To which Rommel replied, “Our friends from the East cannot imagine what they’re in for here. It’s not a matter of fanatical hordes to be driven forward in masses against our line, with no regard for casualties and little recourse to tactical craft; here we are facing an enemy who applies all his native intelligence to the use of his many technical resources, who spares no expenditure of material and whose every operation goes its course as though it had been the subject of repeated rehearsal.”⁹

He was right in his analysis of the American army but, in the view of Gen. Baron Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, badly wrong in his conclusion about how to meet the attack. Schweppenburg commanded Panzer Group West. When Rommel began moving the 2nd Panzer Division closer to the coast, north of Amiens, Schweppenburg protested. Rommel insisted and put the leading battle group right on the coast, dug in. He growled to Admiral Ruge, “The panzer divisions are going to be moved forward, whether they like it or not!”¹⁰

Shortly thereafter, an angry General Schweppenburg, accompanied by Hitler’s panzer expert, Gen. Heinz Guderian, confronted Rommel. The latter blandly told them he intended to dig in every tank on the coastline. Guderian was shocked. He insisted that “the very strength of panzer formations lies in their firepower and mobility.” He advised Rommel to pull the tanks back out of range of Allied naval guns. He insisted that the lesson from the Sicily and Salerno landings was crystal clear—the Germans could not fight a decisive battle while they were under those naval guns. Guderian knew that an amphibious force is not at its most vulnerable when it is half ashore, half at sea. It is at its most powerful at that time, thanks to those big naval guns. He urged Rommel to think in terms of a counteroffensive launched on the Wehrmacht’s terms, at some choke point inland when the enemy was overstretched. That was the way the Russians did it, with great success, as Guderian could testify.

Rommel would not budge. “If you leave the panzer divisions in the rear,” he warned, “they will never get forward. Once the invasion begins, enemy air power will stop everything from moving.”¹¹

When Guderian reported to Hitler, he recommended pulling back and fighting inland, which specifically meant keeping command and control of the panzer divisions out of Rommel’s hands. Hitler tried a weak-kneed, half-hearted compromise. On May 7, he turned over three panzer divisions to Rommel, the 2nd, 21st, and 116th. The other four panzer divisions were to be held inland. Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of OKW, assured Rommel that, although the four divisions were under OKW’s control, they “will be released for operations—without further application by yourself—the moment we can be certain about the enemy’s intentions and focus of attack.”¹²

That sounded reasonable, but skipped over this fact: the leadership principle had led to a situation in which a German panzer division commander would in a crisis look to not one man but three for his orders—Rommel, Rundstedt, Hitler. Jodl’s sensible-sounding words also ignored the failure to choose between competing strategies. Hitler backed neither Rommel nor the Schweppenburg/Guderian team. Just as he could not trust people, neither could he trust one plan over another. He split his resources and invited defeat in detail.

Rommel got his three panzer divisions up as close as he could, especially the 21st, which went into camp around Caen. The 21st had been Rommel’s favorite in Africa, where it had been decimated. It had been rebuilt around a cadre of former officers, including Col. Hans von Luck. Its commander was Gen. Edgar Feuchtinger, whose qualifications for the job were that he had organized the military displays at the annual Party rallies. He had no combat experience, knew nothing of tanks. According to Luck, Feuchtinger “was a live and let live person. He was fond of all the good things of life, for which Paris was a natural attraction.” He was wise enough to leave the reality of command in the hands of his immediate subordinates.¹³

Rommel put the other two panzer divisions under his command, the 12th SS and Panzer Lehr, equally distant from Calais and Calvados. They were not close enough to get to the beaches in a few hours, however, a reflection of the immense front line the Germans had to cover. General Fritz Bayerlein, commanding Panzer Lehr, described the division as “the best equipped panzer division that Germany ever had. It was 100 percent armored; even the infantry was completely armored.” When he took the command, Guderian told him, “With this division alone, you must throw the Allies into the sea. Your objective is the coast—no, not the coast, it is the sea.”

Aside from the three panzer divisions, Rommel’s forces had little mobility. Rundstedt, true to his analysis that fighting a mobile battle inland was preferable to fighting a pitched battle from fixed fortifications, put most of his effort in the first five months of 1944 into improving transport facilities for the coastal divisions. But Rundstedt’s efforts to put wheels under his army were offset by Rommel’s insistence on digging in every available soldier and gun along the coast. Anyway, as Gordon Harrison observes, “German notions of mobility in the west in 1944 hardly corresponded to American concepts of a motorized army.” German “mobile” units had, at best, one or two trucks to move essential supplies, with horse-drawn artillery and general transport. The men were listed as “mobile” because they had each got a bicycle.¹⁴

The Wehrmacht of 1944 was a strange army. In the panzer divisions, it had highly mobile forces with superior firepower, absolutely up to date. But it did not have the fuel to sustain operations. Thanks to the Allied bombing campaign against the Romanian oil fields, Germany had desperate fuel shortages. In France, that meant the panzer divisions had to sharply curtail their training. In the infantry divisions, meanwhile, the Wehrmacht of 1944 was almost a replica of the Kaiser’s army of 1918. It was dependent on rail and horse for its supplies, on foot power for movement. In organization, tactics, and doctrine, it was prepared to fight a 1918 battle, just as the Atlantic Wall was an attempt to build a replica of the World War I trench system.

Despite the handicap of inadequate equipment, the German infantry divisions could have been made more mobile through training maneuvers. But so great was Rommel’s obsession with pouring concrete and sticking logs into the tidal flats that he put his fighting men to work building beach obstacles. Challenged by a subordinate who wished to emphasize training, Rommel ordered, “I hereby forbid all training, and demand that every minute be used for work on the beach obstacles. It is on the beaches that the fate of the invasion will be decided, and, what is more, during the first 24 hours.”¹⁵ Even 21st Panzer units around Caen were put to work putting in asparagus.

In March, after the spring thaw had immobilized the armies on the Eastern Front, Hitler began transferring units to the West. Rommel put them into the line where they were most needed. The Cotentin got a new division, the 91st, supposedly mobile, and the 6th Parachute Regiment, commanded by Col. Frederick von der Heydte, a legend for his exploits in Crete. His regiment was an elite, all-volunteer unit. Average age was seventeen and a half (in the 709th Infantry Division on the Cotentin, average age was thirty-six). When he arrived in Normandy, the colonel was shocked by “the mediocrity of the armament and equipment of the German divisions. There were weapons from every land that had fallen into German hands over the past thirty years.” His own regiment had four kinds of grenade launchers and seven types of light machine guns.

Heydte was also shocked when he was shown a document and told to sign. It came from Hitler. He wanted each commander to give his written promise to remain in place, to hold every inch of ground, when the invasion came. Heydte refused to sign; his corps commander simply shrugged.¹⁶

Throughout the Cotentin, by May, Rommel had three divisions, the 243rd, the 709th, and the 91st. Along the Calvados coast he had the 352nd facing Omaha, the 716th at the British beaches, with 21st Panzer around Caen.

This was neither fish nor fowl. The whole point to pouring all that concrete and digging all those trenches along the coast was to check the enemy long enough to allow a concentrated panzer counterattack before the end of D-Day. But with only one division to cover the whole Calvados-Cotentin coastline, and only two to cover the area from Le Havre to Holland, Rommel could not possibly hope to make an early concentrated panzer attack. By denying Rommel command of the tanks, Hitler denied Rommel his strategy. At that point, a less stubborn general might have taken steps to begin implementing the strategy he didn’t believe in but had been forced by circumstances to adopt. Not Rommel. He stuck to a strategy that by his own logic, given available resources, couldn’t work.

On the day the battle would be joined, therefore, the mighty Wehrmacht’s armored divisions would be immobilized not so much by the Allied air forces, or by the Allied navies, or by the Resistance, as by the leadership principle of the Third Reich.

But suppose that Rommel had persuaded Hitler to put the armored divisions under his immediate command. Suppose further that he got lucky and stationed one panzer division in Bayeux, another at Carentan (as according to General Bayerlein, commander of the Panzer Lehr Division, he wanted to do).¹⁷ Then suppose that on D-Day Rommel launched a panzer-led counterattack against the 4th Infantry at Utah and another at Omaha’s left flank and Gold’s right. That surely would have created a crisis and caused some chaos on the landing beaches, as well as many casualties.

But consider the price to the Wehrmacht. With the Allied communications network, including fire-control parties on shore and in the air in radio contact with the navy gunners, the U.S. and Royal navies, supported by Canadian, Norwegian, Polish, and French warships, would have killed every tank in the assault. In other words, Rommel’s most basic idea, to stop the invaders cold on the beach, was flawed. Bringing the panzers down in range of the Allied navies was madness, as Guderian had argued. At Sicily and again at Salerno, German tanks managed to penetrate the Allied lines and get down close to the beach. There they were blasted by Allied destroyers firing point-blank. But Rommel had not been at Sicily or Salerno.

Rundstedt was right; the Germans’ best hope was to fall back from the coast (as the Japanese were learning to do in the Pacific islands) and fight the battle out of range of an overwhelming naval barrage. That would have required depth to the defense, a series of strong points, as in World War I, to fall back on. Had the same amount of labor gone into building defensive positions at every choke point, river crossing, and so forth, as went into building the Atlantic Wall, then the Germans might have held on in France until winter weather closed down operations in 1944. Such a delay would not have won the war for Germany, however, because in the spring of 1945 the Allies would have been able to launch a tremendous air and land bombardment on German lines, culminating in August in an atomic bomb over Berlin.

But that would take time, and meanwhile Germany’s only hope would have come into play. A long winter along the Seine or Somme would have had a terribly depressing effect on Allied morale, given a boost to the German. A long winter along the Seine would have caused Stalin to wonder whether he might not be better off reaching a compromise peace. A long winter would give the Germans time to bring in their secret weapons, most notably the ME 262.

Rommel’s decision to put as much of his strength on the beaches as possible, behind the strongest fortifications possible, was based on his military judgment. Hitler’s decision to approve (partly) Rommel’s concept of the Atlantic Wall was based on his political megalomania. His conqueror’s mentality forbade him giving up any territory without a fight.

Rommel and Hitler made fundamental errors in planning for D-Day, based on faulty judgments. The old man, Field Marshal Rundstedt, who was there for window dressing, was the one who got it right—get out from under those naval guns.

But Rommel and Hitler were land fighters. They were more afraid of airplanes than they were of ships. They looked overhead, instead of out to sea, for danger. They made a mistake.

Dr. Detlef Vogel of the Militargeschichtliches Forschungsamt in Freiburg comments: “It is truly amazing that the senior army commanders, who had once conducted such nimble operations, suddenly wanted to hide behind a rampart.”¹⁸

Equally amazing was the way that Rommel, who had made his reputation as a commander who used brilliant tactics, long-range movements, and lightning strikes, had so completely adopted a defensive posture. On May 11 he visited La Madeleine on Utah Beach. The company commander at the fortification was Lt. Arthur Jahnke, a twenty-three-year-old who had been badly wounded on the Eastern Front. Rommel arrived in his Horch, with accordions stuffed into the trunk; Rommel’s habit was to give an accordion to units that were performing to his satisfaction.

Lieutenant Jahnke and his men did not get an accordion. Rommel was in a bad mood, which got worse as he strode along the dunes, followed by his staff and the hapless Jahnke. His criticism fell like hail: not enough obstacles on the beach, not enough mines around the blockhouse, not enough barbed wire.

Jahnke had enough. He protested, “Marshal sir, I string all the wire I’m sent, but I can’t do more than that.”

“Your hands, lieutenant! I want to see your hands!” Rommel ordered.

Bewildered, Jahnke removed his gloves. At the sight of the deep scratches that disfigured his palms, Rommel softened. “Very well, lieutenant,” he said. “The blood you lost building the fortifications is as precious as what you shed in combat.” As he got back into his Horch, Rommel counseled Jahnke to “keep an eye on each high tide. They surely will come at high tide.”¹⁹

THE ALLIES, MEANWHILE, went ahead with plans that they were sure would work. To them the Atlantic Wall was formidable but by no means impregnable. On April 7, Good Friday, Twenty-first Army Group had completed the overall outline plan and was ready to present it to the division, corps, and army commanders. Montgomery presided over a meeting at his headquarters, St. Paul’s School (of which Montgomery was a graduate). “This exercise,” he began, “is being held for the purpose of putting all general officers of the field armies in possession of the whole outline plan for Overlord, so as to insure mutual understanding and confidence.” He then laid out the plan.

Working from left to right, it called for the British 6th Airborne Division to begin its assault right after midnight, with the objectives of knocking out an enemy battery at Merville, seizing intact the bridges over the Orne River and the Orne Canal, blowing the bridges over the Dives, and generally acting as flank protection. The British 3rd Division, with French and British commandos attached, was to push across Sword Beach, then pass through Ouistreham to capture Caen and Carpiquet airfield. The Canadian 3rd Division was to push across Juno Beach and continue on until it cut the Caen-Bayeux highway. The British 50th Division at Gold had a similar objective, plus taking the small port of Arromanches and the battery at Longues-sur-Mer from the rear.

At Omaha, the U.S. 1st and 29th divisions were to move up the exits, take the villages of Colleville, St.-Laurent, and Vierville, then push inland. Attached ranger battalions were to capture the battery at Pointe-du-Hoc, either by land or sea or both. At Utah, the 4th Infantry was to cross the beach, establish control of the coast road, and move west along the causeways to the high ground inland, ready to wheel to the right to drive for Cherbourg. The 101st Airborne would land southwest of Ste.-Mère-Église to secure the inland side of the causeways and to destroy the bridges in the vicinity of Carentan while seizing others to protect the southern flank at Utah. The 82d Airborne was to land west of St.-Sauveur-le-Vicomte to block the movement of enemy reinforcements into the Cotentin in the western half of the peninsula.

At the briefing, Montgomery acted on the assumption that getting ashore was not the problem. What worried him was staying ashore. He told his subordinates, “Rommel is likely to hold his mobile divisions back from the coast until he is certain where our main effort is being made. He will then concentrate them quickly and strike a hard blow. His static divisions will endeavor to hold on defensively to important ground and act as pivots to the counterattacks. By dusk on D minus 1 the enemy will be certain that the Neptune area [code name for the seaborne portion of Overlord] is to be assaulted in strength. By the evening of D-Day he will know the width of frontage and the approximate number of our assaulting divisions.” Montgomery thought that Rommel would bring two panzer divisions against the lodgment on D plus one; by D plus five it would be six panzer divisions. Protecting and expanding the lodgment area would be more difficult than establishing it.²⁰

WITH THEIR OBJECTIVES set, the generals and colonels went to work at division, regimental, and battalion levels to develop specific plans for getting ashore. As they and their staffs worked through April and into May, Rommel was building, pouring concrete, setting posts. They could not be so confident as Montgomery that getting ashore was the least of their problems. For them, it was the first of their problems, the one that had to be overcome or there would be no more problems.

The plan that emerged ran as follows:

The first regiments to hit the shore would come in on the heels of a preassault air and naval bombardment. It was designed to neutralize known gun positions and demoralize enemy troops. It would begin at midnight, with an RAF attack against coastal batteries from the mouth of the Seine to Cherbourg (1,333 heavy bombers dropping 5,316 tons of bombs). At first light, the U.S. Eighth Air Force would hit enemy beach defenses in the assault area. Strong points at Omaha were due to get hit by 480 B-24s carrying 1,285 tons of bombs. Troops scheduled to go ashore at Omaha were assured that there would be innumerable craters on the beaches, more than enough to provide protection and shelter.

Naval gunfire would commence at sunrise and continue to H minus five minutes (sunrise was at 0558, H-Hour set for 0630). At Omaha, the battleships Texas and Arkansas would fire their ten 14-inch and twelve 12-inch guns, respectively, from eighteen kilometers offshore, concentrating on Pointe-du-Hoc and enemy strong points defending the exits. They would be joined by three cruisers with 6-inch guns and eight destroyers with 5-inch guns.

If that bombardment failed to render the defenders dead, incapacitated, or immobilized by fright, smaller fire-support craft would precede the first wave to add to the Germans’ misery. At Omaha, sixteen LCTs carrying four DD tanks each were fitted so that two tanks could fire up to 150 rounds per cannon over the ramp, beginning from a range of three kilometers at about H minus fifteen minutes. Ten LCTs would carry thirty-six 105mm howitzers (self-propelled) of the 58th and 62nd Armored Field Artillery battalions; the howitzers were mounted so that they could fire 100 rounds per gun from the LCTs at a range of eight kilometers, commencing at H minus thirty minutes. Finally, fourteen LCT(R)s were outfitted as rocket launchers; each LCT(R) fired 1,000 high-explosive rockets simultaneously from three kilometers offshore. Under that cover, the first waves would land.

The plans for the assault landings varied from regiment to regiment, beach to beach. That of the 116th Infantry of the 29th Division on the western (right) flank at Omaha was representative. As the accompanying chart shows, the 116th’s plan to penetrate the defenses was complex and detailed down to the seconds. At H minus five minutes, just as the naval and air bombardments lifted, and as the rockets from the LCT(R)s whistled overhead, companies B and C of the 743rd Tank Battalion (thirty-two tanks strong) would touch down on the right. These were DD tanks, which would swim ashore from 6,000 yards out. They would take up firing positions at the water’s edge to cover the first wave of infantry.

At H-Hour, 0630, eight LCTs would land to the left, bringing ashore with them Company A of the 743rd Tank Battalion. With Company A there would be eight tank dozers, towing trailers of explosive to be used by combat engineers in demolishing the obstacles before the tide covered them.

At H plus one minute the first wave of infantry would touch down, Company A on the far right at Dog Green, companies E, F, and G at Easy Green, Dog Red, and Dog White. Each company was about 200 men strong; firepower included rifles, machine guns, bangalore torpedoes, bazookas, mortars, and grenades. Behind these skirmishers would come engineers, followed by light artillery and antiaircraft batteries, more engineers, then at H plus fifty minutes another wave of infantry (the 116th’s L, I, K, and C companies). At H plus sixty minutes two ranger battalions would come in on the right; at H plus 110 minutes DUKWs would bring in heavy artillery. At H plus three hours, Navy salvage units and truck companies would move in. By then, the beach should be clear, the fighting rifle companies moving inland.

(Brig. Gen. Norman “Dutch” Cota, second in command of the 29th Division, did not like the idea of storming ashore an hour after first light. He had little faith in the accuracy of air and naval bombardment, thought it would do little good, and wanted to land the first wave in total darkness. That way the assault troops could cross the tidal flat safely and would be able to take up firing and attacking positions at the foot of the bluff before the Germans could see them. “The beach is going to be fouled-up in any case,” he declared. “Darkness will not substantially alter the percentage of accuracy in beaching—not enough to offset the handicaps of a daylight assault.” He was overruled.²¹)

Each movement required an exact timing schedule that would begin three and four days before H-Hour at ports in southwestern England that were up to 160 kilometers from Omaha. Men and equipment would load up on LSTs, LCIs, and LCTs. Off the mouths of the harbors the convoys would form up. After crossing the Channel, the ships would anchor off the coast of France. Men would climb down the rope nets to their LCVPs, or descend in the boats as they were lowered by the davits. They would circle, circle, circle until they got clearance to form up line abreast and go in.

There was much more to the plan of assault than outlined here, and there were variations at different sectors and beaches, but basically the 116th plan was similar to those elsewhere. The emphasis was on a crescendo of high explosives hitting the beach defenses for a half hour before the tanks arrived, to be immediately followed by the first wave of skirmishers, who should be able to take advantage of the dazed enemy and seize the trenches as well as the exits from the beach. After that it was a question of getting enough transport and firepower ashore quickly enough to take the plateau area and move inland. All this was planned out on a timetable that was exceedingly rigid and complicated—and it was done without a single computer.

WHEN PVT. JOHN BARNES of Company A, 116th Infantry, attended the briefing on the assault plan, he was mighty impressed. He would be going ashore at H-Hour; one minute later E Company would come in behind him, followed by engineers at H-Hour plus three minutes. Then would come Headquarters Company and antiaircraft artillery, then more engineers, then Company L at H-Hour plus fifty minutes, and so on through the day. “It seemed so organized,” Barnes recalled, “that nothing could go wrong, nothing could stop it. It was like a train schedule; we were almost just like passengers. We were aware that there were many landing boats behind us, all lined up coming in on schedule. Nothing could stop it.”²²