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June 6th 1944 is a day that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
has been looking forward to for a long time: his wife's birthday.
With bad weather making an invasion impossible
and intelligence suggesting that Eisenhower's waiting for more troops,
the commander of Normandy's defences has decided to go home
and surprise his wife with a pair of Parisian shoes.
In the middle of the night, his phone rings. The invasion's begun.
This episode is sponsored by Wargaming!
New players can download World of Tanks
and use the code NEPTUNE for free goodies. Link in the description!
The Nazi leadership had begun preparing for D-Day
even before the Allies held their conference at Tehran.
Following a British Commando raid at St. Nazaire
and the landings at Dieppe in 1942,
Hitler had realized that even if an invasion lay years off,
the Allies were already capable of hitting ports in occupied France.
His solution was the Atlantic Wall,
a line of coastal defences that originally clustered around ports,
but eventually stretched from the Spanish border to Norway.
Rather than building a continuous defensive barrier,
German engineers drafted a million forced labourers from France
to create a string of machine gun and artillery positions.
These hard points had overlapping fields of fire, with artillery intended to fire
along the length of the beach, rather than out to sea.
This allowed the German army to cover a larger amount of territory
with fewer men - a consideration that was crucially important by 1944.
In late 1943, Hitler had appointed Rommel
as overall commander of forces in northern France.
It was a political as well as practical appointment,
leveraging Germany's most famous general
in order to reassure the troops and the public.
Rommel also had a personal relationship with Hitler, which allowed him
to operate semi-autonomously outside the chain of command.
When Rommel arrived, he was shocked at the state of the Atlantic Wall.
Command had stripped troops for the Eastern Front,
and many of the men were either new recruits, conscripts from Eastern Europe
or had gone soft garrisoning the wine-soaked towns of France.
Allied bombing had nullified the Luftwaffe. Rommel went to work.
He sent veteran units to supplement the poorly-trained divisions.
He seeded the ground around the defensive emplacements with mines
that jumped into the air before exploding.
At low tide, he sank a forest of wooden stakes
tipped with anti-tank mines that sat just below the waves.
Now, any invader would have to choose between running the gauntlet at high tide,
or landing at low tide and crossing 300 yards of open beach.
He also flooded the low country, erected poles to tear apart gliders,
and stationed troops inland to slow the Allied advance
in preparation for a counter-attack.
But planning around that counter-attack was a problem.
First of all, they didn't know exactly where the Allies would land.
Luckily, German intelligence pulled off a coup:
they successfully deployed multiple agents in England.
Soon, they were receiving reports of armies marshalling to attack
Pas de Calais, along with diversionary attacks in occupied Norway
and... What was the other one? Normandy? Eh, whatever.
And aerial reconnaissance confirmed forces massing for these attacks.
Of course, every single one of those German agents
was actually working for the British. Good work, Garbo!
Regardless of where the landings took place,
Rommel believed the battle would be decided on the beaches.
Should the Allies establish a beachhead, it would be over.
In his plan, the divisions defending the coast would slow the enemy down
in preparation for a decisive counter-attack.
As a result, he wanted the Panzer reserve under his own command,
close to the shore in order to sweep the Allies back into the sea.
However, Hitler's leadership style started to affect strategy.
From his early days in the Nazi party,
Hitler had promoted a kind of social Darwinism among his staff,
giving them overlapping responsibilities
and intentionally fostering feuds and competition.
This meant that subordinates couldn't amass enough power to challenge him,
and it elevated his position as the final arbiter of any dispute.
In this case, Rommel was opposed by officers,
including the elderly Eastern Front veteran von Rundstedt,
who wanted the tank reserves held near Paris. This would keep them flexible
in case the Allies landed somewhere unexpected,
and shield them from shore bombardment. Rommel countered
that the long drive toward the coast would make them vulnerable to air attacks.
After fierce debate, they put it to the Führer,
who, ever indecisive, created an unworkable compromise.
He broke up the reserve, giving Rommel three Panzer divisions
and keeping the larger reserve around Paris as a personal unit,
which couldn't be moved without his express permission.
Only one of Rommel's divisions, the 21st Panzer, was sent to Normandy.
So, the stage is set for June 5th, and the weather could not be uglier.
With conditions so poor for both sailing and flying,
senior officers relax in the knowledge that the Allies will not arrive anytime soon.
Many take the opportunity to rush home on leave.
And that is when paratroopers start to land.
At 5:30 AM on June 6th,
German soldiers peer out of their bunkers to see shapes in the morning mist:
ships stretching from horizon to horizon. Then: aircraft engines.
A massive Allied bombardment rocks the ground
as bombs, naval shells, and rockets pound French soil.
But the bombers drop too far inland. The rockets fall short.
Naval guns make little headway against the steel-reinforced bunkers.
1,745 tons of ordinance drop on Omaha Beach
without killing a single German, but the roads inland are wrecked.
Worse, Allied paratrooper and glider units
land between the static units and their reserve,
with resistance elements destroying crucial bridges and rail lines,
meaning that reinforcements and supplies can't get through.
Landing craft begin to plunge toward the shore. On Omaha Beach,
the Germans see the first Allied soldiers trudging in the surf.
Machine guns open fire.
Far away, Allied soldiers lie face down, pinned,
as the first wave of mortars and artillery shells fling bodies into the air.
Months of preparation mean that German artillery crews
have ranged out the beaches and know exactly where to drop their ordinance.
The initial slaughter is monumentally one-sided.
One American company at Omaha takes 92% casualties.
By 1:30 that afternoon, German observers at Omaha report
that small groups of Americans have broken through, but the defence is holding.
They're pushing the Allies back into the sea.
But Omaha is the exception. Despite fierce resistance,
the British have broken through at Sword and Gold,
and the Canadians at Juno. The botched American landing at Utah
has reorganized into a chaotic opportunity.
Here, the bombardments have had more effect,
and the terrain isn't as challenging, but men still die in droves.
The chaos on the beach is mirrored at every German headquarters
between Normandy and Hitler's vacation home at Berchtesgaden.
Generals argue over whether to commit reserves, and where.
Rommel is rushing to toward the battle in a staff car, unable to issue orders.
His rival von Rundstedt quickly orders the 21st Panzer
to meet the British advancing on Caen,
and issues orders for the reserve units near Paris to move out.
But his orders are countermanded.
That unit can only be moved by the Führer's personal order.
And Hitler is asleep. Ever since his days as a bohemian in Vienna,
Hitler has always been a late riser.
Rigid procedure dictates that the Führer should not be woken unnecessarily,
and even in the face of invasion, no one wants to break this protocol.
After all, what if it's only a diversion?
When Hitler eventually wakes at noon, he is thrilled the invasion has arrived.
This, he says, is his chance to decisively crush the Allies! And yet he delays.
It's 4:00 PM before he orders the Panzer reserve to move out.
By that time, the clouds have cleared, exposing the column to Allied air power.
So, instead of advancing, the unit ends up hiding in the woods until dusk.
It will take them two days and a night to join the battle.
As the Allies overwhelm German defences and march inland,
Hitler spends his day ordering V-1 revenge strikes, not on Normandy,
but on London, then holds a conference with minor functionaries.
When Goebbels shows him the Normandy landings on a map,
Hitler exclaims with delight: "Just where we expected them!"
Goebbels, who has heard Hitler rant for months
about how the Allied target would be Calais,
simply nods at the Führer's historical revisionism.
After all, Hitler is somewhat right, in a way.
They all knew that a diversionary landing would happen at Normandy.
Probably best to keep the strong units in Calais.
Meanwhile, the Atlantic Wall is crumbling.
Even at Omaha, the defence has degraded.
Ammunition is running out. Artillery emplacements fall silent.
Americans begin breaking through and enveloping the casements.
At Caen, the Germans see one last opportunity:
a gap between the Canadian and British lines.
A grenadier regiment rushes to exploit it,
and by 8:00 PM radios that they're on the beach.
With armoured support, they can hold. But the Allies have gotten wise.
When the 21st Panzer tries to follow, they find themselves running a gauntlet.
Fire pours in from both sides. Every minute, another tank explodes.
Seeing that the window of opportunity has closed,
their commander orders them to halt and dig in around Caen.
But the defence is stiffening. All along the battlefront, Allied units
begin failing their first-day objectives of advancing and linking up inland.
By dusk, the Allies have scattered beachheads, but not much more.
Within days, German reinforcements will arrive.
And the hedgerows of Normandy will become a killing field
that will dwarf the casualties of the landings.
D-Day is over, but Operation Overlord could still fail.
To win, the Allies are gonna have to push just as hard on D-Day +1,
and D-Day +2, and every day after that.
For all of these forces,
American, British Commonwealth, French, German, and Soviet,
the fight would continue for eleven murderous months.
But the Allies now had a beachhead, and in trying to throw them back,
Germany would spend more men, fuel, and equipment that they could ill-afford.
Allied victory is a long way off, but for the first time, it's in sight.
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