Codeword Overlord

by Nigel West

  If, in spite of the enemy’s air superiority, we succeed in getting a large part of our mobile force into action in the threatened coast defence sectors in the first few hours, I am convinced that the enemy attack on the coast will collapse completely on its first day. Very little damage has so far been done by the heavy enemy bombing to our reinforced concrete installations, although our field positions, dugouts and communication trenches have in many places been completely obliterated. This shows how important it is to get concrete over all our positions, even those, such as artillery, anti-aircraft and reserve positions, which are located behind the front.

  My only real anxiety concerns the mobile forces. Contrary to what was decided at the conference on the 21st March, they have so far not been placed under my command. Some of them are dispersed over a large area well inland, which means that they will arrive too late to play any part in the battle for the coast. With the heavy enemy air superiority we can expect, any large-scale movement of motorised forces to the coast will be exposed to air attacks of tremendous weight and long duration. But without rapid assistance from the armoured divisions and mobile units, our coast divisions will be hard put to it to mount counter attacks coming simultaneously from the sea and from airborne troops inland. Their land front is too thinly held for that. The dispositions of both combat and reserve forces should be such as to ensure that the minimum possible movement will be required to counter an attack at any of the most likely points, whether in the Low Countries, in the Channel area proper, in Normandy or in Brittany, and to ensure that the greater part of the enemy troops, sea and airborne, will be destroyed by our fire during their approach.

  Contrary to myself, General Geyr von Schweppenburg, who may well know the British in peacetime but has never yet met them in battle, sees the greatest danger in an operational airborne landing deep inside France, and so wishes to be in a position to mount a quick counter-operation. His forces have been located mainly with that end in view. Furthermore, he does not wish to take his armoured divisions to an area behind the land front of the coastal defences, where the enemy could make an airborne landing. I, on the other hand, see the greatest danger in the enemy using every weapon he has, especially airborne troops, to break through our coastal defences over a wide front, and thus gain a foothold on the continent. To my mind, so long as we hold the coast, an enemy airborne landing of an operational nature must, sooner or later, finish up in the destruction of the troops who have landed. In our experience, moreover, enemy airborne forces have in the past always been wiped out wherever the landing has been made in areas held by our troops. I believe airborne troops can be destroyed in this way at far less cost in bloodshed than by mounting an attack from outside against an already landed enemy, who could have large numbers of anti-tank guns ready for action within a few minutes, and could then be supported by his bomber formations. I have disagreed very violently with General von Geyr over this question and will only be able to execute my ideas if he is put under Army Group command early enough. The most decisive battle of the war, and the fate of the German people itself, is at stake. Failing a tight command in one single hand of all the forces available for defence, failing the early engagement of all our mobile forces in the battle for the coast, victory will be in grave doubt. If I am to wait until the enemy landing has actually taken place, before I can demand, through normal channels, the command and dispatch of the mobile forces, delays will be inevitable. This will mean that they will probably arrive too late to intervene successfully in the battle for the coast and prevent the enemy landing. A second Nettuno [Anzio], a highly undesirable situation for us, could result …4

  Four days later, Rommel expressed some optimism to his wife, reassuring her that, ‘it looks as though the British and Americans are going to do us the favour of keeping away for a bit. This will be of immense value to our coastal defence, for we are growing stronger every day.’

  Rommel’s failure to persuade Hitler of his strategy led him to undertake the journey to Germany on 5 June, having made a serious miscalculation, which was recorded in his diary by his ADC, Captain Hermann Aldinger, retrospectively:

  5th–8th June 1944. Fears of an invasion during this period were rendered all the less by the fact that tides were very unfavourable for the days following, and the fact that no amount of air reconnaissance had given the slightest indication that a landing was imminent. The most urgent need was to speak personally to the Führer on the Obersalzberg, convey to him the extent of the manpower and material inferiority we would suffer in the event of a landing, and request the dispatch of two further panzer divisions, an A.A. corps and a Nebelwerfer brigade to Normandy …

  According to the account given by Bayerlein, the embarkation of the Allied invasion force, and its voyage across the Channel, went completely unnoticed, and he attributed the failure to the fact that poor weather had persuaded the Luftwaffe to cancel the usual reconnaissance flights, and the Kriegsmarine not to deploy the normal picket patrols.

  The Axis defenders at D-Day experienced several disadvantages, one of which was the lack of accurate weather forecasting. The Kriegsmarine weatherships stationed off Greenland had been picked off, one by one, by the Royal Navy early in the conflict in ‘pinches’ to seize the vital crypto material, such as the monthly keylists associated with their Enigma cipher machines. KURT, a clandestine facility in northern Labrador established by U-537 in October 1943, represented the final chance, but the apparatus ran out of power, thereby terminating all transmissions. KURT was the last of twenty-seven devices manufactured by Siemens to operate independently by collecting meteorological data on a variety of instruments and then transmit the information to a home station in Germany on a 15w Lorenz radio. Altogether fourteen automatic weather stations were deployed across the Arctic and the Barents Sea, but their duration was limited by a battery life of only six months. By June 1944 all had been exhausted, and the Kriegsmarine was unable to deploy any U-boats to replace the equipment.

  In the absence of good forecasting, but with the Channel in the grip of a storm on 5 June, the Wehrmacht took the opportunity to conduct a map exercise at Rennes under the command of General Friedrich Dollman of the 7th Army in Normandy. He would be accompanied by General Heinz Hellmich of the 243rd Division and General Wilhelm Falley of the 91st Air-Landing Division. During May there had been eighteen days of calm sea, but the Allies had not acted. On 4 June the chief meteorologist, Major Lettau of Flak Regiment 155 at Amiens, had predicted two weeks of inclement weather, prompting Rommel to tell von Rundstedt that he planned to go home the following morning before visiting the Berghof, with the intention of seeking permission to reinforce the 21st Panzer Division at Caen with two additional armoured divisions. When he drove to Germany, he was accompanied by his operations staff officer, Colonel Hans-Georg von Tempelhof, and was back at the Villa Lindenhof in Blaustein to attend his wife Lucia’s 50th birthday party. He received the news of the invasion in a second telephone call from his Chief of Staff Hans Speidel in the mid-morning of 6 June and was driven back in his Horch staff car the 400km to his headquarters. He departed after midday and arrived late the same evening, having stopped briefly at Reims to obtain an updated briefing from Speidel.

  Other absentees from their posts were the region’s naval commander, Admiral Theodor Krancke, who was travelling to Bordeaux; General Edgar Feuchtinger of the 21st Panzer Division, who had a rendezvous in Paris with his mistress, a South American actress; and Oberleutnant Raimund Steiner, commander of the Merville heavy artillery battery, overlooking SWORD Beach, who was also away from his bunker, sleeping in an observation post when his fortified complex was attacked by glider troops. At von Rundstedt’s headquarters at the Georges V Hotel in Paris, Mayer-Detring was absent, having gone on holiday, and Georg Hansen had travelled from Zossen to attend an Abwehr conference at Baden-Baden.

  In these circumstances, the Allied armada’s arrival went undetected until 0530, when the alarm was given and the coastal bombardment began. A
t that point Field Marshal von Rundstedt had alerted the Panzer Lehr Division near Chartres and the 12th SS Panzer Hitler Jugend Division south of Rouen, but the OKW, anticipating a further invasion, required both to remain in their present positions until the enemy’s intentions were ascertained. In fact, the 12th Panzer Division, commanded by Fritz Witt and equipped with 115 Panzer IV medium tanks and seventy-nine of the more modern Panthers, did not enter combat until the afternoon of 6 June. Then some units were directed to deal with an enemy parachute drop near Herouvillette, which turned out to be TITANIC, a deception scheme involving half-size rubber dummies equipped with firecrackers.

  General Praun also confirmed the lack of advance warning of the invasion, but praised the accuracy of the SIGINT analysis:

  A subsequent comprehensive evaluation prepared sometime after the start of the Allied invasion showed that approximately ninety-five percent of the units which landed in Normandy had been previously identified in the British Isles by means of intensive radio intelligence. Thus one may conclude that the information provided by communication intelligence was quite adequate and the German Supreme Command was in a position to calculate the strength of the enemy forces. Locator cards, regularly issued by the communication intelligence control center, contained precise information about newly organized divisions, and the appearance and disappearance of radio traffic from and to specific troop units. The intercepted radio activity during the numerous landing exercises furnished a picture of the projected invasion procedure. It was impossible, however, to obtain any clue as to the time and place of the landing. The radio picture did not change noticeably until the last day before the invasion. All previously known and observed types of traffic continued as usual. No radio deceptions were recognized. No kind of radio alert was observed. According to later reports the first wave sailed at short notice.5

  When General Praun wrote his account, under US Army supervision, he knew nothing of the Allied deception campaign, and therefore did not realise the significance of his boast that his staff had correctly identified 95 per cent of the Allied units engaged in the landing. The point here is that no FUSAG component was among them, which had the effect of confirming the existence of a huge body of men that had not yet been committed to the battle, thereby underlining the continuing threat of a second wave attack elsewhere.

  However, Praun had a slightly different recollection of General Jodl’s anticipation of a second landing, recalling that the general had:

  said that a second landing was expected north of the Seine and that therefore the German reserves and the 15th Army stationed in that area were not immediately committed to a counterattack. The information obtained by communication intelligence did not support this assumption. The chief of the control center of Communication Intelligence West was asked to address his personal opinion on this matter during a conference of the Western Intelligence Branch. He said that a comparison of the number of units already recognized with those previously identified in Great Britain permitted the conclusion that most of the Allied forces had already been landed and that the remaining ones were insufficient for a second landing. Any still uncommitted units would be needed to feed the current battle. This opinion was shared by the Western Intelligence Branch, but was in contradiction to that of the Armed Forces Operations Staff. The estimate of the situation was given some validity by the fact that a short time after the beginning of the invasion a British landing craft had been captured near Boulogne. However, it seemed obvious that this enemy craft had lost its way. When, during the first few days after the beginning of the invasion, the Allies created the impression of a second airborne landing by dropping enemy paratroops over Brittany at night, communication intelligence offered evidence to the contrary because of the complete absence of enemy radio traffic in the alleged landing area.6

  The Panzer Lehr Division, which was not released until 8 June to engage Allied forces near Caen, was considered a crack unit, formed from training cadres in Germany in 1943 for the specific purpose of repelling an Allied attack in France. However, the requirement to move 110 Panzer II tanks, ninety-seven Panzer IVs, ninety-nine Panthers and six Tigers 140km north to Lisieux in broad daylight proved a challenge.

  The nearest panzer division to the beaches was the 21st Panzer Division, commanded by General Feuchtinger, which consisted of 150 tanks, sixty assault and self-propelled artillery, and 300 armoured troop carriers. However, instead of deploying these units immediately, the OKW delayed. The combined strength of the 12th SS Panzer Division and the well-equipped Panzer Lehr Division amounted to 500 tanks and 40,000 soldiers, making a formidable adversary if it had been ordered to launch a counter-attack on the beaches, a task they had practised in numerous exercises. However, the exercises had lacked authenticity because of the prevailing fuel shortage, which necessarily had limited the scope of their operations, and little consideration had been given by the staff planners to the challenge of moving amour, men and equipment under hostile skies in the unanticipated absence of the Luftwaffe.

  The delay in mounting an instant counter-attack would prove critical, but Hitler relaxed at the Berghof, presided over the usual midday military staff meeting and then, at three o’clock, attended a two-hour conference with the Croatian leader, General Ante Pavelić, who had arrived as planned with a delegation of Foreign Minister Mladen Lorković and Interior Minister Andrija Artuković. The others present were Joachim von Ribbentrop, who had travelled down to Salzburg to greet the Croats at the railway station; Hermann Goering; and Hitler’s Foreign Ministry interpreter, Paul-Otto Schmidt. The agenda, agreed by Ribbentrop and Pevelić, was confined to Balkan issues, and the morning events in northern France were never mentioned.

  In contrast, the discussion at the regular military planning meeting, attended by Admiral Dönitz, who had flown in specially, centred on the invasion, and the Kriegsmarine commander-in-chief had advocated reinforcing Normandy by moving troops up from Brittany. However, Hitler disagreed, convinced that the landings were merely a diversion, and that a further feint could be expected in Brittany. Furthermore, the enemy order of battle charts scrutinised at the conference showed more than sixty British and American divisions still in Britain. Thus, from OVERLORD’s outset, one of the principal Allied objectives, of creating the false danger of a second wave, was achieved, considering that the true Allied strength was fewer than fifty divisions, of which only thirty-seven were available for combat. According to Hans Speidel, an analysis in May of reliable agent reporting from England confirmed the existence of between fifty-five and sixty divisions.

  If anyone still doubted an invasion was intended, the news received in March 1944 was enough to dispel all doubts. Some of the best British and American divisions were embarked in Southern Italy for the United Kingdom – the 1st and 7th British armoured divisions, the 1st British Airborne Division, the 51st Highland Division, the 1st and 9th American Infantry Divisions, and a special beach unit. This switched the focus of war from the Mediterranean theatre to the British Isles. The weapons and equipment of the Allied divisions were excellent.7

  Speidel’s assessment, admittedly published six years after the war, was entirely accurate, and the formations he identified truly had been transferred to Britain in anticipation of D-Day. However, his overall estimate of Allied strength was grossly exaggerated:

  There were about seventy-five divisions in Great Britain, of which the Army Group believed sixty-five to be composed of mobile fighting troops that could be used at short notice after years of training in landing operations. There were between forty and forty-five British divisions and between twenty and twenty-five American divisions. All were largely motorized and mechanized and there were among them seven airborne divisions.8

  In reality, the Allied forces never amounted to more than fifty-five divisions, of which roughly forty were earmarked for the invasion. Speidel’s version, of course, was written at a time when he had absolutely no knowledge of FORTITUDE, but he certainly had an unparalleled grasp
of what Rommel expected:

  The Allies possessed an intelligence network that had been built up and tried in peacetime. It multiplied the forces of resistance and made use of them. These guerilla forces had increased their activities since the winter of 1943–4, though they were of no great importance north of the Loire. Sabotage was not extensive until the spring of 1944. All indications of imminent invasion were watched with greater attention after the beginning of the intensified air offensive at the end of April 1944. They were carefully registered and plotted on the Staff maps of Army Group B. Intruders, bomber sorties, Channel reconnaissance by Allied naval craft, minelaying, minesweeping, acts of sabotage of the resistance, all seemed to point to an intention to land in the area between the Somme and a St Malo–Orleans line.

  It was the more difficult to assess the enemy potential because the Army Group received its intelligence material in already ‘digested’ form from the following authorities: High Command of the Army; Intelligence Section for Foreign Armies, and High Command. The Commander-in-Chief of Western Forces had forbidden the Army Group to work directly with the German Intelligence Service, which had to report to the High Command of the Wehrmacht. The Army Group had, for instance, no material on the resistance forces in France, and nothing about their probable role in an Allied invasion plan. The Army Group received its reports secondhand, and Army Group Headquarters possessed no trained intelligence officer.