The Germans in Normandy

Richard Hargreaves

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526760678
• eBook ISBN: 9781781594704
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Seconda guerra mondiale

This account of the D-Day invasion—from the German point of view—includes maps and photos.
 
The Allied invasion of Northern France was the greatest combined operation in the history of warfare. Up until now, it has been recorded from the attackers' point of view—whereas the defenders' angle has been largely ignored.
 
While the Germans knew an invasion was inevitable, no one knew where or when it would fall. Those manning Hitler's mighty Atlantic Wall may have felt secure in their bunkers, but they had no conception of the fury and fire that was about to break. After the initial assaults of June established an Allied bridgehead, a state of stalemate prevailed. The Germans fought with great courage—hindered by lack of supplies and overwhelming Allied control of the air. This book describes the catastrophe that followed, in a unique look at the war from the losing side.

Chapter 1

Every Night We Wait for Tommy

Day after day nothing. Nothing happened but the waves coming and going, coming and going.

Hauptmann Joachim Lindner

In the tiny village of Mollière d’Aval on the southern bank of the Somme estuary, Gefreiter Heinrich Böll penned a letter to his wife. Böll was a prodigious writer. Daily, almost without fail, he would write to his beloved Annemarie, a schoolteacher. Only writing and the arrival of the post alleviated the boredom for Böll, a reluctant soldier at best. Up at midday, the soldier and his comrades would eat, exercise, work on their bunker and surrounding positions and from 10 p.m. take it in turns to stand watch over the Atlantic in four-hour shifts. Böll had spent three years on and off in France, first standing watch in a bunker on the Cap Gris Nez at the narrowest point on the English Channel, now on the Somme estuary. It was monotonous, tedious. The tension gnawed at the men’s nerves. ‘If just once we could come face to face with the English it would be something different from this waiting, eternal waiting,’ twenty-five year old Böll wrote to his wife Annemarie in August 1943. ‘If the English tried to attack here on the Channel and suffered a defeat, it might perhaps bring about a decisive change in this war. Given the state of our fortifications right here they probably won’t dare. But who knows how everything will turn out.’¹

For almost four years, soldiers like Heinrich Böll ‘lived like a god in France’. France was a backwater, far from the horrors of the Eastern Front, the sands of Africa, the mountains of Italy and snows of Finland. But by the spring of 1944, the ordinary German soldier, the Landser, knew that the days of his comparatively idyllic existence were drawing to a close.

There was evidence along the French coastline. In less than six months 500,000 obstacles, wooden and metal crosses, had been installed on the beaches, plus more than six million mines. Overlooking them on the cliffs the coast was peppered with machine-gun nests, linked by trenches and hundreds of miles of barbed wire, interspersed with mighty concrete bunkers housing artillery pieces and heavy machine guns. And beyond them, a belt of mines 1,000 yards wide, low-lying land flooded to restrict movements, concrete anti-tank obstacles – dragon’s teeth – fields covered with booby traps; stakes and other obstacles fitted with obsolete shells on the tip to prevent airborne landings.

There was evidence far beyond the coast; in the railway stations and junctions, bridges, marshalling yards, supply depots and ammunition dumps, gun emplacements and batteries, radar and radio sites. In the opening months of 1944, the infrastructure of the German Army in France was subjected to systematic destruction by the Allied air forces. And not just the infrastructure. In sweeps of up to 750 aircraft at a time, low-flying Jabos – Jagdbomber, fighter-bombers – ranged across northwest France seemingly at will, attacking trucks, trains and carriages. By the time June arrived, more than 76,000 tons of bombs had been dropped, almost cutting off western France from the rest of the Third Reich.

There was less tangible evidence; a soldier’s natural instinct. Near Bayeux, artillery commander Major Werner Pluskat gathered his men for one of his regular pep talks. But this one, machine gunner Hein Severloh remembered, was different, darker, more fatalistic:

Pluskat...talked about fulfilling our duty and used the usual phrases to motivate us, but his words suggested an imminent attack. Usually, such addresses finished with the phrase ‘to the last drop of blood’, indicating to soldiers that they should not surrender, but Pluskat used a phrase he had never uttered before at the end of his speech: A rotting German corpse can no longer save its Fatherland.²

A few miles to the west near the small Norman coastal town of Colleville, eighteen year old Franz Gockel gazed across the English Channel. Home to Gockel was a cramped bunker, its ceiling reinforced by more than six feet of concrete, completed as May drew to a close. ‘Only once or twice a week would two German aircraft be seen flying along the coast,’ Gockel recalled bitterly, then added with the Landser’s typical black sense of humour: ‘We named them Max and Moritz.’ But there was a growing sense of urgency along the Normandy coastline. New gun positions were going up, real and dummy. The alert status was raised. Veterans not much older than Gockel were certain. ‘Something’s in the air,’ they muttered.³

In the balmy days of the summer of 1940 there had been no thought of an invasion in the minds of Germany’s soldiers basking in the glory of victory over their traditional foe. The German Army in the west settled down to the task of occupation. At its moment of triumph, it stood just short of 100 divisions strong, ten of them armoured. There was an ‘aura of invincibility’ about the Wehrmacht; and an air of finality. The German Army’s command declared confidently: ‘With the decisive success in the west the tasks assigned to the Army here are completed for the time being.’⁴

Campaigns in the Balkans, North Africa and Russia soon drained the reservoir of forces in the west. When the Wehrmacht advanced into the Soviet Union in June 1941, just thirty-seven second-rate divisions, not a single armoured one among them, guarded the western shores. By the following spring, the number had dropped to a mere two dozen, holding the coast and interior of the Netherlands, Belgium and France, from the German border to the Spanish frontier. Quantity wasn’t the only problem facing Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Oberbefehlshaber West – Supreme Commander, West – known simply as OB West. Quality was also lacking: his divisions were second-rate, units exhausted by the fighting in Russia re-forming, or new formations as yet unfit for battle.

Gerd von Rundstedt had arrived in France in March 1942 to take over command of the German Army in the West. Aristocratic, irascible, aged – he was now sixty-six – Rundstedt was the doyen of Germany’s Officer Corps, a soldier for fifty-two years. He had led groups of armies to victory across Poland and France, then into the Ukraine, until he was sacked for retreating with his men at the gateway to the Caucasus in November 1941.

His unemployment had been brief. Never a Nazi – the field marshal frequently referred to Hitler as ‘the Bohemian lance corporal’ - Rundstedt would also never act against the regime. And that made him reliable – and employable. When called upon to safeguard the west against the invader Adolf Hitler knew would come across the Channel, von Rundstedt gushed: ‘Mein Führer, whatever you order, I shall do to my last breath.’

Rundstedt took up his post as OB West, at his headquarters buried beneath a slope under a school in the suburb of St Germain-en-Laye in the north-west quarter of the French capital. The marshal himself lived in a nearby home commandeered from its owner. He enjoyed the lifestyle of his command in France. Rundstedt lacked the drive of many of his fellow marshals; he rose in mid-morning and never worked beyond 8 p.m., but he also lived a modest life beyond his fondness for cigars and alcohol. As a commander, the marshal rarely made a decision on the battlefield – and never acted without consulting his staff – yet by all accounts Rundstedt was sharp, had an excellent grasp of strategy and a photographic memory. His staff were unusually fond of the veteran marshal they dubbed ‘the last knight’. They were convinced his name alone ‘influenced the morale and behaviour of his troops as did no other’.

The elderly field marshal quickly found his time in France frustrating; ‘waiting for the “others”’ gnawed at his nerves. Worse still, Rundstedt found he had no authority, despite his grandiose title. Hitler and his closest advisers on the Wehrmacht High Command, Oberkommando des Wehrmacht or OKW, oversaw operations in the west, while command of the air and naval units in his domain remained firmly in the hands of the Luftwaffe and German Navy, the Kriegsmarine. ‘You see the guard posted outside,’ Rundstedt once complained. ‘If I want to post him on the other side of the house, I must first ask permission of Berchtesgaden.’⁵

With victories seemingly being won daily in Russia during the summer of 1941 and 1942, occupation troops left behind in France settled into a routine which was relaxed – ‘a carefree life’ by comparison with the rest of the Reich. ‘There was entertainment,’ one sailor stationed in Cherbourg recalled. ‘Theatre tickets at the ready. Numerous soldiers’ billets and convalescence homes had a holiday atmosphere.’ It was hardly surprising, then, that Landsers in Russia, Italy and North Africa often accused their counterparts of ‘Leben wie Gott in Frankreich’ – living like a god in France. But the German soldier billeted in the west did not live like a god. Visits to Paris, for example, were severely restricted, not merely because the city offered so many temptations; Nazi leaders didn’t want German soldiers ‘overrunning’ the French capital, upsetting French sensibilities. Contact with the French was limited, such that one infantryman complained: ‘We didn’t sample the culture of France.’ Slowly but surely, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels observed, life in France was eating at the soul of the German soldier. ‘Not once has living in France been good for troops on occupation duties. What I hear about our occupation forces there is anything but flattering.’ A ‘long rest period in a rich land’, one division’s war diarist complained, was not good for the discipline of the German soldier. As the occupation dragged on, inactivity, alcohol – which invariably played ‘a key role’ – and the temptations of French girls, led to a worrying rise in attacks, rapes, assaults and misdemeanours. Duties were monotonous; the endless Wacht am Kanal – guard over the Channel. Lethargy permeated every command, every army, every corps, division, regiment and battalion. Hauptmann Joachim Lindner, of 302nd Infantry Division holding the coast around Dieppe, captured the mood perfectly. ‘Day after day nothing,’ he complained. ‘We had a problem with the men guarding the coast, the poor man walking with his rifle along the cliffs. Nothing happened but the waves coming and going, coming and going.’ Heinrich Böll wrote home in a similar vein: ‘We wait, every night we wait for Tommy, but he doesn’t seem to want to come yet. I am really curious to see if he will come in the end.’⁶

Only once did ‘Tommy’ come in any strength. He came at Dieppe. His aim was not to invade, at least not permanently. His aim was to see if he could forge a bridgehead, if he could seize a port in occupied territory. The raid on 19 August 1942 failed almost entirely, especially around the port itself. Tanks trundled on to the beach, but got no further. They could not get around the high sea wall and, under murderous German fire, engineers could not blow a hole in the barrier. By mid-morning it was clear the landing had failed, and by 2 p.m. it was all over. An army major watched as the Allied warships laid down a thick smokescreen and turned to head back to Britain, then he ventured down to the water’s edge to begin rounding up prisoners. ‘In my battalion’s sector alone prisoners were brought in in their thousands,’ the major wrote. ‘All Canadians, young, well-built chaps.’ On the beach were shot-up tanks and landing craft. ‘Between them hundreds of dead and the badly wounded,’ the major observed. ‘I have not witnessed images more terrible. In one landing craft the entire crew of about forty men had been wiped out by a direct hit. On the water we could see...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations used in references
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Every Night We Wait for Tommy
• Chapter 2 - The Last Opportunity to Turn the Tide
• Chapter 3 - My God, it’s the Invasion
• Chapter 4 - Up Against an Irresistible Force
• Chapter 5 - Approaching a Catastrophe
• Chapter 6 - Further Sacrifices Cannot Change Anything
• Chapter 7 - The Unequal Struggle
• Chapter 8 - The Blackest Day in German History
• Chapter 9 - Only the Dead Can Now Hold the Line
• Chapter 10 - Death has Reaped a Terrible Harvest
• Chapter 11 - Out-Generalled and Out-Fought
• Chapter 12 - This Cannot be the End
• Bibliography
• Index