The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  For the next six months, Messerschmitt tried manfully to make a bomber out of a fighter. He got nowhere. Finally, in November 1944 Hitler authorized the formation of the first jet-fighter wing. But by then the transportation system was a shambles, the fighter-pilot force was decimated, and the fuel sources all but dried up.I The Luftwaffe never got more than a token force into the air before things fell apart.

  The Germans built more than 1,000 ME-262s, but only in the last six weeks of the war did they get as many as 100 in the air at one time. But as a secret report in 1960 to President Dwight Eisenhower pointed out, “During that time the Germans literally flew rings around our fighters and bored holes in our bomber formations with complete impunity. . . . For example, 14 fighter groups escorted the 1,250 B-17 raid on Berlin March 18 [1945]—almost a one-for-one escort ratio. They were set upon by a single squadron of ME 262’s which knocked down 25 bombers and five fighters, although outnumbered roughly 100 to 1. The Germans lost not a single plane.”

  The report (which Eisenhower had asked to have prepared for his personal use only) was written by White House staff officer Ralph Williams. He said he had talked to Gen. Carl Spaatz, commander of the Eighth Air Force in World War II. Spaatz “freely conceded that none of our fighters was any match for the German jets, and . . . added that if the Germans had been able to get them deployed in force to the French coast they could have denied us air superiority and frustrated the Normandy landings and might even have compelled us to work our way up into Europe via the Italian route.”5

  But what might have been wasn’t; there were no German jets over France or the English Channel in June 1944, and precious few prop airplanes.

  There were also precious few ships of war, and those that were there were E-boats, an oversize German version of the American patrol boat (PT boat), almost as big as a destroyer escort (the E stood for “enemy”). They were capable of laying mines and firing torpedoes and running away at high speed. Other than the E-boats, the only contribution the German navy could make to the defense of Fortress Europe was minelaying.

  With no air force and no navy, the German defenders of Fortress Europe were blind and forced to stretch out to cover every conceivable landing site. Control of the air and sea gave the Allies unprecedented mobility and almost certain surprise—in briefest form, they would know where and when the battle would be fought, and the Germans would not.

  In World War I, preparations for a massive offensive could not be hidden. The buildup of troops took weeks; the artillery preparation took days; by the time the offensive began, the defenders knew where and when it would hit and could strengthen their positions at the point of attack. But in the spring of 1944, the Germans could only guess.

  • •

  Hitler’s spiritual mentor, Frederick the Great, had warned, “He who defends everything, defends nothing.”6

  It was the human and material wastage of the war on the Eastern Front that forced Hitler to ignore Frederick’s warning and adopt a policy on the Western Front of fixed fortifications. Wehrmacht losses had been staggering. In June 1941, the Wehrmacht went into Russia with 3.3 million men. By the end of 1943 it had suffered nearly 3 million casualties, about one-third of which were permanent (killed, missing, captured, or unfit for combat due to wounds). Despite heroic efforts to make up the deficit by drawing down in France and calling up fresh conscripts from within Germany, after the Kursk battle (next to Verdun, the greatest battle ever fought, with more than 2 million men engaged) the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front was down to 2.5 million, attempting to hold a line that stretched from Leningrad in the north to the Black Sea in the south, nearly 2,000 kilometers.

  When the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union, it prided itself on its “racial purity.” The desperate need for replacements forced it to drastically modify and eventually abandon that policy. Initially, so-called Volksdeutsche (“racial Germans”) from Poland and the Balkan countries were required to “volunteer.” They were classified as Abteilung 3 der Deutschen Volkslists (Section 3 of the German Racial List); this meant that they were vested with German citizenship for a probationary period of ten years and were liable to military service but could not rise above the rank of private first class. In 1942–43 recruiting in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union was aggressively pursued for the struggle against communism; initially there was some truth to the designation of these recruits as Freiwilligen (volunteers), as men from the western republics of the Soviet empire signed up for the fight against Stalin. When the German retreat began, there were fewer Freiwilligen, more Hilfswilligen (auxiliaries) conscripted from the occupied territories and from Red Army prisoners of war. By the beginning of 1944 the Wehrmacht had “volunteers” from France, Italy, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Asian Russia, North Africa, Russia, Ukraine, Ruthenia, the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union, as well as Volga-Tatars, Volga-Finns, Crimean Tatars, and even Indians.

  The so-called Ost (east) battalions became increasingly unreliable after the German defeat at Kursk; they were, therefore, sent to France in exchange for German troops. At the beach called Utah on the day of the invasion, Lt. Robert Brewer of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, U.S. Army, captured four Asians in Wehrmacht uniforms. No one could speak their language; eventually it was learned that they were Koreans. How on earth did Koreans end up fighting for Hitler to defend France against Americans? It seems they had been conscripted into the Japanese army in 1938—Korea was then a Japanese colony—captured by the Red Army in the border battles with Japan in 1939, forced into the Red Army, captured by the Wehrmacht in December 1941 outside Moscow, forced into the German army, and sent to France.7 (What happened to them, Lieutenant Brewer never found out, but presumably they were sent back to Korea. If so, they would almost certainly have been conscripted again, either into the South or the North Korean army. It is possible that in 1950 they ended up fighting once again, either against the U.S. Army, or with it, depending on what part of Korea they came from. Such are the vagaries of politics in the twentieth century.) By June 1944, one in six German riflemen in France was from an Ost battalion.

  Furthermore, the Wehrmacht sharply relaxed its physical standards to bring more genuine Germans into the line. Men with stomach and lung ailments were sent to the front. Convalescence time was cut, as was training time for recruits. Younger and older men were called up; of an army of 4,270,000 men in December 1943, more than a million and a half were over thirty-four years old; in the 709th Division, on the Cotentin Peninsula, the average age was thirty-six; in the Wehrmacht as a whole the average age was thirty-one and a half (in the U.S. Army the average age was twenty-five and a half). Meanwhile, the classes of 1925 and 1926 were called up.8

  As a consequence of these desperate measures, the Wehrmacht did not have the resources to conduct a defense in depth, based on counterattacks and counteroffensives. It lacked sufficient high-quality troops, it lacked sufficient mobility, it lacked sufficient armor. The old men, boys, and foreign troops were of value only if they were put into trenches or cement fortifications, with German NCOs standing behind them, pistol in hand, ready to shoot any man who left his post.

  • •

  In 1939 Hitler had characterized the Wehrmacht as “an army such as the world has never seen.” It was far from that at the end of 1943. The U.S. War Department described the German soldier as “one of several different types. . . . The veteran of many fronts and many retreats is a prematurely aged, war weary cynic, either discouraged and disillusioned or too stupefied to have any thought of his own. Yet he is a seasoned campaigner, most likely a noncommissioned officer, and performs his duties with the highest degree of efficiency.

  “The new recruit, except in some crack SS [Schutzstaffel, or Protection Detachment] units, is either too young or too old and often in poor health.

  “He has been poorly trained for lack of time but, if too young, he makes up for this by a fanaticism bordering on ma
dness. If too old, he is driven by the fear of what his propagandists have told him will happen to the Fatherland in case of an Allied victory, and even more by the fear of what he has been told will happen to him and his family if he does not carry out orders exactly as given. Thus even the old and sick perform, to a certain point, with the courage of despair.

  “The German high command has been particularly successful in placing the various types of men where they best fit, and in selecting those to serve as cannon fodder, who are told to hold out to the last man, while every effort is made to preserve the elite units, which now are almost entirely part of the Waffen-SS [combat troops of the SS]. The German soldier in these units is in a preferred category and is the backbone of the German Armed Forces. He is pledged never to surrender and has no moral code except allegiance to his organization. There is no limit to his ruthlessness.”9

  Beyond the Waffen-SS, the best of the young recruits went into the Fallschirmjäger (paratroop) or panzer (armored) units. These elite troops had been carefully brought up in Nazi Germany for just this challenge. Born between 1920 and 1925, they had grown up in Hitler’s Germany, subject to constant and massive propaganda, members of the Nazi Youth. Given good equipment—and they got the best Germany could produce, which in small arms, armored vehicles, and artillery was among the best in the world—they made first-class fighting outfits.

  In naturally strong coastal defenses made stronger by the skill of German engineers, even second- and third-class troops could inflict heavy casualties on an attacking force. Hitler roundly declared that it was a soldier’s duty “to stand and die in his defenses.”10 That was a World War I mentality, a far cry from blitzkrieg, inappropriate to the age of tanks and other armored vehicles, but, given the situation, inevitable. What gave the concept some believability was the plan to use the crack Waffen-SS, paratroops, and armored troops in an immediate counterattack. At the end of 1943 those troops and tanks were still on the Eastern Front, or forming up inside Germany, but Hitler’s directive of November 3, 1943, meant that many of them, perhaps enough, would be standing just behind the Atlantic Wall when the assault began.

  As early as March 1942, Hitler laid down the basic principle in Directive No. 40. He ordered that the Atlantic coast defenses should be so organized and troops so deployed that any invasion attempt be smashed before the landing or immediately thereafter.11 In August 1942, he decreed that fortress construction in France proceed with Fanatismus (fanatic energy), to create a continuous belt of interlocking fire emanating from bombproof concrete structures. In the words of the official American historian, Gordon Harrison, “Hitler was not then, and never would be, convinced that defense could not be made invulnerable if enough concrete and resolution could be poured into it.”12

  In September 1942, at a three-hour conference with Goering, Reich Minister Albert Speer (chief of Organization Todt, the German construction organization), Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander in the West, Gen. Guenther Blumenstedt (chief of staff, Oberbefehlshaber West—OB West, the German ground headquarters of the Western Front), and others, Hitler reiterated his orders to prepare the strongest possible fixed fortifications along the Atlantic Wall. They must be built, he said, on the assumption that the Anglo-Americans would enjoy air and naval supremacy. Only concrete could stand up to the crushing weight of bombs and shells. He therefore wanted 15,000 concrete strong points to be occupied by 300,000 men. As no portion of the coast was safe, the whole would have to be walled up. He wanted the fortifications completed by May 1, 1943.13

  Most of this was pure fantasy and, aside from the top-priority positions, almost none of it was accomplished at the end of 1943. But the policy had been set, the commitment made.

  Rundstedt was unhappy with the idea of fixed fortifications. He argued that the Germans should hold their armored units well back from the coast, out of range of Allied naval gunfire, capable of mounting a genuine counteroffensive. But shortages of armor, men, fuel, and air coverage made that questionable.

  What Hitler could do was attempt to anticipate the landing site, keep what armor was available for the West near that place, and use it for local counterattacks while the Atlantic Wall held up the invaders. Tanks could seal off any penetration; tanks could drive the lightly armed and unarmored first wave of invaders back into the sea, if the fortifications were strong enough to keep the Allies from establishing momentum. The trick was to pick the place to make the fortifications that strong.

  The Pas-de-Calais was the logical place for the invasion for two overwhelming reasons: between Dover and Calais is where the English Channel is narrowest, and the straight line from London to the Rhine-Ruhr and on to Berlin runs London-Dover-Calais-Belgium.

  Hitler had to make a bet, and in 1943 he bet the invasion would come at the Pas-de-Calais. In a way, he tried to force the Allies to invade there. In the summer of 1943, he decided to install the launching sites for the V-l and V-2 Vergeltungs weapons in that area. He believed that whatever the Allies’ previous plans might have been, the V weapons would be so dangerous as to force them to attack directly in the Pas-de-Calais in order to overrun the launching sites.

  Thus the area around Calais became by far the strongest fortified portion of the Kanalküste (Channel coast), and in 1944 the location of by far the greatest concentration of German armor in the West. It was there that the Atlantic Wall came closest to what German propaganda claimed it was, an impregnable fortress.

  • •

  He was a strange man, the German führer. In the view of the deputy chief of operations at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), Gen. Walter Warlimont, “He knew the location of the defenses in detail better than any single army officer.” Hitler’s passion for detail was astonishing. On one occasion, he pointed out that there were two fewer antiaircraft guns on the Channel Islands than had been there the previous week. The officer responsible for this supposed reduction was punished. It turned out to have been a miscount.

  Hitler spent hours studying the maps showing German installations along the Atlantic Wall. He demanded reports on building progress, the thickness of the concrete, the kind of concrete used, the system used to put in the steel reinforcement—these reports often ran to more than ten pages.14 But, after ordering the creation of the greatest fortification in history, he never bothered to inspect any part of it. After leaving Paris in triumph in the summer of 1940, he did not set foot on French soil again until mid-June 1944. Yet he declared this was the decisive theater!

  * * *

  I. The jets were powered by synthetic fuel, one source of which was the German 1944 potato crop made into alcohol. The German people paid a terrible price in 1945 for this madness.

  2

  THE ATTACKERS

  THE ALLIED PROBLEM was to land, penetrate the Atlantic Wall, and secure a lodgment in an area suitable for reinforcement and expansion. The sine qua non of the operation was to achieve surprise. If the Germans knew where and when the attack was coming they could surely concentrate enough men, concrete, tanks, and artillery at the spot to defeat the assault.

  It was going to be difficult enough even with surprise. Amphibious operations are inherently the most complicated in war; few have ever been successful. Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror had managed it, but nearly every other invasion attempted against organized opposition had failed. Napoleon had not been able to cross the English Channel, nor had Hitler. The Mongols were defeated by the weather when they tried to invade Japan, as were the Spanish when they tried to invade England. The British were frustrated in the Crimea in the nineteenth century and defeated at Gallipoli in World War I.

  In World War II, the record got better. By the end of 1943 the Allies had launched three successful amphibious attacks—North Africa (November 8, 1942), Sicily (July 10, 1943), and Salerno (September 9, 1943), all involving British and American land, sea, and air forces under the command of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. None of the coastlines, however, had been fortified. (The only attack against a for
tified coast, by the Canadians at Dieppe in northern France in August 1942, had been decisively defeated.) In North Africa, the Allies had achieved surprise when they attacked a French colonial army without a declaration of war, and even then they encountered many difficulties. At Sicily the opposition had been mainly dispirited Italian troops; nevertheless, there were some horrendous foul-ups, including the shooting down by Allied naval craft of Allied transport planes carrying the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division into battle. At Salerno, the Germans had quickly recovered from the twin surprises of the Italian double cross and the seaborne landings and come awfully close to driving the Anglo-American troops back into the sea, despite being outnumbered and outgunned.

  Going into 1944, in short, there was precious little in the way of precedent or historic example the Allies could look to for inspiration. What they were about to attempt had not been done before.

  But it had to be done. U.S. Army chief of staff George C. Marshall had wanted to invade France in late 1942, and even more in mid-1943. British hesitation and political necessity had forced a diversion to the Mediterranean. At the end of 1943, however, the British overcame their doubts and the Allies committed themselves to a cross-Channel attack as the decisive effort for 1944.

  There were manifold reasons, of which the overriding one was the obvious point that wars are won by offensive action. For all his hesitation about when the offensive should begin, British prime minister Winston Churchill always knew that it must happen. As early as October 1941, he had told Capt. Lord Louis Mountbatten, head of Combined Operations, “You are to prepare for the invasion of Europe, for unless we can go and land and fight Hitler and beat his forces on land, we shall never win this war.”1