You've probably heard the story of D-Day a hundred times, but always from the Allied side. There's another side to that day that doesn't get talked about nearly as much. Here's what June 6th looked like for the Germans, and why it was much darker than you might think.
Building the Atlantic Wall
The story begins with the fall of France in 1940. Germany now controlled roughly 5,000 kilometers of Atlantic coastline. When Britain refused to negotiate peace and America entered the war in December 1941, it was no longer a question of if an invasion would come, but when and where.
On March 23rd, 1942, Hitler demanded an impregnable fortress stretching from Norway to the Spanish border. The directive called for 15,000 concrete emplacements manned by 300,000 soldiers, everything completed by May 1943. Only 10% of the 260,000 construction workers were German. The rest were prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates, and conscripted civilians working under SS supervision with limited tools and scarce food. Over 185,000 deaths were recorded during construction.
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| Atlantic Wall Construction |
By the May 1943 deadline, only 6,000 of 15,000 planned bunkers were complete. Field Marshal von Rundstedt dismissed the defenses as rubbish. Rommel called the entire strategy cloud cuckoo land.
When Rommel took command in November 1943, his first inspection shocked him. In five months he tripled laid mines to over 6.5 million, built over 4,600 fortifications, and placed over half a million foreshore obstacles. He ordered six rows of beach obstacles, though only three were completed by June 6th. He warned that the war would be won or lost on the beaches and that the first 24 hours would be decisive. No one knew how right he was going to be.
The Men Defending the Wall
The Atlantic Wall was not defended by Germany's finest. Their best units were dying on the Eastern Front. The garrison was a barely functional collection of the old, wounded, foreign, and expendable. Many soldiers were over 35, some well into their 40s and 50s, recovering from Eastern Front wounds or suffering chronic conditions. These divisions received the lowest possible combat effectiveness rating.
One out of every six soldiers defending France on D-Day was not German. The Osttruppen, Eastern Troops, were former prisoners of war from occupied territories who had been given a choice between serving in German uniform or dying in camps. About 3.3 million of 5.7 million Soviet prisoners had died in German custody, so many chose to serve. When D-Day came, many surrendered at the first opportunity.
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| The Osttruppen Soldiers |
Not everyone was second rate though. The 352nd Infantry Division at Omaha Beach was formed from Eastern Front survivors with nearly 7,000 battle-hardened troops. Allied intelligence never knew they had arrived.
The Night Everything Went Wrong
On June 5th, German meteorologists predicted weather too bad for the Allies to cross the channel. Rommel left for Germany to celebrate his wife's birthday. About half of all commanders were away from their units. Hitler was watching newsreels at his mountain retreat with strict orders that staff not wake him.
At 7 minutes past midnight on June 6th, guards spotted low-flying aircraft. Within half an hour, reports of paratroopers were flooding in. But the Allies had also dropped four to five hundred dummy paratroopers with explosive charges that destroyed the evidence on impact, plus sound devices simulating rifle fire. Among the decoys, 12 SAS men landed with gramophones playing pre-recorded battle sounds and deliberately let some Germans escape to spread panicked reports.
The actual 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions dropped over 13,000 paratroopers, but bad weather scattered them across 25 miles. Many drowned in deliberately flooded fields. German headquarters couldn't determine what was real and what was fake, or where the actual attack was coming from.
The Morning at Omaha
At 5:45, naval bombardment began. When the sun rose, defenders saw a fleet of nearly 7,000 vessels. Nothing like it had ever been seen before.
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| Allied Bombing Fleet on D-Day |
At Omaha, poor visibility made Allied bombers drop their payloads too far inland. The German defenses were still intact. WN62, the largest strong point, had a garrison of 40 soldiers armed with 75 millimeter guns, a 50 millimeter anti-tank gun, mortars, MG42s, MG34s, and flamethrowers.
Twenty-year-old Heinrich Severloh was manning an MG42 positioned 450 meters from where the first wave would land. His commander told soldiers to open fire when the enemy was knee-deep in the water. By his account, there were at least a thousand men in front of him, most likely more than two thousand. He described it as awful, saying just thinking about it made him want to throw up. He claims to have fired over 13,000 MG42 rounds and 400 rifle rounds that day.
Eighteen-year-old Franz Gockel manned a water-cooled machine gun at the same strong point. He said he couldn't understand why the Americans kept pushing forward even as they were being cut down. Around 8:00 in the morning, his gun was destroyed by a direct hit and two fingers were shot off his hand. He defended himself with a pistol until noon.
For those first few hours, it looked like the Atlantic Wall was doing exactly what it was designed to do.
The Collapse
But then the strong points started running out of ammunition. American destroyers moved in within a thousand yards of the beach, risking grounding to fire directly into bunkers. This bought time for soldiers to reach the fortifications and clear them with flamethrowers. By 2:30 in the afternoon, WN62 was out of ammo, outflanked, and overrun.
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| Allied troops Establishment |
Meanwhile, the German command structure had completely collapsed. Rommel was hundreds of kilometers away. Hitler was asleep and nobody dared wake him. Von Rundstedt couldn't release reserve divisions without Hitler's personal permission. When Hitler finally woke up, the invasion had been going for six hours. He dismissed the landings as a decoy, convinced the real invasion would come at Pas-de-Calais.
It wasn't until 4:00 in the afternoon, more than 12 hours after the first paratroopers landed, that Hitler released two panzer divisions. First units didn't reach their gathering point until 10:00 that night. The Panther tank battalion ran out of fuel and couldn't move at all. The division didn't engage Allied forces until 10:00 the next morning, a full day after the invasion started.
Nineteen divisions of about 150,000 men sat waiting at Pas-de-Calais for two weeks for a real invasion that never came.
The Luftwaffe was virtually non-existent over the beaches. Only two German aircraft managed to strafe the landing areas on D-Day.
The Cost
Total German casualties on D-Day are estimated between 4,000 and 9,000. By the end of June 6th, over 150,000 Allied troops were ashore. A month later, 875,000. By the time the Normandy campaign ended in late August, Germany had lost 320,000 men total, with 27 of their 38 divisions completely wiped out.
Rommel was right all along. The war in the west was decided in the first 24 hours.
Half the commanders absent, the leader asleep, 19 divisions waiting in the wrong place, and rubber dolls falling from the sky. The Germans spent two years building a wall that was supposed to stop the invasion cold. It held for a few hours on one beach. By sunset, it was over.
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