Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

In the west the German defenses had, necessarily, been allowed to run down in order to strengthen the Russian front. While there were a few good divisions in the west, the majority of the German forces there were in units not prepared for combat, and totally lacking in mobility. The men were over-age or very young, physically unfit or convalescing, prepared to serve as occupation police and beach-watchers but quite unfit for real fighting. There was even one division made up almost entirely of men with digestive disorders. Most divisions in the west were only two regiments, and, because they were totally lacking in transport, they were classified as “static” (not fully combatant) units.

Although Hitler had ordered the coast to be fortified, this was done almost nowhere, for lack of concrete and manpower. Allied aerial bombardment increased these lacks; almost a million men were engaged in air defense in Germany itself. Disruption of railway transportation made it difficult to get the supplies that were available to the shore area. In May, for example, with a daily need of 240 carloads of cement for one area, the arrival was 16 a day. When Rommel took over the active defense in the west, he ordered a continuous belt of land mines to be laid, requiring, at a minimum, 50 million mines. Only 6 million were laid. Similarly, sea mines were ordered laid off the coast, plus a renewal of the mid-Channel mines which had been put down in 1943 and were now too old to function properly. The last could not be done at all, while the coastal mines were put down in the wrong area.

The chief German defensive forces were the Fifteenth Army defending the Pas-de-Calais and the Seventh Army farther southwest in Normandy and Brittany. The Germans expected the attack to come in the Pas-de-Calais, since it was closer to England. They continued to believe this, even after D-Day, since they thought that the Normandy landings were merely a diversion preliminary to the main attack farther north. Moreover, the Germans were convinced that the attacks would come just before high tide in order to minimize the width of beach to cross and, accordingly, constructed their obstacles and laid mines down to the half-tide mark only.

Although the Allied cross-Channel attack was not a large one, being only five attack divisions preceded by parts of three airborne divisions, it was beautifully planned, competently carried out, and encountered a number of very lucky chances, especially from the weather.

The desired landing conditions were low tide, just after dawn, following a moonlit night. These occurred only once a month and lasted for only three days. In June 1944 these days were the 5th, 6th, and 7th. Bad weather, making air operations difficult, and impossibly heavy surf forced Eisenhower to postpose the attack on June 5th; but because better weather information, expertly interpreted, showed the Allies that the weather would improve suddenly, the supreme commander ordered the attack to take place on June 6th, at a time when the Germans expected the adverse weather to continue. The two American divisions went ashore on either side of the Vire River near Carentan with “Utah Beach” to the west and “Omaha Beach” (between the Vire and the Drome rivers) to the east. A Canadian and two British divisions went ashore between the Drome and the Orne rivers, in front of Bayeux and Caen. Airborne divisions were dropped inland on either flank of the attack area to hold up any German counterthrust, and another airborne division was dropped inside Utah Beach to seize the causeways which crossed the lagoons inside the beach. Tactical surprise was achieved at all points, so completely, in fact, that at Omaha Beach the strongest German coastal battery in the west was found unmanned and unguarded. Except at Omaha Beach, where high bluffs had to be scaled under fire, the landings were immediately successful. At Omaha the issue hung on the balance into the second day. As a result, 2,000 casualties were suffered at Omaha compared to 200 at Utah Beach.

As soon as the landings were established, men and equipment were poured into the beachheads. A great gale of June 19th-23rd stopped all unloading for two days and destroyed the American artificial harbor at Omaha, but, by the time the gale began, there had been put ashore 629,000 men, 95,000 vehicles, and 218,000 tons of supplies. The millionth man landed on July 6th, just a month after the first.

In spite of this success, the Allied forces were hemmed in in Normandy for two months. On the left, the British forces under the cautious Montgomery were unable to take Caen; the American forces under General Bradley were stopped in the center before Saint-Lǒ. Only on the right was movement possible, to cross the peninsula (June 18th) and turn westward to storm and capture Cherbourg. This great seaport, taken with its 40,000 German troops on June 27th, was so devastated that it could not be brought into service until late in August, and Allied supplies continued to come in over the Normandy beaches.

In the first 18 days of July, Caen and Saint-Lǒ were taken after severe fighting initiated by a terrific aerial bombardment by over 2,200 planes which dropped 7,000 tons of explosives on one town and 4,000 on the other. Both towns were wrecked, but the Allied forces were still unable to move, meeting furious resistance from German forces as they fought their way across field after field, each bordered by an impenetrable hedgerow.

As the Allies crept forward in this way, two sensational events occurred elsewhere in western Europe. On June 15th the first of Hitler’s “vengeance weapons,” the V-1, was fired from Pas-de-Calais on London. This was a small jet-propelled, pilotless, and automatically guided plane, moving at 400 miles per hour and carrying a one-ton explosive charge. About 8,000 of these were fired in 80 days, but the defense was steadily improved so that, late in August, 90 percent were being stopped before they reached London. Nevertheless, 2,300 reached their targets, inflicting over 20,000 casualties, one-quarter of them fatal, and forcing a million women and children to evacuate the city.

On September 8, 1944, the V-1 was replaced by the much superior V-2, a rocket which could not be intercepted because it moved faster than sound. A total of 1,050 of these weapons fell on England before the end of the war, killing over 2,700 persons and injuring three times that number. On the whole these weapons, while frightening, used up large German resources and energies but achieved no military results.

Equally spectacular was the attempt to assassinate Hitler by exploding a bomb concealed in a briefcase beside his chair at his headquarters in East Prussia. This was the last of several attempts of this kind, made by the same group which had tried in vain to negotiate with Chamberlain, Halifax, and Churchill in September 1938. The conspirators, mostly from the conservative upper classes, consisted chiefly of army officers, with a minority of civilian and diplomatic leaders. The chief military figures were Generals Ludwig Beck, Georg Thomas, Erwin von Witzleben, Karl von Stuelpnagel, and others; the chief civilian leader was Carl Goerdeler, one-time mayor of Leipzig; the chief intellectual figure was Count Helmut von Moltke, son of the German commander in chief of 1914; the leading diplomatic figures were the brothers Kordt, Theodor and Erich, the first in the London Embassy, while the second headed Ribbentrop’s office in the Foreign Ministry; among those linked with the conspiracies in an ambiguous fashion were Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of Military Counterintelligence, and Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s personal interpreter.

This group for years discussed ways of getting rid of Hitler and what should be done with Germany afterward. Sporadically they made attempts to kill the Führer. All of these were unsuccessful because of a combination of bad luck, lack of resolution, and Hitler’s extraordinary intuition.