woke
up the Furr and he read the message and he said, well,
for God's sakes, tell them in Normandy, which was done.
(16:45):
The message was encoded and sent on to Paris, and
then telephoned forward to the regimental command post in Normandy,
and finally telephoned forward to the bunkers on the Cannel coast,
so that at first light on June sixth, the message
would come in to these bunkers where the men would
be looking out to see what their binoculars. And the
message said, look out, the invasion is coming and is
(17:06):
coming to Normandy. And they looked at it and they said,
oh my god, because what they saw was five thousand
ships coming right at them. In short, Garbo's message didn't
arrive soon enough to do any good, but it's sure
as hell raised the German's opinion of Garbo. Now, three
days later, Garbo sent another message, as those tanks of
(17:28):
Romels were warming up ready to drive to the sound
of the guns. Garbo's next message on June ninth thread,
I have checked with all of my sub agents and
we are all agreed that the attack in Normandy is
a faint. The real attack is going to come in
the Potta cala after you move your tanks south and
(17:52):
west of the Seine River. In support of this, he
pointed out that Paton wasn't involved in Normandy. In support
of this, he pointed into all of the units in Dover,
these fectational units that he had built in the mind
of the German intelligence over the preceding months. None of
those units were involved, and Shorty told him to look
(18:12):
out for Calais, because that's where the real attack is
going to come. Piver read that message and immediately sent
a stop order to Ramo leave the tanks where they are.
With that, Germany lost her best chance to throw the
Allies back into the scene.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Had a great job on the editing and production by
our own Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to the
Ambrose estate for allowing us to use Steven Ambrose's audio.
Go to Amazon or the usual suspects and buy these
Ambrose books, their masterpieces. And what a story he told
here about spycraft, and my goodness, what Eisenhower managed here,
(18:53):
and the risk he took letting the Nazis know about
Normandy for one purpose only build up the creditability of
his spy, so in the end that spy could be
used to trick the German Army into not deploying Ronel's
tank force against our troops nailed down in Normandy. It
(19:15):
changed the outcome of the war. The story of D
Day as told by Stephen Ambrose here on our American
Stories
This is Lee Hbib and this is our American Stories.
Stephen Ambrose was one of America's leading biographers and historians.
At the core of Ambrose's phenomenal success is his simple
but straightforward belief that history is biography, history is about people.
(00:30):
Stephen Ambrose passed in two thousand and two, but his
epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here in Our
American Stories, thanks to those who run his estate. Here's
Ambrose with the D Day Invasion Part one. Let's take
a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
The troops going in on D Day morning, we're brief
to expect that when they got to the bluff that
overlooked the beach code named Omaha, they would find it
just blasted to smithereens full of craters, all the defenses
(01:09):
along the bluff destroyed, all the German defenders in the
immediate area dead or wounded or so badly dazed by
the bombardment that they would be incapable of offering any opposition.
The men were told that swimming tanks would come in
beside them, tanks that had rubber skirts on them that
(01:33):
could be dropped when they got to the shoreline, and
that the men should get behind these tanks and they
would work their way up the draws, these little dirt
roads that led off the beach through the drainage system.
There were five of them at Omaha, and after they
had gotten to the top, following behind those tanks, then
(01:56):
their battle would begin. But on the beach was going
to be a cakewalk thanks to the naval and air
bombardments that would precede the attack. In the event, the
air bombardment was delayed by the pilots and the navigators
(02:16):
two fatal seconds as they crossed over Omaha Beach. They
were afraid of hitting their own men, so they didn't
hit that button so that the bombs would dropped right
on the beach. They delayed, and the result was that
an enormous tonnage of bombs, the equivalent to the herosion
of bomb about ten thousand tons, fell four and five
(02:39):
and six kilometers inland, killing a lot of cows, but
doing no good at all for the attacking forces and
disturbing the Germans and their defenses not a bit. The
naval bombardment was also long, and the swimming tanks all
sunk or at least thirty two out of thirty five
(03:01):
of them did. That turned out to be a terrible
idea and was never repeated, so that the infantrymen going
ashore in the first wave at Omaha Beach on the
sixth of June of nineteen forty four, were greeted by
a hail of bullets and mortar rounds and rocket shells
and heavy artillery that was as bad as anything any
(03:24):
men in combat I have ever seen anywhere at any time.
Entire platoons thirty men were wiped out before they ever
even got out of their Higgins boats. The carnage among
the junior officers was just dreadful because they had to
lead the way out of those Higgins boats. Come to that,
(03:47):
the carnage among the men was a terrible thing to behold.
Company A of the one hundred and sixteenth Regiment because
the Virginia and Delaware and Maryland Guard outfit. Company A,
most of whose members came from Bedford, Virginia, suffered ninety
(04:07):
five percent casuals in the first two minutes without firing
a shot. Those who managed in the second and third
waves to get across the beaches and behind the sea
wall found themselves about an hour and a half after
the battle began pressing against that sea wall, which was
(04:28):
composed of small round stones called shingles, and was as
much as six feet high and two or three feet
across at the base. That that provided some protection from
plunging rifle fire coming from the infantrymen in the trenches
up on the bluff, but it provided no protection from
(04:48):
mortar rounds or from the heavy artillery that was sighted
to fire inflay down the beach. That is, the big
guns and the small ones too, to the seventy five millimeters.
The eighty eight, one hundred and fives in their casements
were sighted to fire straight down the beach, not out
to sea. They weren't there to get into a duel
(05:08):
with the navy's gunners. They were there to destroy tanks
and half tracks and men on the beach itself. So
that these guys huddled at the seawall wondering where in
the hell or the tanks, and where were all those
craters that the air force was going to create, and
come to that, where was all the destruction that was
going to be wrecked on the German army. Where all
(05:29):
that was. We're taking very heavy casualties now as they
lay there at the Seawall. They were disorganized. Men from
different regiments, even from different divisions, were mixed together. Naval
Signal Corps men were mixed in with medics, who were
mixed in with artillerymen, who were mixed in with infantrymen.
(05:55):
In some areas you had no officer leadership at all,
and others you had four five junior officers baby a colonel,
and no enlisted men. This was a great test of democracy.
The question down there on that beak at about eight
hundred on the morning of June sixth, nineteen forty four,
(06:16):
was could a democracy produce young men tough enough to
stand up to combat to take on the Wehrmacht on
its home territory? Had the division building system that George
Marshall put into effect works was the twenty ninth Division,
(06:37):
the first Division, and over at Utah Beach the fourth
Infant Division Up to this challenge, The answer turned out
to be that they were. The minute Omaha Beag one
by one came to the conclusion, I can't stay here,
(06:58):
I can't retreat. There ain't gonna be any tanks coming
in for me to follow up that bluff. I'm not
gonna be able to get up those exits, they're way
too heavily defended. We got to go up the bluff
on foot. The bluff was steep enough that a vehicle
couldn't climb it, but a man on foot cut That
bluff was crisscrossed with trenches. This was as bad as
(07:21):
World War One. Barbed wire in front of the men,
minefields behind the barbed wire, and then as the bluff began,
a whole series of trenches with German machine gunners and
German riflemen well protected firing down on them. In this situation,
then said to themselves, well, I ain't gonna just die here.
(07:43):
I'm gonna take some of them with me. And he
would look to his right and look to his left
and say, come on, let's go. Let's get up this bluff.
And over here a group of five, and over there
a group of seven, and somewhere else a group of ten,
sometimes led by a corporal, sometimes led by a private
first class, sometimes led a colonel, started working their way
(08:03):
up that bluff. They seized the initiative and accepted the
responsibility and went to war. This was the triumph of
the United States Army in the Second World War. They
had been high school and college students three and even
just two years earlier. Now, in their first taste of combat,
(08:23):
they had been thrown a challenge it can only be
compared to World War One and that awful trench warfare.
And they met that challenge, and they rose up and
they drove up that bluff and they overcame the Germans
and their trenches and gained the high ground.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
And you've been listening to the late great Steven Ambrose
tell the story of what happened on Omaha Beach, And
my goodness, the boys had real expectations, those boys who
were storming those beaches, that the beach would be clear,
that the Germans would be blasted out of their positions,
that these water tanks, these swimming tanks could be up
(09:04):
on that beach front and they'd be behind them. Well,
none of that worked out. The swimming tanks sunk. The
naval and air bombardments that were supposed to blast that beach,
well they were way off target. And then the question
was there, could democracy produce the kinds of young men
that could storm those bluffs anyway? The answer was a
(09:27):
resounding yes. As Ambrose said, many of them thought, if
I'm going to die here. I'm going to take some
of those Nazis with me when we come back. More
of this remarkable story of these young men just years
out of high school and college. Their heroism, their attitudes
absolutely American in every respect. Their story continues, and the
(09:49):
D Day story continues here on our American stories, and
we returned to our American stories and the story of
(10:13):
D Day. Let's return to Stephen Ambrose and pick up
where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Over on Utah Beach. They were landed a klimeter and
more south of where they were supposed to be. General
Teddy Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt's son, and General Jim Van Fleet,
who were both in the first wave. Teddy Roosevelt was
the oldest man to go ashore on D Day at
(10:39):
age fifty five, looked at their maps, looked at the
church people in front of us, at hell, we're in
the wrong place. If they'd have been German officers, I
guarantee you they would have gotten on the radio and
called out to the Ancon which was Bradley's command ship,
and asked what the hell do we do now? It
never occurred to them to get on that radio and
(11:01):
to ask for orders. They had an immediate problem to
deal with, and they dealt with it. They made the decision,
we'll start the war from right here, let's go move inland.
To hell with the plan, just as the men at
Omahaat had to say, to hell with the plan. And
they too seized an initiative and accepted a responsibility and
(11:22):
drove inland. By the end of D Day, the Americans,
the British, and the Canadians and manager land one hundred
and seventy five thousand men. Nowhere had they penetrated more
than three at the most four kilometers inland, but everywhere
they were ashore. And now this great logistical build up
that had taken place in England from the United States
(11:44):
could swing into motion. Using those LSTs, all of them
a year old or younger, just built for this purpose,
could bring in the tanks and the trucks, and the
half tracks and the artillery, and the men land him
on an open beach. This was something that the Germans
had never anticipated it would be possible to support and
(12:08):
supply a great army over an open beach, but thanks
to the LST it was possible to do it. In
the afternoon, the Germans tried to counterattack with their panzers.
It got pounded by naval gunfire and by Allied air
forces and was stopped that afternoon. Ronald drove from Germany,
(12:35):
where he had been visiting his wife on her birthday,
and got to the battle scene as dusk fell on
the night of D Day. He immediately began bombarding Hitler
for request to bring the tanks that were in the
Pot of Calais down across the Seine River and into
(12:56):
the battle. Hitler took some persuading on this. Hibber was
as fooled by Operation Fortitude as everybody in the German
General staff had been, and he, like they, continued to
anticipate that the real invasion was going to take place
at the Pot of Calais, that what was happening in
Normandy was a faint designed by the Allies to induce
(13:20):
the Germans to bring their tanks south and west of
the Seine River before the real invasion, headed by Patent
coming out of dover landed at the Pot of Calais.
Ramo was insisting, this is it, this is where the
battle is going to be fought. Not get me those tanks.
(13:41):
We're talking about a few thousand tanks here in numbers
Timmor Finally, at the end of the third day, when
the battle in Normandy was stalemated, that is, the Germans
were unable to penetrate the Allied outer ring, but the
Allies were unable to press on inland and create room
to bring all this equipment across from me. With the
battle in a stalemate situation, on the third day, Ramo
(14:05):
finally convinced Hitler to release the tanks, and they began
starting up their engines and preparing to move off, bringing
their own bridges with him to come down and bridge
the same river and throw themselves into the battle on
the Allied left flank, that is, against the British, with
every hope of success, because the Allies had not yet
(14:27):
been able to get enough room to land very many
tanks of their own and almost no heavy artillery. But
as those tanks were warming up preparing to move, a
message arrived from our old friend Garble, the double agent,
the Spaniard, who was working for the British Secret Service
(14:51):
and who had been telling the Germans right along all
through the spring there was this enormous build up in Dover.
Pat was the commander for the invasion and that it
was going to come at the Potto Calais. Now Garbo's
reputation with the German intelligence people was exceptionally high at
(15:12):
this moment because of a very great risk that Eisenhower
had taken. On the night of June five to six,
after I could said goodbye to the paratroopers and gone
back to his tent to spend a few hours sleeping
before laying down, he had approved another message from Garbo.
This one went out at midnight June five six, nineteen
(15:35):
forty four. In it, Garbo told his controller in Hamburg
that the invasion was coming at dawn in Normandy. He
named the divisions that would be involved. He even had
the code names that the Allies were using for the beaches.
He had it all right, and he had just given
away the biggest secret of the war, even as the
(15:57):
Allied ships were starting to cross the Channel and as
Allied paratroopers began jumping out of their SEE forty seven's.
That message had to be decoded at Hamburg. Then it
had to be sent on to the fur a's headquarters
in Burke Descoten, near Salzburg. There it had to be
(16:20):
put on paper and brought to the Furor, except someone
had to make the toughest decision in Nazi Germany. First,
that decision was do we wake up the fur or not?
In this case, they thought we'd better and they woke
up the Furr and he read the message and he said, well,
for God's sakes, tell them in Normandy, which was done.
(16:45):
The message was encoded and sent on to Paris, and
then telephoned forward to the regimental command post in Normandy,
and finally telephoned forward to the bunkers on the Cannel coast,
so that at first light on June sixth, the message
would come in to these bunkers where the men would
be looking out to see what their binoculars. And the
message said, look out, the invasion is coming and is
(17:06):
coming to Normandy. And they looked at it and they said,
oh my god, because what they saw was five thousand
ships coming right at them. In short, Garbo's message didn't
arrive soon enough to do any good, but it's sure
as hell raised the German's opinion of Garbo. Now, three
days later, Garbo sent another message, as those tanks of
(17:28):
Romels were warming up ready to drive to the sound
of the guns. Garbo's next message on June ninth thread,
I have checked with all of my sub agents and
we are all agreed that the attack in Normandy is
a faint. The real attack is going to come in
the Potta cala after you move your tanks south and
(17:52):
west of the Seine River. In support of this, he
pointed out that Paton wasn't involved in Normandy. In support
of this, he pointed into all of the units in Dover,
these fectational units that he had built in the mind
of the German intelligence over the preceding months. None of
those units were involved, and Shorty told him to look
(18:12):
out for Calais, because that's where the real attack is
going to come. Piver read that message and immediately sent
a stop order to Ramo leave the tanks where they are.
With that, Germany lost her best chance to throw the
Allies back into the scene.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Had a great job on the editing and production by
our own Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to the
Ambrose estate for allowing us to use Steven Ambrose's audio.
Go to Amazon or the usual suspects and buy these
Ambrose books, their masterpieces. And what a story he told
here about spycraft, and my goodness, what Eisenhower managed here,
(18:53):
and the risk he took letting the Nazis know about
Normandy for one purpose only build up the creditability of
his spy, so in the end that spy could be
used to trick the German Army into not deploying Ronel's
tank force against our troops nailed down in Normandy. It
(19:15):
changed the outcome of the war. The story of D
Day as told by Stephen Ambrose here on our American
Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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