Adding to this British deployment problem was the stubborn German defense of the Hillman strongpoint. This virtual fortress caused an intense firefight that slowed the 185th Brigade's advance for most of the afternoon. All of these delays gave the Germans the precious time they needed to overcome their initial disorganized response and launch a determined counterattack.61
“IF YOU DON’T SUCCEED…WE SHALL HAVE LOST THE WAR”
The Twenty-First Panzer Division near Caen did not make a lightning response to the Allied landings. Hitler's divided command system and hesitancy among local German commanders mishandled the Twenty-First Panzer all day on June 6.
This did not mean that some German officers did not show initiative. At 1:30 a.m. Colonel Hans Von Luck of 125th Regiment of the Twenty-First Panzer Division responded immediately to the first reports of the airborne landings. He gave orders to assemble his regiment. By 2:30 a.m. his officers and men were lined up beside their tanks with their engines running waiting for orders. They waited a long time for Hitler to wake up.
Finally at 10:00 a.m. Lieutenant General Rudolf Schmundt woke Hitler up. Eisenhower had just announced to the world that the Allies had launched the Normandy invasion. Hitler ordered an immediate conference with Keitel and Jodl.62
As they entered Hitler shouted, “Well, is it or isn’t it the invasion?”63 Hours passed as the man who previously guessed Normandy as the landing site changed his mind again. “My opinion,” he finally announced, “is that this is not the real invasion yet.”64 Finally he made the decision to release to Rundstedt's command the two panzer divisions that he had requested before dawn. Hitler gave orders for the Allied troops to be “annihilated” by the end of the day.65 It was after 4:00 p.m. by the time these orders reached the two panzer divisions. Earlier there had been predawn darkness, and until midday the panzers’ advance would have been obscured by clouds. Now without cloud cover, the Allied air forces owned the skies. Movement was delayed until darkness had fallen. Only the Twenty-First Panzer at Caen could save the day.
Blumentritt, Rundstedt's chief of staff, speculated that even if the Twelfth SS Panzer Division had been released at about 1:00 a.m., they would not have reached the Caen area before daylight at 4:00 a.m. The Allied air force would have intervened. Being nearer the battle area, the Twelfth SS might have been able to support the Twenty-First Panzer's attack by the afternoon. With luck the Panzer Lehr might have arrived during the evening of June 6 at the earliest.66
About 6:00 p.m. Rommel had reached Rheims on his way to Normandy. He called Speidel at La Roche-Guyon and learned all the bad news regarding the delayed panzer counterattack. He then climbed back into his car. Historian Liddell Hart theorized, “It is possible that they would have been released earlier if Rommel had not been absent from Normandy…. Rommel…often spoke to Hitler himself on the telephone.”67 Later that day, Rommel exclaimed, “My God! If the 21st Panzer can make it, we might just be able to drive them back in three days!”68
Because of Hitler's self-imposed delay, General Marcks did not get permission to release the Twenty-First Panzer tanks until the British and Canadians were well established on the beaches and moving inland. It was not until 7:00 p.m. that the Twenty-First Panzer Division joined forces with the 192nd Panzer Grenadier Regiment (a divisional reconnaissance unit) at the jumping-off point for their attack northward into the Canadian-British bridgehead. Their target was the British beaches. Taking a page from the Desert Fox, General Marcks traveled forty miles from St. Lo to personally oversee this crucial battle.
Marcks told the battle group leader, Colonel Hermann von Oppeln-Bronikowski, “Oppeln, if you don’t succeed in throwing the British into the sea we shall have lost the war.” The colonel saluted and said, “I shall attack now.”69 Victory or defeat now rode with a mere ninety-eight German panzers.
From atop a small hill, Marcks showed him the gap several miles wide between the Juno and Sword beaches. The German spearhead was to proceed north from Lebisey and drive through this gap between the towns of Langruné and Lion-sur-Mer on the coast to reinforce the German coastal bunkers. (See Map 6.) With this three-mile-wide wedge the Germans could begin to roll up the Allied beachheads in both directions.
Meanwhile the Third British Division had finally learned of the presence of the Twenty-First Panzer Division when it ran into it on Périers Ridge. The British knocked out several Mark IVs. Afterward the Germans veered off to the west, and the British pressed on southward toward Caen.
The leading company of the King's Shropshire Light Infantry, a few hundred trudging riflemen who had been left marooned on the beach, advanced to within two miles of the objective when it was hit by a wall of intense enemy fire from a wooded ridge outside of Lebisey. No reinforcements arrived to continue what had been envisioned as a bold push to Caen. Instead, the British retreated to Biéville and dug in. Weeks would pass before the British advance to take Caen resumed.
Meanwhile on the German left, one-half-dozen tanks supported by a company of infantry made it through the British lines and drove northward. At approximately 8:00 p.m. this little battle group reached the coast at Luc-sur-Mer and linked up with the German coastal defenders, remnants of the 716th Division, to await more tank reinforcements.
About fifty panzers had been dispatched to strengthen the German wedge when, by sheer coincidence of timing, about 250 British gliders appeared overhead. This was the planned reinforcement fly-in of the Orne River bridgehead, the largest on D-Day, by the British Sixth Airborne Division.70
The Germans mistakenly thought it was a lightning response to the Twenty-First Panzer Division's breakthrough. “No one who saw it will ever forget it,” declared Panzer Grenadier Werner Kortenhaus. “Suddenly the hollow roaring of countless aeroplanes, and then we saw them, hundreds of them, towing great gliders, filling the sky.”71 The Germans lost heart, panicked, and withdrew. Their retreat was another major D-Day blunder.
That evening the British occupied six square miles of Sword Beach, twenty miles long but only three to six miles deep. The entire Third Division had landed with the Twenty-Seventh Armored Brigade, but these units were stopped three miles short of Caen. About twenty-nine thousand men were now ashore, at the cost of around one thousand casualties for that day.72
Compounding the failure of a German counterattack on D-Day was the lack of any serious air attack to stop the Allied landings. “Where is the Luftwaffe?” was a question repeatedly asked by desperate German soldiers scanning the sky over Normandy.
On D-Day only 319 aircraft were available to the Luftwaffe in the West. The Germans flew just 309 sorties on June 6. Most were intercepted and shot down. Only two German Focke Wulf 190 fighters broke through the Allied screen of over five thousand fighters to strafe Sword Beach and miraculously survived. Isolated German flak batteries provided all the token air protection that the Seventh Army could expect on D-Day. They accounted for most of the 127 Allied aircraft lost. From early morning to late that night the Allies had absolute air supremacy.73
Rommel was not in the best of moods when he finally reached his chateau headquarters at 10:00 p.m. He asked about the Twenty-First Panzer counterattack, but no details had arrived. Rommel wanted to know where the Panzer Lehr and Twelfth SS were. They had been held up by Hitler's indecision. “Madmen,” said Rommel. “Of course, now they will arrive too late.”74
Later his aide-de-camp, Captain Helmuth Lang, approached his chief. “Sir, do you think we can drive them back?” he asked. “Lang, I hope we can,” came his answer. “I’ve nearly always succeeded up to now.”75 Because of a weather surprise Rommel had missed the most important battle of his career and a decisive one for Germany as well.
RESULTS “HOW CLOSE IT WAS”
When midnight came on June 6, a full moon shone over the fifty-mile Normandy front. The 156,000 British, American, and Canadian troops had penetrated no more than about ten miles inland. Omaha Beach was only just hanging on. Except for Gold and Juno, none of the other three bridgehe
ads had yet linked up. Few of the ambitious targets for D-Day had been achieved. (See Map 7.)
However it was still a tremendous success for the Allies. Hitler's Atlantic Wall had been breached. The complex NEPTUNE assault plan had largely worked. Allied casualties had proven remarkably light. SHAEF planners had predicted twenty-five thousand casualties, including ten thousand dead on D-Day. Instead total estimated casualties were fewer than twelve thousand (6,600 American, 3,500 British and 1,000 Canadians). Twenty-five hundred soldiers were dead. Admiral Ramsay summed up the day in his diary: “Still on the whole we have very much to thank God for this day.”76
The Germans had contained the Great Invasion but not repulsed it. With a nearly dysfunctional system of command, it is amazing how well the Germans did on the “longest day.” Rommel's strategic and tactical approach was vindicated. Overwhelming Allied air superiority made a mobile defense almost impossible that day and throughout the OVERLORD campaign.
The Germans almost achieved a tactical victory in the Omaha Beach sector. If more of the 352nd Infantry had been on the beaches, the landings would have failed. At Caen, the initial counterattack of the Twenty-First Panzer Division was successful in stopping the British advance to take the city. If the division had attacked earlier in the day, they would have reached the coast and placed a strong wedge dividing Juno and Sword beaches. If Rommel had been successful in placing two additional panzer divisions behind the Allied invasion beaches, they would have created havoc on D-Day. For the Germans June 6 and 7 were the decisive days for defeating the OVERLORD operation.
By nightfall of June 6 the German front containing the invasion was in a precarious situation. All available reserves were committed. Rommel noted that reinforcements were still in transit, delayed by Allied air interdiction. Ammunition was running low, and economy was required all along the German lines. A feeling of hopelessness began to spread.77
For the Allies the very boldness of Montgomery's plan to take and hold Caen on D-Day ensured its failure. Max Hastings termed it “a substantial strategic misfortune.”78 The overall failure of British senior commanders to warn their assaulting forces of the presence of the Twenty-First Panzers was inexcusable. Could they have reinforced the Third Division and better orchestrated the landings by delivering a stronger armor-infantry Caen assault on D-Day? The fact that these alternatives were not even considered is evident by examining Montgomery's diary and papers from early June 1944.79
After June 6, Montgomery makes no mention of his initial failure to take the city. As historian Carlo D’Este states, “To have taken [Caen] according to plan…would have needed…some sort of miracle.”80
Monty's failed plan to capture Caen on D-Day stalled the entire Normandy campaign. However on June 10 he still told General Bradley how pleased he was with its progress. Bradley smiled and admitted they were better than during the opening hours of D-Day. “Someday,” Bradley explained, “I’ll tell General Eisenhower just how close it was in these first hours.”81
Even more telling was how on June 6 the vaunted Desert Fox could do nothing right. When Speidel phoned to tell him of the amphibious invasion, Rommel was devastated. “How stupid of me!” he said, thinking of his failure to persuade Hitler to place more panzers on the coast.82
He immediately called his aide Lang to get his car ready. “Imagine Lang,” Rommel said with bitter irony, “the great day has come. The Allies are landing in Normandy and we are here!”83
Before he left his wife's fiftieth birthday celebration on June 6, the third stroke of bad luck befell the field marshal. He gave his wife gray suede shoes from Paris. But like most husbands, Rommel had no idea of her shoe size. They didn’t fit.84
“Indomitable in retreat, invincible in advance, insufferable in victory.”
—Winston S. Churchill on General Montgomery (1958, alleged)1
THE MORNING AFTER
When dawn came on June 7, the Allied foothold on Normandy was tenuous. The risks of success or failure did not end on D-Day. Nowhere had any of the Allied units achieved all of their D-Day objectives.
The British had failed to dislodge German forces from the key crossroad city of Caen and its Carpiquet Airfield. Only the forces on Gold and Juno beaches had linked up. The other invasion beaches remained isolated enclaves.
The Americans’ lodgment was too narrow. Omaha Beach was still under mortar fire. When Admiral Ramsay arrived at 11:45 a.m., he found a scene of great confusion with the beach so densely covered by casualties and equipment wreckage that it was blocking traffic between the beach and the shore.
Inland on the Cotentin Peninsula behind Utah Beach, dawn found the Eighty-Second Airborne Division in a precarious position. They remained isolated and almost out of ammunition. As the day progressed, the Eighty-Second was reinforced by glider infantry and finally was linked up with seaborne forces from Utah Beach. By nightfall the Americans had forced their way deeper into the Cotentin with a bridgehead eight miles deep and nine miles long. Meanwhile the Americans on Omaha succeeded in advancing their lines about four miles south of the landing beaches.
June 7 was a better day for the British. Bayeux was almost entirely evacuated by German forces, enabling the British to liberate the town with little damage. Port-en-Bessin, between Omaha and Gold beaches, also was liberated. This small harbor facility was the planned first stage site of the British Pluto oil pipeline so vital to the support of the invasion. By the night of June 8, the First US Infantry Division made contact with the British near Port-en-Bessin, finally linking up all of the five beachheads.
General Montgomery landed in Normandy on June 7, and General Bradley set up his headquarters near Pointe du Hoc on June 8. However, it was not until June 10 that Admiral Ramsay judged Omaha Beach secure enough to allow LSTs to run up on the beach and discharge their cargoes.
For the first fifty days of the Normandy invasion, German defenses remained so strong that Allied advances were limited. German reserve forces were continuously thrown into the fight, endangering the Allied beachheads. Montgomery's failure to take Caen and his change of strategic plans caused turmoil within the Allied command and altered the final outcome of the OVERLORD operation.2
THE FATAL RACE
When General Rommel arrived at his headquarters on June 6 at 10:00 p.m., he realized that the period of great vulnerability for the Allied bridgehead would last only a few days. Late in the afternoon of that same day, Hitler had finally released the First SS Panzer Corps reserve. It began a slow advance toward Normandy that verged on a nightmare as Allied aircraft severely punished these and other units. Fighter-bombers cratered roads, attacked railroad marshalling yards, and destroyed trains in daylight raids. Tank deployment was hampered as they needed to be loaded on rail flatbed trucks for transport because their tracks wore out over long distances. Rommel's warnings about Allied air power proved completely correct.
On June 6, OKW ordered the Second SS Panzer Division from Toulouse, the Seventeenth SS Division from the Loire Valley, and other infantry units to reinforce the Normandy sector. The Second SS Panzer took seventeen days to make a 450-mile journey. Normally it took five.3
Thus German reinforcements arrived late in driblets, strung out along the roads. Infantry were exhausted from long, forced marches. Allied air interdiction kept fuel supplies from reaching the panzer divisions, leaving them chronically short of fuel.4
If Rommel had been able to reinforce Normandy rapidly with divisions taken from the Fifteenth Army around Pas-de-Calais, he might have driven the Allies back into the sea. However, Rommel, Hitler, and Rundstedt remained convinced that the main Allied invasion was still to come across the Straits of Dover. Normandy was only a diversionary attack before the main blow. Operation FORTITUDE continued to deceive the German leaders.
Top secret Ultra intercepts of German-coded radio messages, however, told the Allies that the Germans were set to significantly reinforce Normandy. On June 7, Hitler ordered four infantry divisions and the 116th Panzer, their str
ongest armored division in the West, to move from Pas-de-Calais to attack the Normandy bridgehead.
To counter this move, Eisenhower authorized one of the Allies’ most successful double agents, Juan Pujol Garcia, code-named Garbo, to reinforce the deception of Operation FORTITUDE that the current Normandy attack was a diversion. Shortly after midnight Garbo radioed his German contact, “This is the fake, you have to believe me.”5
At 7:30 a.m. on the morning of June 10, Jodl, Hitler's chief of staff, telephoned the headquarters of Rundstedt in Paris. Since he was still asleep, Rundstedt's operation officer General Bodo Zimmermann took the call. Jodl told him that Hitler had received unimpeachable information that Pas-de-Calais was about to be invaded. Therefore, Hitler fatefully had canceled the all-out reinforcement of Normandy. All units en route to Normandy from Pas-de-Calais were to immediately return to their original positions. Later Zimmermann recalled that this was “the decision that lost the war for Germany.”6
Rommel had to counterattack with only piecemeal reinforcements. Early on June 8 he ordered the Twenty-First Panzer Lehr Division and Twelfth Panzer Division to attack side by side in order to pierce the Allied front line between Bayeux and Caen. (See Map 8.)
Unexpectedly that same day, General Marcks was given the entire Allied plan of operations from D-Day onward. They were found on a dead American beachmaster's body in a shell-riddled landing craft on the Vire River. Marcks sent them immediately to Rommel and Rundstedt.
But what good were the enemy plans if Rommel lacked the forces to foil them? It proved easier to order the decisive counterattack than deliver it. The Twelfth Panzer Division had arrived but was so short of fuel, it could not attack. Around Caen, the Twenty-First Panzer waged a bitter battle with the Third British Division. The Panzer Lehr was still struggling in from Chartres badly decimated by Allied fighter-bombers that succeeded in wounding its commander, General Bayerlein.7
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