Did the Germans really blunder at D- Day?

Question

Is it true that the Germans made a serious strategic blunder by holding forces in reserve until it was obvious that "D-Day" was the only Allied invasion operation, and not a "feint"?

Would an immediate counter-attack by all Germans forces have annililated the Allies?

Was the possibilty of a "feint" sound miltary reasoning? When the Germans did committ they held the Allies in check for a prolonged period.

Answer 1

No, Germany did pretty good strategic and tactical fighting on D-Day; look at the results.

Germany was also fighting in many regions so according to many, they did a good job on D-Day.

Battle of the Bulge, now that is where Germany had some great opportunities but miserably failed.

~enjoy

Answer 2

These are good questions but they could take pages to answer. I'll try in sentences instead.

1. The belief that Germany's Atlantic Wall was inpenetrable was a serious blunder. Holding forces in reserve was a serious blunder (as was not allowing front-line officers to give commands to release troops).

2. I don't think the Allies would have been wiped out by an immediate counter-attack, but it would have made the situation much worse. Remember that the Germans didn't know exactly where the main force of invasion was for many hours after the first landings. They still expected the main force to land further north.

3. A 'feint' is a sound military tactic that has worked with success in most documented conflicts. It worked on D-Day enough for the Allies to gain a strong foothold, at least.

Depends on what you mean by prolonged. At Utah and Omaha beaches, they moved inland fairly rapidly. The British and Canadians had a harder time moving towards Caen because of stiffer resistance by a larger German force.

These answers are extremely simplified, the real answers are much more in-depth.

Answer 3

It was a very good bit of deception by the Allies. They invented a ghost army ( The Us 1st Army) which was supposed to be based in England opposite Calais which was where the Gemans most feared the invasion because it was the shortest sea crossing.
They had bogus wireless traffic so the Germans could find out the strength and number of units and they made large parks of dummy vehicles and tanks so the German reconnaissance planes could spot them.
So the Germans were mostly convinced that the invasion would be in the Calais area although some of them disagreed.
By this time the war was going badly for the Germans in Russia so the troops they had available were not of the best quality except for the Panzers which were kept in reserve far from the coast.
Another drawback was that Hitler personally controlled the movement of these Panzers and he would not move them because he was convinced the main strike would come at Calais.
If they had reacted sooner they may have delayed the result by several weeks but the Allies always had air superiority
and the Panzers were easy targets for Typhoons and Tempests.
As it was the Germans made a good show in countryside that favored the defenders and the British and Canadians fought a war of attrition by engaging the main enemy armor for several weeks and destroying it while the Americans built up their forces on the right flank and eventually broke out of Normandy into Brittany and the Germans were caught in a classic pincer movement at Falaise where most of their forces in Normandy were destroyed

Bearstirring in cave -- the first forces to land on D-Day on Sword beach were French Commandos under Colonel Keiffer -- Look it up!

Answer 4

A counter-attack backed up with heavy armor would have pushed the allies back into the sea. Infantry can't deal with armor for long, and the Germans still retained the the high ground for a while during the early stages of D-day.

The Germans also feared Patton, and excpeted him to lead the allied thrust into Europe. The allies actually created a fake army and placed it under Patton's command, because they knew it would get the Germans's attention. They went so far as to create dummy tanks, guns, etc in order to sell the fake army idea to German recon flights.

A feint is always a possibility in warfare, and yes they have frequently succeded. Had d-day actually been a feint, and the Germans commited too early they would have exsposed themselves to another unexpected front. In many withholding forces made some sense, but with the benifit of hindsight it was a blunder. If German armored units advanced to the landing zones the allies would hav been forced to withdraw with heavy casualties, leaving only pokets of resistance inland.

Answer 5

In military history we do need to recognize that the combatants do not have our 20/20 hindsight. It was reasonable to think the main attack would come at Calais, which was much, much closer and had a natural harbor; Gen Patton was a great decoy. Normandy had to have an artificial harbor.

The Allies suffered terrible casualities at Normandy, despite the German errors. One of the most bizarre was that Hitler was asleep--who would want to wake him up? Yet the deployment of many troops could only be made by him. The German organizational system, including Hitler, lacked flexibility. Essentially, the Germans combined the Rommell plan, which stressed massing on the beach to the Von Rundsted plan, of moving troops to the area of attack was one of many errors. Fortress Europe was formidable, and if the German commanders could have swiftly moved troops to the Normandy, then the Allies really would have had trouble. As it was our attack took tremendous losses, and had difficulty progressing.

Your point of a counterattack would have been, I believe, our greater difficulty. Rommell had an Atlantic Wall that lacked the mobility to stop our invasion. Once we got through, we could establish a beachhead. But if Germany had had a more flexible command structure, then the Allied invasion would have only preceded slowly in the face of the resistance.

In closing, the Germans would have been better advised to have a flexible system to quickly mass troops to the Allied spot of attack. They, reasonably, could not be sure where the attack would take place. On this basis I think the Von Rundstedt plan was better than Rommell's; it had more flexibility. Hitler, who was no military genius, combined the plans, did not give his Army the flexibility to respond, and so D-Day succeeded.

Answer 6

No, they did not blunder, they were completely fooled. A previous answerer has explained about General Patton and his huge non-existent army group, supposed to be all ready to invade at Calais as soon as the Germans had moved enough forces to counter the "feint" in Normandy.

In a recent book by Jack Copeland on the Colossus machine at the Bletchley Park codebreaking centre, he relates the following (slightly edited) after D-day had been postponed from its planned date of June 1 due to bad weather.

"On 5 June, Eisenhower was in conference with his staff when a courier arrived from Bletchley Park and handed him a piece of paper. Hitler had sent Rommel battle orders by radio, which had been decoded with the new Colossus. In them, Hitler said the Normandy invasion was imminent, but it was a feint to draw troops away from the Channel ports, against which the real invasion would be launched FIVE DAYS LATER, therefore Rommel was not to move any troops. Eisenhower could not tell anybody in the room what he had just read, but knowing that he would have at least five days to build up the invasion force, he handed the paper back to the courier and announced "We go tomorrow".

And, as they say, the rest is history.

Answer 7

The many 'what ifs' of WWII, many have asked this question. Rommel wanted the Panzer reserves close enough to the beaches to counterattack the allies while they were still on the beaches.

The 21st Panzer Division was the only armoured unit close enough to do anything in the first hours of the invasion. They were near Caen during the attack, however, with only one division, and with allied air superiority and naval gunpower, the one panzer division was not enough to do anything while the allies were still on the beaches.

The 12 SS Hitler Jugend was close enough on Jun 6th to provide support to the 21st, but was not released to tactical control of the normandy commanders until the 7th.

Panzer Lehr and 1st SS LAH were committed June 8-12th. the 2nd SS Das Reich and 9th SS Hoenstaufen arriving in late June. The 10SS Frundberg also arriving in late June.

Having been released to Normandy too late having to travel at night to avoid Allied fight/bombers, the panzer reserves were committed too late to make a difference. If they had been closer to the front, the allied air superiority and naval bombardments would've still won the day for the allies. The carpet bombing of high level bombers and the swarms of Typhoons and other fighters ground the German divisions all over France.

On the one hand, you could say it was a blunder for keeping the Panzer Reserves in the rear and committing them piecemeal, but on the other hand, they would've been chewed up by allied aircraft.....so you could say it was not a blunder...

Answer 8

It isn't as simple as that. Rommel wanted all the forces up close on the beaches, figuring air interdiction would stop counterattacks. This was true. On the other hand, von Runstedt wanted to keep most of the forces off the beaches, figuring naval gunfire would be too destructive. That was true, too. Hitler tried a compromise, neither fish nor fowl, and probably worse that either of the two bad alternatives, but they were really between Scylla and Charybdis in planning the defense, especially since the threat was a lot less than the Red Army rolling across eastern Europe.

Answer 9

Yes, that was one of many they made.
No the blunder was made earlier when they decided the Allies would not invade and stripped the western front of units too invade Russia.
Maybe.
Failing too believe reports from the front about the size of the attacking force had more to do with hesitating than the feint threat. Key German officers where also out of contact. That containment had more too do with the terrain than German efforts

Answer 10

The Germans blundered when they started the War. Despite the vaunted 'Genius' of Hitler, and the 'Greatness' of German Warriors, most everything the Germans did planted the seeds for future failure.
NO - - - an immediate counter-attack would not have annihilated the Allies .... We are talking about American, British, and Canadian Troops augumented with Poles - - - no way would they had backed down (if the forces had been French then yes they would have been back in their boats by noon)...

The Germans were much to weakened by their committment on the Eatern Front and Italy to do much about the invasion. Rommel was well aware he did not have the one thing needed for modern warfare. Tanks. Tanks and armoured vehicles. He was also aware that German guns could only fire out to sea - - - much as the French fumbled with the Magiot Line, the Germans planted static defences that were ineffective in the face of Allied Ingenuity.

Peace...

Answer 11

The Germans and above all Hitler expected an attack to the step of Calais and therefore the disembarkation in Normandia had been initially considered one offensive feint. When the Germans noticed that that one in normandia was the true disembarkation, by now was too much late…