The landings on 6 June at Normandy were a complete operational surprise, and the deception plan was so effective that the Germans continued to believe the main invasion would come at Pas De Calais, even well into July. But the ruse wouldn’t last much longer, and most of the German’s reserves were already committed to containing the Allied lodgement.

In the east, Montgomery failed to take Caen on the first day for a variety of reasons, most of which weren’t his fault. The British troops faced the only panzer counterattack on D-Day, and that by their desert nemesis, the 21st Panzer Division. The terrain around Caen is all open fields and river valleys, and this made the counterattack particularly difficult, and Montgomery stopped the 21st Panzer from reaching the beachheads. Unfortunately, the reverse was also true, and Montgomery would launch no less than 6 separate army level offensives to try and take Caen over the next 6 weeks. To counter this, Field Marshal Von Rundstedt committed the bulk of the panzer reserves in the West to face them, including three of the best panzer divisions in the German military: the Panzer-Lehr, the veteran 2nd Panzer Division, and the fanatical 12th SS “Hitlerjugend” Panzer Division made up of Hitler Youth. The British Sherman, Churchill, and Cromwell tanks did not fare well against the Tiger, Panther, and Pzkfw IVs of the panzer divisions. Only British stubbornness and overwhelming material and airpower superiority allowed Monty to capture Caen on 10 July 1944, over a month later than planned.

Monty’s material superiority came at a cost to the other areas of the front because Mother Nature had a say-so. Just after D-Day, the great storm that Group Captain Stagg feared had finally arrived. On 9 June, “The Great Gale of 1944” did damage to the invasion force that the Luftwaffe could only dream of. Several ships were sunk, dozens were beached, all were damaged, and one of the two vital “Mulberry” artificial harbors was destroyed. This created a massive supply shortage for weeks in Normandy, and what supplies were on hand went to either Monty trying to take Caen, or to the Americans trying to capture Cherbourg: a deep water port on the Cotentin peninsula which could do much to alleviate the Allies supply problems. The US VII Corps captured Cherbourg on 26 June, but the Germans did “masterful” work wrecking the harbor. They did such a good job emplacing mines and boobie traps, destroying facilities, sinking ships in the channel, and ruining the docks that it would take three weeks for small ships to get through and eight weeks before it was safe enough for larger ships to unload. There would be no influx of supplies from Cherbourg and what supplies that did come through the one working Mulberry would go to Monty. This was unfortunate because the Americans in the center of the landing zone were facing something unexpected and ancient, and used to deadly effect by the Germans: the bocage, or Norman hedgerows.

Bocage was the French term for the hedge/tree walls that surrounded Norman fields. In the 9th century, Danish and Norwegian Vikings raided the area, and with the collapse of Charlemagne’s Empire, settled it. The better off Vikings established themselves at the mouths of the rivers, such as the Orne and the Seine, primarily in the east. They intermarried with the local population and the Franks named the area “Normandy”, or “Land of the Northmen”. West Normandy was settled by Viking farmers. However, this did not stop future generations of Danish and Norwegian Vikings from continuing to raid just because their forebears settled the area. The Vikings could no longer sail up the rivers to raid the French because of the Norman fortress towns such as Caen, Carentan, and Harfleur. So they beached on the coast and traveled overland to get around the Normans at the mouths of the rivers, frequently by raiding isolated farmsteads in the west and stealing horses and food. The Norman farmers, former Vikings themselves, knew this and combatted it by planting trees around their fields with thick thorny bushes at their bases. This forced the raiding Vikings onto predictable paths where they could be watched and ambushed. Over the centuries, the Norman farmers continued the practice. By the twentieth century, erosion, sunken roads, and a dropping water table exposed the roots of these hedgerows. This formed a four or five foot high impenetrable wall of packed earth and gnarled roots, covered with thorny bushes and topped with a line of thick trees. They couldn’t be climbed over, much less pushed through or seen through.

The bocage itself wasn’t deadly but the Germans used the hedgerows to great effect. They would ambush the Americans on the roads, just as the Normans did to the Vikings, and force them to breach the hedgerows to get around. Once the Americans went through the lengthy and difficult process of breaching the hedgerow walls, they would be met by another German ambush on the other side, usually machine guns and anti tank guns dug into the hedgerow in an opposite corner of the field. They easily covered the beautiful fields of fire that were the enclosed Norman farms. It would take Gen Omar Bradley and US First Army until 25 July, seven weeks after D-Day, to break out of the Norman Hedgerow country.

The Red Army on the Eastern Front was not obliging the Wehrmacht in 1944. The Red Army usually did limited operations during the winter snows and spring mud, and this gave the Germans time to dig in and reorganize. But the winter and spring of 1944 were different, very different, particularly for Army Groups North and South.

In the previous six months, Army Group North was forced to lift the two year long siege of Leningrad and was driven back to the Baltic States. And Von Manstein’s Army Group South was chased almost all the way out of the Ukraine in a series of surprisingly effective and overwhelming Soviet offensives. Only the intervention of panzer formations from Army Group Center stabilized the front. The Abwehr, or German Intelligence, thought that the Soviets would continue in the south, so the panzers stayed there. The Abwehr and German High Command were distracted by Soviet deception operations, and the Allied landings in France which were just 1000 miles from Berlin. The nearest Soviets were 1200 miles away and they were opposite Army Group Center, in the very defensible terrain of the trackless forests and swamps of Byelorussia.

But this was only defensible against the Red Army of 1941, 1942, or even 1943. The Red Army of 1944 was a new animal. It finally had the equipment, staff proficiency, specialized training, and mobile logistics to put their “Deep Operations” doctrine into practice. Of which, Von Manstein in the Ukraine was the full dress rehearsal.

Deep Operations was the standard Soviet Doctrine since the mid-30s, but Stalin’s purge of 90% of the officer corps in 1937, the calamitous losses in Finland in 1940 and the German invasion in 1941/42 meant that they had to resort to massed tank and human wave attacks to make up for the lack of leadership and trained manpower. It took three years for the talented survivors, such as Zhukov, Konev, Rokossovsky, Vasilevsky and others to rebuild. By 1944, that situation was rectified.

Deep Operations was the logical end state of JFC Fuller’s influential “Breakthrough” theory during the interwar period. DO relies on specialized troops, with massed rifle and artillery breaking through a defensive line, followed by local heavy tank formations to confirm the penetration. Then this penetration was exploited by huge tank, mechanized, cavalry, or elite Guards armies (mounted in American Lend Lease trucks) who attacked deep operational objectives to cut off and encircle German forces. German pockets of resistance were bypassed. Deep Operations has been likened to a Russian matryoshka doll where a small encirclement is then encircled by a larger one, and then a larger one, and so on, until the offensive culminated. (Glantz, “When Titans Clashed”) The Soviet summer offensive in Byelorussia was the ultimate expression of Deep Operations.

Marshall Zhukov launched Operation Bagration on 22 June 1944, and fell upon an unsuspecting Army Group Center. The penetrations were immediate. Although some panzer formations from the South attempted counterattacks that resulted in apocalyptic tank battles, the Germans never recovered. Hitler declared every city in the area a fortress to be defended to the last man, so the retreating German commanders just avoided them in their quest to escape the overlapping layers of encirclement.

It didn’t help. By August the Red Army was at the gates of Warsaw and German East Prussia, Army Group North was cut off in Courland, Army Group South was cut off in the Ukraine, and Army Group Center ceased to exist. The German army lost 500,000 men and 4000 tanks and assault guns that could not be replaced. 57,000 German prisoners were marched through Red Square, and then the Soviets made a point to wash the streets afterwards.

The Soviets were now much closer to Berlin than the Allies were.

The Imperial Japanese High Command was desperate for a decisive victory over the Allies. After their retreat to the inner circle in late 1943, they looked for an opportunity for the “Kantai Kessen”, or the decisive victory that would end the war. Historically, the Japanese won their wars through a single titanic decisive battle that irrevocably smashed their enemies ability to fight. There was a Kantai Kessen that defeated the Mongols in the 13th Century, one that brought the Tokugawa Shogunate to power in the 17th, and one that defeated the Russians in the early 20th. Admiral Spruance’s 5th Fleet off of Saipan would provide the opportunity to similarly defeat the Americans. The Japanese hoped that destroying the US Navy in the Philippines Sea would be the Pacific War’s Kantai Kessen.

If the Japanese wanted a final showdown with the Allies’ strongest force, they couldn’t have chosen a better target. Their objective was the innocuously named Task Force 58, the carrier task force of the 5th Fleet, led by Vice Admiral Marc Mitsher. TF 58 was the largest and most powerful independent naval strike force in the history of mankind. Mitsher commanded seven big fleet aircraft carriers, eight light carriers, seven fast battleships, 900 aircraft, and dozens of cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. Against this, Vice Admiral Ozama had only five fleet carriers, four light carriers, 400 carrier based aircraft, and five battleships, but two of those were the Yamato and Musashi, the largest battle ships in existence, and he also had 300 land based planes on Guam.

But it wasn’t the numbers that defeated the Japanese, it was the Japanese that defeated the Japanese. By 1944, they were being out produced and out innovated by a wide margin. All but one of Ozawa’s capital ships were commissioned before Pearl Harbor, while virtually none of Mitcher’s were. Ozawa’s ships were 1930’s designs, while Mitcher’s ships reflected the hard lessons learned over the past two years, and his planes even more so. The Japanese A6M Zero was the terror of the skies in 1941 and 42, but by 1944 it was obsolete. The US Navy F6F Hellcat and the US Marines’ distinctive gull winged F4F Corsair had more power, more armor, and more guns. The Zero was still more maneuverable but to take advantage of that, you needed experienced pilots.

Bushido, or at least the perverted version of Bushido pushed by Imperial Japan in the Second World War, destroyed the once vaunted Japanese naval air arm well before the Battle of the Philippines Sea. Specifically the “No Retreat” rule. Fear of being shamed, Japanese aircrews would not come off the line to train the next generation of airmen. The victors of Pearl Harbor fought until they died. The Battles of Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, and the Solomon’s saw thousands of irreplaceable aircrews shot down, and there was no one to train the replacements. Furthermore, Allied submarines created an oil shortage, so very little fuel was allocated for training. What fuel there was available was wasted by bad instructors, whom were usually the worst flyer of the previous class who was left behind to train the next class. There was no honor in training new flyers, only in engaging the enemy and dying for the emperor. Most Japanese airmen in 1944 had fewer than 60 hours in the air, were poorly trained, and had no combat experience.

When the Japanese attacked TF 58 on 19 June 1944, the outcome of the largest carrier air battle in history was already a foregone conclusion. The Americans did lose over one hundred aircraft but the majority of them were due to empty fuel tanks, not Japanese bullets. It would have been more, but Mitcher ordered his whole task force to turn on their lights during the night of the 19th, defying every, risk management worksheet, safety officer, and OPSEC notice on his wardroom bulletin boards, in order to bring his flyers back home in the dark. Ozawa lost two carriers, but more importantly, he lost 700 pilots, never to be replaced. An American anti air gunner on a destroyer said, “It was like shooting fish in a barrel”, but it was a Hellcat pilot’s quote that would stick; he said,

“It was like going to a turkey shoot back home.”

Admiral Nimitz’ Central Pacific Fleet was like a spear driving straight into gut of the Japanese Empire. While MacArthur aimed at the Philippines for his return, Nimitz was cutting across the axis. His next targets were the critical Marianna’s Islands, which included Guam, Tinian and Saipan. These were the first islands in the Japanese “Inner Defense Ring” and the Japanese planned to make a fight of it. The Americans had to be stopped.

On 15 June, 1944 Lieutenant General Howland “Howling Mad” Smith’s 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions and US Army 27th Infantry Dvision, stormed ashore on Saipan, through lanes cleared of obstacles by the first use of UDTs or Underwater Demolitions Teams (forerunners of the SEALS), and met three times as many Japanese as Naval Intelligence predicted. And they also met everything left in the Japanese navy that could float or fly.

The Americans knew the Marianna’s were important, but only the Japanese truly knew how critical they were. First, they both knew Allied planes flying from the Marianna’s would effectively cut off all Japanese possessions to the west and south: Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Java, Borneo, Malaysia, and New Guinea. Supplies would not get south, and raw materials would not go north. Allied wolfpacks were already wreaking havoc with Japanese shipping, if they were directed by reconnaissance planes from Saipan, they would be devastating. Also, they both knew American bombers from the Marianna’s would be in range to bomb the Japanese home islands. This would be even more alarming once the Japanese discovered a new Allied weapon, first used on Saipan, which would be catastrophic to Japan’s wooden cities: napalm. Finally, most importantly and unbeknownst to the Americans, the Imperial Japanese High Command had been lying to the people for years regarding the conduct of the war. The people and most of the government of Japan thought the war was being won. Their propaganda machine would not be able to hide the loss of Saipan, a prewar Japanese territory, nor the clouds of B-29s that were sure follow. They would have to admit they were losing the war.

The Marianna’s Islands were extensively reinforced, particularly Saipan. The Japanese planned on fighting for the whole island from the surf to the last dug in bunker, effectively combining the old and new defensive techniques. Also, two of the Japanese’ best commanders were in charge of the island, through under different circumstances. Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito was one of the army’s best and was hand-picked to lead the defense of the first prewar Japanese territory to see invasion. His navy counterpart, Vice Admiral Nagumo, the victor of Pearl Harbor and easily the Japanese’ best carrier admiral, was there in disgrace, commanding the island’s cruiser and destroyer defense flotilla for losing the battle of Midway. (He influenced the battle on land but had no effect on the wider naval battle in the Marianna’s, although he was sorely needed.) Finally, the cream of what was left of the Japanese Navy was committed to the defense of the islands.

For the next three weeks, the fighting on Saipan was fierce but the issue was never in doubt. The inter-service political battles between the US Army and the US Marines that erupted because of the fighting would eventually garner more attention. The Japanese finally got their Kantai Kessen, decisive battle, with the US Navy in the Philippine Sea, but were soundly annihilated by Allied quality, quantity and professionalism. By the beginning of July, Japanese naval airpower was destroyed, never to return. The first recon planes were spotting for the submarines before the fighting was completed, and the first B-29s arrived soon after. In a glimpse of what was to come, most of the Japanese civilians on the island committed suicide by jumping off the southern cliffs, to the horror of the watching US soldiers and marines.

With the loss of Saipan, the Japanese government began preparing the Japanese people for the worst: the invasion of the Home Islands. To the Americans the turning point of the War in the Pacific was Midway and Guadalcanal. To the Japanese, it was Saipan.