 in disguise’. For the bulk of the German forces in the West was drawn there, while arriving bit by bit owing to divided views in their High Command and constant hindrance from the vast allied force that dominated the sky. The panzer divisions, arriving first and used to plug gaps, were ground down first—thus depriving the enemy of the mobile arm he needed when it came to fighting in the open country. The very toughness of the resistance that so much delayed the Allies’ break-out ensured them a clear path through France once they broke out.
The Allies would have had no chance of ever getting established ashore but for their complete supremacy in the air. They owed much to the support from naval gunfire, but the decisive factor was the paralysing effect of the Allied air forces, directed by Air Chief Marshall Tedder, Eisenhower’s deputy as Supreme Commander. By smashing most of the bridges over the Seine on the east and over the Loire on the south, they turned the Normandy battle-zone into a strategic isolation-zone. The German reserves had to make long detours, and were constantly harried on the march, that they suffered endless delays and only arrived in driblets.
But almost as much was owed to a conflict of ideas on the German side–between Hitler and his generals, and among the generals themselves. Initially, the German’s main handicap was that they had 3,000 miles of coastline to cover—from Holland, round the shores of France to the Italian mountain frontier. Of their fifty-eight divisions, half were of a static type, and anchored to sectors of that long coastline. But the other half was field divisions, and of these, the ten panzer divisions were highly mobile. That provided the enemy with the possibility of concentrating an overwhelming superiority to throw the invaders back into the sea before they became established and grew too strong for eviction.
On D-Day the one panzer division that was in Normandy, and near the stretch where the Allies landed, succeeded in frustrating Montgomery’s hope of capturing the key-point of Caen that day. Part of it actually pierced the British front and drove through to the beach, but the thrust was too small to have a wide effect. If even the three panzer divisions, out of ten, that were on the scene by the fourth day had been at hand and able to intervene on D-Day, the Allied footholds could have been dislodged before they were joined up and consolidated. But any such strong and prompt counterstroke was frustrated by discord in the German Command, both about the probable site of the invasion and the method of meeting it.
Before the event, Hitler’s intuition proved better than his generals’ calculation in gauging where the Allies would land. After the landing, however, his continual interference and rigid control deprived them of the chance of retrieving the situation, and eventually led to disaster.
Field-Marshall von Rundstedt, the Commander-in-Chief in the West, thought the invasion would come across the narrower part of the Channel, between Calais and Dieppe. His view was based on a conviction that this course was the more correct strategy for the Allies to follow. But it was fostered by a lack of information. Nothing important leaked out from the tight-lipped island where the invasion armies were assembling.
Rundstedt’s Chief of Staff, General Blumentritt, later related in interrogation how badly baffled was the German Intelligence: Very little reliable news came out of England. (Intelligence) gave us reports of where, broadly, the British and American forces were assembling in Southern England—there were a small number of German agents in England who reported by wireless transmitting sets what they observed. But they found out very little beyond that . . . nothing we learnt gave us a definite clue where the invasion was actually coming.
Hitler, however, had a ‘hunch’ about Normandy. From March onwards he sent his generals repeated warnings about the possibility of a landing between Caen and Cherbourg. How did he arrive at that conclusion, which proved correct? General Warlimon