THE GERMANS attempting to meet the invasion needed every possible intelligence advantage because they were seriously handicapped by both Allied action and a cumbersome, inherently chaotic command structure. Consequently, while local German divisions and commands, by late evening of June 6, had begun moving to counter the invasion at a tactical level, their actions were not guided by any comprehensive strategic plan. Believing that the inevitable invasion was not yet due and would occur in the Pas de Calais or even farther up the northern coast, Hitler and his staff officers at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command) refused to accept that this was the invasion. Rather, they remained convinced that the landings in Normandy were a feint made in force to draw divisions—particularly armoured ones—away from Pas de Calais. Once this soaking off of strength had weakened Fifteenth Army’s defences, the Germans believed the Allies planned to land in force, cut off all the troops attempting to throw back the decoy invasion, and destroy them. In one bold stroke, the Allies would assure themselves of ultimate victory by imposing a defeat far exceeding the disaster of Stalingrad.
Although on May 2, 1944, Hitler had intuited from intelligence reports of a major buildup of Allied divisions in southeast England and Wales that an invasion of Normandy and Brittany was possible, OKW staff had remained skeptical. Only the fact that Hitler “kept harping on it and demanded more and more reinforcements for that sector” led to the strengthening of woefully inadequate defences along the Normandy coast.1
Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel, heading Army Group B, was responsible for defending Europe’s northwest coast from Holland to the Loire under Commander-in-Chief, West, Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt. The sixty-eight-year-old von Rundstedt’s position had been reduced to titular status by Rommel’s appointment to command of the newly formed Army Group B in January 1944. While Rommel was to keep him informed of his orders for strengthening coastal defences, the old Prussian was under no illusions that he could countermand the younger man. Rommel had Hitler’s ear and reported directly to him through OKW, while von Rundstedt so disdained “that Bohemian corporal” and his toadies at OKW that he refused to talk directly with them. He left this distasteful task to his Chief of Staff, General der Infantrie Günther Blumentritt.2
The most popular war hero in Germany, Rommel was also greatly respected by his Allied adversaries for his leadership during the German Northwest African campaigns. Within the Wehrmacht, however, Rommel was less popular. Although he had won Germany’s highest decoration, the Pour le Mérite, for heroism during the Caporetto offensive in World War I, he spent the majority of the interwar years in obscure postings after being judged lacking in General Staff ability. His outspoken nature and unorthodox military theories, however, served to bring him to Hitler’s attention. Although he refused to join the Nazi Party, Rommel initially respected the ever more popular fascist leader and benefited from the relationship with a reinvigorated career when he was appointed to command the Führer’s personal headquarters.
Following the successful invasion of Poland, Rommel asked Hitler for a Panzer command and was given the 7th Panzer Division, which he commanded during the blitzkreig across France in 1940. Rommel led the division from the front, seeming to instinctively recognize how to exploit enemy weaknesses through rapid and flexible mobile offensive action. In Africa, when he showed the same capability, Hitler and the Nazi propaganda machine lionized him to the point where he became a living symbol of German military prowess. As his stature grew, many Wehrmacht generals dismissed Rommel as a political general, who would have remained in the bottom drawer if not for his Nazi connections. Rommel’s reliance on instinct over military doctrine was a character trait that he and Hitler shared. Both had triumphed at times when the conservative generals on OKW’s staff had predicted failure and this served to draw the two more closely together.3
If Rommel enjoyed a unique relationship with Hitler, he still had no illusions that he enjoyed a free hand in preparing for the invasion. Hitler and OKW insisted on being consulted at every turn, constantly meddling in the disposition of divisions and allocation of resources. As well, Rommel had no authority over Luftlotte 3—the Luftwaffe air arm in the region—nor the naval command, Marine-gruppe West. These reported to and received orders from their respective supreme commanders, who in turn were subordinate to OKW and Hitler. Even the coastal defence construction unit—Organization Todt—reported to Reichsminister for Armament and War Production Albert Speer, who took his direction from the Führer, rather than Rommel. Should Rommel want something from those outside his direct authority he generally had to go cap in hand to Hitler, the Führer’s Chief of Staff, Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, or OKW Operations Chief, Generaloberst Alfred Jodl. Army Group B’s Chief of Staff, Generalleutnant Hans Speidel, rightly declared that a system that effectively denied his superior decisive control over the theatre of operations “led not only to a confused chain of command, but to a command chaos.”4
That chaotic structure had plagued Rommel as he prepared to meet the invasion. The compromises arising from a proliferation of views strongly advanced by high-ranking officers and Nazi politicians had frustrated his strategy. Believing the battle would be decided on the beach, Rommel had declared: “Never in history was there a defence of such an extent with such an obstacle as the sea. The enemy must be annihilated before he reaches our main battlefield… We must stop him in the water, not only delaying him but destroying all his equipment while it is still afloat… The high water line must be the main fighting line.”5
Lacking sufficient manpower, Rommel had been forced to sacrifice a defence in depth in order to pack as many men as possible into fighting positions right up against the coastal beaches. He had also proposed deploying the Panzer divisions close enough to the shore that each could bring its guns and tanks to a specific section before the Allies broke through the largely immobile beach defences. “It is more important to have one Panzer division in the assaulted section on D-Day, than to have three there by D plus 3,” he said.6
Rommel’s plan had immediately drawn stiff opposition from Panzer Group West commander, General der Panzertruppen Leo Freiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg, another powerful player in the tortuous German command structure. Formed in late 1943, Panzer Group West was tasked with training Panzer forces in the western theatre and with advising von Rundstedt on Panzer tactics and operational requirements. By early 1944, all Panzer divisions and corps in Western Europe were effectively under von Schweppenburg’s command. In stark contrast to Rommel, the general thought the “Atlantic Wall” was destined to collapse at the first major assault.
Born in 1886, von Schweppenburg was considered a leading tank expert by many Wehrmacht generals. He had commanded his first mobile unit regiment in 1933, led the 3rd Panzer Division into Poland in 1939, and in 1940 taken the helm of XXIV Corps for the invasion of Russia. After two years of fighting on the Eastern Front, he was transferred to command of the LXXXVI Corps in France before heading up Panzer Group West. Having years of Eastern Front combat experience, von Schweppenburg recognized the near impossibility of holding long, exposed front lines in the face of a determined attacker. He also had the unique background of having served from 1933 to 1937 as a military attaché in London and so had a good sense of British army tactics and the psychology of its generals.
The repulse of the Dieppe raid, von Schweppenburg believed, had lulled Germany’s high command into believing an invasion could be met on the beaches and destroyed before it got established ashore. This theory was partially based on an assumption that the German martial spirit was greater than that of the British, Americans, or Canadians who would have to win the beach. Had not Dieppe proven this superiority? its proponents asked disingenuously. But von Schweppenburg countered that Dieppe had not been an invasion, so such an assumption was “irresponsible.” Taken “together with Rommel’s misguided doctrine on coastal defence,” the Panzer general said, “this idea was fundamentally responsible for the grotesque defense situation, which was contrary to all experiences of strategy and recent war developments.”
Von Schweppenburg grudgingly conceded that “Rommel was an able and experienced tactician, although entirely lacking in strategic conceptions.” This inability to think strategically, von Schweppenburg maintained, had led Rommel to the ludicrous conclusion that his only option was to defend the entire coastline. But how could eight hundred miles of coast be defended? Given “the formidable enemy air superiority and the number, caliber, and effectiveness of the naval guns of the combined Anglo-American battle fleets, a landing… could not be prevented and would succeed in any case. The only solution,” von Schweppenburg concluded, “would be to utilize the only German superiority—that of speedier and more flexible leadership which employed mobile reserves. High-quality Panzer units should be held in reserve to crush an enemy penetration inland.”7
The Panzer Group West commander easily won the support of Generaloberst Heinz Guderian, the old Panzer master strategist who was Hitler’s advisor on Panzer tactics, but neither man could convince either the Führer or Rommel that the “Atlantic Wall” strategy was doomed to failure. Hitler was determined that not a yard of European territory should be yielded, so Rommel’s plan found the sympathetic ear of the man who ultimately mattered most in the German command chain. After hearing the arguments of Rommel and the Panzer generals, Hitler offered a compromise that satisfied nobody. He split control of the Panzers between Rommel and von Schweppenburg, giving the latter his mobile armoured reserve in the form of just four divisions—1st SS Panzer, 12th SS (Hitlerjugend) Panzer, Panzer Lehr, and 17th SS Panzer Grenadier. Except for these units, “one Panzer division after another was marched to the front and required to dig in 10 to 20 kilometres behind the coastline.”8
CONSEQUENTLY, ON JUNE 6 the Germans had in place neither a strong tactical nor strategic reserve.9 In Normandy, the armoured unit dug in closest to the beaches was the 21st Panzer Division, which found itself facing a night drop by 6th British Airborne Division on the eastern shore of the River Orne and the westerly British-Canadian landings. Its commander, Generalleutnant Edgar Feuchtinger, had dithered between moving on his own authority to stamp out the airborne troops or seeking instruction from up the chain of command. This was partly due to his own lack of resolve, but also a standing order that no offensive action by Panzers was to be taken without Army Group B authorization, to avoid such divisions becoming engaged in a piecemeal fashion. The command chaos Generalleutnant Speidel had warned of proved itself, as hour after hour passed with nobody at either Army Group B or Seventh Army headquarters assuming overall control of the German response.
“If Rommel had been with us instead of in Germany, he would have disregarded all orders and taken action—of that we were convinced,” Major Hans von Luck, commander of the 21st Panzer Division’s 125th Panzer Grenadier Regiment, later wrote.10 With the Germans firmly believing that the invasion was still sometime off, however, Rommel had departed on June 5 to celebrate his wife’s birthday at their home near Ulm and then to try convincing Hitler to bolster the number of Panzer divisions in Normandy.11
From their respective headquarters, Speidel and Blumentritt sought authorization from OKW to release the Panzers, only to be told that such an order must come personally from Hitler. But Hitler slept until 0900 hours on June 6 and nobody had the temerity to interrupt his slumber, so it was not until 1030 that orders from OKW placed the 21st Panzer Division under area commander General der Artillerie Erich Marcks of the LXXXIV Corps. Marcks, who had worked with Guderian during the interwar years developing blitzkrieg tactics, immediately ordered the division to attack west of the Orne in an attempt to break through to either Sword or Juno beaches and roll the invasion up by destroying the beachheads.12
Hours passed as the division’s officers struggled to manoeuvre their units into position for the planned counterattack. Once it got underway, the division did succeed in driving into the gap between 3rd British Infantry Division and the Canadians, but too small a force had been committed and the attack crumbled.
At the same time as 21st Panzer Division’s counterattack was falling apart, help in the form of leading elements of the 12th SS (Hitlerjugend) Panzer Division began arriving. Also ordered to concentrate against the Normandy beaches was the Panzer Lehr Division and the general command of I SS Panzer Corps with its inherent corps troops—all to come under direct authority of Seventh Army Commander Generaloberst Friedrich Dollman.13 Once this force massed around Caen, Dollman intended to attack the enemy by driving a three-division-strong wedge into the gap between the forces advancing out of Sword and Juno beaches. The attack would be directed at the section of coastline directly west of Lion-sur-Mer, where the last truly organized elements of 716th Infantry Division were isolated but still holding the ground between this village and Luc-sur-Mer on the Canadian left flank. Operational command for the attack would rest with Obergruppenführer Josef (Sepp) Dietrich, who headed up I SS Panzer Corps.14*
* Canadian Army, German Army, and SS rank equivalencies are explained and compared in Appendix C.
Dietrich’s corps was comprised of two SS divisions, the 12th and the 1st SS Panzer Division. As the latter division was encamped in Belgium east of Antwerp, it was too far away to join the planned counteroffensive. Dietrich would have to rely on the three Panzer divisions in the vicinity, two of which had never previously served under his command and were regular army rather than SS formations.
Born in 1892, this illegitimate son of a peasant girl had won the Iron Cross, 1st Class during World War I while serving as a sergeant major. He likely would have led an obscure working-class life except
for memberships during the interwar years in Germany’s burgeoning Fascist movements. First he served in the SA—the Brown Shirts—under Ernst Röhm, before switching allegiance to Hitler’s Nazi Party after the two organizations broke apart in 1933. Hitler rewarded Dietrich’s loyalty by putting him in charge of recruiting the leader’s SS bodyguard unit. When the rift between the SA and the Nazis deepened the following year, Dietrich was a pivotal figure in the June 30, 1934 Night of the Long Knives, during which Röhm, the SA leadership, and many others who opposed Hitler’s ascendancy were brutally slaughtered.
Impressed by Dietrich’s “cunning, energetic, and brutal” nature, Hitler continued to promote the man as the SS matured from a paramilitary organization into one with a formal military arm. In 1938, the bodyguard force, known as the Leibstandarte, was transformed into motorized infantry and later expanded into a Panzer division. Both formations were under his command. One of his principal staff officers, Rudolf Lehmann, recognized that Dietrich “was no strategic genius… His forte did not lie in formulating a complete tactical evaluation. But he had an extraordinary sense of growing crisis and for finding the favourable moment for action.”15
Finding that kind of opportunity for the planned counterattack would prove difficult. Dietrich wanted to await the arrival of Panzer Lehr—still moving towards the Normandy coast from its assembly point at Nogent le Rotrou, ninety-five miles southwest of Caen. He also wanted to tee up as much air support as possible, both to strike against the enemy troops and to protect his advancing units from the punishing fighter-bomber and strafing attacks they had endured throughout the march to the coast.
By 0400 hours on June 7, having hurried back from Germany, Rommel was briefed by Seventh Army’s Chief of Staff Generalleutnant Max Pemsel on the status of the three I SS Corps Panzer divisions. They had, he learned, “been brought into the assembly areas and had been ordered to begin the counterattack without any other considerations and with all available forces.”16 With Panzer Lehr still far off in the distance and its commander reporting that his first fighting units could not possibly reach Caen until the morning of June 8, this was clearly not the case. For its part, 21st Panzer Division was badly scattered and disorganized after its botched solo counterattack into the gap between Juno and Sword. Various elements of this division were still tangling with the paratroops west of the Orne and its 192nd Panzer Grenadier Battalion had become entangled in running night battles with the Canadian battalions on 3 CID’s left flank. Whether significant elements of this division would be able to reorganize by morning to participate in the counterattack was unclear.
As for 12th SS Panzer Division, many of its units were also still on the march and expected to filter into the area by fits and starts throughout June 7. At the head of this mechanized juggernaut grinding into Normandy was Standartenführer Kurt Meyer, commander of the 25th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment. As darkness fell, Meyer received instructions from his divisional commander, Brigadeführer Fritz Witt, to prevent the Allies capturing Carpiquet airport and entering Caen. The 12th SS would form up alongside the 21st Panzer Division through the night and then attack during the day with their armoured shoulders brushing. This was not just a spoiling attack intended to stop the British-Canadian advance. Witt told Meyer, “The division is to attack the enemy along with the 21st Panzer Division and throw them into the sea. H-Hour for the attack is 7th June at midday.”17 That the 21st Panzer Division was in a shambles and much of the 12th SS still well short of the assembly point for the attack was disregarded. Witt wanted action and Meyer was equally determined to take the fight to the Allies.
A tactical headquarters was set up at the side of the Caen-Bayeux highway in a small country house surrounded by tall trees that provided necessary camouflage from detection by Allied aircraft. There, Meyer anxiously awaited the arrival of his regiment’s various battalions. As the commander of each unit pulled in, Meyer gave a quick personal briefing before hurrying the officer on to an advanced forming-up position in the area of Cussy and the Abbaye d’Ardenne.
The Abbaye was a ruined monastery about two miles northwest of Caen in which the 12th SS had established a forward command post. A thick stone wall surrounded the abbey, separating the buildings and internal compound from a small orchard protected by a second, equally stout wall.18 Two square-shaped towers attached to the abbey’s church provided a panoramic view over the “gently undulating plateau” stretching almost ten miles to the beaches. “As if on a theater stage, villages with their orchards, stands of trees and small wooded areas, were staggered into the distance, scattered among the corn and beet fields, and the livestock pastures. Tethered balloons were visible in the sky on the horizon. They were meant to secure the landing fleet from low-level air attacks. The objective, the coast, seemed within reach,” one 12th SS officer observed.19
THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT, that objective—Juno Beach—had been randomly pounded by German bombers as Luftlotte 3, virtually absent during the day, fitfully attempted to disrupt the Allied buildup of supplies and personnel. By nightfall, the entire five-mile stretch of beach was “a maze of commodity stacks with thousands of personnel employed around them” that presented a tempting target to the Germans. Royal Canadian Army Service Corps Captain “Pat” Patrick was assigned as the Beach Ammunition Officer for the RCASC unit attached to the 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade. His job on D-Day had been to oversee the landing of 330 tons of ammunition from two Landing Craft, Tanks. This great stack of munitions was piled up in a huge dump on the beach near Bernières-sur-Mer awaiting allocation as needed to 9 CIB’s battalions.
With Captain Dave Morwood, Patrick was busy digging a two-man slit trench when a lone German plane “flew toward us along the beach, dropping anti-personnel bombs. We watched the flashes coming closer and, at the same moment, decided we should dive for cover.” Patrick plunged into the hole and Morwood piled in on top as a bomb went off practically on their position.20 While neither man was injured, elsewhere on the beach it was a different story as the planes “bombed the beaches—killing, wounding, blowing up ammunition and destroying equipment.”21
Standing off the beach aboard Landing Ship, Tank 402, ‘D’ Company’s No. 12 and No. 15 Platoons of the Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa had been delayed by the congestion on the beach from landing their heavy mortars on D-Day. During the night, the mortar teams witnessed four separate German air attacks “during the early hours and before dawn.” The company’s war diarist reported “many bombs landing on the beaches” with “two bombs [striking] very close to [the] ship, about three to five hundred feet away. Mostly low-level attacks.”22
Also stuck offshore aboard another LST was the Camerons’ commander, Lieutenant Colonel Percy Carl Klaehn. He and the Camerons’ command group had been stranded when the Rhino Ferry shuttling personnel from the LST to shore was disabled during its first trip to the beach. A frustrated Klaehn learned that a replacement Rhino would not be available until D+1. “There were five air raids during the night,” he confided to his diary, “which were met with intense flak. No damage to ships, but beaches got quite a pasting.”23
Relatively few German planes managed to penetrate the screen of shipboard and beach-based anti-aircraft guns and hovering Allied fighters waiting to pounce on them. Dodging wildly through walls of flak while also trying to duck fighter planes, the German bombardiers seldom managed to zero in accurately on the wealth of targets packed into the small space. When a patrol by Royal Canadian Air Force 401 Squadron arrived over Juno Beach at 0810 hours on June 7, the pilots watched a twin-engine Junkers-88 slam into the cable of a barrage balloon and plunge to the ground. Then one of the flyers spotted “at least a dozen” JU-88s descend out of the cloud cover. Squadron Leader Lorne Maxwell Cameron of Roland, Manitoba “called for everyone to pick his own target and the squadron broke up” with Spitfires swooping towards the bombers. Some of the German pilots threw their planes into dives towards the beach, while others turned away in a desperate attempt to lumber back to the covering protection of the cloud, the rear gunners blasting at the closing fighters with their machine guns.
“A melee ensued,” the squadron’s war diarist reported, that resulted in Cameron shooting down two bombers, two pilots sharing another kill, two others gaining a kill apiece, and another being awarded a probable kill. During Cameron’s pursuit of the Junkers, he passed over Caen and Carpiquet airport. The intensity of flak coming up from the latter told him that it was obviously still in enemy hands. The Spitfire pilots were elated, the patrol having frustrated the German attack at no cost other than a bullet that harmlessly pierced Flight Lieutenant Alexander Foch Halcrow’s perspex canopy just behind his head.24
Also over Juno Beach on several sorties during the day was Flying Officer Gordon F. Ockenden of 443 Squadron. Each approach to Normandy “saw us dodging our own barrage balloons. We watched the [sixteen-inch] shells from the battleship… drift by like small balloons as they headed inland, and we were fired on by the navy at least once each day as we got too close to the ships and they got twitchy (also poor aircraft recognition) as we had the big invasion stripes right from Day One [on the spitfires].”
During an afternoon patrol, Flight Lieutenant William Arnold Prest spotted four ME-109 fighters. The Canadians bounced the Germans, with Prest damaging one plane and Ockenden and another pilot combining their firepower “to blow up another.” Squadron Leader Hall’s Spitfire was struck by several bullets, but not seriously damaged, while Flying Officer Henderson “was lucky to walk away, after engine failure forced him down.”25
Pilot Officer N. Marshall and Flying Sergeant R.D. Davidson of Squadron 401 were less fortunate. In the late afternoon, the squadron tangled with about six FW-190 fighters that had just finished strafing and bombing the beach when the Canadians attacked. A whirling dogfight ensued. When the guns stopped firing, one German fighter and two Spitfires had been downed. Marshall’s plane was shot out of the sky by flak and he was listed as missing. Nobody saw Davidson, who had only joined the squadron two days before, go down. When he failed to return to base, the war diarist noted that Davidson was one of the pilots lost “of whom nothing is known.” The squadron’s tally for the end of the day was seven JU-88s and the single FW-190—“the highest one-day toll since the Battle of Britain four years earlier.”26
WHILE THE LUFTWAFFE tried frantically to raid the beaches, but achieved little success in exchange for significant loss in aircraft and crews, the Kriegsmarine was better positioned to attack the Allied fleet. And, while it was true that the Luftwaffe had failed to develop any coherent strategy for meeting the invasion, Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz had been feverishly working out a battle plan. Caught by surprise by the invasion itself, Headquarters Naval Group West had been unable to respond in any viable form on D-Day itself. When night fell, however, Dönitz ordered an array of boats to slip their berths and sail out to sea. With thousands of Allied ships squished into a narrow corridor extending from southern England across the Channel to Normandy, there was no shortage of viable targets. Should even a single German warship get in amid the Allied fleet, it could wreak havoc, as it would be nearly impossible for the Allies to determine who was friend or foe. But before such destruction could be wrought, the German raiders had to sneak or fight their way through the combat ships and aircraft tasked with screening the armada’s flanks.
Dönitz’s plan called for the motor torpedo boat flotillas based in Cherbourg, Boulogne, and Ostend to move immediately against the Allied ships. The 5th and 9th MTB flotillas in Cherbourg would lay mines and launch torpedo attacks against the ships operating in the area of the American beaches, while the 2nd and 4th MTB flotillas out of Boulogne carried out similar operations in the waters near Ouistreham. The 8th Flotilla would patrol the eastern part of the Channel, picking off any ships encountered.
The admiral was under no illusions that he could destroy the armada or even inflict enough losses to cripple its ability to support the invasion, for the German navy was simply not strong enough to go head to head against the protecting Allied ships. But he hoped, by harrying the armada’s flanks and gaining the occasional breakthrough into its midst, to slow the rate of supplies being carried across the Channel from a steady stream to fitful spurts.
German MTB operations were seriously hampered, however, by a critical shortage of torpedoes for resupplying the boats. Dönitz hoped to compensate by sowing the Allied invasion shipping routes with a new type of mine—called the Oyster or Pressure mine. These mines settled to the sea bottom and were triggered by the hydrostatic pressure created when a ship passed over them at speed. They were next to impossible for minesweepers to catch in their nets and could be programmed to explode after the first ship passed over or to lie quietly until a specified number of ships had passed before detonating. This meant that once an area had been mined, there was no guarantee it could ever be crossed safely. Interspersed among this type of mine, Dönitz ordered acoustic and magnetic pistol-type mines to be sown as well. Both were fitted with delayed-action mechanisms and sometimes anti-sweeping devices that would destroy the minesweeper nets.
Again, Dönitz was not thinking the mines would sink hundreds of ships. His intention was to slow the ferrying of supplies to a crawl by forcing the Allies to embark on lengthy minesweeping operations to ensure that shipping routes were safe.
The final and highest stake cards up Dönitz’s sleeve were the U-boats massed on the northwest European coast prior to the invasion. About seventy U-boats had been held back from operations in the Atlantic or Mediterranean theatres and kept in a high state of readiness in order to immediately attack the Allied invasion fleet. More than half of these were positioned in ports in the Bay of Biscay, with the remainder stationed in Norway. Counting among those in the Biscay ports was a special unit operating out of Brest—called the Landwirte Group—that comprised thirty-six U-boats.27 Nine of these boats were fitted with Schnorkels, an air induction trunk and exhaust pipe that enabled them to use their diesel engines while submerged at periscope depth. This allowed the subs to operate for days at a time without taking the risk of surfacing to recharge their auxiliary battery-powered electrical engines. On D-Day, the Schnorkel boats were already at sea, and by noon all conventional boats stationed in pens at Lorient, St. Nazaire, and La Pallice were unleashed in force.28
The threat posed by the U-boats had long been anticipated by Allied naval commander Royal Navy Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay. To block any attempt by the submariners to break into the Channel waters, Royal Air Force’s Coastal Command had been instructed to create “a solid wall of air patrols over the southwestern approaches.”29