"Thank God for the Navy"

THE INVASION OF FRANCE AND GERMANY, 1944-1945 (360 pp.)--Samuel Eliot Morison--Atlantic-Little, Brown ($6.50).

The individual G.I. may have been little aware of naval support during the Normandy invasion, but when Major General Leonard Gerow went ashore to set up V Corps headquarters, his first message to General Bradley was: "Thank God for the United States Navy!" That is also the message of Rear Admiral (ret.) Samuel Eliot Morison, U.S.N.R., in his massive naval chronicle of World War II. Of the 14 volumes he blocked out, only three remain to be written. Vol. XI, The Invasion of France and Germany, 1944-1945, has the firm documentation and almost jaunty dash of its predecessors; it also shows that the many books already written about the Normandy invasion cannot keep another good one from being consistently interesting.

All the Difference. The book is a sharp reminder of the awesomely detailed planning that went into operation Neptune-Overlord. Historian Morison's special interest is the naval support, from the ferrying job to naval gunfire, but he necessarily refights much of the battle for the beaches --and does it with freshness and sharp detail. What seems plain is that the Germans ensured Allied success by a series of blunders: they concluded that the weather was not right for an invasion when it came; they canceled a routine E-boat patrol that might have discovered the coming attack; and they swallowed the carefully planted notion that General Patton was waiting to turn a whole Army group loose on the Pas de Calais. To meet the Pas de Calais attack that never came, the Germans kept 19 divisions at the ready that might have made Utah and Omaha a disaster for the Allies.

Most readers will be surprised to discover just how great was the U.S. Navy's contribution to success during the early days of the invasion. On Morison's showing, it seems likely that naval gunfire made all the difference at some points. There was even one instance of German soldiers waving the white flag to a sharpshooting destroyer 1,300 yards out in the Channel.

Nearly Faultless. Invasion goes on to do for Operation Anvil-Dragoon in the South of France what it does for Neptune-Overlord. The fighting for the southern beaches was a combat lark compared to the close call at Omaha. Naval support was close to perfection, and Morison, who saw service on no fewer than eleven vessels, thinks the South of France invasion was the "nearly faultless" large-scale operation of the entire war. One thing the U.S. fighting sailor will readily acknowledge, whatever his theater: no other fighting arm in World War II has found a historian with the flair, sympathy and lucidity of the Navy's Morison.

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