Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  Rommel fortified the so-called Atlantic Wall and made all his plans on that principle. Had we fought D-day as he planned it, we might have won and turned the war around.

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Roon gives no credit to the superb deception tactics, mainly British, that encouraged the Germans in their wishful "look" about where we would land. An enormous effort was laid on: air attacks and naval bombardment of the Pas de Calais exceeding those in Norman,.i, aerial bombing of the railroads and highways leading to it, vast arrays of dummy landing craft and fake army hutments near Dover, and a variety of still-secret intelligence tricks. The Germans were not very imaginative. They swallowed all hints confirming their cleverjudgment that we were coming to the Pas de Calais. - V. H.

  What Went Wrong-Preparations

  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 Goering'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 tese, 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 Oh 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 Jollies.

  What Went Wrong-aday

  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 sippers, 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 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 ncyt alarm us. Ncyt 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 poohPoohed- Our informers in the French Resistance had olytained 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.

  ...

  My Trip to the Front (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. Jid see Jodl at about ten o'clock, after a leisurely private breakfast, he quite approved denying Rundstedt's frantic requests.

  The Bercht
esgaden 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 teleorinters 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 Fuhrer 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 Fuhrer 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 spat 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 Oh 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 divertion 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, burnedout 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-Lo, I fell in with trucks carrying our paratrooper's 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 Fohrees gory boasts at Klessheim Castle about "squashing the invaders into the sand," and "meeting them with a curtain of steel and fire! As we drove eastward small gun duels sputtered and villages burned in the persisting quiet. Interrogating officers wherever I could, I learned the reason for the strange calm. A vast combined naval and air bombardment at dawn had poured a deluge of shot and shell on our defenses. The wounded I spoke to had horror-stricken faces.

  One older noncom with a-smashed arm told me that he had lived through Verdun and experienced nothing like it. Everywhere I encountered fatalism, apathy, lost communications, broken-up regiments, and confusion over orders. The gigantic sea armada, the air fleets roaring overhead, and the fearful bombardments had already spread a sense of a lost war.

  That a possibly fatal crisis was at hand I could no longer doubt.

  Speeding back to. Paris I told Jodl over the telephone that this was the main assault, and that we must concentrate against it, moving at night to evade the air interdiction, and effecting transport repair on a crash basis. Jodl's response was, "Well, get back here, but I advise you to be very careful about what you say." It was unnecessary advice.

  I never got a hearing. At the next few briefing conferences I was not called on. Hitler pointedly avoided my eye. The Normandy situation deteriorated rapidly, and my information was soon out of date.

  Two impressions remain with me of this lovely June, when our German world was crumbling while Hitler socialized over tea and cakes in Berchtesgaden. On June 19 a great storm blew up on the Normandy coast and raged for four days. it set back the invaders far more than our forces had. it broke up the artificial harbors, and(threw almost a thousand vessels up on the beach. Reconnaissance photographs showed such a gigantic disaster that I felt my last flicker of hope. Hitler was in seventh heaven, reeling off giddy disquisitions on the fate of the Spanish Armada. When the weather cleared, the enemy resumed his attacks by land, sea, and air, as though a summer shower had passed by.

  His resources, pouring out of the unreachable U.S. cornucopia, were frightening. We heard no more about the Spanish Armada.

  Stamped on my memory too is a briefing conference about the time Cherbourg was falling. Hitler was standing at the map, wearing his thick glasses, and with a compass and ruler-he was gleefully showing us what a small part of France the invaders held, compared to the area we still occupied. This he was telling to senior generals who knew, and who had been warning him for weeks, that with the defensive crust at the coast smashed, and a major port gone, the rest of France was open country for enemy operations, with no tenable German position short of the West Wall at the border and the Rhine. What a sorry moment; scales fell from my eyes, and I knew once for all that the triumphant Fuhrer had degenerated to a pathological monster, trembling for his life behind a mask of bravado.

  ...

  Normandy: Summary (from World Holocaust)... Had Hitler accepted the suggestions of Rommel and Rundstedt late in June to end the war, we would have had to kneel down to a draconic peace. We might have ended up
partitioned as we are now, we might not have; but certainly our people would have been spared a year of savage air bombings, including the gruesome horror of Dresden, and Eisenhower's ruinous march to the Elbe; and from the east, the horror of universal Bolshevik pillage and rape, which the world smiled at and overlooked, while millions of our civilians had to flee westward from their homes, never to return.

  In 1918, while we stood on foreign soil, Ludendorff and Hindenburg had similarly counseled surrender, before others could inflict on German territory the ruin of war. But in 1918 there had been a political state and a military arm' and by the abdication of the Kaiser, the politicians could effect this timely surrender. Now there was no political state, no military arm; all was merged in Hitler. Politically, how could he surrender, and stretch out his neck to the hangman? He could only fight on.