The Second World War (59 page)

Führer Directive No. 51 went on to specify the particular measures for strengthening OB West’s forces. They included the reinforcing of Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions in his zone of operations and a guarantee that no formation would be withdrawn from it except with Hitler’s personal approval. In November 1943 OB West (Rundstedt) commanded all German ground forces in Belgium and France, organised into the Fifteenth and Seventh Armies (Army Group B) and the First and Nineteenth Armies (Army Group G), from his headquarters at Saint-Germain near Paris. The boundary between the army groups ran west-east along the Loire, with the First Army defending the Biscay and the Nineteenth the Mediterranean coast, the Fifteenth Army in Belgium and northern France and the Seventh in Normandy. Unbeknown to all in Germany, it was in Normandy that the Allied stroke was destined to fall.

Rundstedt’s divisional strength stood at forty-six, soon to be raised to sixty, including ten Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions. Six of the armoured divisions were north of the Loire, four south. That was entirely appropriate. Jodl, Hitler’s operations officer, warned an assembly of the Nazi Party’s Gauleiters at the time Directive No. 51 was issued that ‘along a front of 2600 kilometres it is impossible to reinforce the coastal front with a system of fortification in depth at all points. . . . Hence it is essential to have strong mobile and specially well-equipped reserves in the west for the purpose of forming
Schwerpunkte
[centres of military effort].’ Strategic analysis revealed that the Allies’ own
Schwerpunkte
against the
Westheer
, even if reinforced by another in the Mediterranean, must be formed by forces assembling in Britain and lie on the Channel coast. Hence the Panzer concentration north of the Loire.

The Panzer concentration was critical because the rest of OB West’s divisions were barely mobile. The two parachute divisions stationed in Brittany and the army divisions with numbers in the 271-278 and 349-367 series were of high and adequate quality respectively, though lacking mechanised transport. The rest were not only of average to low quality but were wholly dependent on the French railway system if they were to leave their permanent bases for the invasion front. Their artillery and supply units were horse-drawn; their infantry units, except for bicycle reconnaissance companies, manoeuvred by marching at a speed no faster than Napoleon’s or, indeed, Charlemagne’s. Moreover, they would have to move under the threat of Allied airpower, which, he had already conceded on 29 September 1942, would be absolutely supreme. Railway and even road movement would be severely inhibited. It was therefore vital that the Panzer divisions, which alone had the capability for rapid, off-road movement, should be positioned close to the invasion zone, to hold a line until the infantry reinforcements arrived. The coast itself would be garrisoned by ‘ground-holding’ (
bodenständige
) divisions, unable to manoeuvre but protected from Allied air and naval bombardment by concrete fortifications. The beaches that their positions overlooked were to be mined, wired and entangled with obstacles; much of this defensive material was to be stripped from the Belgian fortified zone and the Maginot Line which had survived the onslaught of the Wehrmacht in 1940.

The Atlantic Wall scheme was excellent in theory. When complete it would go far to offset the feebleness in the west of the Luftwaffe, which at the end of 1943 deployed only 300 fighters in France (to hold in check Allied air forces whose strength would total 12,000 aircraft of all types on the day of the invasion); but on the day that Führer Directive No. 51 was issued the Atlantic Wall had still far to go before completion. During the two years when Hitler had discountenanced the invasion danger, the
Westheer
had led a bucolic life. Its commander, Gerd von Rundstedt, was not a firebrand. After his removal from the Eastern Front in December 1941 he had settled into a comfortable routine at Saint-Germain reading detective stories and allowing his staff officers to practise English conversation, a mark of the ‘aristocratic’ style that Wehrmacht traditionalists cultivated to differentiate themselves from the ‘Nazi’ generals Hitler favoured in the
Ostheer
. The lower ranks behaved accordingly. Life in France was agreeable. Live and let live characterised relations with the population, which, if not actively collaborationist, lent little support to the embryo resistance movement. Forced labour (
service du travail obligatoire
), introduced in 1942, was unpopular because it conscripted young Frenchmen to factories in Germany, to join the million French prisoners of war still held there in 1943; so, too, was
la Milice
, Vichy’s paramilitary police force, which punished the contempt of fellow countrymen by exceeding its powers. The cost of occupation rankled; the German levy on the French treasury, exacted at a 50 per cent overvaluation of the mark, not only forced France to pay for the indignity of having a German army in its territory but allowed the Reichsbank to make a profit on the transaction. However, these were aspects of defeat which did not affect the French people at large. Most accepted the presence of the (‘very correct’) German soldiers with resignation; the Germans, more than content to be posted to the only easy billet in the Wehrmacht’s zone of operations, gathered roses while they might, ate butter and cream, and worked no harder than their officers drove them.

The cosy life ended with the arrival of Rommel in December 1943, first to inspect the defences, then to take command of Army Group B. Since his invaliding from Tunisia in March he had held an undemanding post in northern Italy, but on the promulgation of Directive No. 51 he was selected by Hitler to put fire and steel into the western defences. According to his biographer, Desmond Young, ‘to the snug staffs of the coastal sectors [he] blew in like an icy and unwelcome wind off the North Sea.’ Rommel found that since 1941 only 1.7 million mines had been laid – he reminded his staff that the British had laid a million in two months during his campaign against them in North Africa – though explosive held in France was sufficient to manufacture 11 million. Within weeks of his arrival, mine-laying had increased from a rate of 40,000 to over a million a month and by 20 May over 4 million were in place. Between November and 11 May half a million obstacles were laid on the beaches and likely airborne landing-grounds, and he had ordered the delivery of an additional 2 million mines a month from Germany. On 5 May he dictated to his secretary: ‘I am more confident than ever before. If the British give us just two more weeks, I won’t have any more doubt about it.’

The defence of the French coast could not, however, be assured by the Atlantic Wall alone. Rommel, a master of mobile warfare but also a respectful veteran of campaigns fought under conditions of Western Allied air superiority, knew that he would have to get tanks to the water’s edge at the moment the Allies disembarked if they were to be defeated. To do so he must solve two problems: the first was to identify where they would land; the second was to establish the shortest possible chain of command between himself and his armoured units. The problems were interconnected. To justify taking personal command of the Panzer divisions under OB West he must be able to show that he knew where they could be best used; but he could not credibly lay claim to the divisions as long as the Allies wreathed their intentions in a mist of misinformation and deception.

The Allied deception plan for Operation Overlord, as the invasion of north-west Europe was codenamed at the Washington Trident Conference in May 1943, was deliberately conceived to persuade the enemy that the landing would fall in the Pas de Calais, where the Channel is narrowest, rather than in Normandy or Brittany (though Hitler’s fears of a descent on Norway, to which he was acutely sensitive, were also kept alive, with the profitable result of fixing eleven German divisions there throughout 1944-5). A Pas de Calais landing made military sense: it entailed a quick crossing to level and sandy beaches, which were not closed off from the hinterland by high cliffs, whence the exploitation route into the Low Countries and Germany was short. Operation Fortitude, as the deception plan was codenamed, centred on the implantation in the consciousness of German intelligence – the Wehrmacht’s Abwehr and the army’s Foreign Armies West section – of the existence, wholly fictitious, of a First US Army Group (FUSAG), located opposite the Pas de Calais in Kent and Sussex. False radio transmissions from FUSAG were sent over the air; false references were made to it in bona-fide messages. General Patton, whose reputation as a hard-driving army leader was known to the Germans, was mentioned as its commander. Moreover, to reinforce the notion that FUSAG would debark on the short route to the Reich, the Allied air forces in their programme of bombardment preparatory to Overlord dropped three times the tonnage east of the Seine as they did to the west. By 9 January 1944 the deception had borne fruit: an Ultra intercept referred to FUSAG on that day and others followed. It was the proof the Fortitude operators needed that their plan was working. They could not, of course, expect to distract the attention of the Germans from Normandy, the chosen landing site, for good; but they hoped to minimise German anticipation of a Normandy landing until it was actually mounted, and thereafter keep alive the anxiety that the ‘real’ invasion would follow in the Pas de Calais at a later stage.

Hitler was only partially deluded. On 4 and 20 March and 6 April he alluded to the likelihood of a Normandy landing. ‘I am for bringing all our strength in here,’ he said on 6 April, and on 6 May he had Jodl telephone Günther Blumentritt, Rundstedt’s chief of staff, to warn that he ‘attached particular importance to Normandy’. However, apart from allocating Panzer Lehr and 116th Panzer Divisions to Normandy in the early spring, he made no decisive alteration of OB West’s dispositions; indeed until he allowed divisions to cross the Seine into Normandy from the Pas de Calais at the very end of July, he himself remained prisoner to the delusion of a ‘second’ invasion throughout the crucial weeks of the Overlord battle.

His concern to back both horses nevertheless compromised Rommel’s urge to disperse the mist of deception by direct assault. Rommel’s argument was that it was better to have some armour on the right beach, even if the rest was wrongly disposed, than to keep armour in central reserve and then fail to move it when Allied airpower descended. At the end of January 1944 he was translated from the post of inspector of the Atlantic Wall to commander of Army Group B (Seventh and Fifteenth Armies), as Rundstedt’s direct subordinate for defence of the invasion zone. Almost at once he fell into dispute with his chief. Rundstedt had never experienced a battle in which the Luftwaffe was not dominant. He therefore believed that there would be time, even after the enemy landing craft had arrived, to make a deliberate assessment of the military situation and then commit reserves to a counter-attack. Rommel knew that an unhurried counter-attack would be destroyed by enemy aircraft. From personal experience in Egypt and Tunisia he knew how great was the power of the Allied air forces and was convinced that only by holding armour ‘forward’ and committing it immediately could the invasion be met and defeated.

The Rommel-Rundstedt dispute, in which personal experience favoured one general, conventional military wisdom the other, eventually reached the ears of Hitler. He resolved it on his own terms, to neither subordinate’s liking, when the two visited him at Berchtesgaden on 19 March 1944. Panzer Group West, which oversaw the six armoured divisions of Army Group B, was split; three of its divisions were allocated to Rommel, three to Rundstedt – but with the proviso that Rundstedt’s divisions (21st, 116th and 2nd) were not to be committed without the direct approval of Hitler’s operations staff at OKW, with the attendant risk of even greater delay than Rommel had feared in the first place.

As the 21st Panzer Division was the only armoured division close to the beaches chosen by the Overlord planners, Rommel’s intention to launch a quick counter-attack was thus compromised from the start. Montgomery, his old desert opponent, had warned on 15 May in his pre-invasion assessment:

[Rommel] will do his level best to ‘Dunkirk’ us – not to fight the armoured battle on ground of his choosing but to avoid it altogether and prevent our tanks landing by using his own tanks well forward. On D-Day he will try (a) to force us from the beaches; (b) to secure Caen, Bayeux, Carentan. . . . We must blast our way onshore and get a good lodgement before he can bring up sufficient reserves to turn us out. . . . While we are engaged in doing this, the air must hold the ring and must make very difficult the movement of enemy reserves by train or road towards the lodgement areas.

Had Montgomery known, at the time he wrote this assessment, how grievously the Rommel-Rundstedt-Hitler dispute on armoured deployment had harmed the
Westheer
’s prospect of defeating the landing force, his fears for the successful outcome of D-Day would have been greatly relieved.

Montgomery was appointed to the command of the landing force only on 2 January 1944. Until the Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill conference at Tehran in November 1943 no commander for Overlord had been nominated at all. Both the American and British chiefs of staff, General George Marshall and General Sir Alan Brooke, had been promised the appointment by their heads of government, though since August Brooke had known that for reasons of international politics it must go to an American. However, it was only at Tehran that the issue of nomination had been brought to a head. Stalin had there made it the test of Anglo-American dedication to the alliance’s Second Front. ‘Do the British really believe in “Overlord”,’ he had asked, ‘or are they only saying so to reassure the Soviet Union?’ In the face of Churchill’s protestations of commitment, he demanded that a commander be nominated not later than one week after the conference ended. Churchill acquiesced and Roosevelt agreed to make the choice. On 5 December, however, at the end of the time limit, Roosevelt recognised that he could not spare his helpmate, Marshall, from Washington, and told him so; the Supreme Command of the Allied Expeditionary Force would therefore go to Eisenhower. Because Eisenhower’s talents were strategic rather than tactical, however, operational authority would be vested in a ground commander, Montgomery, until the ‘foothold’ on the soil of France had been consolidated into a ‘lodgement’ from which the Wehrmacht could not displace the Allied liberation army.