The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  The tidal-flat obstacles began with so-called Belgian gates, which were gatelike structures built of iron frames ten feet high. These sat in belts running parallel to the coastline, about 150 meters out from the high-water line. Teller mines (antitank mines carrying twelve pounds of TNT) were attached to the structures, or old French artillery shells, brought in from the Maginot Line, pointed out to sea and primed to fire. Admiral Ruge had no faith in land mines and artillery shells stuck underwater, as they had no waterproofing, but the marine mines he preferred were not available in sufficient quantity.6

  Next, at about 100 meters out from the high-water mark, a band of heavy logs were driven into the water at an angle pointed seaward, with Teller mines lashed to the tips of some of the logs. At about seventy meters from shore, the main belt of obstacles featured hedgehogs (three or four steel rails cut in two-meter lengths and welded together at their centers) that could rip out the bottom of any landing craft.

  Rommel bestrode France like a colossus. He could, and did, flood the countryside by damming rivers or letting in the sea. He could and did uproot and evacuate French civilians, tear down vacation homes and buildings to give his artillery a better field of fire, cut down forests to get the trees he needed for his beach obstacles.

  The obstacles forced the Allies to choose between risking their landing craft on a full tide or coming in on a rising tide and thus giving the German soldiers an opportunity to cut down the first waves of attackers as they struggled through the tidal flat and up to the first feature of the beach, which at Omaha was a bank of shingle (small, smooth rocks),I or a line of sand dunes at Utah that could provide some cover. To make full use of the killing zone, Rommel had his static divisions (many of whose battalions were Ost units; in some divisions the men were 50 percent Polish or Russian) right up close.

  At each of the beach exits at Omaha, for example, riflemen and machine gunners were in fire trenches on the lower part of the bluff, halfway up the bluff, and at the top. Scattered along the slopes of the draws, and on the plateau above, were hundreds of “Tobruks,” circular concrete-lined holes big enough for a mortar team, a machine gun, or even the turret of a tank. The Tobruks were connected by underground tunnels. Beside and around them, the Germans had fixed fortifications of reinforced concrete looking straight down onto the beach. In them, as in the Tobruks, there were panoramic sketches of the ground features in front of them, giving range and deflection for specific targets. In other words, they were zeroed in.

  Back down on Omaha Beach proper, the Germans had twelve strong points built to provide enfilade fire the length of the beach. Big guns, 88mm and even 105mm, were put into casemates with embrasures that opened down the beach, not out to sea. The casemates had an extra wing on the seaward side to hide the muzzle blast from the Allied navies.

  Up on the bluff there were eight concrete casemates and four open field positions, for 75mm to 88mm guns, all sited for both grazing and plunging fire on every yard of beach. The guns came from all over the Nazi empire, French 75s, big Russian guns, 105s from Czechoslovakia, others from Poland.

  The big casemates could take any shell the Allied navies could throw against them and still protect the guns; to protect the casemates from the real threat, an infantry assault with grenades and flamethrowers, the Germans surrounded them with land mines and barbed wire.

  So the GI hitting the beach in the first wave at Omaha would have to get through the minefields in the Channel without his LST blowing up, then get from ship to shore in a Higgins boat taking fire from inland batteries, then work his way through an obstacle-studded tidal flat of some 150 meters crisscrossed by machine-gun and rifle fire, with big shells whistling by and mortars exploding all around, to find his first protection behind the shingle. There he would be caught in a triple crossfire—machine guns and heavy artillery from the sides, small arms from the front, mortars coming down from above.

  If the GI was not killed getting off his landing craft or crossing the tidal flat, if by some miracle he made it to the shingle, Rommel wanted him wounded before he got there. If not wounded, paralyzed by fear.

  To keep that GI huddled there, Rommel had more mines laid. Between the shingle and the bluffs there was a shelf of beach flat (in some places marshy). Rommel loaded in the barbed wire but relied mainly on mines. They were irregularly placed throughout the shelf and of all types. Some were simple charges of TNT covered by rock and set off by trip wires. S-mines were devices of the devil; they jumped up when activated, then exploded at waist height. There were others. Altogether Rommel laid 6.5 million mines, and wanted many millions more (his goal was 11 million antipersonnel mines).7 Behind the mines and astride the draws there were antitank ditches, two meters or so deep, and cement antitank or antitruck barriers across the exit roads.

  All this was backed up by big guns at Pointe-du-Hoc, where there was to be a six-gun battery of 155s capable of firing into the mass of shipping off both Omaha and Utah beaches, another at St.-Marcouf looking right down on Utah, another at Longues-sur-Mer covering Gold, and so on.

  Behind Omaha, once one got inland from the plateau, there were no fixed defenses of any kind. Mainly this reflected the impossibility of Rommel’s building a genuine Atlantic Wall that had depth to it—the length was too great, the resources insufficient. Partly it reflected Rommel’s all-or-nothing attitude about the battle for the beaches. But as every GI who fought in Normandy can testify, in the country of hedgerows and stone-walled villages, farmhouses, barns, and outbuildings, fixed fortifications were not needed. The hedgerow country of Normandy was ideal for fighting a defensive struggle with the weapons of the mid-twentieth century.

  At Gold, Juno, and Sword, the beach obstacles were extensive, but the dunes were not so high as at Utah, and instead of bluffs behind the seawall there were French vacation homes. Some of these were torn down to give a better field of fire, some were used as strong points. There were casemates, large and small, scattered along the coast. As elsewhere, there was no depth to the defense.

  At Utah, the beach obstacles were in place, but there was no bluff behind the beach, only sand dunes behind the one- to three-foot seawall, so the extensive trench system manned by infantry was absent, but the Germans had dug into the dunes a series of Tobruks with tank turrets mounted on them, connected by underground trenches, along with casemates holding heavy artillery, thousands of miles of barbed wire, and thousands of mines.

  The strong point at Utah was a blockhouse at La Madeleine. It had an 88mm cannon, two 50mm antitank guns, two 75mm cannon, a 16-inch howitzer, five grenade-launching mortars, two flamethrowers, three heavy machine guns, one under an armored turret, and eight “Goliaths.” These were miniature tanks hardly bigger than a child’s wagon, but they were stuffed with explosives and had a radio-guidance mechanism.

  Behind the dunes at Utah, a road ran parallel to the beach. Four exit roads, or “causeways” as the Americans called them, ran inland perpendicular to the beach. The causeways crossed the flooded fields created by damming up local rivers. Behind the flooded fields, Rommel had troops stationed in every village, along with field artillery presighted on the causeways. The troops came from the 709th and 716th divisions (consisting of the Georgian Battalion and 642nd Ost Battalion). They had almost no organic motor transport.

  These inland units were used to build defenses locally, consisting of sticking logs into the ground in any open field suitable for a glider landing. The Allies had used gliders extensively if not very successfully in Sicily in July 1943, and Rommel assumed they would again. To prevent it, he devised “Rommel’s asparagus,” ten-foot logs driven into the ground, to be topped with shells attached by interconnecting wires. The shells didn’t arrive from Paris until after D-Day, but the logs by themselves were enough to bust up a wooden glider going better than 100 kilometers per hour.

  For deception purposes, Rommel built casemates that held no guns. Admiral Ruge recalled, “Dummy batteries attracted a great many Allied air attacks and helped
the real guns to survive.”8 The Americans were making extensive use of rubber, blown-up “tanks” and other heavy vehicles as part of Operation Fortitude, but the Germans did not develop such devices.

  Instead, Rommel poured more concrete and planted more asparagus. Col. Gen. Georg von Sodenstern, commander of the Nineteenth Army in southern France, thought Rommel mad. He commented on Rommel’s fixed defenses: “As no man in his senses would put his head on an anvil over which the smith’s hammer is swung, so no general should mass his troops at the point where the enemy is certain to bring the first powerful blow of his superior material.”

  To which Rommel replied, “Our friends from the East cannot imagine what they’re in for here. It’s not a matter of fanatical hordes to be driven forward in masses against our line, with no regard for casualties and little recourse to tactical craft; here we are facing an enemy who applies all his native intelligence to the use of his many technical resources, who spares no expenditure of material and whose every operation goes its course as though it had been the subject of repeated rehearsal.”9

  He was right in his analysis of the American army but, in the view of Gen. Baron Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, badly wrong in his conclusion about how to meet the attack. Schweppenburg commanded Panzer Group West. When Rommel began moving the 2nd Panzer Division closer to the coast, north of Amiens, Schweppenburg protested. Rommel insisted and put the leading battle group right on the coast, dug in. He growled to Admiral Ruge, “The panzer divisions are going to be moved forward, whether they like it or not!”10

  Shortly thereafter, an angry General Schweppenburg, accompanied by Hitler’s panzer expert, Gen. Heinz Guderian, confronted Rommel. The latter blandly told them he intended to dig in every tank on the coastline. Guderian was shocked. He insisted that “the very strength of panzer formations lies in their firepower and mobility.” He advised Rommel to pull the tanks back out of range of Allied naval guns. He insisted that the lesson from the Sicily and Salerno landings was crystal clear—the Germans could not fight a decisive battle while they were under those naval guns. Guderian knew that an amphibious force is not at its most vulnerable when it is half ashore, half at sea. It is at its most powerful at that time, thanks to those big naval guns. He urged Rommel to think in terms of a counteroffensive launched on the Wehrmacht’s terms, at some choke point inland when the enemy was overstretched. That was the way the Russians did it, with great success, as Guderian could testify.

  Rommel would not budge. “If you leave the panzer divisions in the rear,” he warned, “they will never get forward. Once the invasion begins, enemy air power will stop everything from moving.”11

  When Guderian reported to Hitler, he recommended pulling back and fighting inland, which specifically meant keeping command and control of the panzer divisions out of Rommel’s hands. Hitler tried a weak-kneed, half-hearted compromise. On May 7, he turned over three panzer divisions to Rommel, the 2nd, 21st, and 116th. The other four panzer divisions were to be held inland. Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of OKW, assured Rommel that, although the four divisions were under OKW’s control, they “will be released for operations—without further application by yourself—the moment we can be certain about the enemy’s intentions and focus of attack.”12

  That sounded reasonable, but skipped over this fact: the leadership principle had led to a situation in which a German panzer division commander would in a crisis look to not one man but three for his orders—Rommel, Rundstedt, Hitler. Jodl’s sensible-sounding words also ignored the failure to choose between competing strategies. Hitler backed neither Rommel nor the Schweppenburg/Guderian team. Just as he could not trust people, neither could he trust one plan over another. He split his resources and invited defeat in detail.

  Rommel got his three panzer divisions up as close as he could, especially the 21st, which went into camp around Caen. The 21st had been Rommel’s favorite in Africa, where it had been decimated. It had been rebuilt around a cadre of former officers, including Col. Hans von Luck. Its commander was Gen. Edgar Feuchtinger, whose qualifications for the job were that he had organized the military displays at the annual Party rallies. He had no combat experience, knew nothing of tanks. According to Luck, Feuchtinger “was a live and let live person. He was fond of all the good things of life, for which Paris was a natural attraction.” He was wise enough to leave the reality of command in the hands of his immediate subordinates.13

  Rommel put the other two panzer divisions under his command, the 12th SS and Panzer Lehr, equally distant from Calais and Calvados. They were not close enough to get to the beaches in a few hours, however, a reflection of the immense front line the Germans had to cover. General Fritz Bayerlein, commanding Panzer Lehr, described the division as “the best equipped panzer division that Germany ever had. It was 100 percent armored; even the infantry was completely armored.” When he took the command, Guderian told him, “With this division alone, you must throw the Allies into the sea. Your objective is the coast—no, not the coast, it is the sea.”

  Aside from the three panzer divisions, Rommel’s forces had little mobility. Rundstedt, true to his analysis that fighting a mobile battle inland was preferable to fighting a pitched battle from fixed fortifications, put most of his effort in the first five months of 1944 into improving transport facilities for the coastal divisions. But Rundstedt’s efforts to put wheels under his army were offset by Rommel’s insistence on digging in every available soldier and gun along the coast. Anyway, as Gordon Harrison observes, “German notions of mobility in the west in 1944 hardly corresponded to American concepts of a motorized army.” German “mobile” units had, at best, one or two trucks to move essential supplies, with horse-drawn artillery and general transport. The men were listed as “mobile” because they had each got a bicycle.14

  The Wehrmacht of 1944 was a strange army. In the panzer divisions, it had highly mobile forces with superior firepower, absolutely up to date. But it did not have the fuel to sustain operations. Thanks to the Allied bombing campaign against the Romanian oil fields, Germany had desperate fuel shortages. In France, that meant the panzer divisions had to sharply curtail their training. In the infantry divisions, meanwhile, the Wehrmacht of 1944 was almost a replica of the Kaiser’s army of 1918. It was dependent on rail and horse for its supplies, on foot power for movement. In organization, tactics, and doctrine, it was prepared to fight a 1918 battle, just as the Atlantic Wall was an attempt to build a replica of the World War I trench system.

  Despite the handicap of inadequate equipment, the German infantry divisions could have been made more mobile through training maneuvers. But so great was Rommel’s obsession with pouring concrete and sticking logs into the tidal flats that he put his fighting men to work building beach obstacles. Challenged by a subordinate who wished to emphasize training, Rommel ordered, “I hereby forbid all training, and demand that every minute be used for work on the beach obstacles. It is on the beaches that the fate of the invasion will be decided, and, what is more, during the first 24 hours.”15 Even 21st Panzer units around Caen were put to work putting in asparagus.

  In March, after the spring thaw had immobilized the armies on the Eastern Front, Hitler began transferring units to the West. Rommel put them into the line where they were most needed. The Cotentin got a new division, the 91st, supposedly mobile, and the 6th Parachute Regiment, commanded by Col. Frederick von der Heydte, a legend for his exploits in Crete. His regiment was an elite, all-volunteer unit. Average age was seventeen and a half (in the 709th Infantry Division on the Cotentin, average age was thirty-six). When he arrived in Normandy, the colonel was shocked by “the mediocrity of the armament and equipment of the German divisions. There were weapons from every land that had fallen into German hands over the past thirty years.” His own regiment had four kinds of grenade launchers and seven types of light machine guns.

  Heydte was also shocked when he was shown a document and told to sign. It came from Hitler. He wanted each commander to give his writte
n promise to remain in place, to hold every inch of ground, when the invasion came. Heydte refused to sign; his corps commander simply shrugged.16

  Throughout the Cotentin, by May, Rommel had three divisions, the 243rd, the 709th, and the 91st. Along the Calvados coast he had the 352nd facing Omaha, the 716th at the British beaches, with 21st Panzer around Caen.

  This was neither fish nor fowl. The whole point to pouring all that concrete and digging all those trenches along the coast was to check the enemy long enough to allow a concentrated panzer counterattack before the end of D-Day. But with only one division to cover the whole Calvados-Cotentin coastline, and only two to cover the area from Le Havre to Holland, Rommel could not possibly hope to make an early concentrated panzer attack. By denying Rommel command of the tanks, Hitler denied Rommel his strategy. At that point, a less stubborn general might have taken steps to begin implementing the strategy he didn’t believe in but had been forced by circumstances to adopt. Not Rommel. He stuck to a strategy that by his own logic, given available resources, couldn’t work.

  On the day the battle would be joined, therefore, the mighty Wehrmacht’s armored divisions would be immobilized not so much by the Allied air forces, or by the Allied navies, or by the Resistance, as by the leadership principle of the Third Reich.

  But suppose that Rommel had persuaded Hitler to put the armored divisions under his immediate command. Suppose further that he got lucky and stationed one panzer division in Bayeux, another at Carentan (as according to General Bayerlein, commander of the Panzer Lehr Division, he wanted to do).17 Then suppose that on D-Day Rommel launched a panzer-led counterattack against the 4th Infantry at Utah and another at Omaha’s left flank and Gold’s right. That surely would have created a crisis and caused some chaos on the landing beaches, as well as many casualties.