As full darkness came to Normandy, about 2200, unloading at the beaches ceased. Nearly 175,000 American, Canadian, and British troops had entered Normandy, either by air or sea, at a cost of some 4,900 casualties.I From the American airborne on the far right to the British airborne on the far left, the invasion front stretched over ninety kilometers. There was an eighteen-kilometer gap between the left flank at Utah and the right flank at Omaha (with Rudder’s rangers holding a small piece of territory in between at Pointe-du-Hoc), an eleven-kilometer gap between Omaha and Gold, and a five-kilometer gap between Juno and Sword. These gaps were inconsequential because the Germans had no troops in them capable of exploiting the opportunity.
For the Germans, the battlefield was isolated. Rommel had been right about that at least; Allied command of the air had made it difficult to impossible for the Germans to rush men, tanks, and guns to the scene of the action. For the Allies, virtually unlimited men, tanks, guns, and supplies were waiting offshore for first light on June 7 to begin unloading, and behind them were even more men, tanks, guns, and supplies in England waiting to cross the Channel.
There was little depth to the penetration, nowhere more than ten kilometers (Juno) and at Omaha less than two kilometers. But everywhere the Allies had gone through the Atlantic Wall. The Germans still had the advantage of fighting on the defensive, and the hedgerows, especially in the Cotentin, gave them excellent ready-made positions. But their fixed fortifications on the invasion front, their pillboxes and bunkers, their trench system, their communications system, their emplacements for the heavy artillery, were with only a few exceptions kaput.
The Germans had taken four years to build the Atlantic Wall. They had poured thousands of tons of concrete, reinforced by hundreds of thousands of steel rods. They had dug hundreds of kilometers of trenches. They had placed millions of mines and laid down thousands of kilometers of barbed wire. They had erected tens of thousands of beach obstacles. It was a colossal construction feat that had absorbed a large percentage of Germany’s material, manpower, and building capacity in Western Europe.
At Utah, the Atlantic Wall had held up the U.S. 4th Division for less than one hour. At Omaha, it had held up the U.S. 29th and 1st divisions for less than one day. At Gold, Juno, and Sword, it had held up the British 50th, the Canadian 3rd, and the British 3rd divisions for about an hour. As there was absolutely no depth to the Atlantic Wall, once it had been penetrated, even if only by a kilometer, it was useless. Worse than useless, because the Wehrmacht troops manning the Atlantic Wall east and west of the invasion area were immobile, incapable of rushing to the sound of the guns.
The Atlantic Wall must therefore be regarded as one of the greatest blunders in military history.II
THE ALLIES HAD made mistakes. Dropping the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne in the middle of the night was one. Almost surely it would have been better to send them in at first light. The great assets of the Allied bomber and warship fleets were not used to full effect in the too-short and too-inaccurate preinvasion bombardment. The single-minded concentration on getting ashore and cracking the Atlantic Wall was, probably, inevitable, so formidable did those fixed fortifications appear, but it was costly once the assault teams had penetrated. It led to a tendency on the part of the men to feel that, once through the Wall, the job had been done. Just when they should have been exerting every human effort possible to get inland while the Germans were still stunned, they stopped to congratulate themselves, to brew up a bit of tea, to dig in.
The failure to prepare men and equipment for the challenge of offensive action in the hedgerow country was an egregious error. Allied intelligence had done a superb job of locating the German fixed defenses and a solid if not perfect job of locating the German units in Normandy, but intelligence had failed completely to recognize the difficulties of fighting in the hedgerows.
ALLIED ERRORS PALE beside those of the Germans. In trying to defend everywhere they were incapable of defending anywhere. Their command structure was a hindrance rather than a help. Rommel’s idea of stopping the invasion on the beach vs. Rundstedt’s idea of counterattacking inland vs. Hitler’s compromise between the two prevented an effective use of their assets. Using Polish, Russian, and other POWs for construction work made sense; putting them in Wehrmacht uniforms and placing them in trenches, hoping that they would put up a stiff resistance, did not.
The Wehrmacht’s many mistakes were exceeded by those of the Luftwaffe, which was quite simply just not there. Goering called for an all-out effort by the Luftwaffe on D-Day, but he got virtually none at all. The Allies’ greatest fear was a massive air bombardment against the mass of shipping and the congestion on the beaches, with Goering putting every German plane that could fly into the attack. But Goering was in Berchtesgaden, agreeing with Hitler’s self-serving, ridiculous assertion that the Allies had launched the invasion exactly where he had expected them, while the Luftwaffe was either in Germany or redeploying or grounded due to administrative and fuel problems. Once the terror of the world, the Luftwaffe on June 6, 1944, was a joke.III
The Kriegsmarine was no better. Its submarines and cruisers were either in their pens or out in the North Atlantic, hunting merchant shipping. Except for one minor action by three E-boats, the Kriegsmarine made not a single attack on the greatest armada ever gathered.