'Tens of thousands of connected parts'

Identities and personalities. Myths and truths. Strategies and uncertainties. Good ideas and bad ones. Naval operations, airborne assaults and ground combat. Offense and defense. It all came down to one very complex moment in world history over 70 years ago: D-Day.

Some of the world's foremost historians gathered Thursday in New Orleans for a symposium at the National WWII Museum and showed why the Normandy invasion captivates new generations and produces a seemingly eternal stream of research, interpretation, television programming and best-selling books.

"History is alive and well in our country and abroad," National WWII Museum President and CEO Nick Mueller said in his opening remarks of the symposium that kicked off the fourth International Conference on World War II, which this time focuses on the events of 1944. "D-Day itself - no matter how you cut it - is one of history's most iconic days."

The conference, which continues through Saturday evening, was sold out but is streamed live online at www.www2conference.com.

Thursday's pre-conference symposium on D-Day, presented by World War II Magazine and Weider History Group, was divided into four parts: Situation and Strategy, Assault from the Air, Battling for the Beaches and Wrapping up D-Day. Each session examined the variables, strategies and outright uncertainties that made the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944, the pivotal battle for the Allies in World War II and pried loose the Axis grip on the planet.

By the time Allied forces were building up and training along the coast of England in 1944, Adolf Hitler's Germany was spread thin in western Europe and fighting a losing battle on its eastern front, against the Soviet Union. German forces in Normandy, explained historian and author Robert Citino, "knew this was do-or-die time." He said the most many Germans hoped for at the time was "something resembling a strategic stalemate" as Hitler's Atlantic Wall was defended by, among others, former Soviet prisoners of war and Mongolians whose language astonished Allied troops, who expected to hear German voices.

The Atlantic Wall itself was over-promoted by the German propaganda machine, Citino explained, noting that while Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the "desert fox" of the North Africa battles, did his best to set up a costly and stationary line of defense along the Normandy coast, he ultimately proved that Nazi money would have been better spent better arming a more mobile army. "(Rommel) did good work - so good the Allies had to change plans" to invade at low tide.

Ultimately, the historians noted at the end of the day's presentations, the Atlantic Wall held back the Allies for about five minutes on D-Day. By the end of what writer Cornelius Ryan titled "The Longest Day," his best-selling 1959 book about the invasion, Allied forces were moving inland with jeeps, tanks and artillery weapons they would need to begin their long, bloody march to Berlin. The strength of the wall, Citino said, is one of many myths about the battle that persists today.

Dr. Craig L. Symonds, author and emeritus history professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, traced one vital strand of D-Day success back to places like New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Portland, Ore., and Evansville, Ind., where the home-front work force was working around the clock to build the ships and landing craft - specifically the Landing Ship Tank (LST) that could carry tanks, trucks, jeeps, cannons and large numbers of troops across the Atlantic. In fact, he said, D-Day was delayed at least a month while Allied leaders waited for newly built LSTs to arrive from the United States. When the LSTs took their places in the armada of more than 5,000 ships, the Allied commanders were finally confident enough to invade.

"Overlord was, after all, an amphibious operation, the largest in world history," Symonds said. It would not have been possible without Operation Neptune and the three-year assemblage of some 19 million tons of naval warships at a time when U.S. labor and raw materials alike were in short short supply. Building that naval might, training sailors and delivering it all to two different war theaters on opposite sides of the earth was what Symonds called "a complex problem involving tens of thousands of connected parts."

A case could be made, he explained, that the LST "was the most important ship of the war." However, he added, it was no one's favorite. "It could be difficult, even dangerous, to just sit on the toilet," he said, noting that veterans he had interviewed said that while other Navy crafts went through or over sea waves, "the LST would just club the waves to death."

Known jokingly by the acronym "large slow target," the LST was also often at risk of attack by German submarines, as was the case when three of the big vessels were sunk during a training exercise in April 1944 known as Operation Tiger. A collision in the night with German forces off the coast of England killed more than 700 men and removed three vital LSTs from the pre-Normandy fleet.

The scholars also examined the pre-dawn airborne assault of Normandy. "There was no question that the drop was screwed up," author Dr. Allan Millett explained. "We won't have any controversy on that."

Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and Gen. Omar Bradley would later say the airborne assault was essential to the success of the beach landings on D-Day, but casualties were extremely high among the 13,000 paratroopers of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, and the gliders that attempted to bring in jeeps, artillery pieces, support personnel and supplies became known as "flying coffins."

The airborne assault left paratroopers as far as nine miles away from their designated landing zones and ended the Army's era of nighttime jumps. "They finally figured out that doing this was a bad idea," said Millett, a retired Marine Corps Reserves colonel. "It hid you, some. But you also couldn't see where you were landing."

Low clouds, wind and flak from German 20mm anti-aircraft guns contributed to the scattered mis-drops in the pre-dawn D-Day invasion, Millett explained, noting that it is a wonder there were no mid-air collisions of C-47s among the 41 aircraft lost that night. The chaos had one positive effect: the German defenses could not understand what the Americans were doing or where they were coming from. In fact, Millett explained, "three battalions that landed where they were supposed to got virtually wiped out."

D-Day also featured two very different aerial bombardment missions - the effective Utah Beach raid that flew and dropped bombs parallel to the coastline and the much less effective Omaha Beach strike that came in perpendicular to the line of German defenses and typically missed their targets.

Darren Moran, a historian and son of a D-Day veteran of the 344th Bomb Group, discussed how the different approaches to the enemy line may have contributed to the big difference in casualties - 197 to 2,374 - between Utah Beach and Omaha Beach.

One reason for the two different approaches, according to Moran, was that such bombardments were not yet "fully evolved. You might look at Omaha Beach as research and development."

Two top scholars and writers about ground operations on D-Day - Dr. John McManus and Joseph Balkoski - discussed the similarities and differences between the 1st Infantry Division and the 29th Infantry Division that stormed Omaha Beach.

"Every division was different from every other one," Balkoski told the crowd. "The most prominent commonality (between the 1st and 29th) was confidence --confidence in the success of the whole venture. That's what really got the men through the trials and tribulations of Omaha Beach."

McManus, author of "The Dead and Those About to Die," agreed, noting that commanding generals of other divisions were not always fond that "Big Red 1 soldiers liked to say that the U.S. Army consists of the 1st Division and 10 million replacements."

He said he also thinks 1,100 is an under-estimate of the number of casualties taken by the 1st Infantry Division in the invasion.

"A lot was on the line," McManus said. "If they fail, perhaps the invasion fails."

That refrain could be applied to all the topics -- personalities, identities, naval, ground and air myths, truths and interpretations -- that were addressed by scholars Thursday in New Orleans, demonstrating why the many connected dots of D-Day are likely to be re-examined, with fresh perspectives, generations from now.