Where were our troops in June 1944. A second front was opened
Many events claim to be the main battle of World War II, but in Europe there is no doubt that it was the Normandy landing operation and the events that followed it. Doctor of Historical Sciences Vladimir Lavrov, in a conversation with RT, said that Western historians hush up the role of the Battle of Stalingrad and the Battle of Kursk, focusing on the decisive role of the Western allies.
Vladimir Lavrov is confident that Germany would have been defeated even without the Allied landing in Normandy.
“The opening of the second front by the Americans and the British in 1944 was not the most important event, not a turning point, as is usually written in Western textbooks,” the historian believes. “This is a major operation for the West, they opened a second front, but they promised to open it much earlier.”
“The Americans enter the war, start dividing the pie, when they already need to get benefits, but without large losses, neither the Americans nor the British are used to fighting with large losses. We could have won without them,” Lavrov added.
The head of the German Agency for Global Communications, Professor Lorenz Haag, also believes that the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944 “are an important event, but the Second World War was won on the Eastern Front by the Red Army.”
“It was on the Eastern Front that the Wehrmacht lost 90% of its personnel,” he recalled. “Therefore, we should not overestimate the significance of this operation. If it had not taken place, World War II could have been completely won by the USSR.”
According to the expert, “the Allied landing in Normandy was of enormous military and political significance, primarily for the United States and Great Britain.” “The leaders of these countries understood that Nazi Germany would soon be defeated, and its only winner would be the USSR. The leaders of the USA and Great Britain took into account that delay in opening a second front would harm their interests in Europe after the end of the war,” said Lorenz Haag, ITAR-TASS reports.
“Given the contradictions between the USSR and Western countries, their hostility towards each other, solving this problem was previously not easy,” the historian believes. “The Allies’ promise to open a Second Front was not fulfilled either in 1942 or 1943,” the agency’s interlocutor recalled. “They waited and hoped that after a grueling war, the Soviet Union would be weakened and lose its significance as a great power. And the deployment of military operations in Western Europe would lead to the diversion of part of the German troops from the Eastern Front and, consequently, to the preservation of the forces of the Red Army.”
The professor believes that the war in Europe could have ended in 1943. “And if this did not happen, then the reason for this is the desire of the United States and especially England to outplay the USSR not in the fight against Nazi Germany, but in building the post-war world order. The costs were of little concern to London and Washington,” he said.
The famous British historian of the Second World War, James Holland, also believes that the landing of Allied forces in Normandy, contrary to the popular point of view, was not an exclusively American military operation.
“By the Normandy landings, many people only mean the fierce fighting of American and German troops in the Omaha area and the American parachute landing,” Holland notes in an article posted June 5 on the CNN website on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Operation Overlord. . According to him, such ideas were largely influenced by popular culture, including the famous film “Saving Private Ryan” and the television series “Band of Brothers.”
“The Normandy landings on June 6, 1944 were an allied operation in which Great Britain rather played the leading role. Yes, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe was the American General Dwight Eisenhower, but his deputy was the British Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Arthur Tedder. Three commanders of the armed forces were also British,” writes the researcher.
According to Holland, the plan for Operation Overlord was largely developed by British General Bernard Montgomery, the commander-in-chief of Allied ground forces in Europe, and the main responsibility for executing the landing fell on the British Navy.
Holland notes that as a result of the landing operation, the United States and Great Britain lost approximately equal numbers of people. The historian emphasizes that he does not diminish the merits of the American side, but strives to show the public a broader view of this important historical event.
According to information from open sources, the Normandy operation, or Operation Overlord, was the Allied strategic landing of troops in Normandy, which began in the early morning of June 6, 1944 and ended on August 31, 1944, after which the Allies crossed the Seine River, liberated Paris and continued their offensive. to the French-German border.
The operation opened the Western Front in Europe in World War II. More than 3 million people took part in the landing operation in Normandy, who crossed the English Channel from England to Normandy.
On Tuesday, June 6, 1944, during World War II, American and British troops carried out the largest amphibious landing operation in history. "D-Day" has gone down in history.
In France, almost three million soldiers landed on the coast of Normandy.
The Western Front, which we call the Second Front, was finally opened.
During Operation Overlord, on a foggy morning, thousands of ships leaving the ports of southern England crossed the English Channel and began to liberate France captured by the Germans.
The Germans knew and prepared. The northern coast of France was protected by the so-called. "Atlantic Wall" - a strip of powerful coastal fortifications. Since most of the Wehrmacht fought on the Eastern Front, there were few soldiers in France, and the battle on the fortified coastal lines decided the fate of the entire Western Front.
The Allies landed on the weakly fortified beaches of Normandy, the operation was highly classified and the effect of surprise was a success.
The landing took place on five Normandy beaches, the code names of which, of course, every schoolchild (American, I assume) should know - Utah, Omaha, Goldie, Juneau and Sword.
The Germans put up fierce resistance on Omaha Beach. The landing of the first echelon turned into a bloodbath. “Bloody Omaha” became a symbol of the entire Second World War for Americans.
I love history.
And here I am at the Omaha drop zone.
The Americans chose this beach for landing for a reason. For many kilometers around the coastline consists of sheer cliffs, and only this six-kilometer open strip is suitable for landing people and equipment.
The Germans also guessed about this modest fact, which is why here the Americans were waiting for 8 large-caliber guns, 18 anti-tank guns, and about a hundred machine guns. The entire shore of the beach was a continuous mess of hedgehogs, mines, barbed wire, piles were driven into the water to prevent the approach of landing craft.
and behind it - a two-hundred-meter wide swampy salt marsh
and behind it - a fifty-meter-high ridge of hills, inaccessible to technology. The Germans were sitting on it.
But the Americans really needed to land
By five in the morning, about six thousand ships, a giant armada, had crossed the English Channel, and part of this Armada, according to plan, headed for the Omaha landing sector.
If the landing of the British and Canadians in the Goldie, Juneau and Sword sections went smoothly, here the Americans did not go well from the very beginning - heavy fog, storm, disgusting visibility.
The furious bombing of the Omaha hills from planes and ships did not bring any harm to the Germans - the pillboxes were so reliable. A few kilometers from the coast, the Americans began boarding paratroopers from ships onto light landing boats.
It was somewhere there, in the distance
At the same time, the battleships Texas and Arkansas tried to turn the German fortifications into a mess, but in vain.
Seeing practically nothing, blindly, the landing boats spun on the waves and in the labyrinths of hedgehogs and piles. In panic, amphibious tanks began unloading in deep water. Of the 32 tanks, 29 with all their crews sank. Only one boat captain disobeyed the order and did not release his tanks. These three tanks were the only support for the infantry
Which finally reached a shallow depth and began disembarking. The shallow depth is two to three meters, which is logical; a large number of soldiers with 30 kilograms of ammunition immediately sank to the bottom
And the rest were waiting for the coastal water boiling from German bullets and shells.
The Omaha site was divided into eight sectors.
Here are the columns, they indicate the boundaries of the plots.
One of them, codenamed "Dog Green", was immortalized by Steven Spielberg in his "Saving Private Ryan". Actually, like Omaha itself.
One company was responsible for each sector.
Eight sections - eight companies of the first wave, 1450 people.
Few of these soldiers escaped.
Spielberg's picture of carnage is close to the truth. But it did not last long, because the next waves, having passed over the corpses of their comrades, began to knock out the Germans, of whom, by the way, there were few.
However, the total American losses at Omaha amounted to three thousand people - taking into account the fact that the losses of all allied forces during the landings in all five sectors amounted to five thousand.
On the Utah, the losses were only 200 people, thanks to the weather - they landed in the wrong place, but two kilometers away.
The story of Private Ryan has a real basis - two Niland brothers were killed on the Utah and Omaha, and the third was sent home to his mother, however, no one was looking for him.
For Americans, Omaha is an important point on the world map.
In addition to the symbol of courage and the horrific losses for them (naturally, incomparable with the scale of the operations of the Eastern Front), there is also a military memorial cemetery for the fallen American soldiers during Operation Overlord.
As fate would have it, I got to Omaha on May 8, which, as you know, in the West is Victory Day. We ended the war in Prague a day later. Therefore, it was quite crowded here. Singles and couples wandered thoughtfully along the beach with an inexplicable feeling in their eyes.
Someone stood for a very long time and simply looked out to sea, towards England, to where the Allied flotilla appeared 65 years ago.
The cemetery is more than impressive
A huge meadow with neat white crosses
9,300 soldiers lie here
Crosses are occasionally interrupted by Stars of David
For many American Jews, it was considered a sacred duty to volunteer for the army to fight the hated Hitler.
On all the crosses there is an inscription - the name of the deceased, where he served, when and where he was killed, and the most sacred thing - the state. For an American of those years, place of birth was like a mark, so much so did it determine the character and mentality of a particular person.
All 48 states lie here
And all these names, crosses, dates, Stars of David, states, stretch to the horizon.
Among them is Ryan's grave.
there is a wonderful memorial at the cemetery, at least for a person like me - all in maps and diagrams
"My eyes saw...
"...the glory of the coming of God"
And next to it is a museum. In the most Western sense of the word “museum” - photographs, films, slides, great words carved into marble.
On the way back we discovered a preserved German pillbox. It survived, probably, due to the fact that a monument to the victors, the fifth engineering brigade, was erected on it. And the names of more than a hundred people who were killed by the brigade during the assault on the heights and pillbox.
But no. A little further down the slope, another pillbox remains.
Inside, the runners for turning the carriage of a large-caliber gun survived.
Here is a look from the pillbox through the eyes of this gun. The entire beach is at your fingertips. It is no wonder that it cost the Americans dearly to take the heights on Omaha.
But this did not save the Germans. Within two months, the battle in Normandy was lost, Paris was surrendered to the Germans without a fight, and from August 1944 they rolled east with virtually no resistance.
And in April 1945, American and Russian officers in the town of Torgau on the Elbe shook hands for the first time
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The front of the armed struggle of the USA and Great Britain, as well as the troops of a number of allied states, against Nazi Germany in 1944-1945. in Western Europe was opened on June 6, 1944 by the landing of the Anglo-American expeditionary forces on the territory of Northern France (Normandy landing operation).
From the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet leadership raised the question of the early opening of a second front in Western Europe by Anglo-American troops to the United States and Great Britain. The landing of the Allies in France led to a reduction in the losses of the Red Army and the civilian population, and the rapid expulsion of the enemy from the occupied areas. At some stages of the fighting in 1941 - 1943. the problem of the second front was of critical importance for the Soviet Union. At the same time, the timely opening of hostilities in the West could significantly speed up the defeat of the fascist bloc and shorten the duration of the entire Second World War. For Western leaders, however, the question of a second front was largely a matter of implementing their strategy.
During the negotiations, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs V.M. Molotov, with British Prime Minister W. Churchill and US President F. Roosevelt in May-June 1942, an agreement was reached on the creation of a second front in Western Europe in 1942. However, soon after the negotiations, Western leaders decided to reconsider their previous commitments and postpone the opening second front
Only during the Tehran Conference in November-December 1943 was the question of the timing of the opening of a second front resolved. The Allies agreed to land their troops in France in May 1944. For his part, he made a statement that at about the same time he would launch a powerful offensive on the Soviet-German front.
The overall leadership of the Allied military operations in Europe was entrusted to the commander of the expeditionary forces, General D. Eisenhower. At the head of the English group of troops was Field Marshal B. Montgomery. The opening of the second front was sincerely welcomed in Moscow. But during the two-year period of the Allies postponing the landing in Northern France - from May 1942 to June 1944. only the irretrievable losses of the Soviet armed forces (killed, captured and missing) amounted to more than 5 million people.
Myagkov M.Yu. Second front. // The Great Patriotic War. Encyclopedia. /Ans. ed. Ak. A.O. Chubaryan. M., 2010
CORRESPONDENCE OF W. CHURCHILL AND J. STALIN DURING THE ALLIED LANDING IN NORMANDY, June 6-9, 1944
Everything started well. Mines, obstacles and coastal batteries have been largely overcome. Airborne assaults were highly successful and were undertaken on a large scale. The infantry landing is deployed quickly, and a large number of tanks and self-propelled guns are already on the shore.
The weather is tolerable, with a tendency to improve.
B) SECRET AND PERSONAL FROM PREMIER J.V. STALIN TO THE PRIME MINISTER Mr. W. CHURCHILL, June 6, 1944.
“Overlord” has received your message about the success of the start of operations. It makes us all happy and hopeful about our future successes.
The summer offensive of the Soviet troops, organized in accordance with the agreement at the Tehran Conference, will begin by mid-June on one of the important sectors of the front. The general offensive of the Soviet troops will unfold in stages by sequentially introducing armies into offensive operations. At the end of June and throughout July, offensive operations will turn into a general offensive of Soviet troops.
I undertake to promptly inform you about the progress of offensive operations.
C) PERSONAL AND MOST SECRET MESSAGE FROM Mr. WINSTON CHURCHILL TO MARSHAL STALIN, June 7, 1944.
1. Thank you for your message and congratulations on Rome. Regarding Overlord, I am quite satisfied with the situation as it developed until noon today, June 7th. Only in one coastal area where the Americans landed there were serious difficulties, and these have now been eliminated. Twenty thousand airborne troops landed safely behind enemy lines on his flanks, in each case making contact with American and British troops landed by sea. We crossed with minor losses. We expected to lose about 10 thousand people. We hope to have most of a quarter of a million people on shore this evening, including a significant number of armored forces (tanks) unloaded ashore from special vessels or reaching the shore under their own power by swimming. This latter type of tank suffered quite significant losses, especially on the American front, due to the fact that the waves capsized these amphibious tanks. We must now expect strong counterattacks, but we expect superior armored forces and, of course, overwhelming air superiority whenever the sky is clear of clouds.
2. Late yesterday evening in the Caen area there was a tank battle between our armored forces that had just landed ashore and fifty enemy tanks from the 21st Armored Grenadier Division, as a result of which the enemy abandoned the battlefield. The British 7th Armored Division is now coming into action and should give us superiority within a few days. We are talking about how much force they can throw against us in the next week. The weather in the Canal area does not appear to interfere in any way with the continuation of our landing. In fact, the weather seems more promising than before. All the commanders are satisfied that, in fact, during the landing process things went better than we expected.
3. Top secret. We expect to very soon establish two large prefabricated ports on the shores of a wide bay at the mouth of the Seine. Nothing like these ports has ever been seen before. Large ocean liners would be able to unload and deliver supplies to the fighting troops through numerous piers. This should be completely unexpected by the enemy, and would allow accumulation to take place to a very large extent regardless of weather conditions. We hope to capture Cherbourg in operations soon.
4. On the other hand, the enemy will quickly and intensively concentrate his forces, and the battles will be fierce and their scale will increase. We still hope that by the date of D-30 we will have deployed about 25 divisions with all their auxiliaries, with both flanks of the front abutting the sea and the front having at least three good ports: Cherbourg and two assembly ports. This front will be continuously supplied and expanded, and later we hope to include the Brest Peninsula. But all this depends on the accidents of war, which you, Marshal Stalin, know so well.
5. We hope that this successful landing and victory at Rome, the fruits of which still need to be collected from the cut off divisions of the Huns, will bring joy to your gallant soldiers after all the burden they had to bear and which no one outside your country felt more keenly than I .
6. After I had dictated the above, I received your message regarding the successful start of Overlord, in which you talk about the summer offensive of the Soviet troops. I sincerely thank you for this. I hope that you will notice that we have never asked you a single question due to our complete confidence in you, your people and your troops.
D) SECRET AND PERSONAL FROM PREMIER J.V. STALIN TO THE PRIME MINISTER Mr. W. CHURCHILL, June 9, 1944.
I received your message dated June 7 with the message about the successful deployment of Operation Overlord. We all salute you and the brave British and American troops and warmly wish you continued success. Preparations for the summer offensive of the Soviet troops are ending. Tomorrow, June 10, the first round of our summer offensive on the Leningrad Front opens.
I was very glad to receive your message, which I conveyed to General Eisenhower. The whole world can see Tehran's plans come to fruition in our concerted attacks against our common enemy. May all good luck and happiness accompany the Soviet armies.
Correspondence of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR with US Presidents and British Prime Ministers during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. T.1. M., 1986
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF D. EISENHOWER
The period from D-Day to our decisive breakthrough of the enemy defenses on July 25 constituted a certain phase in the operations of the Allied forces and was called the “Battle for the Bridgehead.” This phase included a series of continuous and difficult battles, during which, with the exception of the capture of Cherbourg, we were unable to advance very far. However, it was at this time that the conditions were prepared for subsequent actions to liberate France and Belgium...
From the day we landed on the shore, fighting nowhere acquired the positional character of the First World War, with the exception of battles at individual isolated points. However, such a possibility existed, and all of us, and especially our English friends, remembered all this...
By July 2, 1944, we had landed about a million people in Normandy, including 13 American, 11 British and 1 Canadian divisions. During the same period, we unloaded 566,648 tons of cargo and 171,532 tires ashore. It was very hard and exhausting work, but it paid off handsomely when we finally prepared to strike the enemy with all our might. During these first three weeks we captured 41 thousand prisoners. Our losses amounted to 60,771 people, of which 8,975 were killed.
Eisenhower D. At the Head of the Allied Forces. // The Second World War in the memoirs of W. Churchill, C. de Gaulle, C. Hall, W. Leahy, D. Eisenhower. M., 1990
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Second front - Read it, I never knew such details Very interesting article; ; I advise you to read it.
Http://a.kras.cc/2015/04/blog-post_924.html
Http://a.kras.cc/2015/04/blog-post_924.html
The Second World War, which began on September 1, 1939 and ended on September 2, 1945, has long been described by historians and memoirists as a painful and bloody movement from one decisive battle to another. Some of them lasted several days, others for months. Among them were battles of a gigantic scale, such as, for example, months-long battles in North Africa, the assault on the Japanese islands in the Pacific Ocean, the Battle of the Bulge, the Battle of Stalingrad or Kursk. Millions of soldiers, thousands of tanks and aircraft took part in these battles. The consumption of weapons and ammunition amounted to many thousands of tons per day, human casualties amounted to several thousand per day. There were many such battles during the war in Europe and Asia, and yet the landing of the Anglo-American armies in Normandy, codenamed “Overlord,” which began early in the morning of June 6, 1944, was a unique phenomenon in the history of all wars! Its scale and results, its technical equipment, its influence on post-war affairs in the world forced even Stalin to appreciate this event. In a congratulatory telegram to Churchill dated June 11, 1944, Stalin wrote: “History will mark this event as an achievement of the highest order!”
During the war with England, Napoleon gathered a huge army on the mainland to land it on the English coast. Hitler did the same during World War II. But both of them did not dare to land, realizing that the chances of success were very small, and the risk of losing their army was very high. We, former citizens of the USSR and Russia, know very little, if anything, about this event. Even after decades have passed, Russian publications about the war do not contain any reliable information about D-Day, as this event is commonly called in Western sources. The communist regime in the USSR diligently hid from its citizens the enormous role played by its allies England and America during the war between the Soviet Union and Germany. Now we can believe that without the help of the allies in the period 1941-1942, the USSR would not have survived against the Germans. But this is a special topic and is not what we are talking about now.
I remember well how throughout the war and after it the Soviet people said: “The allies did not fight.” If we measure participation in the war by the number of human losses, then the allies not only did not fight, but did not even know that there was a war going on. They, fighting simultaneously in Europe and Asia, lost ten times less killed than the Red Army. Moreover, Soviet propaganda insisted that the Allies were not opening a second front in Europe, deliberately contributing to the weakening of the USSR in the war. The Soviet press and radio broadcast a lot of other things in order to blame the incompetent leadership of the country and the war by Comrade Stalin and his team on the “inaction of the allied countries.” Why did the allies of the USSR really not open a second front in France until June 1944? After all, it was in their interests to end the war as soon as possible. England was already almost bankrupt!
Unlike humanities historians, who for some reason always apologize to the reader for citing “boring” figures, I am an engineer and will not apologize for this. I don’t see any boredom in numbers and I believe that without numbers it is impossible to correctly imagine the scale of historical events. Moreover, the absence of figures allows events to be distorted and often turns a historian into an ideologist and even a party leader.
Let's start with the numbers. On the first day, 150 thousand soldiers and officers were transported ashore from 6 thousand large and small ships. 9 thousand tons of various cargo, 3 thousand tons of fuel, 2 thousand trucks, and Jeeps. Several hundred guns, dozens of tanks, etc.
Only 2 thousand people worked on reloading all this from ships to shore. And this is only on the first day! How was it possible to send so much cargo ashore in such a short time? By this time, tens of thousands of special landing craft had been built. Among them were small ships for landing a platoon of fighters with light small arms. There were also large landing ships that came close to the shore with folding bows, ramps, along which tanks, heavy guns with tug cars, hundreds of jeeps, and thousands of heavy trucks loaded with boxes of ammunition came out of the holds. All this was complicated by stormy seas, stormy winds and fierce resistance from the Germans, located on high banks up to 30 meters. The Germans built reinforced concrete bunkers with hundreds of cannons and machine gun nests. The shore and shallow part of the beaches were strewn with mines, barbed wire and steel hedgehogs. To destroy them, to suppress fire from the heights, the Germans fired at 14 battleships with guns ranging from 5 to 16 inches in caliber, which came extremely close to the shore. Seventy cruisers and one and a half hundred destroyers fired along the shore with all their guns! Hundreds of rocket launcher barges rained down volleys of 70 large missiles each on the enemy. Even the old battleship Texas, built in 1912, was involved with six 12; guns and twelve 6;.
Thousands of Allied aircraft ensured complete air superiority. Transport planes supplied ammunition to paratroopers dropped at night deep in the German defenses. Thousands of heavy bombers bombed German fortifications along the shore. Hundreds of fighters prevented almost a single German bomber, attack aircraft or fighter from approaching the landing sites.
From the first day of the landing, the Allies began to build a temporary port, without which the operation would have been doomed to failure. Again numbers and nothing but numbers! Before the capture of the first major port of Antwerp on September 14, which could only be captured by a combined attack from sea and land, 2.5 million soldiers and other personnel of several armies, 500 thousand vehicles and 4 million tons of various cargo from ammunition and tanks to food and medicine. Just to gather and concentrate such a number of people and cargo in the ports of England required two years of intense preparatory work on the English and American shores. Moreover, to plan such a complex operation
Over the course of a year, entire divisions were transported from America to England on large passenger ships, including the famous Queen Mary I, with a displacement of 80 thousand tons. The speed of these ships was so great that they were not afraid of slow-moving submarines and sailed across the Atlantic without military escort. One Queen Mary, after being converted from a luxury ocean liner into a transport ship, could carry 10 thousand soldiers on board! She crossed the ocean in four to five days, depending on the weather. Without a deep-sea port with berths and cranes, it was unthinkable to land so many people and equipment! In England they were in abundance. And in Normandy? Naked beach!
Beginning in 1943, 150,000 people were sent to England every month until the number reached 2.5 million. Then they joked that under this load, plus tens of thousands of planes, tanks, guns and trucks, little England would drown in the ocean. Air units with aircraft, food and ammunition were transported to England. However, most goods were transported from America on ordinary slow-moving transport ships. The Atlantic was swarming with German submarines, and until two-thirds of them were destroyed by the end of 1943, there was no point in thinking about transferring so many troops, equipment and ammunition. In addition, the sea was saturated with millions of mines. Fascinating books have been written about the destruction of hundreds of German submarines, this struggle was so complex and dangerous! And not only the fleet, but also electronic equipment.
Already from these figures it is clear why the Allies could not land in Normandy earlier. It was necessary to assemble a gigantic army with full weapons. We needed mountains of weapons and equipment. The Allies began the war completely unprepared for such an operation. In America at the beginning of the war there were not even 150 tanks and no more than 1,500 aircraft of all types. But, if we truthfully describe the events, then it should be mentioned that back in the summer of 1943, the Allies landed large troops, first in Sicily, and then on the main territory of Italy in the area of the city of Salerno. No fewer than 22 German divisions fought against Allied forces in Italy in the summer of 1943. At the height of the Battle of Kursk, which began on July 5, 1943, Field Marshal Manstein's tank army was urgently transferred on July 10 from Kursk to Italy. Was this not a second front?
And if we remember the grandiose defeat of Field Marshal Rommel’s army in North Africa in the spring of 1943, when the Allies destroyed and captured 250 thousand German soldiers and officers, then the opening of the second front can be moved to the end of 1942. Let me remind readers that almost at the same time, the army of Field Marshal Paulus, consisting of 250 thousand people, was defeated near Stalingrad. However, the landing in Normandy surpassed in scale and, most importantly, in risk, all previous Allied operations.
England, a country with a population half that of Germany, lost all its weapons on the continent in the summer of 1940, when France essentially refused to fight and the entire British expeditionary force of 350 thousand people was miraculously able to cross over to England almost only with rifles. Thousands of guns, tanks, armored personnel carriers and other heavy weapons were lost and had to be remade. And England was already at war with Japan in East Asia and in the boundless expanses of the Pacific Ocean. America soon joined her. Hundreds of ships, thousands of aircraft and dozens of Marine divisions fought the Japanese there.
But, let's go back to the beaches of Normandy! The landings began simultaneously in five areas of coastal Normandy between the cities of Le Havre and Cherbourg. These five beaches stretched over 50 miles and were distributed among the armies of England, Canada and America. The Americans landed on two of them. Their code names are Utah and Omaha. In the first hours of the landing, troops and equipment, as I already wrote, were delivered to the shore only from landing ships and amphibious vehicles with a carrying capacity of 2.5 tons. Until the Germans brought fully armed tank and motorized divisions to the beaches, the Allies could successfully capture their coastal fortifications. But with the arrival of the main German forces, it would have become impossible to fight them without the constant supply of huge quantities of equipment, people and ammunition. Thousands of tons of fuel, food and even water were needed, along with hundreds of tons of medicine.
A stable wired connection was needed. It was impossible to deliver all this without permanent port facilities.
The Allies understood this and, on Churchill’s advice and sketches, began in advance the construction of giant reinforced concrete floating blocks-caissons, which formed the elements of future piers and breakwaters. Their code name is "Phoenix". 23 such caissons were built. The giant blocks had the following dimensions in meters: 18 x 18 x 60. Their construction took 9 months and required 20 thousand workers who worked day and night. The hollow blocks had positive buoyancy and in the first hours of the landing they were transported by tugboats to the beaches where the battle was still going on. Who, if not Churchill, would have known about the failure of an attempt to land large military formations on a hostile shore without proper preparation, supplies and reconnaissance. He paid for such an attempt in 1915 with a ministerial post and many other major troubles. During the First World War, an attempt by British troops to land by sea on the Turkish coast at Gallipoli in February 1915 failed. With the help of the Germans, the Turks held out for a long time and threw the British into the sea with huge casualties. The initiator of the operation was the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Winston Churchill! And although it was not he who commanded it, all the blame for the failure was placed on him.
But let's return to concrete blocks. They were filled with water and flooded in the right places, the next blocks were brought to them, their surface flat parts were turned into berths, located quite high above the surface of the water. No less important was that these were excellent breakwaters, which together formed a harbor protected from wind and waves. Her codename is "Mulberry". Long breakwaters-berths were made of them and along them heavy loads could be delivered to the beaches from ordinary cargo ships with cranes. However, the construction of breakwaters and piers was only part of the task. They were flooded perpendicular to the shore and at a considerable distance from it. Their high, 18-meter walls did not allow them to be used as berths near the shore.
It is known that the seashore on the beaches is very sloping and the depth of several meters is sometimes a hundred or more meters from the land. To transport cargo ashore, pontoon bridges were built with articulated joints that allowed bridge sections to rise and fall according to the water level during high and low tides, as well as in the event of rough seas. At one end the bridges were attached to the caissons; the other end went out onto land. From these bridges, loaded trucks, tanks and guns drove down to the shore under their own power or in tow. Part of the breakwaters was made up of 70 old ships that were sunk in the required places. The total length of the breakwaters was 7.5 kilometers. Large, convenient harbor.
It should be mentioned that subsequently fuel and lubricating oils were delivered ashore from England via three pipelines laid along the bottom of the English Channel. On June 12, the pipelines, each 30 miles long, began operating! Communication was carried out via an underwater cable, also laid after the landing. Laying the pipelines was a very difficult task. A flexible pipe was wound onto a giant drum several meters in diameter. The drum was towed from the coast of England to the landing site, the pipe unwound and lay on the bottom. And all this in very fresh weather! Pumping stations were built by this time on the shore.
It is now clear how the landing was ensured in the first days of the battle. However, this is not all. It should be mentioned that in 1942 a test landing of an Allied division was made on the French coast near the city of Dieppe. Without preliminary reconnaissance, without port facilities and, therefore, without heavy weapons, the division was defeated and its remnants were thrown into the sea. The coast was heavily fortified, large German formations were quickly delivered to Dieppe by rail, and the landing ended in nothing but the loss of several hundred Allied soldiers and officers. Their command again realized that it was impossible to land on a coast controlled by the enemy like this. We were seriously preparing for the next landing. In addition to the preparations mentioned above, since 1942, groups of people had to be disembarked from small boats at night to take soil samples at the intended landing sites and study the shore. They often blew up enemy radars. During the landing at Dieppe, it turned out that the sandy and pebble soil of the beach was not suitable for the passage of tanks. They skidded on the pebbles or buried their tracks deep in the wet sand. They were of little use. One burden.
It was necessary to build special machines to overcome this obstacle. Machines were needed to clear mines from beaches. You can't send sappers there. They will be killed with machine guns in a few minutes! This was done by military engineer Major Percy Hobart. The basis for such vehicles was a tank with heavy armor. In front of it, rotating drums hung with pieces of steel chains were suspended on two parallel steel beams. It turned out to be a mine trawl. As the tank moved, the drum rotated, the chains pounded the ground and detonated mines. Their explosions could not damage the tank. The crew was protected from the fragments by armor and the mines exploded far ahead of the tracks, without causing any damage to them. On another type of machine, a drum was attached to the same beams, on which a thick rubberized tarpaulin reinforced with wire was wound. The winding diameter was more than three meters.
As the tank moved, the tarpaulin unwound, the tank drove onto the tarpaulin, and it lay in front and behind the tank on a smooth and non-slip road. The next tanks were already moving along it. Otherwise, the tanks would not have been able to move on the pebbles and sand of the beach.
But that's not all! Tanks were built that carried giant bundles of long logs. These bundles fell into anti-tank ditches and the tanks passed along the logs, bypassing the ditch. There were not enough ships from which the tanks went ashore, and amphibious tanks were built. There were standard amphibious light tanks in the armies of several countries, but these were tankettes with bulletproof armor. Wedges were clearly not suitable for storming the shore armed with anti-tank guns. Percy Hobart made tanks with 76 mm guns float. and weighing over 30 tons, which were not intended by the designers for navigation. He sealed them and even equipped them with propulsion screws. Let the reader imagine how much time, money, and materials the Allies spent on the construction of this entire port and assault facility. It is not surprising that it took two years for the landing to begin with any hope of success. However, any military operation requires intelligence. It was waged from the first days of the war, since the British feared a German landing since 1940.
Along the coast, the Germans installed radar and radio stations to warn of British aircraft raids on German territory.
It was necessary to find out their location, type of installations, and methods of protecting them. It was necessary to break the secret codes of the German army and navy. Already in 1942, the Germans began to build the so-called Western Wall along the coast to repel the Allied landing from the British Isles.
British aviation began systematic aerial photography of the coast of Brittany. Dozens of planes, day after day, in daylight, photographed not only the shore, but also the structures and landscape located in the depths. Hundreds of kilometers of film with five million frames were processed by specially trained specialists. Special equipment made it possible to take three-dimensional pictures and gradually the Allied headquarters received a complete picture of the places where the landing was to take place and where further battles took place to capture a deeper bridgehead than a narrow strip of beaches. Dozens of pilots died performing this mission. The Allies were interested not only in German defensive structures. Roads and railways, rivers and canals, bridges, and railway stations were no less important. Already at night on the day of landing, Allied aviation carried out a precise bombing of these objects, depriving the Germans of the opportunity to transport ammunition and reinforcements to the battle sites. And over the previous three months, Allied aircraft dropped 66 thousand tons of bombs on German positions and roads. Some of them were spent only to ensure that deep craters from heavy bombs were used by paratroopers as shelters in the first hours of fighting! Amazing, unparalleled concern for the lives of soldiers! For comparison; Marshal Zhukov drove soldiers into minefields, once - mining them in such an “original” way to save time. He told General Eisenhower about this, which was reflected in the latter’s memoirs. The general melancholy noted there that he would not have been in command for long if something like that had reached Congress. A military tribunal and a dishonorable resignation would follow immediately! Different worlds, we say. Different wars, different circumstances.
But perhaps the most ambitious part of the upcoming operation was the measures to deceive the enemy. The Germans were not supposed to know the exact landing site. It was natural to expect that it would happen in the narrowest section of the English Channel near the city of Calais. However, the Allies decided that it would be more convenient to land to the west of this place. But the English Channel is three times wider there! The Germans had to be kept confident that the landing would be where they expected. First, a brilliant operation was organized to deceive the Nazi General Staff. The corpse of a worker who had just died of tuberculosis was found in a London morgue. Tuberculous lungs, when opened, give a picture of the lungs of a person who recently drowned in sea water. They dressed the corpse in the uniform of a major of the English army, attached a special briefcase with “secret documents” to his wrist with a steel chain, kept him in sea water for many hours until the medical condition required for the drowned man, organized a “catastrophe” over the sea of an English plane that sank at an unattainable depth and threw it a corpse from a submarine right off the Spanish coast near Gibraltar.
Experts provided the “drowned man” with such a set of documents, papers and pieces of paper that sophisticated German counterintelligence officers did not smell the forgery. In his pockets, Major Martin had an original ticket for the London cinema where the deceased had gone before his death, and a receipt for the hotel where he stayed on his “last” night. A letter from his beloved with a real name and address in London, a letter from his strict father, who did not approve of his choice and engagement to her, and many equally skillfully fabricated details.
Spanish fishermen discovered Martin on the shore and informed the Spanish police. They took the body and immediately called the German consulate. Counterintelligence officers and a pathologist from the Gestapo arrived from Germany. The most thorough examination did not reveal the trap, and the briefcase contained top secret documents about the Allied landing at Pas-de-Calais in June 1944. So the Germans swallowed the bait whole. Martin saved thousands of lives because the Germans were confident in the authenticity of the documents. And the measures to deceive the Germans continued. Fake airfields and roads were built, thousands of models of transport and combat aircraft, tanks and guns, tractors and cars stood on them, and barracks were built. From the air it looked quite real. The Germans had no spies on the ground. General George Patton, perhaps the most talented and aggressive general of the Allied forces, was appointed commander of a non-existent army located opposite Calais.
The Germans knew: where Patton is, there is an offensive! Expect trouble there! With him came his radio operators, whose “handwriting” German intelligence knew from the time of the invasion of Sicily, where Patton commanded the American invasion army. These radio operators filled the airwaves with false orders, similar in style to the orders of General Patton, well known to the Germans. On the English coast, from which the Germans were awaiting landing, a huge number of troops were maneuvering and boarding transport ships. The Allies installed powerful radio amplifiers on the shores of the Pas-de-Calais at its narrowest point and transmitted pre-recorded sounds of voices and loading, engines of military equipment and ships through loudspeakers to reinforce the Germans’ confidence that a landing was being prepared here. German ships and submarines constantly listened to the shore. But the real operations took place in the deepest secrecy and the landing site was known to only a few commanders, including Churchill and Roosevelt. American General Dwight Eisenhower was appointed commander of the entire operation.
The Allied headquarters needed to obtain secret codes used by the German army and navy. Even more valuable were encoding machines that automatically converted normal text into encryption and back again. With the help of Polish partisans, some parts of these machines were obtained, and a daring night raid on a German radio station made it possible to obtain encryption codes, the device itself in full working order, and several living German radio operators. However, this was not enough. The Germans periodically changed the codes and the signals intercepted by radio had to be deciphered by a special team working in Bletchley Park near London. There was a strange team of military codebreakers, engineers, chess grandmasters, crossword puzzle experts, mathematics professors, theater set designers, and even magicians. They successfully solved many puzzles of German codes, came up with fake structures and made real objects invisible from the air.
Deciphering German codes and ciphers was a long and labor-intensive job, because they used 19th century technology - punching machines. Therefore, in 1943, the brilliant English engineer Tommy Flowers and mathematician William Tutt, who worked at Blatchley Park, invented the world’s first computer on 6 thousand vacuum tubes, producing 5 thousand operations per second, called “Colossus”, and developed a decryption algorithm. He processed so much information in a few hours that it would have taken years to process it manually. Unfortunately, the work was so secret for many years after the war that the glory of the inventors of the computer went to others, and few people still know about the true inventors. Not everything has been declassified yet! Soon British intelligence had the opportunity to decipher any German radio signal! Bletchley Park's outstanding role in the war has been documented in numerous books and articles. General Eisenhower said that the geniuses of Blatchley Park brought victory two years closer. It was an Allied brain trust! They played with Hitler like a cat and a mouse, knowing in advance about his actions and plans and feeding him false information about what they had no intention of doing. They even knew the coordinates of German submarines in the ocean!
But the difficulties of the landing did not end there. Factors such as tides, moonlit nights and weather had to be combined. It turned out that a favorable combination of these data occurs twice a month. And if you miss these days, you will have to wait for the next time. All this added to the worries of General Eisenhower and his staff! Especially the weather! The Atlantic is very unreliable at this time of year. Severe storms when the height of cold waves exceeds three meters
Happen there very often. In such a storm, landing from small transport ships is not possible. And it was on the appointed landing day, June 5, that the storm became so intense that the landing had to be postponed for a day. Imagine thousands of ships in the roadstead off the coast of England, and among them very small ones, on which there were 150 thousand soldiers and officers.
It is impossible to land them ashore in order to wait out a stormy night on the shore. The landing would then have to be postponed for a month. And it would have been even more impossible to keep it secret from the Germans. All night the landing headquarters was in a super-tense state. Especially the Commander. A colossal responsibility lay on him! Weather forecasts were required hourly. When the storm subsided slightly and the forecast for the next two hours was encouraging, Eisenhower gave the order for landing.
According to strictly marked schedules, even at night, in the light of the moon, a giant armada, led by 350 minesweepers, moved to the shore with precision to the minute. The strait was swarming with millions of mines! The Germans said that the water was not visible due to thousands of ships densely moving towards the shore! At the same time, thousands of naval guns rained down tons of shells on the German fortifications. Thousands of aircraft were busy working on fortifications, roads, bridges and railway stations.
But even a few hours before the landing, hundreds of cargo gliders with infantry, light tanks and guns were thrown into the German rear. The famous one hundred and first airborne division in its entirety, more than 12 thousand soldiers, was dropped by parachute in the rear to hold those bridges that were not specifically destroyed by aircraft, which may be needed during the battles. The sabotage work was not forgotten either. A deceptive trick was also used, which is still talked about in military schools. Thousands of primitive stuffed animals depicting armed paratroopers were dropped by parachute into areas where German infantry were concentrated. In the darkness of the night, illuminated by the moon, from a distance and in the air, these stuffed animals looked like real paratroopers.
The paratroopers called this scarecrow made of sandbags and wearing primitive military uniform “Rupert.” Everything in the army must have a name! These Ruperts distracted the attention of hundreds of defending Germans. They were hit with all guns, using hundreds of kilograms of ammunition. Special units rushed to capture them, while real paratroopers operated in other areas without much hindrance. The brave Ruperts saved hundreds of lives. The Germans did not immediately understand how shamefully they had been deceived!
So, the landing craft began landing the first units. On a steep wave, under the fire of far from completely destroyed reinforced concrete bunkers, from which machine guns and even large cannons fired, the soldiers jumped ashore and, following minesweeper tanks, rushed through minefields to the foot of dunes up to 30 meters high. Many soldiers drowned without reaching land in heavy equipment. Many were killed on the beaches near the water line! Several floating tanks and small landing craft sank. The storm did not subside! From above they shot at the paratroopers from all types of weapons. The soldiers found shelter on the beaches only behind steel hedges placed by the Germans as anti-tank obstacles and in craters from bombs and shells. And only when those who managed to reach the base of the high bank did they find themselves out of the fire of Nazi soldiers. From here the fighters began their assault on the heights.
Assault ladders, climbing equipment and simple ropes with anchors at the ends were their only means. Plus high training on mock-ups of the French coast, which lasted several months, and courage in the majority of the fighters who were not fired upon. And at the top there were machine-gun nests and barbed wire waiting for them. They used grenades and explosives on long sticks, which were pushed under barbed wire and under the parapets of machine gunners. And of course a variety of small arms. They often fought hand-to-hand, attacking the Germans with whatever they hit. Separate units, dropped at night from parachutes and gliders, having destroyed the gun crews, reached the German fortifications on the dunes from above and, with the joint efforts of paratroopers from the sea, captured the coastal heights, opening the way deeper into the coastal territory.
What were the top German commanders doing at this time? Field Marshal Rommel flew to Germany to celebrate his wife's birthday. The commander-in-chief of the Western Front, Field Marshal Runstedt, was also far from the landing site. Hitler was sleeping and could not be awakened under any circumstances. The entire top of the Wehrmacht was sure that in such stormy weather a landing was impossible, and they were waiting for it in Pas-de-Calais, a good hundred miles to the east. Hitler also did not allow tank divisions to move to the landing site without his order. "Not a single tank." Therefore, Runstedt waited for the Fuhrer to awaken, cursing like a loader. Hitler woke up very late as usual. He worked nights and forced others to stick to his schedule.
Reflections on whether this landing was a false one to distract the Germans from Pas-de-Calais took at least a day. They remembered, of course, Major Martin.
The tanks stood, Hitler thought, Rundstedt cursed, but could not do anything. This outstanding commander immediately realized that the landing was not false, that if the allies were not thrown into the sea in the first two days, then the war could be considered over! When the German tanks finally moved on platforms along the railway (tanks do not go into battle under their own power if the road is long), it turned out that the tracks were destroyed by Allied aviation, which had complete air superiority. While they were being restored, the Germans and again destroyed by Allied aviation, a lot of time passed. More than once tank echelons were subjected to crushing air bombing.
Instead of 24 hours, three tanks were traveling, and when it became clear that they were too late and Hitler’s chief of staff, General Zeitzler, asked Rundstedt “what should we do now?” he, completely enraged by the Fuhrer’s stupidity and fueled by continuous curses against him, shouted into the telephone receiver: “Idiots! Make peace before it's too late! The war is lost! This cry led to his immediate resignation, but the situation did not change. Hitler had no chance of victory since Stalingrad, and after the successful landing of the Allies in Normandy, the time until the end of the “thousand-year” Reich began to be measured in months.
How did events go further at the landing site? On June 19, the artificial port, built with such difficulty by the Allies, was swept away by a storm unprecedented in strength even in these parts. Repairing the port took several days, but by that time troops, heavy weapons and ammunition had been delivered ashore in such quantities that even without the port the Allies were advancing and the Germans could no longer do anything! During the two weeks of operation of the improvised port, 2.5 million military personnel, 4 million tons of cargo and 500 thousand vehicles were delivered ashore, from artillery tractors - all-wheel drive three-axle Studebakers to Jeeps. Studebakers were also used as trucks, transporting up to 2.5 tons of cargo over absolute off-road conditions.
By the way, six hundred thousand of these vehicles were supplied free of charge by the allies to the Soviet Union in 1942-1945. I remember well that the whole country rode them and American motorcycles for another 10 years after the victory. In his memoirs, Marshal Zhukov spoke about them this way: “We received six hundred thousand cars from the allies during the war. And what cars! They didn’t care about off-road conditions.”
What can we say in conclusion? The reader, I hope, saw how grandiose the task was and how brilliantly it was solved. Sir Winston Churchill later wrote that, with the exception of minor details, the operation went off like a parade. He was a professional military man and knew the business he was writing about. He was directly involved in the planning of this operation! Gallipoli will not happen again! The landing under continuous enemy fire, in a storm, from thousands of ships of all types and sizes went like something out of a movie. This “movie” alone cost 2 thousand killed and 8 thousand wounded soldiers in the first day. I almost wrote “only” 2 thousand! In his memoirs, General Eisenhower wrote that losses of at least 25% were expected, which was several times higher than the true losses. Moreover, he prepared a short message for the press in case of failure of the landing, stating that all responsibility for the failure lies not only with the weather and other insurmountable reasons, but also with him, as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the entire operation. This is how difficult and unpredictable was the task that the Allied forces solved so brilliantly.
Having studied the history of World War II all my life, I have not come across a single military operation that is anything close to the scale, complexity, danger and effectiveness of Operation Overlord. I think that only an army and people of free countries who are not afraid to answer for their actions, only an Army of free people and its commanders who are not afraid that in case of failure they will be accused of treason, sabotage or espionage, as often happened in the army of the USSR, is capable for such actions. What is striking first of all is the organization of this whole affair. Coordination of the actions of thousands of departments, millions of people and industry on two continents distant from each other.
The coordinated actions of the armies and navies of the two countries on a colossal scale, acting as one organism, have no analogues in history. I don’t think that the Soviet Union would have solved such a problem at all. This requires a different socio-political system and different human material. In 1944, the soldiers of the Red Army had no less courage, bravery and ability to fight than the Allied soldiers. And the weapons were no worse. However, in the dictatorial Stalinist regime, which suppressed the initiative of the people, mortally intimidated the entire people, including generals and marshals, whom Stalin periodically shot even in the fall of 1941 to intimidate the rest, there would simply be no one to organize and carry out such an operation. And the Russian “maybe” would not allow this to be done properly!
During June 6, in the area northwest and north of the city of YASSY, our troops successfully repulsed all attacks by enemy infantry and tanks. On June 5, 49 German tanks and 42 aircraft were shot down in this area. On other sectors of the front - no change.
On June 5, 48 enemy aircraft were shot down on all fronts in air battles and anti-aircraft artillery fire.
A massive raid by our aviation on the railway junction and military installations of the city of Iasi
On the night of June 6, our long-range aviation carried out a massive raid on the railway junction and military installations of the city of Iasi (Romania). As a result of the bombing, up to 90 fires arose. Trains, station buildings and enemy military warehouses were burning. The fires were accompanied by strong explosions. Several trains at the railway stations closest to the city of Iasi were fired upon and set on fire by machine-gun and cannon fire. Our pilots observed the flames of fires while leaving the target from a distance of more than 100 kilometers.
All our planes returned to their bases.
North-west and north of the city of Iasi, our troops continued to fight with the enemy. The Germans, who have suffered heavy losses in recent days, today brought into battle a comparatively smaller force of tanks and infantry. Soviet units successfully repelled all attacks of the Nazis. A fierce battle took place only in the sector defended by the N-formation. During the day, the Germans in this area went on the attack twice, but achieved no results. In front of our positions there were several destroyed German tanks and armored personnel carriers and up to 300 enemy corpses.
North-west of the city of Tiraspol, thirty-seven snipers of the N-unit killed 158 Germans over the past five days. Sniper Comrade Nikulin killed 13 German soldiers, sniper Comrade Lapin - 8, sniper Comrade Ryabushenko - 7, sniper Comrade Klimentyev killed 5 Germans.
North-west of the city of Vitebsk, a reconnaissance detachment under the command of Captain Gerasimenko broke into the enemy’s location early in the morning. Soviet soldiers blew up three dugouts, destroyed 20 Nazis and, having captured 6 prisoners, returned to their unit.
On the night of June 5, aviation of the Red Banner Baltic Fleet sank three German transports with a total displacement of 11 thousand tons in the Baltic Sea.
Yesterday 35 German planes tried to raid one of our military installations in the Gulf of Finland. The enemy planes were met by fighters from Lieutenant Colonel Koreshkov's unit. In fierce air battles, Baltic pilots shot down 20 German aircraft. Not a single enemy aircraft was allowed to reach the target. The pilots who particularly distinguished themselves in air battles were: Senior Lieutenant Chernenko, Senior Lieutenant Kamyshnikov, Lieutenant Zhuchkov and Lieutenant Shestopalov.
The partisans of the detachment operating in the Minsk region learned that in one locality the Germans were robbing civilians. Soviet patriots ambushed and attacked the Nazis returning from a bandit raid. The partisans killed 69 German soldiers and officers and captured two non-commissioned officers. The property looted by the Nazis from Soviet citizens was returned to the population. The partisans of the Shchors detachment derailed the enemy’s military echelon. The locomotive and 10 carriages were destroyed. Up to 200 German soldiers and officers were killed and wounded.
The captured commander of the 3rd company of the 12th regiment of the 15th Romanian Infantry Division, Captain Nikolai Alexandrescu, said: “In the fall of 1941, our division was defeated near Odessa. Its remnants were taken to the rear for reorganization. About a year later, the division was transferred to the Kletskaya area, where it lost 12 thousand people in two months. The division was re-formed for the third time and again sent to the front. The division is commanded by Brigadier General Stefan Bardan. At the division headquarters are the German Major Wendt, his assistant Oberleutnant Grese and several German clerks. The German Wendt is the actual owner. He unceremoniously cancels the orders of the division commander and does everything at his own discretion. Romanian soldiers do not want to fight for Hitler. I was once again convinced of this in the last battle. A small group of Russian soldiers in three boats quietly crossed the river, went ashore and, shouting “hurray,” rushed to our positions. These positions were defended by a Romanian company, which had several heavy machine guns. When our soldiers heard the shouts of “hurray,” they immediately fled. With several throws, the Russians reached the command post. Seeing that resistance was futile, I stood up and raised my hands. Together with me, Lieutenant Lehu, Senior Lieutenant Rosca and Lieutenant Rizcanu surrendered.”
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