Schwerpunkt: From D-Day to the Fall of the Third Reich (13 page)

Just over 50 German infantry divisions were positioned in Northern France in the spring of 1944. The Germans had nine Panzer divisions supporting the infantry in this area, four of them elite SS Panzer divisions, but only one armored division was in the immediate area of the Normandy landing sites on June 6, 1944. Most of the German defenders were without their important leaders on DDay. General Rommel was in Germany trying again to persuade Hitler to move the Panzer divisions under his control closer to the Normandy coastline and to put control over Panzer Group West into his hands. General Dollman, Commander of the German Seventh Army, had gone on war training games dealing with repelling an enemy invasion. With both generals gone, Major General Max Pemsel, Dollman’s Chief of Staff, was acting commander for much of DDay. Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich commanded I SS Panzer Corps which meant he commanded General Bayerlein‘s Panzer Lehr and General Witt’s 12
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SS Panzer Divisions. Sepp Dietrich was in Brussels on June 6
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. Admiral Krancke had cancelled sea patrols and therefore the Allieds had the Channel to themselves. Field Marshal Goerring had rotated out the 26
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Fighter Wing so there was no Luftwaffe air coverage. The German anti-aircraft Flieg Abwehr Kanonen (FLAK) artillery, however, was effective in destroying many Allied planes and airborne troops.

Members of the French Resistance disrupted German communication lines in an attempt to give the Allied invaders more time to achieve their objectives before more German troops could be ordered to the front. They impeded German road and rail lines so reinforcements, when ordered to move, would be delayed. Operation Fortitude exceeded expectations by keeping most German generals firm in their belief that the main Schwerpunkt of the Allied Invasion would be at Calais. Therefore, none of Hitler’s generals ordered the reserve tanks protecting the Calais area to be released to the Normandy beaches when the first invaders began coming ashore. These first landings were seen as a feint, designed to draw off the reserves from where the real Schwerpunkt would take place and Hitler would not be duped.

Finally, the fragmented German command system as it existed in June, 1944 caused numerous problems at critical points and contributed significantly to the confusion and disarray the defenders experienced on DDay. German Field Marshals could order the movement of some but not every armored or infantry division. Hitler gave control of some but not all of the Panzer divisions to some of his generals but controlled others himself. His intense control of operations and his policy of firing or demoting generals with whom he had disagreements further emasculated the chain of command and by putting himself as the sole decision maker in battle planning and overall war time strategy, Churchill said that the German command “passed from the experienced hands of the General Staff into the hands of a lance corporal,” Hitler’s rank at the end of World War I.

For the last couple of weeks, our gun batteries all along the French coastline have been bombed even more frequently than before. We received reports from one of our batteries that between 28. May and 3. June, ¾ of a ton of bombs were dropped, just on them alone! We went to look at the damage done and found that our concrete fortifications withstood the attacks even though we saw bomb craters in the surrounding area which were almost 10 meters deep. Five grown men could have stood on each other’s shoulders, that’s how deep these craters were but because of how solidly Fritz Todt’s “Todt Organisation” workers have built our gun emplacements, no real damage was done to them or to the colossal guns inside. By this time, we were all convinced that if the weather cleared up even a little, the enemy may just try to land soon. We were all on high alert and nerves were fraying.

I know that for many months now our German Army Intelligence has been intercepting signals broadcast to members of the French Resistance by the BBC. Lately, though, there has been increased communication and we were alerted that our Intelligence teams deduced that the invasion would come within 48 hours. The signal was code words, literally the beginning lines of a French poem. I cannot describe how I felt when these code words, which were to signal the start of the invasion, were heard on 4. June 1944. Immediately, the three command centers of General von Rundstedt, General Jodl and General Rommel were notified. Then nothing happened either on 4. June or 5. June. Was this BBC message a mistake? Clearly it had to be since the weather was now precluding any major air or sea landings. A storm of almost hurricane proportions was raging and with that, we knew there could be no invasion.

With the reprieve this bad weather brought, I had been trying to catch up on sleep while Herr General Rommel was gone. He has been working our men beyond what they think they are capable of but he thinks they are not giving enough. Herr Dr. Speidel has been put in charge of our Army Group B Headquarters during General Rommel’s absence. I’m not sure if General Dollman, the Commander of our 7
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Army listened to our Meteorologist, Dr. Stöbbe and ordered a map exercise at this time because the weather was going to be so bad or if he had other reasons but war games are to take place in Rennes starting tomorrow, 6. June. All of the Divisional and two of the Regional Commanders have been ordered to attend these exercises. They are to practice how to handle a seaborne invasion by the enemy.

I went to bed early on 5. June but then, in the very early hours of 6. June, I was awakened because reports started coming in. The reports were from isolated locations along our northern French coastline and I had to sort through them and route them to General Speidel. He had been entertaining guests at a dinner party he was hosting but by now, he too had retired for the night. Reports of an enemy paratroop landing as well as “shots fired” have come in to our headquarters but the “shots fired” reports were from a different area than where the paratroops reportedly landed. Though it is not up to me to take any action, I think these are reports from overly nervous sentries who imagine seeing things at their observation posts, especially when the wind and rain are howling. If these sightings were to mean anything significant, there would be more of them and they would be given with more details. When General Rommel returns, which I hope is soon, I’m sure he will sort out what is happening.

As the night progressed, we received more reports of paratroop landings but there were no reports coming into our headquarters to indicate any major operation. The reports that did come in indicated that the landings were pretty widely scattered. There was clearly no Schwerpunkt of enemy activity and because the enemy had dropped straw dummies around the Calais area on several earlier occasions, I can’t believe anyone would take these isolated reports seriously enough to mobilize more forces than were already on hand to neutralize them, even if they were real. General Speidel did order me to telephone General Rommel’s house in Herrlingen, Germany early on the morning of 6.June to advise him of some enemy airborne troop landings in Normandy. As directed, I placed the call to General Rommel’s home and told him about the scattered parachute drops. Since there didn’t appear to be any concentrated Schwerpunkt to these landings, General Rommel said he was going back to bed and that he intended to stay at home with his wife for her birthday. After der Führer said that he expected that the enemy would precede their real invasion with various diversionary attacks, everyone now believed that would be the case and so we saw these first incursions for what they were. We saw them as a feint.

I kept seeing reports from Major General Max Pemsel who continuously repeated that these landings were not a feint but rather the signal that the real Schwerpunkt of the invasion was happening now, behind some Normandy beaches. Herr General Pemsel, in my opinion (which I would never utter out loud) is an excitable officer who probably thought the sky was falling on more than one occasion before this. He swore he heard engine noises off at sea but Herr Dr. Speidel is certain that whatever is happening is a localized intrusion. He is convinced that this is not the assault we have all been preparing for. At worst, he says this is a diversionary operation designed to excite us into taking action which would leave the real invasion site under defended.

As dawn started breaking during the first early morning hours of 6. June, our headquarters soon became a mass of confusion and indecision. We were now receiving scores of scattered reports that thousands of enemy soldiers were running over the Normandy beaches, that enemy soldiers were jumping out of planes, and that there were glider planes which made no noise but dropped jeeps and vehicles out when they landed. Also coming in were even more reports of shots fired, especially inland from behind the beaches as well as from the beaches themselves. Bombs had been dropped and coastal shelling was heavy. I have to admit that I was nervous and fairly scared since neither General Rommel nor General Dollman was present to receive the news and coordinate a response. Though I’m sure I’m over reacting, it seemed to me that no one anywhere really seems to know what to do except notify someone else of what was happening.

Even though we dutifully reported to General Jodl’s headquarters all of the information we received, we were later told that the messages sat on Field Marshal Jodl’s desk. I have a friend who works with General Jodl at the Berchtesgaden Headquarters of der Führer’s Alpine headquarters (General Rommel sometimes calls what comes out of this mountain retreat orders from “Cloud Cuckoo Land”) and he later told me that when General Jodl awoke on the morning of 6. June, he digested not only his breakfast, but also the news from the other fronts. The news from Russia has not been good lately but the news from Italy is even worse. It seems the general was particularly upset that just two days before, Rome had fallen to the enemy. I’m sure he was calculating how additional troops, which would now be needed to defend against the enemy in Italy, could be deployed. As he read those early morning reports, his headquarters was notified that enemy paratroops were landed by plane and glider in the Cotentin Peninsula earlier this morning around 1:00am. My friend told me that Herr General Jodl was far more concerned about Italy than these drops which he considered to be merely diversionary. I heard someone else say that General Jodl was advised of all that was going on but he thought General von Rundstedt would order an alert and I heard that General von Rundstedt thought that either General Rommel or General Jodl would order it. For whatever reason, no alert was sounded. What happened next was nothing but a series of fatal errors if anyone were to ask my opinion.

What I just can’t understand is why, in spite of all the reports and notice given to some of our top generals, did no one order anything major to be done to stop this invasion, even as more and more enemy soldiers were streaming onto what we’ve now counted as five separate landing sites in Normandy. They were coming in spite of the horrible weather we had. If the windy, cloudy, and stormy weather couldn’t keep them away, I was wondering who was going to issue the orders telling us how to repel them. I guess I wasn’t wondering who was going to issue the orders, I guess I was just wondering when General Rommel would be back to do so. But from what I was able to gather, the current situation wasn’t even deemed important enough to re-awaken General Rommel and so it was only later this morning around 10:00am, when he was still home with his wife in Germany, that his Chief of Staff, Herr Dr. Speidel called him. During this conversation he told him of the reported seaborne landings that started taking place in the early morning hours of 6. June and he told him they were still going on.

By this time, seeing these massive landings, General Speidel has come to the conclusion that this is in fact the real Schwerpunkt. There are without exaggeration, thousands of ships landing thousands of enemy soldiers on at least five Normandy beaches and I’m trying to figure out if there are even more. When General Rommel heard of the seaborne landings, coupled with the reports I told him about of the parachute drops earlier, General Rommel was quick to put two and two together and he raced back to Normandy. I continued reading and sifting through reports, especially looking for reports about landings in Calais as well, but so far I haven’t seen any yet. General Rommel finally reached our headquarters at La Roche Guyon after 8:00 the night of 6. June. I heard him talking to himself saying, “How could I have been so stupid?!”

Der Führer had placed Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt in charge of our entire army in France. Therefore, as Commander in Chief in the West, General von Rundstedt controlled the troops of two Army Groups and ordered their dispositions, but only after obtaining der Führer’s permission. Der Führer had earlier ordered General Dollmann to command 7
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Army which was west of the Seine River and General von Salmuth to command 15
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Army east of the River. Our 7
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Army under General Dollmann was responsible for defending the northern coast from the Cotentin Peninsula east until it met our 15
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Army which was responsible for defending east of Normandy to Holland. Both of these Armies comprised Army Group B and were therefore directly under General Rommel’s command. The Panzer divisions, however, were subject to an entirely different command chain headed by General Geyr von Schweppenburg.