By Earl McElfresh
Olean, NY – This month marks the 60th anniversary of D-Day and the last official reunion of D-Day veterans.
The plan to embark Allied armies from Britain across the English Channel to land them on the beaches of Normandy was the most complex and ambitious military operation ever undertaken. Critical to its success was secrecy. So long as the Germans didn't know where the landings were to take place, they were forced to defend an immense stretch of the French coastline. The Allies would be able to fling a strong concentrated force against one section of the German's long but shallow defenses.
The first thing military planners need is great maps. On a battlefield, ignorance is not bliss. Nowhere is the dictum "knowledge is power" more full of truth and consequences, than on a battlefield. Whoever knows which hill is highest - and occupies it - will command the field.
The work of preparing maps began in mid 1943. Since the actual target of the invasion was top secret, Allied mapmakers made as earnest an effort to map Pas de Calais as they made to map Normandy. The job was monumental because the maps had to be extraordinarily accurate and immensely detailed. It was not enough to correctly record the roads and towns. It was necessary to know each tree and house, every hedgerow and culvert.
Where to begin? The British Broadcasting Corporation got the mapping project underway, asking everyone in Britain with picture postcards of the French coast to mail them in. Within days, nearly 30,000 were received. Similar requests were made for French road maps, guide books, photographs and brochures.
The Allied air forces began intensive aerial photography missions. High altitude photographs were pieced together as "mosaics," creating de-facto maps. As the invasion date loomed, converted fighter planes took oblique photos of beach obstacles, flying so low they returned to base with vegetation snagged in their fuselage.
British submarines nosed up close to the beaches under cover of darkness to photograph beach houses and seaside cafes, some of which were disguised German gun emplacements. From their observations, photo-realistic watercolor paintings were prepared of the beachfronts so that landing crafts could positively identify their assigned objectives. Frogmen slipped ashore to determine which beaches had firm enough surfaces to sustain the heavy vehicles which would disembark to support the infantry.
The most unusual group preparing maps for D-Day were members of the Engineer Model Making Detachment, or V Section as the British unit was called. They were painters, sculptors, scene designers, ornamental plasterers, architects, carpenters, geographers, teachers, metal workers, even toy designers. When only a few men working beneath the pavements of Westminster knew Normandy would be the objective on D-Day, this odd assemblage knew it as well. The model-maps they were preparing were so labor intensive and of such intelligence value that they didn't have the luxury of preparing phantom maps. Designed like railroad layouts or dioramas, their maps were remarkable three dimensional renderings of the invasion beaches and the inland areas where the airborne forces would sail out of the night sky to bewilder and obstruct German operations. These miraculous model-maps were accurate in every detail, from the shape of rooftops to the width of farm lanes.
No maps are ever perfect but the D-Day maps were faulty in only two regards: they failed to assess how serious an obstruction the Normandy hedgerows would be to Allied offensive operations. And paratroopers whose maps indicated surface water landed in deep flood waters and, weighted down with equipment, floundered and drowned. But at the time there was general agreement that the maps for D-Day were the best maps any armies ever used in battle. The importance of these maps was summed up for me by a WW2 veteran, "When we ran off the maps, it was like running out of gas. We stopped."
Listener-Commentator Earl McElfresh operates the McElfresh Map Company in Olean.