If Germany had had one army more in France by June 1944, could she have repelled the Normandy landings?
- Thread starter Juan de Mariana
- Start date
There's a few subtleties to this:
Most of the troops at the beach were from battalions belonging to 716th Division under command of 352nd Division; the movement of 352nd forward IIRC about doubles troop numbers on the beach, but 352nd are spread much wider than just Omaha.
Not only did Bradley think the attack was near failure, so did the Germans, who sent their reserve to block advances from Gold.
However in reality the attack had stalled, not been defeated - some units had crossed the beach with zero casualties but paused before making their way up the bluffs.
The problem for the Germans is that they don't have enough troops to double the coastal crust everywhere; if the crust cracks they have to counterattack any Allied penetrations and the track record of D-Day is poor. The Fusilier battalion of 352nd supported by a company of StuGs tried to counterattack a penetration from Gold - they were annihilated; 21st Panzer based around Caen tried to counterattack the British airborne troops and made no headway; they tried to counterattack against Sword and got stopped with heavy tank losses.
Agreed, but he didn't go far enough - the invasion can only be stopped in the water, not on the beach.
I admit that I am completely ignorant about the Hunger Plan. But if the germans give land to the population, in Ukraine and in other parts of the Soviet Unión occupied by them, and let them keep an importante part of the product, the population would have had a much greater incentive to produce more, and so the germans could have compensated the loss.
But they were Nazis. That would go completely against their entire worldview. Giving the Ukrainians land defeats the whole purpose of the invasion. Lebensraum wasn't just a funny word.
Garrison
Donor
If you are ignorant of the Hunger Plan then you really need to study it to understand why your proposal is impossible. At the moment you are simply refusing to accept it when others are telling you that this scheme of land redistribution is impossible and you've now admitted that refusal is based on a lack of knowledge about the realities of the situation in OTL. If you really want to understand the workings of the Nazi economy and the horrifying mix of pragmatism and ideology that shaped their policies in the East I am going to have to for what seems like the 100th time across so many threads recommend Adam Tooze's 'Wages of Destruction'.
The Allies assumed a slower advance because they assumed the Germans would fall back to successive defense lines, mostly behind the Rivers of France. Instead Hitler insisted on fighting it out in Normandy till the bitter end. German losses in Normandy were fearful. The battle of attrition was going heavily against the Germans. Allied Air, and Artillery superiority was grinding the Germans down. When Rommel meet with Hitler on June 16-17 he warned him that a collapse in Normandy was inevitable. From D-Day on the Germans were losing on average 4,000 men a day, so even with 100,000 more combat troops in the battle that only adds 25 days. When the Allies landed in Southern France on August 15 the German situation in France became completely untenable.
Allied losses would have gone up by maybe 50,000 men, but the German defeat in France would be even greater then in the OTL. Wherever this extra army came from their absence leaves fewer units to plug the holes in the German lines. In this early Summer of 1944 the Germans are retreating to the Gothic Line, suffering the destruction of army Group Center, the isolation of Army Group North, the loss of Romania, the invasion of Hungary, and the evacuation of the Balkans. By being caught up in the defeat in France what other front is going to suffer an even greater calamity?
I agree with your view that Germany really suffered in Normandy but have you considered the effect these increased casualties would have on the Wallies?
They wouldn't know how bad the situation was for the Germans. They'd only know how bad things were going for them. High casualties, stalled advance and no clear indication of success would cause inevitable stress on the alliance. Churchill and his entire command staff were against a head-on assault on Germany, having experienced WWI. If Normandy looks like a similar slaughter, they are going to push very hard for a shift in strategy.
If the Americans are doing very poorly, they might also reconsider their current strategy of a frontal assault with just 90 divisions in total.
Only historians and wargamers have the luxury of knowing everything. The actual commanders and politicians had to make their decisions based on limited information and the results on the ground. A costly, protracted battle in Normandy which failed spectacularly to reach the expected progress lines would undermine all the assumptions underpinning the invasion of Europe.
The allies had a hilarious advantage over the germans in pretty much every intelligence gathering method possible. At times, they had a significantly better picture about the german side of the front then the german high command itself. They used this to a devastating degree already once shortly before D-Day, when in their operation to destroy the Luftwaffe in France they read every message of the germans, where they discussed how hard the allied hit them and what they hoped they wouldn't do because they had a couple weakpoints they assumed the allies didn't know about..cue massive attacks exploiting those.
So even if one accepts your narrative about the famously weak-willed wallies who throw the towel the second they have less then 100% success ( a popular narrative, including in the german and japanese commands of the time, but pretty wrong) then "don't know how bad the germans are reeling" is just about the last possible reason to rattle them.
It's a fair point.
The OP asked a pretty generic question; I have qualified the answer as "Probably not, though perhaps not impossible, if a lot of the transferred units are being sent to the D-Day beaches." But for that to happen, the Germans need a complete intelligence windfall of OVERLORD. And along with that, they'd also have to be getting intelligence about how thoroughly the Allies have penetrated them. This, too, is almost certainly necessary for the Germans to have any chance.
Points well taken. I elided a lot of this, I was in a hurry.
But as for Bradley: in battle, perception can matter more than reality. If Bradley is getting a more pessimistic picture of the situation at Omaha than the facts actually warrant, that *could* be sufficient.
I really haven't studied this closely, so I can't be dogmatic about drawing conclusions. I suspect that just one additional frontline infantry divisions at Omaha would not be enough, though maybe, depending on how you deployed them, you might force abandonment of one or two zones. I suspect that at (say) Gold and Juno, you will need more (due to the geography), and you will need some kind of reserve to counterattack penetrations. How much, I am reluctant to hazard a number or details.
Of course, the more the Germans send to Normandy, the greater the chance of detection, and then the risk is that Ike calls it off.
Do you mean, having to sink the ships out on the middle of the channel through sea and airpower?
History Learner
Banned
Quick glance at Wikipedia shows 113,000 German casualties to 120,000 Allied. From June 6th to July 24th is 48 days, so actually closer to 2,300 casualties per day slightly in favor of the Germans. This would've prolonged the fighting by almost six weeks, meaning the Allies would not take Paris until October, derailing the Western European Campaign.
See: 'Churchill as an Ally in War' by Eisenhower in Churchill by his Contemporaries. Churchill (a veteran of WW1, as a soldier and as a politician, and moreover painfully aware of what had happened in Italy following the Allied invasion/liberation of that part of Europe in the current war) was absolutely convinced (pre D-Day) that the realistic best the Western Allies would be able to do by the winter was to liberate the Brittany and Cherbourg peninsulas, and that it would be an absolute miracle if Paris was liberated by Christmas. Or at least that's what Eisenhower says Churchill told him.
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And the context of THAT expressed concern was the mounting British manpower shortage, which by this point was informing so much of British strategic decision-making and lobbying within the western alliance. On D-Day itself, in fact, Churchill and the cabinet were informed that the Army manpower shortage could soon reach 90,000. In August, in fact, the first of several British divisions (the 59th) was disbanded to free up men to shore up other depleted units. The British were simply reaching the bottom of their manpower pool, at least for combat units.
So a scenario where the Western Allies have only ground out a bridgehead of Brittany and most of Normandy by winter would be a nightmare in view of these manpower concerns, because you can just imagine what the casualty rates would be.
No problem, there is so much detail that it's difficult to summarise.
Omaha was not much more strongly defended - first wave casualties were not that different across the beaches, the extra casualties on Omaha are more due to the assault stalling at the sea wall due to an unrealistic plan than anything the Germans did.
It doesn't need the Germans to sink ships in mid-Channel, just optimise their beach obstacles for a low water landing; troops having to swim ashore without weapons or armoured support are not a threat.
True, but by the end of September there were only 26 US divisions in combat; 11 more arrived in next 2 months - with a longer harder campaign the British contribution would be lower.
But that would, in turn, reduce Churchill's clout in Allied councils...
And a campaign in which the Allies only liberated a modest part of NW France by winter would necessarily mean a bloodier one, inflicting casualty rates which...the British could afford much less than the Americans, who were only beginning to realize their full capabilities.
Everything the British did at this point in the way was shaped by this fear, in a way that American leaders didn't always appreciate.
Your right, British influence was inexorably declining, but the Allies holding only NW France was a highly unlikely outcome. Even if the Germans can hold out longer in Normandy the landings in Southern France made the whole German position in France untenable. Once out of the Bocage Country the Allied advantages in mobility, and fire power, coupled with their overwhelming air power doomed the Germans in France.
Agreed
But the Allies were expecting a much slower campaign. See the map from Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe:
Paris liberated in October
Calais January 1945
German border April 1945
Rhine crossing June-July 1945
(There were no detailed plans for the longer-term plan and so Eisenhower's map is a retrospective creation, and used in part to justify Dragoon, as he credits this with OTL success. However it's the best indication we've got for beyond D+90. Remember that by the time that the Allies had crossed the Rhine there were still 6 US divisions that had not yet entered combat.)
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As I said in an earlier reply, what I had in mind as a POD was the nazis being replaced, with a coup at the end of 1943, by a Beck-Goerdeler government, which would have had every motive, both for practical reasond and of principle, of supporting the creation of nationalist anti-bolshevik states and winning the goodwill of the population.
That is interesting. Was there any possibility of Overlord being called off?