Thus the area around Calais became by far the strongest fortified portion of the Kanalküste (Channel coast), and in 1944 the location of by far the greatest concentration of German armor in the West. It was there that the Atlantic Wall came closest to what German propaganda claimed it was, an impregnable fortress.
HE WAS A strange man, the German führer. In the view of the deputy chief of operations at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), Gen. Walter Warlimont, “He knew the location of the defenses in detail better than any single army officer.” Hitler’s passion for detail was astonishing. On one occasion, he pointed out that there were two fewer antiaircraft guns on the Channel Islands than had been there the previous week. The officer responsible for this supposed reduction was punished. It turned out to have been a miscount.
Hitler spent hours studying the maps showing German installations along the Atlantic Wall. He demanded reports on building progress, the thickness of the concrete, the kind of concrete used, the system used to put in the steel reinforcement—these reports often ran to more than ten pages.14 But, after ordering the creation of the greatest fortification in history, he never bothered to inspect any part of it. After leaving Paris in triumph in the summer of 1940, he did not set foot on French soil again until mid-June 1944. Yet he declared this was the decisive theater!
I. The jets were powered by synthetic fuel, one source of which was the German 1944 potato crop made into alcohol. The German people paid a terrible price in 1945 for this madness.