War and Remembrance (164 page)

We German generals are sometimes accused of blaming Hitler, the dead politician, for losing the war it was our job to win. Still, the defeat in France was Hitler’s work. He fumbled the one slender chance we had. This fact cannot be blinked in a professional analysis.

His
fundamental
estimate was not bad. As far back as November he issued his famous Directive Number 51 for shifting strength to the west. Quite properly he pointed out that we could trade space for time in the east, whereas an enemy lodgment in France would have immediate “staggering” implications; the Ruhr, our war-making arsenal, would come within enemy reach. The directive was sober, its program realistic. If only he had followed through on it! But from January to June he dithered and waffled, actually draining western forces into three other theatres: the occupation of Hungary, the eastern front, and the Allied front south of Rome. Also, he froze large forces in Norway, the Balkans, Denmark, and the south of France to ward off possible landings, instead of massing all these near the Channel coast.

Certainly he was under pressure. Europe’s three thousand miles of coastline lay exposed to assault. In the east the Russians were fighting on, in Hitler’s phrase, like “swamp animals”; freeing Leningrad, recapturing the Crimea, and threatening our whole southern flank. Partisan activity was making all Europe restive. The satellite politicians were wavering. In Italy the
enemy kept crawling up the boot. The barbarous Allied air bombings were intensifying in size and accuracy, and for all Goring’s loud mouth, his battered Luftwaffe was tied down in the east and over our factory cities. Like England in 1940, we were stretched too thin with diminishing troops, arms, and resources. The tables had turned, and there was no untouched ally beyond the seas to pull our chestnuts out of the fire.

At such times a great leader should supply the steadying hand. If Directive Number 51 was correct, Hitler’s course was clear:

1. Firm up political faltering with victory, not with wasteful armed occupation as in Hungary and Italy;
   
2. Withdraw in Italy to the easily defended line of the Alps and Apennines, and send the released divisions into France;
   
3. Slow the enemy in the east with elastic harrying tactics, instead of rigid costly stands for prestige;
   
4. Leave skeleton forces in unlikely invasion areas, and gamble all strength at the Channel.
   

That is how von Nimitz and Spruance won the Battle of Midway against odds; by accepting great risks to concentrate at the decisive point. This principle of warfare is eternal. But Hitler’s nervousness precluded adhering to principle. Obstinate he was, but not firm.

His much-vaunted “Atlantic Wall” along the Channel was ill-conceived. In his solitary wisdom he decided that the invasion forces would head for a major port. A million and a half tons of concrete and countless man-hours went into pillboxes and heavy gun emplacements, designed by the supreme genius himself, that bristled around the main French harbors. Rommel presciently ordered the open beaches fortified too: belts of mines on land in the sea, underwater obstacles to tear up and blast approaching vessels, sharpened stakes in areas behind the beaches to destroy gliders, myriads of more pillboxes and gun emplacements along the shore.

But lack of manpower hampered this new effort, because of the excavating of grandiose bomb-proof caverns for aircraft factories, and the repair of bomb damage in our cities. Compared to INVASION, how important were such things? Yet Hitler did not back up Rommel’s supplementary Atlantic Wall orders, and the “Wall” remained largely a propaganda phantom. One instance suffices. Rommel ordered fifty million mines planted in the glider areas behind the beaches. Had he been obeyed the airborne landings would have failed, but not even ten percent of the mining was done, and they succeeded.

On paper we had a force of about sixty divisions to defend France; but the static divisions strung along the coast consisted mainly of substandard
troops scraped from the bottom of the barrel. Some attack infantry divisions were scattered here and there, but with the ten motorized and armored divisions lay our hope. Five of these, stationed not far from the Channel coast, could strike at either the Pas de Calais or Normandy. Rommel intended to annihilate on the beaches the first wave arriving in landing craft; actually, as it turned out, only five divisions in all. He therefore pleaded for operational control of the panzers.

In vain. Rundstedt, the overall
Ob West,
advocated hitting the invaders after they were well-lodged. Dithering between the two tactical concepts, Hitler came down on neither side. He issued orders dividing the panzers among three different commands; and
he reserved to himself, six hundred miles away in Berchtesgaden, operational control of the four panzer divisions nearest the Normandy beaches.
This decision was a grievous one. It tied Rommel’s hands, when all depended on a quick free-swinging punch. But the invasion found the German command in such a state of chaos that it is hard to say which omission, which mistake, which folly, brought
finis Germaniae.
Invasion day was a cataract of omissions, mistakes, and follies.

The overwhelming failure was the Pas de Calais mistake. That we lacked agents in England to ferret out a “secret” involving two million men; that deception measures took us in, and that our reconnaissance could not pinpoint the direction of an attack organized a few score miles away in plain sight; there is a bitter mystery!

We failed to discern that they would land at low tide. Our guns bore on the high-tide line; the thought was, why should they elect to slog across eight hundred additional yards of mushy sand under fire? They did. Eisenhower’s shock troops came in when our formidable underwater obstacles were exposed for swift clearing by sappers, and his troops made it across the sand.

We abjectly failed on the question,
When?
As the enemy armada was crossing the Channel, Erwin Rommel was visiting his wife in Germany! A near-gale was blowing on the fifth of June, predicted to last three days. This bad weather lulled Rommel and everyone else. Eisenhower had meteorological intelligence showing a marginal break in the weather. He risked a go-ahead. The scattered airborne descents in the wee hours of the morning somehow did not alarm us. Not till our soldiers in the Normandy pillboxes saw with their naked eyes the monstrous apparition of Overlord — thousands and thousands of vessels, approaching in the misty gray dawn — did we go on battle alert.

Actually we had one intelligence break which was pooh-poohed. Our informers in the French Resistance had obtained the BBC signals that would
call for D-day sabotage. Our monitoring posts heard these signals. All operational commands received the warning. In our Supreme Headquarters the report went to Jodl, who thought nothing of it. Later I heard that Rundstedt, laughing off the alarm, remarked, “As though Eisenhower would announce the invasion on the BBC!” This was the general attitude.

(from “Hitler as Military Leader”)

…It seemed that Hitler would never wake up that morning. Repeatedly I telephoned Jodl to rouse him, for Rundstedt was demanding the release of the panzers. Obviously the Normandy attack was serious! Jodl put off Rundstedt, a decision for which historians now excoriate him. Yet when Hitler did see Jodl at about ten o’clock, after a leisurely private breakfast, he quite approved denying Rundstedt’s frantic requests.

The Berchtesgaden command situation was absurd. Hitler was up at his mountain eyrie, Jodl in the “Little Chancellery,” and operational headquarters were in a barracks at the other end of town. We were never off the telephone. Rommel was out of touch, returning to the front; Rundstedt in Paris, and Rommel’s chief of staff, Speidel, at the coast, and the panzer general, Geyr, were all scorching the telephone lines and teleprinters to Berchtesgaden. The midday briefing conference was scheduled for Klessheim Castle, a charming spot about an hour out of town, in honor of some Hungarian visitors of state. It never occurred to Hitler to call this off. No, the staff had to motor out there to meet him in a small map room, where he rehearsed the “show” briefing for the visitors; then we had to hang around for the briefing, while our troops were dying under Allied bombs and naval shelling, and enemy lodgments were expanding by the hour.

I can still see the Führer bouncing into that map room about noon, his bloated pasty face wreathed in smiles, his mustache aquiver, greeting the staff with some such remark as, “Well, here we go, eh? Now we’ve got them where we can hit them! Over in England they were safe.” He showed no concern whatever over the grave reports. This landing was all a fake that we had anticipated long ago. We weren’t fooled! We were all ready for them at the Pas de Calais. This feint would turn into another bloody Dieppe fiasco for them. Splendid!

So he also declaimed in the large briefing chamber, with its soft armchairs and impressive war maps. He bombarded the Hungarians with disgusting boasts about the strength of our forces in France, the superiority of our armaments, our miraculous “new weapons” soon to be launched, the
greenness of the U.S. army, etc. etc. etc. He pooh-poohed the fall of Rome two days earlier, even making a coarse joke about his relief at turning over a million and a half Italians, syphilitic whores and all, for the Americans to feed. What the obsequious Hungarians thought of all this, nobody could tell. To me, Hitler was convincing only himself, talking his daydreams aloud. As soon as this charade was over, I requested permission to go to Normandy. Not only did the unpredictable Führer agree, he waived the rule against airplane travel by senior officers. I could fly as far as Paris, and find out what was going on.

When my plane circled down several hours later over the swastika fluttering on the Eiffel Tower, I couldn’t help thinking,
How long will it fly there?
In Rundstedt’s situation room everything was at sixes and sevens. Hitler had meantime released
one
panzer division, and a staff argument was raging about where to use it. Junior officers rushed about in a din of teleprinters and shouting. The battle map bristled with little emblems of ships and parachute-drops. Red infantry markers delineated a fifty-mile front in surprising depth, except in one spot where we had the Americans pinned down at the waterline.

Rundstedt appeared calm enough, and as usual bandbox-neat, but weary, thin, and pessimistic. He did not act at all like the
Ob West;
rather, like an old man with worries but no power. He tried to argue that I should not risk capture by paratroopers, but he was half-hearted about that, too. He still believed this was a diversion in force. But throwing the invaders back into the sea would buck up the Fatherland and give the enemy pause, so it had to be done.

Next morning the beautiful French landscape, with its fat cows and drudging peasants, was strangely quiet. The young aide of Rundstedt’s who was riding with me had to order the chauffeur to detour time and again around knocked-out bridges. The damage from the weeks of methodical Allied air bombings was manifest: devastated railroad yards, smashed trestles, burned-out trains and terminals, overturned locomotives, Churchill’s “railway desert” with a vengeance. Tactically the ground was a blotch of islands, rather than a terrain suited to overland supply. No wonder;
fifteen thousand enemy air sorties on D-day alone,
with virtually no opposition! So the postwar records show.

Passing through Saint-Lô, I fell in with trucks carrying our paratroopers toward Carentan. I took the major into my car. French saboteurs had cut his telephone lines, he said, and he had been out of touch on invasion day, but late at night had gotten through to his general. His mission now was to counterattack the thin American beachhead east of Varreville.

The strange bucolic quiet persisted as we neared the coast. The major and I climbed the steeple of a village church to have a look around. A stunning
panorama greeted us: the Channel dotted with enemy ships from horizon to horizon, and boats like a million water-insects swarming between the shore and the vessels. Through field glasses a colossal and quite peaceful operation was visible on the beach. Landing craft were lined up hull to hull as far as one could see, disgorging men, supplies, and equipment. The shore was black for miles with crates, boxes, bags, machines, and soldiers doing stevedore labor, and a crawling parade of trucks heading inland.

The “Battle of France” indeed! These troops were preparing to destroy Germany, and they looked like picnickers. I heard no gunfire but a scattering of rifle shots. What a contrast to the Führer’s gory boasts at Klessheim Castle about “squashing the invaders into the sand,” and “meeting them with a curtain of steel and fire”!