Chapter 2
‘I have received a warning that invasion will be launched between the 3rd and the 10th. I should perhaps add, gentlemen, that we have received similar warnings every full-moon period and every no-moon period since April.’
GENERAL RICHTER, 716TH INFANTRY DIVISION
Without doubt, the much-hyped Atlantic Wall was not as strong as Goebbels’s propaganda would have the German people or the Allies believe. However, in June 1944, it did present a serious obstacle to the Allies that, with every passing day, grew stronger. But on the night of 5 June, the German defences were at a low state of readiness. Unlike the Allied meteorologists, the Germans predicted marginal weather; they had interpreted met reports from U-Boats in the Atlantic slightly differently. The weather conditions, combined with the assessment that the state of the tide was wrong for an Allied landing, led to the invaders gaining a considerable degree of tactical surprise. Colonel von Luck of 21st Panzer Division explained:
‘The general weather conditions worked out every day by naval meteorologists and passed on to us by Division, gave the all clear for 5 and 6 June. So we did not anticipate any landings, for heavy seas, storms, and low flying clouds would make large operations at sea and in the air impossible for our opponents.’
Rommel took the opportunity to travel to Germany to see his wife and to plead with Hitler for the forward deployment of armour. In Normandy, senior officers were travelling south for a map exercise. The soldiers in the strong points (Wederstandneste) were on minimum manning and much of 21st Panzer Division was deployed on blank firing night exercises.
German Operational Strategy in the West
When it became clear to Hitler that Operation BARBAROSSA had frozen to a halt within sight of Moscow in late 1941, he issued instructions to build a wall along the coast of Europe. By March 1942, this had been translated into Fuhrer Order Number Forty. The important section read:
The coastline of Europe will, in the coming months, be subject to the danger of enemy landings in force… Even enemy landings with limited objectives can seriously interfere with our own plans if they result in the enemy gaining a toehold on the coast… Enemy forces that have landed must be destroyed or thrown back into the sea by immediate counter attack.’
The focus of German work was to continue strengthening port defences and surrounding areas as Oberefehlshaber (OB) West assessed that an invading force could not be sustained without the use of a major port. The Pas de Calais, with its ports, and proximity to Southern England was heavily defended, due to the Allied advantages of a relatively long ‘time over target’ for aircraft and quick turn around for shipping. Elsewhere along the 3,000 miles of coastline from the North Cape of Norway to the Pyrenees Mountains, a thin, patchy, string of defences began to take shape. Starved of human and material resources, work on the Atlantic Wall was slow but with Allied success in the Mediterranean and growing Allied strength in the west, Hitler issued Fuhrer Order Number Fifty-one in late 1943:
‘All signs point to an offensive on the Western Front no later than spring, and perhaps earlier.
‘For that reason, I can no longer justify the further weakening of the West in favour of other theatres of war. I have therefore decided to strengthen the defences in the West, particularly at places where we shall launch our long-range war [V-weapon] against England. For those are the very points at which the enemy must and will attack: there – unless all indications are misleading – the decisive invasion battle will be fought.’
Along with the new orders came a new commander. At the same time as Montgomery and Eisenhower were returning from the Mediterranean, Generaleidmarschall Rommel took up the post of Inspector General of the Atlantic Wall. His responsibilities extended beyond his own Army Group B in Northern France to cover the Atlantic and the North Sea coasts. What he saw did not impress him, despite the best efforts of the Todt labour organization and its much-publicised works around the Pas de Calais. Building on his experience of operating against an enemy with air superiority in the Mediterranean, Rommel assessed that he would have to defeat the Allied invasion on the beaches. To that end, with incredible vigour, Rommel set about constructing what he called a ‘devils garden’ of defences. He drove his soldiers and workers hard and in many places, despite supply difficulties, they worked in shifts twenty-four hours a day. A priority was providing overhead cover to the gun batteries, which involved the building of massive reinforced concrete casemates. This was a slow process but by 6 June, most artillery and anti-tank guns were casemated.
Generalfeldmarschall Rommel and Hitler.
Many captured weapons were used on the Atlantic wall. In this case a Dutch manufactured Lewis gun provides anti-aircraft cover.
In six months the Germans laid the majority of the 1.2 million tons of steel and poured the 17.3 million cubic yards of concrete used in construction of the Atlantic Wall which produced a hard crust of mutually supporting defended localities. All along the coast, these localities were surrounded by over four million anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, while on the beaches, 500,000 obstacles of various types were built.
Hitler had created a command system in the west with overlapping areas of responsibility, which was an elastic web rather than a taught chain of command. This led to a loss of unity of command but within Commander in Chief West’s armies, Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt and his generals agreed on the necessity of a well defended coastline. However, they could not agree on how to use the scant German armoured reserves in France. With little firm intelligence to rely on, von Rundstedt supported by the senior panzer officers advocated the conventional military option of identifying the main enemy attack before massing reserves to counter-attack. Rommel, however, had experienced the power of the Allied air forces, and consequently, doubted the ability of the panzer divisions to assemble and make a timely move to battle while subjected to Allied air interdiction sorties. Rather than having the panzer divisions located in the centre of France, Rommel advocated forward locations from which the panzers could strike the Allies as soon as they had landed. He argued that ‘penny packeting’, which is contrary to the credo of any armoured commander, would in fact deliver vital armoured counter-attacks at the crucial time and place early in the battle while the Allies struggled to establish a beachhead. However, the senior panzer commanders, with their Eastern Front experience, disagreed and both sides vigorously lobbied Hitler. The result was that the Führer insisted that his personal authority was required before any panzer formation was redeployed or committed to battle. Even so, Rommel successfully used his influence to argue the case for control of three of the eight panzer formations in the west, with the remainder split between Panzergruppe West and the SS’s 1st SS Panzer Corps. It is no wonder that von Rundstedt complained ‘As C-in-C West, the only authority I had was to change the guard at my front gate’. Canadian intelligence officer, Major Milton Shulman, having studied the German chain of command, wrote:
The obstacles as envisioned by Rommel – another Dieppe.
German Atlantic Wall anti-aircraft gunners relax awaiting their next kill – note the silhouettes painted on the wall.
Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt
‘When the invasion began there was, therefore, neither enough armour to push the Allies back off the beaches in the first few hours, nor was there an adequate striking force to act as an armoured reserve later on. No better design for a successful Allied landing could have been achieved than this failure to concentrate the armour in the West along one unified and determined course.’
Deception
Winston Churchill wrote: ‘In war-time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’ In order to protect the OVERLORD plans and prevent the Germans from feeling they could concentrate against the Normandy beachhead, Operation BODYGUARD was set up by the Allies. BODYGUARD proved to be one of the most comprehensive and successful deception and counter-espionage operations ever undertaken in the history of warfare. Anthony Cave Brown described the operation’s aim:
‘Plan Bodyguard, and the intricate special means that would be employed in its execution, had been designed for a single purpose – to enable the best and finest young men to get ashore – and stay ashore – in the first tumultuous hours of D-Day.’
BODYGUARD also sought to stop the Germans from realising their reinforcement potential of some thirteen divisions by D Day plus five. It was important that as many enemy divisions as possible remained guarding other sectors of the coast against a second landing.
Operation BODYGUARD sought to persuade Hitler and his staff to identify a series of strategic considerations. Firstly, that the Allies thought that the bomber offensive may be sufficient to bring Germany to her knees i.e. a lack of commitment to a Second Front. Secondly, to keep the German garrisons in Norway, South-Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean fixed in place and away from Northern France. Thirdly, that the invasion would be co-ordinated to start after the Russian summer offensive and finally, BODYGUARD sought to mislead the Germans about the size and location of the Allied invasion forces.
Hitler was becoming increasingly concerned about Normandy as a possibility for the expected Allied invasion.
This last aim was the most important and with German agents either eliminated or turned, the Allies set about reinforcing the German belief that they would invade the continent at the Pas de Calais. The component Operation, FORTITUDE (South), was a masterpiece of deception that was still effective well after the Allies had broken out of Normandy. Lieutenant General Morgan (COSSAC) described FORTITUDE’S aim and some of the difficulties:
‘… there was always the need to do everything possible to induce the enemy to make faulty dispositions of his reserves, to strive if possible to have him at a disadvantage. …One bogus impression in the enemy’s mind has to be succeeded by another equally bogus. There had to be an unbroken plausibility about it all, and ever present must be the aim, which was to arrange that the eventual blow would come where the enemy least expected it, when he least expected it, and with a force altogether outside his calculation.’
The very core of Operation FORTITUDE was the creation of a fictitious First US Army Group (FUSAG) in South-East England under the flamboyant General George Patton. To convince the Germans that the Allies had many more divisions than they actually had available, a combination of ‘special means’ were used. Chief amongst these was the use of double agents, such as the Spaniard Garbo, who fed details of fictitious formations and troop movements to Berlin. While in south-east England, a small number of British and American signallers created FUSAG’s electronic signature by simulating their training and administrative radio traffic. The signallers were supported by a few genuine troops and numerous poorly camouflaged dummy tanks and landing craft and, finally, General Patton’s newsworthy presence. So successful was FORTITUDE that in March 1944 German military intelligence, the Abwehr, was reporting that FUSAG:
‘… contains three armies each of three corps, totalling twenty-three Divisions, amongst which, the location of only one need be regarded as questionable. The report confirms our operational picture.’
The Germans finally believed that there were eighty-five to ninety Allied divisions assembling in Britain, together with seven airborne divisions. In fact, the Allies had only thirty-five divisions, including four airborne divisions. By the time D Day came, this estimate had found its way into all the Wehrmacht’s enemy information charts and from there into its operational level plans. The Allied deception was so successful partly because it was in von Rundstedt’s interest to inflate the number of divisions that he was likely to face to secure as many troops as possible for the defence of the west.
Despite FORTITUDE, Hitler was becoming increasingly concerned about Normandy and urged von Rundstedt to move troops to its defence. General Warlimont of OKH explained,
A rather idealistic view of the inside of a Atlantic Wall troop shelter.
Generalmajor Wilhelm Richter commanding 716th Coastal Division.
Germans – mine laying as part of the defences.
‘We generals calculated along the lines of our regular, military education, but Hitler came to his own decision, as he always did, on his intuition alone’’.
In this case, Hitler’s intuition was too late and the picture painted by BODYGUARD and FORTITUDE was so widely accepted that there was little that could be done in the time available to redeploy significant forces to Normandy.
German Coastal Defences
General Richter’s 716th Coastal Division, under command of LXXXIV Corps, held the lower Normandy coast. The 716th had been raised during May 1941 and had been deployed to Normandy in June 1942 in response to Hitler’s Führer Order Number Forty. It was formed with soldiers largely below the age of eighteen and with men over thirty-five. However, the best of the younger soldiers had been regularly taken as drafts for the Eastern Front and were replaced with ‘boys’ and soldiers who had partly recovered from wounds or had suffered third degree frostbite during the Russian winter. Over fifty percent of the division were eventually categorized as being of a low physical grade and the division’s ration return for May 1944 gave a strength of only 7,771 men.
716th Division’s slim Type 44 establishment, allowing for very little equipment or transport, was designed for manning static positions. For two years, with scant resources, the division held a seventy mile front between the River Dives in the east at Carbourg, through to the base of the Cotentin Peninsular. However, on 15 March 1944, Hitler’s intuition came into play and LXXXIV Corps inserted the newly organized and trained, 352nd Division into the coastal defences. This ‘field quality’ division took over the defences between Le Hamel (Jig Sector of Gold Beach) and the mouth of the Vire River (between Omaha and Utah). This placed Juno Beach in the very centre of 716th Coastal Division’s shortened sector. Extensive regrouping of regiments, battalions and even companies took place between the 716th and 352nd Divisions. In a post-war debrief, ‘it was discovered from General Richter of 716th Division that 726 Infantry Regiment, less one battalion had been placed under command of 352nd Division from 716th Division’. The net effect of these moves was to considerably thicken up the defences. Initially the defences occupied by the redeployed troops were field defences around platoon strong points, which were typically upgraded to company or at least two platoon strength. Allied intelligence only picked up the first hints of the redeployment and 352nd Division’s move forward on 14 May 1944 but by then it was too late to alter plans.
Osttruppen under command of 736 Regiment receive a briefing on a sandtable model.
In the Juno Beach area, 716th Division had deployed four reinforced infantry companies in the coastal strong points. Covering what was to become Mike Sector was 7 Kompanie, 6/736 held the defences of Couseulles, while 5/736 occupied the strong points in Bernieres 5/736 Grenadiers (Nan Sector), with a fourth company, 9/736 Grenadiers and St Aubin. Just to the east, in the Lagrune area, which the commandos were to clear, were elements of 9/736 Regiment. Included amongst the coastal defences were several platoons of Osttruppen (Russian prisoners of war co-opted into the Wehrmacht, Osttruppen were also to be found in the artillery batteries at Ver-sur-Mer and at Beny-sur-Mer. These batteries were respectively captured 100mm Czechoslovakian and French 155mm guns.
About a mile inland from the coast a second line of field fortifications had been created by troops released by the insertion of 352nd Division. In this new line the 716th Division had four companies of German soldiers and at least two companies of Osttruppen. Behind this position, there were few reserves and such reserves as were available, were held well back and had to cover the entire division’s frontage. There was little armour available to General Richter, but Number 1 Kompanie, 716 Panzerjager Battalion had approximately ten self-propelled assault 75mm guns (Pak 40s), mounted on the chassis of obsolescent French tanks captured in 1940. Located near Bayeux, these assault guns were earmarked for immediate counter-attacks. On D Day, they spent the day marching and countermarching on LXXXIV Korps Orders as German commanders’ perception of the threat changed. All the while they were under attack by Allied fighter-bombers.
Rommel had, by a slight of hand, managed to deploy at least one armoured formation, 21st Panzer Division, closer to the coast than officially approved. Located south-east of Caen the panzers formed a potentially powerful operational reserve that could strike against Sword and Juno Beaches by midday.
Much has been written debating the relative difficulty of the tasks faced by Allied troops on various beaches. What is without doubt is that the well defended harbour of Courseulles in the centre of it and with a string of coastal towns to the east, 3rd Canadian Division had some potentially strong defensive positions to take. However, the coastal troops holding these positions were not generally of the same field quality as those faced by the Americans at Omaha and 231 Brigade on the western portion of Gold Beach. The 3rd Canadian Division’s Intsum described the qualities of the enemy troops in 716th Division:
‘This division, like others in the 700 series, is a low category division of two regiments of infantry and one regiment of artillery (two field and one medium battery). All personnel are trained in coast defence although the better trained have been transferred to field divisions. The remainder consists of young soldiers, men of older classes unfit for service on the Eastern Front and men who have been wounded and are only slightly disabled. In comparison with a first class field infantry division, its fighting value has been assessed as 40% in a static role and 15% in a counter attack. The division should be up to strength in personnel and equipment … it has been reported that non-German soldiers, Russians, Monguls, etc. have been seen in the divisional area …’
In another post war interrogation, the Chief of Staff of 352nd Division, Oberstleutenant Fritz Ziegelman, confirmed this assessment of the coastal troops’ quality:
‘In taking over the sector, we were surprised that the reinforced 726th Grenadier Regiment was very backward in its training, because of the continuous supply of troops to new formations, and a lack of initiative in the officers and NCOs in training the remainder. In addition, the corps of NCOs was composed of elements which hoped to survive the war without having been under fire.’
Oberstleutenant Ziegelman’s impression of the quality of the coastal troops is confirmed by the confession of one of their battalion commanders, Oberstleutenant Pflocksch, who held positions in St Aubin: ‘I asked myself whether I should be happy or unhappy about the invasion and I found out there was every reason to be somewhat happy. Now the war will very soon come to an end.’
As already indicated, the quality of the German troops garrisoning the Atlantic Wall was further reduced by the practice of incorporating prisoners of war from the Eastern Front into the Wehrmacht. Osttruppen recruitment had followed months when:
‘Twenty to thirty men died every night due to the combination of hours of hauling wood, generous lashing with leather whips, and bad food.
‘Suddenly, in early 1942 … Barracks were cleaned, men deloused and food became more abundant. For six weeks they were forced to take exercise so they could get their strength back. … In May 1942 they discovered they were now part of four Armenian battalions which were being formed and trained to fight in the German Army.’
By D Day approximately 75,000 Osttruppen were serving with the German Army in France, mostly as rear area troops. Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt was not impressed with their qualities, The Russians constituted a menace and a nuisance to operations’. However, according to General der Infanterie Gunther Blumentritt, of the operational Ost battalions:
‘…only four remained with LXXXIV Infantry Corps, and only two of these were committed on the coastal front. One battalion, which was especially noted for its trustworthiness, was committed on the left wing of 716th Infantry Division, at the request of this division.’
This battalion, 441 Ost Battalion was positioned on the Meuvaines Ridge, on 716th Division’s left flank in the area of the British Gold Beach, with a company inland from Juno. 439 Ost Battalion was mainly deployed with 352nd Division but 3 Kompanie 642 Ost Battalion was in the second line some two miles inland from Sword beach. In addition, recent German research has confirmed that both 726 and 736 Regiment had troops attached from the four Kompanies of 439 Ost Battalion. These soldiers were normally attached to German units in platoon strength to boost the overall number of defenders in a specific location and would account for the fact that many of the prisoners taken were of an eastern appearance. It would also be wrong to dismiss Osttruppen as entirely worthless, some did fight well, including a group on Juno Beach who resisted capture until the evening of D Day and some did not surrender until D+1.
In summary, the enemy on Juno Beach were not of the highest quality but they had been in position for a long time and mostly had concrete shelters and casemates, which were clear force multipliers. The German regrouping of platoons and companies made it difficult for Allied intelligence to calculate the number of defenders and, as a consequence, the Canadians faced significantly more enemy troops in the coastal defences than had been expected.
Albert Speer head of the Todt Organization and architect of the Atlantic Wall.
Todt workers constructing concrete casemates on the Channel coast.
German soldiers inland from the Juno area indicate to the camera where they would rather be… Paris.
Keeping a watch on the Channel.
The Wiederstandneste (WN)
It must have been of considerable concern to Major General Keller to have the defences of Courseulles (WN 29–31), in the centre of Juno Beach. Other than the major defences around the small port, every thousand yards or so, amongst the dunes and coastal villages, there were strong points (wiederstandeste). Although each German strong point differed according to its task, the Canadian operation order gives a very good summary:
‘The coast is held by a system of linear defences arranged in strongpoints. A company area consists of several strongpoints occupied by either one section, two sections or in some cases one whole platoon.
‘Each battalion has three companies forward with support weapons sub-allotted down to sections, there is therefore probably no battalion reserve. Each strongpoint may however be expected to have an immediate reserve within the position.
‘Defences consist mainly of pillboxes and open machine gun positions with open emplacements for 75 mm guns reinforcing the stronger positions. Strongpoints are usually set astride exits to cover the beaches with enfilade fire. In addition it can be assumed that each platoon will have a 2 inch (50 mm) mortar, and that a total of six 3-inch (81 mm) mortars per battalion will be shared out to particular strongpoints…. Each strongpoint is surrounded by a protective minefield and wire as well as the minefield and wire on the [back of the] beaches.’
Beach Defences
While the quality of the coastal troops of 716th Division was questionable, they were deployed in a relatively strongly held stretch of the coastline. In front of Rommel’s strong points and their belts of protective wire and minefields were the open expanses of the beaches, covered by the strong point’s interlocking arcs of fire. The Germans had assumed that Allies would land on a rising tide, nearing high water, in order to reduce the distance across the exposed beach. Therefore, a ‘devils garden’ of beach obstacles, designed to impede a landing at high water, had been deployed in rows between twelve and seventeen feet above the low-tide mark.
Much of the material used in constructing beach obstacles was recycled from old border fortifications of the occupied countries. Czech hedgehogs (jagged steel stakes), curved girders from the Maginot Line and even steel gates from the Belgian fortresses, would on a rising tide, be a test of the Royal Navy and Royal Marine landing craft crew’s seamanship.
Gefreiter Werner Beibst describes the work of a coastal infantryman:
‘One of our main duties was to keep guard in two-and-a-half-hour shifts, throughout the day and night, just looking at the sea. There were occasionally bombing raids. Then there was Rommel’s idea – I heard later that it had come from him – to fell trees, pines or some other kind of trees that grew abundantly in that area. These were to become ‘Rommel’s Asparagus’. Anyway, it was our job to fell these trees and then horses were used to drag the trunks out of the woods, back to the coast. Then we had to wait for the tide to go out to plant the trees really far out on the sand. All this we did more or less without any kind of mechanical help. It was terribly difficult work and required huge numbers of people. Once the trees had been erected, mines were planted on the seaward side of the trees. This was all intended to catch the landing craft that we expected to land in that area. We spent April doing this work.
‘We were really strained by the work. During the day, we worked felling and dragging the tree trunks and then at night we had constant watch, such that we could never really sleep properly. We were all quite young at the time, seventeen or eighteen years old, and we really needed our sleep and decent food, but got neither. The bunkers were frightfully primitive, sometimes they were only earth bunkers and we had to live in them; the bombing raids made it impossible to live any other way. In our bunker there were eight men sharing; sometimes it was twelve and very restrictive and unpleasant. No one could move and the sleeping-bunk, well, it was not unlike being in a submarine. Washing arrangements were very primitive and we could never take our clothes off to sleep because we had to keep our uniforms and our boots on at night.
‘I was really only properly scared during the bombing raids. Sometimes they happened during the day, when we were out on the beach, fully exposed, erecting these Rommel Asparagus in the sand. When the raids came, all we could do was throw ourselves down in the sand. A number of people in my group were actually killed on these occasions.’
Conclusion
It is a fact that defensive positions can always be improved. However, after six months as Inspector of the Atlantic Wall, Rommel felt he had made significant progress. True, the German coastal defences were still a crust and work on the inland defences was only just being made possible by the arrivals of formations such as 352nd Division. In addition, the panzer divisions were, in Rommel’s view, badly located. However, Rommel wrote to his wife in early May, ‘I am more confident than ever before. If the British give us just two more weeks, I won’t have any more doubt about it’. Finally, just ten days before D Day, Rommel issued a Special Order of the Day, which reflected his own growing confidence in the outcome of an Allied assault on the Atlantic Wall.
‘I have expressed my deep appreciation of the well-planned and well-executed work performed in so few months.
‘The main defence zone on the coast is strongly fortified and well manned; there are large tactical and operational reserves in the area. Thousands of pieces of artillery, anti-tank guns, rocket projectiles and flame-throwers await the enemy; millions of mines under water and on land lie in wait for him. In spite of the enemy’s great air superiority, we can face coming events with the greatest Confidence.’
ROMMEL Generalfeldmarshal, 22 May 44
The weather in early June that had so concerned the Allied commanders brought a certainty to the Germans that the invasion would not take place in such conditions; after all, Kreigsmarine minelayers had been driven back into port by the heavy seas and strong winds. Oberst Zimmermann commented that ‘there seemed no prospect of an immediate assault against this sector of the coast’. All along the Normandy coast the defences went to ‘minimum manning’ and unit commanders took the opportunity to exercise their men or simply let them rest.
As a result of the weather and deception measures, the Allied attack on the Atlantic Wall was going to achieve tactical surprise.