Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (11 page)

Rommel’s achievement in galvanizing the building of coastal
defences in the spring of 1944 was very real. But he shared the high command’s indecision and lack of grip in allowing resources to be wasted building fortifications in all manner of places where it was absurd to imagine that an invasion could occur. All along the 3,000 miles of occupied coastline, bunkers were constructed, positions dug. German perceptions were much blunted by the incompetence of FHW, the western intelligence arm of OKW, the supreme command. While the eastern branch was brilliantly run
by Reinhard Gehlen, the western was in the hands of Colonel Baron Alexis von Roenne. Roenne had built his reputation on a confident prediction in 1939 that the French and British armies would not attack in the west while Germany was disposing of Poland, and on his advocacy of the great Sedan thrust in May 1940. But in 1944, he was wrong on almost every vital intelligence issue. Although he never took the bait of an Allied threat to Norway, he was deceived by FORTITUDE’s fantasy invasion force for the Pas de Calais. The Allies had placed General Sir Andrew Thorne in command of a fictitious British Fourth Army in Scotland, with wireless traffic to simulate a II Corps based around Stirling and a VII Corps around Dundee. But the central role in the deception operation was that of Patton, commanding the fantasy 1st US Army Group in south-east England, its order of battle greater even than 21st Army Group, with a massive array of dummy landing craft, vehicles, camps and wireless communications provided by the American 3103rd Signals Service Battalion in support. MI5 and the British ‘XX Committee’ were directing the operations of 20 captured or ‘turned’ German agents, nine of these in radio contact with Canaris’s controllers in Germany or Portugal, the remainder communicating by secret writing through the mail. The scepticism of many senior American officers about FORTITUDE was compounded by their necessary ignorance of the brilliant ‘XX Committee’ operation. But the leading historian of wartime deception has written of ‘the strange reluctance among the Americans to accept that it was part of modern warfare – all the more strange since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a successful deceptive operation of the greatest magnitude.’
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Colonel W. A. Harris, the Americans’ principal deception expert, was converted to belief in the value of FORTITUDE only after its success. But it is only just to concede that before the triumph of June 1944, Allied deception operations in Europe had been notably less successful than those in the Middle East. In 1943, some elaborate deceptions had been created to delude the enemy about Allied intentions, which caused OKW to move not a single man or tank.

In the wake of Germany’s defeat, some bitter German commanders argued that Colonel von Roenne, one of the anti-Hitler plotters, deliberately misled them about Allied intentions. Yet it is too simplistic merely to compare the success of Allied intelligence with the failure of that of Germany, and seek conspiratorial explanations. The Allies’ success depended overwhelmingly upon intelligence provided by Ultra, the kind of inspired good fortune that comes to a waning nation seldom in a century. The record of the British Secret Intelligence Service in gaining useful information about Germany from agents was lamentable. For all the nonsense written in recent years about the American wartime OSS and its chief William Donovan, their real profits from agent networks were negligible by comparison with those from decrypts. If the Allies’ huge achievement in breaking the Enigma and the Japanese Magic ciphers is set aside, their agent-dependent intelligence operations appear unimpressive. There is no decisive evidence one way or the other about whether the anti-Hitler conspirators deliberately distorted German intelligence analysis. But it remains easier to believe that OKW’s men were simply wrong.

Hitler’s manic suspicion of his generals and his obsession with dividing authority among them to deny overall power to any one, made for a cumbersome command structure in France. In Paris, the dour, cynical, unbending von Rundstedt presided as Commander-in-Chief. ‘By this time his arteries were hardening,’ said Brigadier Williams,
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Montgomery’s principal analyst of the German army, ‘but they were pretty formidable arteries.’ At Army Group B’s headquarters at La Roche Guyon, Erwin Rommel was to be responsible for directing the battle against the invaders. Yet Rommel was denied direct control of the panzer divisions of OKW reserve, and Hitler was correct in believing that his field-marshal’s ability to dominate the battlefield was now deeply flawed by doubt that victory was even possible. Always highly strung, mercurial, that spring Rommel wavered between outbursts of buoyant confidence and deep depression. ‘If I were doing the invasion,’ he said laconically to his staff one morning, ‘I should be at the Rhine in
fourteen days.’
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His driving energy was undiminished. His ability to spend hours racing from unit to unit along the coast, designing positions, hastening the erection of beach defences and glider obstacles – ‘Rommel’s asparagus’ – still aroused the wonder of his staff. But he was no longer the Desert Fox, the supremely confident Panzer leader of 1941–42. Too many defeats had intervened. Now under his command in northern France were the coastal divisions of Seventh Army in Normandy and Fifteenth Army in the Pas de Calais, together with Geyr von Schweppenburg’s Panzer Group West. But while the Allies deliberated about how far Hitler would allow his generals to fight the battle in their own fashion, the Führer had already placed fatal constraints upon them. Rommel was not permitted to deploy the panzer divisions on the coast – a disposition he believed vital in view of the Allied air threat to any movement of forces – and of his armour, only 21st Panzer stood within immediate reach of the beaches, south of Caen. Had Rommel’s request to place a second panzer division near St Lo been granted, the consequences for the American landings on D-Day would have been incalculable, conceivably decisive. If the Allies gained a foothold, Rommel’s preference was to withdraw to a river line to hold them. Hitler’s absolute determination to yield no ground precluded this. Everything would hinge upon the German’s ability to halt the Allies upon the beaches. If they failed in this, the generals understood perfectly that their only choice lay between skilful retreat and inexorable destruction.

The men of the German army in France in June 1944 were sustained by a compound of fatalism and blind faith. Above all, perhaps, for most there was a sense of unreality, a comforting impossibility about the notion that their stretch of windswept dunes, their familiar billets and battery positions, should be chosen above all others by the Allies to become one of the great battlefields of history. ‘It wasn’t in our interests to think too much about our feelings,’ a staff officer of 21st Panzer Division, Captain
Eberhard Wagemann, said drily. ‘We were conscious that neither our men nor our tanks were good enough.’ The troops of the Division had little confidence in its commander, General Feuchtinger; Rommel still thought well of him, but this opinion was rapidly to change. 21st Panzer retained a core of veterans from its great days in Africa, but had been made up to strength with drafts of very moderate quality, and was equipped with substantial quantities of French and locally-modified equipment. Yet this division, deployed around Caen, would be the first German armoured formation to sustain the shock of the Allied landings.

‘We no longer expected total victory,’ said Sergeant Helmut Gunther of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers, ‘but we still felt an absolute sense of loyalty. In Russia we had fought men against men. We knew that in Normandy it would be men against machines.’
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A bank trainee before the war, Gunther volunteered in September 1939 at the age of 20, fought across Europe until he was evacuated with frostbite before Moscow, and later served as an infantry instructor before being posted to the Panzergrenadiers in January 1944. Now, as a platoon commander in the reconnaissance battalion, he was training the big draft of 18-year-olds which had reached the unit, many of them conscripts.

One May morning, Rommel visited the 1716th Artillery Regiment in their positions around Ouistreham. He told the assembled circle of battery officers: ‘If they come, they’ll come here.’
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Lieutenant Rudolf Schaaf did not really believe him. Twice wounded in the leg in Russia, Schaaf was one of many officers and men posted to France because they were unfit for further duty in the east – he walked with a pronounced limp. He and most of his comrades were enjoying their time in France, with plenty to eat and drink, all of it cheap. Above all, they were thankful to be out of the east. ‘The soldiers did as little work as possible,’ he said, ‘and we were too busy putting up wire and planting “Rommel’s asparagus” to have much time for training.’
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Private Heinz Walz, a jovial Swabian shopkeeper serving as a signaller with the 266th Artillery in the eastern Cotentin, was dismayed to hear at the beginning of
June that there was to be yet another comb-out of his unit for men fit to be transferred to the eastern front. He had already served in Russia with a labour unit, and knew that he would be an obvious candidate for posting. The abrupt arrival of the Allies narrowly saved him from that.

There was a wide gulf between the men of the coastal divisions – at best cynical about their role, at worst openly defeatist – and those of the crack units. Sergeant Hans Stober of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers, a 22-year-old veteran of the east, was sent on an anti-gas course to St Lô, where he found himself alongside men of Seventh Army. The coastal troops distanced themselves from the likes of Stober, although contrary to myth there was no general animosity between soldiers of the SS and the Wehrmacht. The Russians, especially, maintained a stolid silence. Stober was amused to meet one man whom he himself had taken prisoner in 1941. A farmer’s son from east Prussia, the sergeant understood that the invasion would be the decisive battle of the war. Like many men on both sides of the Channel, he found that the greatest strain was the interminable waiting for the blow to fall.

Lieutenant Walter Kruger, a signals officer with 12th SS Panzer, was an SS man in the classic mould, asserting his ‘absolute confidence in victory from first to last’.
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The troops of this, the Hitler Youth division, were to prove the most determined and fanatical opponents facing the Allied armies. ‘They had received a proper training in the Hitler Youth,’ said Kruger proudly. ‘They had a sense of order, discipline. They knew how to sing!’ They had practised repeatedly the advance from their camps near Evreux to the Normandy coast. Thinking nothing of the air threat, they confidently expected to be engaged within seven hours of a movement order. Their principal problem was the lack of fuel, which hampered training, and caused such petty restrictions as the divisional mail collection being conducted by horse and cart.

In the last week of May, Kruger was one of 60 officers from his division who found themselves cursorily summoned to divisional headquarters, apprehensive about the cause. To their
astonishment, they arrived to find all their wives gathered, brought up from Germany on the orders of General Fritz Witt, their commander. ‘Since there is going to be no leave for anybody from now on,’ said Witt, ‘you can all go to Paris for two days and then say goodbye at the Gare de l’Est.’ Kruger told his wife Martha that it was obvious that they were ‘for it’. He gave her all his personal possessions to take home to Germany. ‘They told us that the first five days would be critical. If we could not defeat the landings by then, it would be impossible.’

Much depended upon the performance of 12th SS Panzer and the other nine armoured divisions in France. General Guderian, Inspector-General of Armoured Forces, wrote: ‘All hopes of successful defence were based upon these.’
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Lieutenant-Colonel Kurt Kauffmann, Operations Officer of Panzer Lehr, the finest tank formation in the Wehrmacht, created from the demonstration units of the armoured corps, believed that the invasion could be defeated. Despite Panzer Lehr’s lack of opportunity to exercise as a formation, 75 per cent of its men were veterans and it was superbly equipped. Kauffmann’s chief worry concerned the performance of its commander, General Fritz Bayerlein: ‘He was a very good soldier, but he was worn out. In Normandy he showed himself nervous and weak.’
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Through those last weeks before 6 June, the men of the coastal units dutifully laid yet more concrete and field telephone wires, pottered between the minefields carrying their little cans of milk from the local farms, hung their washing to dry on the edge of the bunkers, and cherished their hopes that the Tommies and the Americans might come somewhere else. If high morale means the motivation to give everything for a cause or an objective, few of them possessed it. Their senior officers were haunted by the knowledge that they commanded forces inadequate for the task they might face. The highest hope of most of their men was to survive the war. For few was it to be fulfilled.