Drawing on his experience in North Africa, Rommel told his chief engineer officer, Gen. Wilhelm Meise, that Allied control of the air would prevent the movement of German reinforcements to the battle area, so “Our only possible chance will be at the beaches—that’s where the enemy is always weakest.” As a start on building a genuine Atlantic Wall, he said, “I want antipersonnel mines, antitank mines, antiparatroops mines. I want mines to sink ships and mines to sink landing craft. I want some minefields designed so that our infantry can cross them, but no enemy tanks. I want mines that detonate when a wire is tripped; mines that explode when a wire is cut; mines that can be remote controlled, and mines that will blow up when a beam of light is interrupted.”¹³

Rommel predicted that the Allies would launch their invasion with aerial bombings, naval bombardments, and airborne assaults, followed by seaborne landings. No matter how many millions of mines were laid, he felt that the fixed defenses could only hold up the assault, not turn it back; it would take a rapid counterattack on D-Day itself by mobile infantry and panzer divisions to do that. So those units had to be moved close to the coast to be in position to deliver the decisive counterattack.

On this critical issue, Rundstedt disagreed. Rundstedt wanted to let the Allies move inland, then fight the decisive battle in the interior of France, well out of range of the heavy guns of the British and American battleships and cruisers.

This fundamental disagreement would plague the German high command right through to D-Day and beyond. Rundstedt and Rommel were offensive-minded generals, as were all Wehrmacht-trained officers. But they were on the defensive now. German generals never learned to like it, although in a tactical sense they became proficient at it—as the Red Army could attest. In the strategic sense, they never learned the plain lesson the Red Army could have taught them, had they studied Red Army strategy—that a flexible defense that can give under pressure and strike back when the attacker was overextended best suited the conditions of World War II.

Rommel’s riposte, that Allied airpower would make movement inland difficult if not impossible, ignored Rundstedt’s point, that by fighting on the beach the Germans would be putting themselves under the guns of the Allied fleet.

Despite their disagreement, Rommel and Rundstedt got on well together, and in any case they were agreed that the attack would most likely come at the Pas-de-Calais. Rundstedt recommended that Rommel’s Army Group B headquarters be given command of the Fifteenth and Seventh armies, stretching from Holland to the Loire River in southern Brittany. Hitler agreed. On January 15, 1944, Rommel took up his new command.

AT THE END of November 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill and their staffs went to Teheran, Iran, for a meeting with Stalin. The Soviet leader wanted to know about the second front. Roosevelt assured him that the invasion was definitely on for the spring of 1944. It had a code name, selected by Churchill from a list kept by the British chiefs of staff—Overlord. Stalin demanded to know who was in command. Roosevelt replied that the appointment had not yet been made. Stalin said in that case he did not believe the Western Allies were serious about the operation. Roosevelt promised to make the selection in three or four days.

Despite his promise, Roosevelt shrank from the distasteful task of making the decision. His preferred solution—Chief of Staff George Marshall for Overlord, with Eisenhower returning to Washington to become chief of staff of the Army—had little to recommend it. It would make Eisenhower Marshall’s boss, an absurd situation, and—worse—put Eisenhower in a position of giving orders to his old boss, MacArthur, now commander in the Southwest Pacific Theater. Nevertheless, Roosevelt desperately wanted to give Marshall his opportunity to command in the field the army he had raised, equipped, and trained. When the entourage arrived in Cairo, Egypt, in early December, Roosevelt asked Marshall to express his personal preference and thus, the president hoped, make the decision for him. But Marshall replied that while he would gladly serve wherever the president told him to, he would not be the judge in his own case.

Roosevelt reluctantly made his decision. As the last meeting at Cairo was breaking up, Roosevelt asked Marshall to write a message to Stalin for him. As Roosevelt dictated, Marshall wrote, “The immediate appointment of General Eisenhower to command of Overlord operation has been decided upon.”¹⁴

Eisenhower got the most coveted command in the war by default, or so it seemed. In explaining his reasoning afterward, Roosevelt said that he just could not sleep at night with Marshall out of the country. Since the commander had to be an American (because the Americans were contributing three-fourths of the total force committed to Overlord), a process of elimination brought it down to Eisenhower.

But there were manifold positive reasons for Eisenhower’s selection. He had commanded three successful invasions, all of them joint operations involving the British and American air, sea, and land forces. He got on well with the British, and they with him. General Montgomery, already selected as commander of the ground forces committed to Overlord, said of Eisenhower, “His real strength lies in his human qualities. . . . He has the power of drawing the hearts of men towards him as a magnet attracts the bit of metal. He merely has to smile at you, and you trust him at once.”¹⁵