Schwerpunkt: From D-Day to the Fall of the Third Reich (18 page)

Through decoded reports from our German Intelligence, we were able to identify the two enemy armies which comprised the invasion force. We knew the Englishman Montgomery would be commanding the British 21
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Army Group and that the American Patton would be commanding the First US Army Group. We received numerous reports identifying the presence of Montgomery’s British troops but we received no reports of Patton’s American troops being present in any of the landings on 6. June although we did encounter other American divisions. Since there were no sightings of his army in Normandy, this clearly means he will be leading the “real” invasion and that the Pas de Calais area of coastal France will be the real Schwerpunkt. I’m comforted to know that the plans of our adversaries have been interpreted so brilliantly by our Führer who instructs his generals on what to do next. I was told that Herr Hitler was not alarmed by these initial landings but rather welcomed them, as now we would be able to fight our foes on the fields of France and win our destined victory over them which we could not do when they were hiding in England and Scotland. To me, the landings of last week were massive. I am not a defeatist but if these were just the diversionary landings, I think I must start learning English now because without a miracle, which is not out of the question knowing der Führer of course, there is simply no possibility that our army, after four years of war, can overcome even more enemy invaders. Especially if these invaders are led by their General Patton.

Almost all of our gun batteries and emplacements along the coast and landing beaches were hit by enemy weapons but few were irreparably damaged. Many survived to continue their attempts to turn back the approaching enemy but we then started receiving reports that more and more were being knocked out including some where the poor souls were engulfed in fire from enemy flame throwers. As the enemy soldiers continue to come ashore, more and more of our shoreline gun batteries are being breached. As our soldiers fight to repel the invaders, more and more of our men and equipment are being destroyed. We did repulse many of the enemy soldiers and I’m glad we were able to stop as many of them as we did but there seems to be thousands of these enemy troops fighting what’s left of our quickly dwindling, unreinforced troops and because they now hold the beaches, there will be further hordes of them coming in every day. But there are still no reports of an enemy landing at Calais. So we wait.

It has been a week now since the enemy landed and General Rommel has drafted a Situation Report to Field Marshal Keitel as Chief of the Supreme Command of the German Armed Forces. In it, General Rommel outlined the enemy’s intentions which he saw as:

1) To create, between the Orne and Vire Rivers, a bridgehead so as launch a move on Paris. He expects that the city of Caen must be taken to achieve this objective.

2) To advance through the Cotentin Peninsula, taking Cherbourg at the earliest possible time thereby giving themselves a harbor so further supplies and reinforcements can be brought over from England.

If General Rommel is correct, which I am certain he is, then we have to defend the entire Cotentin Peninsula, especially the port city of Cherbourg as well as the city of Caen further to the east in order to cripple the enemy’s plans. Speaking of Cherbourg, on the day of the invasion, whether diversionary or not, we did not see reports that our troops in the Cotentin Peninsula were able to do much more than carry out sporadic spoiling attacks. Orders had been issued for all available forces to concentrate on the beachheads which were being overrun by enemy soldiers and equipment. Of course, “available” is a loaded term because of the fact that many of our forces could not be moved at all since no orders came from der Führer or from General Rommel. The forces stationed at Calais obviously could not be moved, waiting as they were, for the real invasion to occur. We had four divisions already in the Cotentin Peninsula but then something happened which I really thought might have been a miracle from God. We found a complete set of enemy field orders which proved that Cherbourg was a main enemy objective and now we had their timetable. After learning of the enemy’s plans, General Rommel ordered the forces located in Brittany to move into the Cherbourg area and lend assistance to the defense of that city and protect the port at all costs.

Apparently, two days after the initial invasion, some of our Osttruppen soldiers from the Caucasus region of Russia who are now valiantly serving in our German Army, found a dead enemy officer carrying a briefcase. From this briefcase, these soldiers took a pouch and the documents inside it were translated. This set of plans showed that the enemy planned to cut the Cotentin Peninsula off from the rest of France and then move to take the port of Cherbourg. These documents went from the St. Lo headquarters of General Marcks to the headquarters of General Dollman in LeMans to us at La Roche Guyon. We, of course, passed them on to General von Rundstedt at his headquarters in Saint Germain en Laye and we were told he passed them on to Berlin where they were given to der Führer himself. Thank God Herr Hitler saw these plans for the deceptive ploy that they were and did not move any additional troops from their defensive position around Calais to meet this fictitious enemy offensive. He is brilliant. General Rommel, however, kept the troops he moved from Brittany at Cherbourg.

Herr Rommel is gone from our headquarters most days, being driven from one commander’s field headquarters to another’s. Karl Daniel, his driver and my friend, tells me that the old Horch automobile General Rommel uses is a big reliable car but he wonders how long it will last with the number of kilometers he puts on it driving all across northern France. Lately, he’s had to evade enemy aircraft as well. Nevertheless, General Rommel says he needs to have a “finger tip feeling” for developing situations on the fields of battle. He is not content to receive reports and base his strategy just off of what he is told. General Rommel insists on seeing the situations and conditions for himself and once he gets his finger tip feeling for the scene of a future battle, he draws up his plans and then confers personally with his commanders in the field to make sure they understand what he wants. Many times, he can’t do this because orders from Berlin conflict with what the Field Marshal thinks is warranted, and because Hitler is the military genius, General Rommel complies. I see and hear him disagree with orders he receives, sometimes vehemently, but what can a German soldier do but obey orders from above?

So with all the observing he has done, General Rommel has a good grasp of the military problems we are facing and sees ahead to what problems we will be facing in the near future. He continues to try to persuade der Führer that he needs more troops and that he, not other generals or even der Führer needs to be able to direct where and how all the troops are moved and deployed.

Even before the enemy landed on the very first day of the invasion, General Rommel was itching to fight the battle on the beaches where he was convinced the enemy was weakest, but he wasn’t given the authority he sought. Still, even without having the control over the troops and Panzers which he felt necessary, General Rommel has successfully countered many enemy attacks both in and around Caen and then all along the Cotentin Peninsula. He has been working on a report for der Führer summarizing how and why the enemy’s position is superior to our own. These are the five reasons as I remember them:

1) General Rommel says that our troops and equipment are bombed whenever they even start to move in daylight so we are restricted to nighttime movement only. This means we face delays when quick action is needed. He mentioned that enemy bombing occurs on roads, on streets, and in the fields of the surrounding countryside. No matter where we are in daylight, we are almost always subjected to strafing or bombing. With no Luftwaffe coverage of our own and little to no available anti-aircraft ammunition, General Rommel said we are severely limited in our mobility and that we are losing more men and equipment than is coming in to replace it.

2) General Rommel reported that not only was he facing an enemy in front of him when the invasion occurred, he had to worry about his rear since enemy gliders and planes dropped paratroops behind him on the day of the landings. He said that in order to protect his rear, he had to hold back several units which he could have used to repel the invaders to his front.

3) He said that our German machinery and vehicles are old and are not being repaired or replaced quickly enough.

4) The enemy has been allowed to bring supplies ashore since the first day of the invasion and they now have far more fuel and ammunition than we have. General Rommel added that his supplies are decreasing fast and little to nothing is being done to resupply him.

5) Finally, the enemy’s naval guns are still in a position to fire on us. He said that heavy shelling has knocked out and continues to destroy many of our shore gun batteries even though our gallant troops are holding out steadfastly. He again asked for more help from the Luftwaffe and also from our German Navy to eliminate this peril.

What he didn’t set forth in his report was that the orders he receives from Berlin do not recognize the situation in the field. I know that at first, General Rommel thought that the landings made on 6. June might have been merely a diversionary tactic designed to draw our defenses away from where the real Schwerpunkt of the enemy attack would occur. But after just a week of observation and consideration, General Rommel is convinced that those landings were the real invasion and that Normandy really is the Schwerpunkt after all. He has tried to tell Herr Hitler this but der Führer still thinks the enemy will throw their main offensive against us at Pas de Calais and so he holds two full Panzer divisions and our Fifteenth Army around Calais in spite of the immediate need General Rommel has for these reserves to fight off the enemy right now. Personally, I think maybe a man shouldn’t stop building his own house now just in case a neighbor might need some wood in the future. What I mean by this is that if the real invasion has taken place, holding troops where they can’t be of any use to us now is probably not as prudent as sending in those troops so we can defeat the enemy soldiers we are immediately facing. The fly in the ointment, of course, is where is General Patton’s army? We know his First Army is to be involved in the future invasion because of what our spies have reported seeing and hearing around Calais and from our ability to intercept enemy transmissions. But so far, we have seen neither hide nor hair of General Patton’s men. That’s der Führer’s worry so he still holds back these reserves which, although probably brilliant, is encumbering how we are able to fight off the enemy we are facing at the present.

There is also one other point that I’m sure General Rommel will not put in this report and that is that der Führer will not allow him to order strategic withdrawals which are essential for our troops to regroup. We continually receive the Sieg oder Todt orders which demand we either reign victorious or die trying. We have lost so many soldiers to these orders-soldiers who could have lived to fight another day. I wonder how der Führer will react when he reads this paper of Field Marshal Rommel.

I’m not sure if der Führer even had time to read General Rommel’s report, because we just received a direct order from der Führer, an order brief yet brilliant. It was another Sieg Oder Todt order which precluded General Rommel from retreating at all in his fight to save Caen. I know the general thought that a slight retreat to regroup would yield greater results than standing to the last man on the last centimeter of ground, but because der Führer is a military genius, any movement not going forward is seen as a retreat and retreat is forbidden.

Caen, and more importantly its nearby airfield at Carpiquet to the west of the city, is just over a dozen kilometers inland from the beaches where the enemy landed. Its strategic location has made it an important center for a thousand years. William the Conqueror built his castle there and l hear that the citizens of Caen are now using that very same castle to protect themselves from the bombs that have been raining down on them for the past days and weeks. There were something like 50,000 people who lived in this beautiful old city but there are not that many now because Caen has been bombed and shelled by massive numbers of enemy aircraft. From morning until night on the day of the initial landings, the bombers were back dropping even more bombs on Caen. Now the city is almost all but destroyed yet the enemy still continues to bomb it. What the bombs don’t destroy, the resulting fires do. Add to this the shelling that takes place from our Panzers and the tanks of the enemy and I’m surprised to hear that anything remains undamaged. Reports come in telling us the city looks like the dark side of the moon with all the rubble and debris creating a pockmarked landscape.

General Rommel had his 21
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Panzer Division deployed all around Caen to protect it from the enemy. At the same time, he was still trying to defeat the invaders before they came too far inland and before the beaches were opened and more and more enemy soldiers and supplies came in from their boats. It seemed obvious to General Rommel that if we could preclude the enemy from landing more of their soldiers and prevent them from amassing supplies and equipment, they wouldn’t be able to strengthen and increase their forces. He thought we could obviously handle those who escaped our initial barrage where and when we wanted. Since Hitler is convinced the Schwerpunkt will be at Calais, no other general agrees with Herr Rommel.

The English General’s fight for Caen began on the day of the Normandy invasion and has not stopped since. After the initial fiasco of the first day, we finally mobilized our available forces and the English soldiers marched right into our entrenched defenses where they were immediately attacked by General Feuchtinger’s 21
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Panzer Division. The terrain around Caen has been a big help to us. We have been in Normandy for four years now and we know the terrain well. The land is covered in hedgerows which are embankments, sometimes shoulder high, with thick, old trees growing on them. The tree roots are old, gnarly python-like protrusions that intertwine with each other forming a woven lattice that almost nothing can penetrate, including the enemy’s tanks. The trees themselves are so old and thick and they are grown so close together that someone could literally be on one side of a hedgerow and not know another person was on the other side. I’ve heard the Americans are saying that they can reach through the hedgerows and set the safety on our German guns. General Rommel made sure our troops took full advantage of this terrain and ordered tanks, soldiers and Panzerfausts to be hidden among this cover. We placed our tanks and weapons intermittently throughout the fields, the hedgerows and wooded areas. Our men dug holes on our side of the hedgerows and then waited with their machine guns and anti-tank weapons for the enemy to pass by. In this way, we were well hidden and could fire on the advancing enemy. Most times these trees allowed us to remain undetected from their ground troops but more importantly, it sometimes even gave us protection from enemy aircraft.