The First Wave: The D-Day Warriors Who Led the Way to Victory in World War II

by Alex Kershaw

Among the more fearsome was a shady character who Lovat suspected had seen the inside of several French jails—tattooed on his forehead were the words PAS DE CHANCE. Tough luck.

The Germans who carried the greatest burden in maintaining the deadlock were the beleaguered panzer crews, living short and brutal lives that more resembled those of men aboard hunted U-boats. Trapped by day in their dug-in and heavily camouflaged Mark IVs and Tigers, low on fuel and ammunition, hidden in the lee of honeysuckle-draped walls and hedgerows, covered in clods of lush pasture and leaves, Rommel’s amphetamine-fueled youths watched and waited for their prey to stir. No longer crack offensive units, masters of blitzkrieg, the panzers were now used mostly as armored anti-tank artillery, islands of static defense.

There were a million Allied soldiers in Normandy by late June, but still the front barely moved.

A favorite tactic of the Typhoon pilots, remembered one RAF wing commander proudly, “was to seal off the front and rear of a column by accurately dropping a few bombs. This imprisoned the desperate enemy on a narrow stretch of dusty lane, and since the transports were sometimes jammed together four abreast, it made the subsequent rocket and cannon attack a comparatively easy business against the stationary targets.”