How Hitler Could Have Won World War II

by Bevin Alexander

  The only thing that saved the infantry on Omaha was the U.S. Navy. Twelve destroyers moved in close to the beach, ignoring shallow water and mines, and turned every possible gun onto the German positions on the bluffs. This intense fire diminished German resistance, and permitted the soldiers to slowly gain headway.

  For six hours, Omaha was bloody chaos. The Americans held only a few yards of beach; the waves actually ran red with blood. Not until the principal commanders got ashore did the men begin to move toward the seawall and bluffs. Brigadier General Norman D. Cota, assistant commander of the 29th Division, strode calmly among the crouching soldiers. He yelled: “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach, the dead and those who are going to die. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Slowly, lone and mostly anonymous individuals of incredible heroism began to get things moving, creating breaches to open the draws to advance. In front of one such place, a lieutenant and a sergeant in the 16th Regiment took their lives in their hands and went up and found only barbed wire barred the way. The lieutenant returned to the GIs cringing behind a low shingle shelf on the beach. Standing with his hands on his hips, he said: “Are you going to lie there and get killed, or get up and do something about it?” Nobody moved, so the sergeant and the lieutenant blew the wire themselves. That gave the men courage enough to file through the gap and through a minefield.

  There were many such events on June 6, 1944. By the end of the day the Americans had pushed out a patchwork of pockets over an area six miles long and two miles deep. Behind them, 3,000 Americans lay dead on Omaha beach.

  Early on June 6, German duty officers in Normandy began to get frantic calls that thousands of paratroops were landing. The officers raced to field telephones to report to higher quarters, and the whole machinery of command went into action.

  Erwin Rommel was in Germany for his wife’s birthday, assuming the bad weather would prevent an invasion any time soon, and his chief of staff, Hans Speidel, only reached him by phone at midmorning. Rommel at once started driving toward Normandy.

  There was one panzer division within immediate striking distance of the beaches, the 21st, south of Caen. Two other divisions were fairly close: the Panzer Lehr in the vicinity of Chartres, and the SS Panzer Hitler Jugend just west of Paris. If they had moved at the first word of the invasion, they almost certainly could have smashed it, since the morning of June 6 was heavily overcast, and Allied fighter-bombers could not fly. But while Army Group B had control of the 21st Division, Hitler controlled the other two. Jodl refused to wake the Fuehrer, and questioned whether the Normandy landings were the main effort. It was 4 P.M. before the divisions were at last released.

  The 21st Panzer had 150 tanks, 60 assault guns, and 300 armored troop carriers. Its commander, Edgar Feuchtinger, formed up part of his division to attack the British paratroops east of the Orne River in the morning, but got countermanding orders from 7th Army to attack west of the river. This caused delay and only a single battle group of fifty tanks and a battalion of panzergrenadiers launched the strike toward Sword beach about midday.

  Around 9:30 A.M. the 1st Battalion of the British South Lancashires reached a point almost within sight of Caen when they encountered three antitank guns emplaced on a ridge. The South Lancs dug in and waited for the 65 tanks of the 185th Brigade, which were supposed to lead the midmorning attack toward Caen. For three hours the South Lancs sat there, while the tanks waited for the traffic jam on the Sword beach to clear.

  Around 2 P.M. twenty Sherman tanks finally attacked the three AT guns, which withdrew, and the tanks’ accompanying force, the Shropshire Light Infantry, pressed on toward Caen. Just short of the town it ran into dug-in infantry, and withdrew to Biéville, four miles north. This was the closest the Allies got to Caen for a month.

  Meanwhile the 21st Panzer battle group skirted around west of the Shropshires and drove northward with the intention of splitting Juno from Sword, and destroying each beachhead in turn. The Germans reached the unguarded coast between the two beaches at 8 P.M.

  Feuchtinger was sending another fifty tanks to reinforce this advance when overhead the panzers saw the largest glider-borne force in the war, 250 transports, coming to reinforce the 6th Airborne a few miles east. Feuchtinger assumed wrongly that the gliders were landing in his rear with the intention of cutting off the division, and he recalled all his tanks. This fortuitous appearance of the gliders ended the last chance the Germans had to smash the beachheads.

  The Germans made another fundamental error: they sent the two closest panzer divisions in daylight toward the Normandy beaches. Rommel and Guderian had preached against this, saying that troops had to move at night. But OKW ordered 12th SS Panzer Hitler Jugend Division, west of Paris, to advance on Caen on the late afternoon of June 6. It did not complete its 75-mile journey until 9:30 A.M., June 7. Friedrich Dollmann, 7th Army commander, ordered Panzer Lehr Division, near Chartres, 110 miles from the front, to drive in daylight on June 7 toward Villers-Bocage, fifteen miles southwest of Caen, to block British movement in that direction. Fritz Bayerlein, Panzer Lehr commander, protested in vain.

  Both divisions suffered heavy damage from Allied air attacks. Panzer Lehr, the only division in Normandy at full strength, lost 5 tanks, 84 self-propelled guns and half-tracks, and 130 trucks and fuel tankers. Because of the air attacks Panzer Lehr’s tracked vehicles got separated from the wheeled units, and the division was unable to deliver an attack when it arrived, while SS Hitler Jugend had neither the time nor space to launch a coordinated assault by all its formations.

  Nevertheless, the arrival of both panzer divisions stopped the rapid advance of the Allies out of Normandy. But these and other divisions were eaten up as they were committed piecemeal, and the moment passed when the German army could have thrown the Allies into the sea. Meanwhile Hitler held some of his strongest divisions at the Pas de Calais, still believing the Normandy invasion was a feint. From sites around the Pas, he also launched attacks on London, beginning June 12–13, with the V-1 jet-propelled cruise missile, and, in September, fired the first V-2 rocket-propelled ballistic missiles.

  On June 10, Rommel proposed to Hitler that all armored forces in the line be replaced with infantry formations, and that armor be shifted westward to cut off and destroy the Americans in the lower Cotentin peninsula (7th Corps that had landed at Utah and the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions). But Hitler vetoed the plan, and the Germans were forced into a wholly defensive operation.

  This led to a murderous battle, but the outcome was never in doubt. Overwhelming Allied power was building day by day. Before long the Allies would burst out of Normandy and roll over the German army.

  22 THE LIBERATION OF FRANCE

  ALL THE DISASTERS PREDICTED BY ERWIN ROMMEL FOR FAILURE TO MOVE UP forces in advance now came to pass. Practically every unit ordered to the battlefront suffered heavy damage. Reinforcements had to be thrown in as soon as they arrived, and their strength eroded rapidly. Battle losses ran 2,500 to 3,000 a day. Tank losses were immense, replacements few.

  Allied aircraft destroyed the railway system serving Normandy and smashed anything moving on the roads in daytime. The supply system was so damaged that only the barest essentials reached the front.

  As Hitler repeated his familiar order to hold every square yard, Rundstedt and Rommel went to Berchtesgaden on June 29 to talk with the Fuehrer.

  Hitler’s ideas for stopping the western Allies were utterly unrealistic. The navy was to attack the Allied battleships, but Admiral Dönitz pointed out only a few small torpedo and other light boats were available, and they could accomplish little. A thousand of the new Me-262 twin-engine, jet-propelled fighters were to wrest control of the air over Normandy. However, Anglo-American air attacks in the winter and spring of 1944 had virtually wiped out the pool of skilled German pilots. The Luftwaffe could produce only 500 crews, most of them ill-trained. Consequently, very few Me-262s, with a speed (540 mph) and armament (four 30-millimeter cannons) exc
eeding any Allied fighter, ever flew against the Allies.

  Rundstedt and Rommel told Hitler the situation was impossible. How, Rommel asked, did Hitler imagine the war could still be won? A chaotic argument followed, and Rundstedt and Rommel expected to be ousted from their jobs.

  Back at Paris on July 1, Rundstedt got Hitler’s order that “present positions are to be held.” He called Hitler’s headquarters and told a staff officer he couldn’t fulfill this demand. What shall we do? the officer asked. Rundstedt replied: “Make peace, you fools.”

  The next day an emissary from Hitler presented Rundstedt with an Oak Leaf to the Knight’s Cross and a handwritten note relieving him of his post because of “age and poor health.” Hitler replaced Rundstedt with Günther von Kluge, who at first thought the situation was better than it was. He changed his mind the moment he visited the front.

  Rommel, to his surprise, remained at his post. About this time Rommel and his chief of staff, Hans Speidel, concluded that the Germans should commence independent peace negotiations with the western Allies. Their idea was to open the west to an unopposed “march in” by the British and American armies, with the aim of keeping the Russians out of Germany. Everything had been prepared and Kluge and others won over, when fate intervened on July 17: Rommel was severely wounded by a low-flying Allied aircraft near Livarot.

  Three days later, on July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a leader of the secret opposition to Hitler, placed a bomb under a table where Hitler was meeting in his headquarters at Rastenburg, East Prussia. The bomb exploded, but Hitler survived. Immediately afterward, he replaced the army chief of staff, Kurt Zeitzler, with Heinz Guderian, who reported to Hitler at noon on July 21.

  “He seemed to be in rather poor shape,” Guderian wrote. “One ear was bleeding; his right arm, which had been badly bruised and was almost unusable, hung in a sling. But his manner was one of astonishing calm.”

  Hitler quickly recovered from the physical effects of the bomb. An existing malady, which caused his left hand and left leg to tremble, had no connection with the explosion. The attempt on his life had a profound effect on his behavior, however. Guderian wrote that “the deep distrust he already felt for mankind in general … now became profound hatred…. What had been hardness became cruelty, while a tendency to bluff became plain dishonesty. He often lied without hesitation…. He believed no one any more. It had already been difficult enough dealing with him; it now became torture that grew steadily worse from month to month. He frequently lost all self-control and his language grew increasingly violent.”

  Hitler commenced a wave of terror against anyone suspected of a role in the bombing plot. This led to numerous executions. On October 14, 1944, Rommel, recovering from his wounds at his home in Ulm, received the option of a People’s Court trial, which would have meant execution, or taking poison and getting a state funeral—and no persecution of his wife and son. Rommel chose poison.

  By June 27, the Americans had pushed the Germans out of the Cotentin peninsula and seized Cherbourg (though the Germans damaged the port and it took weeks to get it operating). Meanwhile, Montgomery’s British forces on the east had been unable to budge the Germans from Caen. Danger arose that the Allies would be boxed into Normandy, especially as a Channel storm June 19–23 severely damaged the Mulberries on the Norman coast and drove 800 vessels up on the beaches.

  Omar Bradley, commanding the U.S. 1st Army, began moving his forces south to carry out the original plan of Overlord: breaking out to Avranches at the base of the Cotentin peninsula, thereby opening the door to capture of Brittany and the ports there by George Patton’s 3rd Army, to be committed at this time. These advances in addition would give the Allies space for a massive turning movement that could sweep across France to the German frontier.

  Bradley lined up twelve divisions in four corps to crack through in a massive frontal assault. Troy H. Middleton’s 8th Corps and J. Lawton Collins’s 7th Corps on the west were to drive full speed down the west coast of the peninsula to Avranches. Meanwhile Charles H. Corlett’s 19th Corps would seize St. Lô in the center, and Leonard T. Gerow’s 5th Corps at Caumont would “hold the hub of the wheel,” in Bradley’s words, protecting the right flank of the British 2nd Army.

  Middleton’s corps, on the extreme west, opened the attack on July 3. But it failed completely. Collins’s 7th Corps had no better luck the next day, while 19th Corps made only meager gains around St. Lô.

  To Bradley and his corps commanders the fault lay with the leadership within the American divisions, which in numerous cases was inadequate. Bradley replaced several commanders, but the great problem the Americans faced was the bocage—the hedgerow country of Normandy— which caught the Americans by complete surprise. Planners, solving problems of the landings, had paid little or no attention to the terrain just behind the beaches. No troops were taught how to deal with it.

  Virtually the entire American sector—from the coast of the Cotentin to the line Caumont-Bayeux—was bocage country. In the British sector to the east the land was part bocage and part rolling countryside punctuated by hamlets and small woods. For centuries Norman farmers had enclosed their land in small fields by raising embankments three or four feet high. These banks were overgrown with dense shrubbery, brambles, hawthorn, and small trees. The hedgerows were intended as fences to hold livestock, mark boundaries, and protect animals and crops from sea winds. Each field had a gate to admit animals and equipment. Dirt tracks or sunken lanes ran between these hedgerows, permitting troops and weapons to move free from observation from the air or on the ground. The effect was to divide the terrain into thousands of walled enclosures.

  The bocage proved to be ideal country for the Germans to defend. Antitank weapons—Panzerfäuste, or bazooka rocket tubes—and machine guns posted in the hedgerows could remain hidden until a tank was within fifty yards, destroy all but the heaviest tank with one shot, and stop the advance of infantry. In addition, tanks, assault guns, and 88-millimeter antiaircraft guns concealed in the bocage or villages could knock out any Allied tank up to 2,000 yards distant.

  The Germans organized each field (mostly seven to fifteen acres) as a defensive stronghold, posting machine guns in the corners to pin down Americans advancing across in the open. They placed other automatic weapons in the hedgerows on the front and flanks of the attackers. Once they had stopped the attack, the Germans brought down preregistered mortar rounds on the field. Mortars caused three-quarters of American casualties in Normandy.

  American artillery fire could not be used often, since the range was so close that rounds might land on Americans. This undermined the standard American method of fighting. Infantry habitually maneuvered to locate the enemy, then called on artillery to finish him off. Green infantry tended not to move at all under fire, but to seek the nearest cover or hug the ground.

  The hedgerows also nullified the tanks’ greatest advantages, mobility and firepower. Tankers were reluctant to operate within the confined spaces of the bocage, yet if they stayed on the main roads or lanes they made excellent targets. Commanders realized tanks had to get off the roads, but this forced them into the hedgerows.

  Some way had to be found to break the impasse. Normal American practice had been for tanks and infantry to advance in separate echelons. In Normandy, astute commanders realized the two had to work together (thus recognizing at long last the Kampfgruppe system the Germans had perfected since 1940).

  The 29th Infantry Division’s method was one of the best. Developed in June and tested on July 11 east of St.-Lô, the 29th’s system consisted of a four-phase operation. First, a Sherman M4A3 medium tank broke through enough vegetation in the center of a hedgerow to allow its cannon and machine gun to open up against the enemy-held hedgerow on the opposite side of the field. Meanwhile a 60-millimeter mortar crew lobbed shells behind the enemy hedgerow. Under intense covering fire of the tank’s machine gun, a squad of infantry advanced in open formation across the field. As they closed on
the enemy, the infantry tossed hand grenades over the hedgerow to kill or confuse the German defenders. Meanwhile, the Sherman tank backed away from its firing position, and an engineer team blew a hole in the hedgerow for the tank to drive through. The tank then rushed forward to assist the infantry in flushing any remaining enemy soldiers out of the hedgerow.

  Although this and similar systems worked, the process was slow. Others were thinking of a faster and safer way to get Shermans through the hedgerows—since crashing through exposed the thin underside of the tanks to enemy fire.

  Shermans equipped with bulldozer blades could do the job, but there were few such equipped tanks in the theater. Using explosives to break a hole in the hedgerow gave away the attack and served as an aiming point for German weapons. At last, individual soldiers came up with welded devices on the front of Shermans that could crack through the thickest hedgerow. In a prodigious effort, 1st Army welding teams produced 500 hedgerow cutters between July 14 and 25. By late July 60 percent of the army’s Shermans were equipped with the device.

  Bradley, stymied by fierce German defense of the hedgerows, conceived a new plan of attack, which he named Cobra. He decided to focus the breakout around St.-Lô, spearheaded by Lawton Collins’s 7th Corps. The key feature would be a massive air attack on the narrow front. When Collins broke through, the whole weight of 1st Army, now fifteen divisions, would be thrown into the assault.

  Meanwhile Montgomery drew up plans for an offensive at Caen, code-named Goodwood, to support Cobra. Montgomery launched Goodwood on July 18, preceded by a massive air attack by 1,700 heavy and 400 medium bombers. At first the British attack went well. Tanks advanced against the stunned German defenders. But bomb craters slowed the armor, and the Germans pulled themselves together and launched a counterattack. It gained no ground, but inflicted heavy losses on the British. On July 20, Montgomery called off the attack, having moved six miles south of Caen, but having lost 4,000 men and 500 tanks.