What Decided the Normandy Landings | A Brief History of Things

Air and naval supremacy gave the Allies unprecedented mobility and concealment. They knew when and where the battle would begin. The Germans did not.

Anyone who has seen The Longest Day probably remembers the scene: staff officers want to tell Hitler that the Normandy landings have begun, and his adjutant tells them the Führer is asleep. A German officer says bitterly that they lost the war only because the Führer was sleeping. To blame Hitler for everything that went wrong with the German counterattack at Normandy is something of an exaggeration, but he bears most of the responsibility: he was the one who made an already muddled chain of command worse.

Germans repeated the principle of "one people, one nation, one leader" endlessly, but the Nazis ran their armed forces the way they ran the state — by divide and rule. Hitler deliberately blurred the powers of each agency, so that nobody knew exactly who was in charge of what. The army, navy, and air force feuded openly, which only made the Führer more necessary.

Rommel could not control the Luftwaffe in France, could not direct the navy, and had no say over the administrators of the occupied territories. He had no authority over the SS units stationed in France, nor over the paratroopers and anti-aircraft units, which belonged to the Luftwaffe. The split ran to absurd lengths: as the Allied fleet approached the coast, the naval coastal guns along the English Channel would stay under naval control, but the moment Allied troops began to land, those same guns would pass to the Wehrmacht.

To the very end, Rommel never worked out whether he or Rundstedt would command the battle. Worst of all, Hitler wanted to command it himself. He kept the panzer divisions in his own hands — they could go into action only on his order — while his headquarters sat a thousand miles away.

Allied supreme commander Eisenhower had no such problem. His authority was plain, and his orders were obeyed absolutely. At first he was not given command of the Allied bomber force; he threatened to resign if he could not use the bombers, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave him what he asked for. By the spring of 1944, every soldier, airman, and sailor in Britain, and every unit, took orders from Eisenhower.

The muddle in the German command was made worse by a deep disagreement over how to defend against a landing. Rommel thought that only mobile infantry and panzer divisions could counterattack quickly on the day itself, so those units had to be moved close to the coast to deliver a decisive blow. Rundstedt thought otherwise. He wanted to let the Allies move inland and fight the decisive battle inside France, well beyond the reach of the heavy guns of British and American battleships and cruisers. The disagreement went on troubling the German high command past D-Day.

Rommel believed that if the landing force were not driven back into the sea at once, Allied air power would make its advance easy. He insisted on placing his main combat armies along the coast and digging in. He told his generals he wanted bunkers dug along the shoreline and every tank hidden. Rundstedt believed that fighting on the beaches meant exposing the Germans to the guns of the Allied fleet. He trusted his own analysis, as he always had: a war of movement inland was far better than a static battle fought from fixed works. Through the first five months of 1944 he put most of his energy into improving the transport of the coastal divisions. But his effort to put wheels under his own troops was cancelled out by Rommel's bunkers along the coast, and he had to leave all his men fixed to their guns.

General Heinz Guderian, Germany's expert on armored warfare, was appalled by Rommel's stubbornness; he held that "the strength of an armored formation lies precisely in its firepower and mobility." He urged Rommel to pull the tanks back out of range of Allied naval guns, since the lesson of the Sicily and Salerno landings was obvious: under naval bombardment the Germans could not fight a decisive battle. Rommel would not give way. "If you keep the panzer divisions in the rear," he said, "they will never advance. Once the invasion begins, enemy air power will stop any advance that might be possible."

Guderian reported to Hitler and recommended pulling the tanks back for deployment inland. Hitler, indecisive, produced a half-hearted compromise: he handed Rommel three panzer divisions — the 2nd, the 21st, and the 116th — and held the other four inland in reserve. General Alfred Jodl of the German high command assured Rommel that although those four divisions answered to the high command, "the moment we truly understand the enemy's intentions and the point of his main attack, we will let them go into action at once — you need press the matter no further." In practice this produced an awkward situation: at the decisive moment the commander of a German panzer division would not know whom to obey, because he took orders not from one man but from three — Rommel, Rundstedt, and Hitler.

The arrangement proved only one thing: Hitler backed neither Rommel nor Rundstedt and Guderian. Rommel did everything he could to mass his three panzer divisions, and apart from those three his forces had almost no mobility at all. To deny Rommel command of the tanks was to reject Rommel's strategy. It was less the Allies or the French Resistance that stripped Germany's powerful panzer divisions of their mobility than the decisions of the Third Reich's own leadership.

Even those three remaining divisions could not be gathered into a single fist, because Rommel could not tell where the Allies would come ashore. The front the Germans were trying to fortify was simply too vast, and covering several possible targets at once meant that no division could sit within a few hours of every beach.

Besides the overstretched front, the loss of air and naval supremacy deepened the blindness of the German defenders. Air and naval supremacy gave the Allies unprecedented mobility and concealment. They knew when and where the battle would begin. The Germans did not.

In the air, Hitler again did the Allies a favor. Göring had already built jet aircraft that frightened Allied pilots; the commander of the U.S. Eighth Air Force later admitted that had the Germans deployed jet fighters to the French coast in numbers, Allied air superiority would have vanished and the Normandy landings might have been beaten. But what Hitler wanted more were bombers that could hit London and strike Allied troops coming ashore in France, so production of the jet fighter was shelved. That he had to choose at all showed that by the later years of the war Nazi production had run into a severe ceiling.

Set against Nazi shortages, the Allies' "arsenal of democracy" worked wonders and showed what the American economy could do. America's manufacturing advantage lay not only in the industrial giants everyone knows, but in countless small manufacturers — nowhere more clearly than in landing craft.

The U.S. Navy liked big ships with big guns and was used to handling them; it had no wish to fiddle with small boats, and its major contractors, the big shipyards, felt the same. The work fell to small businessmen, small contractors, and people willing to take large risks. There were many such people, but the finest designer and builder of landing craft was Andrew Jackson Higgins of New Orleans. Higgins taught himself small-boat design, and through the 1930s he built boats for the oil industry. He was prospecting for oil in the swamps of southern Louisiana at the time and needed a shallow-draft boat that could run up onto land and then back off into the water. The wooden "Eureka" boat he designed for the job met the need exactly.

Higgins was convinced a war was coming that would need thousands of small boats, and that when it came steel would be scarce and wood would become an important substitute. So he bought the entire 1939 Philippine mahogany crop and stored it away for later. The Navy's Bureau of Ships, it is said, had meant to design its own landing craft rather than deal with this hot-tempered, loud-talking Irishman, who wanted to build boats out of wood instead of metal and drank a bottle of whiskey a day. Higgins Industries was also an unremarkable Gulf Coast outfit with no standing among the East Coast establishment.

Higgins won his contest with the naval bureaucracy in the end. The Marine Corps loved the Landing Craft, Vehicle and Personnel he built; it was far better than the models designed by the Navy or built by his competitors, and its superiority persuaded even blind, foolish, and hidebound officials. Built on the Eureka design, the Higgins Industries landing craft ran on a single diesel engine and was driven by a shielded propeller. The landing ramp (or bow door) was metal, but the sides and the square stern were plywood, which saved a great deal of steel.

The Higgins boat suited the Normandy landings perfectly. It could carry a 36-man platoon, or a jeep and a 12-man squad, to the shore, let them rush out within seconds, then pull back into the water and return to the mother ship for another load. By the end of the war Higgins Industries had built more than 20,000 of them. Known as "Higgins boats," they put a steady stream of infantry ashore in the Mediterranean, in France, on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and on other Pacific islands. More American soldiers landed in Higgins boats than in every other type of landing craft combined.

Allied deception also badly misled the German defenders, who believed right up to D-Day that the attack would come at Calais. The British had broken the Enigma cipher early, and had turned a number of German agents to feed back information that was half true. The Germans had always been proud of their intelligence work; they thought democracies, used to shouting everything out in the press, could not keep a secret. The flood of material coming back from their agents fed that pride and convinced them they had the best spy service in the world. It also convinced them that Enigma was the best cipher machine ever made and could not be broken, and that they possessed the most advanced intelligence and counter-intelligence system anywhere.

On top of that, effective Allied air reconnaissance and on-the-spot reports from members of the French Resistance gave the Allies a nearly complete picture of the ground around Normandy and of German dispositions. Besides supplying intelligence, Resistance members carried out sabotage of every kind, and did particular damage to the efficiency of German transport. Unlike the German defenders, Eisenhower never had to worry about his rear.

The success of the D-Day landings was a chain of events, and the credit belongs to the steady flow of weapons from American factories, Allied control of the air and the sea, the intelligence and deception systems, the French Resistance, the persistence and inventiveness of Higgins and other inventors and entrepreneurs, and the cooperation of American and British business, government, and labor.

In short, as Stephen Ambrose, author of Normandy 1944 (《诺曼底1944》), put it: with the victory of D-Day the Western democracies exposed the lie the Nazis had told — that democracies are inefficient by nature and dictatorships efficient by nature. The truth was the exact opposite.

Recommended reading: Normandy 1944

Cover image: The Longest Day, via Douban

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