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D-Day: A close-run thing

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  • D-Day: A close-run thing

    United Press International
    June 6 2004

    D-Day: A close-run thing
    By Martin Walker
    UPI Editor
    Published 6/4/2004 5:41 PM


    WASHINGTON, June 4 (UPI) -- Sixty years on from that grim day in June,
    time enough has passed to take the shock from the news that German
    Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will attend the D-Day commemoration
    ceremonies. And by saying that he is one of that very large number of
    Germans today who say that D-Day also marked the beginning of their
    liberation from Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, Schroeder has added grace
    to his presence.

    It is also right that Russia's Vladimir Putin will attend. They may
    have been Soviets back then, but until D-Day, the Red Army took the
    brunt of the war and the mass of casualties, and they tore the heart
    out of Hitler's Wehrmacht. They were comrades-in-arms, and with the
    Cold War more than 10 years over, it is right that the Russians now
    take their place on the Normandy beaches.

    Perhaps Vladimir Kuchma of Ukraine should also be there. When the
    British and Canadian troops stormed ashore at Gold and Juno beaches,
    they encountered whole battalions of Ukrainian, Cossack and Tartar
    troops in the 709th Division, recruited by the defecting Soviet Gen.
    Andrei Vlasov from German prisoner-of-war camps. And after the
    devastation of their country by the great famine that came with
    Stalin's collective farms, who can blame them?

    Perhaps the Koreans might be there too, and the Georgians and
    Armenians. Korean troops who had somehow been dragooned into the
    Red Army, captured and then put into Wehrmacht uniform, were among
    the prisoners the Americans took on the first day ashore. There
    were Georgian and Armenian, not to mention Latvian, Lithuanian and
    Estonian troops, all wearing the field gray of the Wehrmacht, having
    laid aside the khaki and the red star of the Red Army.

    Wars are like that, hauling in whole continents and peoples, and
    subsuming millions of personal dramas and improbable fates into the
    vast anonymity of armies. And there were Indian and South African and
    Rhodesian and Australian and Polish and Czech troops and airmen and
    sailors in the British forces, while the American melting pot meant
    that the GIs probably comprised the most polyglot and cosmopolitan
    force of all.

    But the presence of all these lesser-known players in the great assault
    on Hitler's fortress Europe should serve to remind us of something
    important. There were very few of Hitler's best troops guarding the
    Normandy beaches. There were whole units of the German army known as
    "ulcer battalions" from the special diet required by these second-line
    troops, and one of them was in the 243rd Division among the forces
    guarding Omaha beach. But Allied intelligence had failed to record
    the presence of one front-line German division at Omaha, the 352nd,
    reinforced by elements of the 3rd Sturm-Flak Korps with 37mm and 88mm
    anti-aircraft guns.

    Hitler's reserve of five panzer divisions, the armored fist of the
    Wehrmacht, were concentrated nearly 200 miles north of Normandy in
    the Pas de Calais, just across the most direct invasion route from
    England. Hitler was convinced the main attack would come there, and
    even after the D-Day landing he believed the Normandy invasion was
    but a ruse.

    Well, there was a ruse, but it was not Normandy. Called Operation
    Fortitude, it was the presence of a handful of signalers with their
    radio transmitters in southeast England, keeping up the constant
    flow of radio traffic that signaled the presence of a vast force,
    the nonexistent 7th Army Group. The trick -- and it worked -- was to
    convince Hitler and his High Command that the aggressive American
    General George Patton was preparing to invade near Calais. So that
    was where the bulk of the German tanks and the best troops -- 19
    divisions in all -- were kept fruitlessly waiting.

    Only one panzer division, the 21st, stationed around Caen, was sent
    into action against the beaches on the morning of D-Day. Two more,
    the Panzer Lehr and the even bigger 12th SS Panzer (SS divisions
    were almost twice as large and better equipped than standard Panzer
    divisions), were ordered to mount a counterattack at 4 a.m. on D-Day
    by Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, but Hitler's HQ refused to confirm
    the order while the Führer was sleeping. By the time they got underway
    in the early afternoon, the overcast skies of the morning had given
    way to clear weather and the British and U.S. fighter-bombers exacted
    a high toll for all German road movements.

    One other unit should have arrived to counterattack the Normandy
    beachhead by June 10. This was the SS Das Reich Panzer division,
    which had been refitting and resting near Toulouse in Southern France
    after being nearly destroyed in the battle of Kursk on the Eastern
    front the previous summer. Rested and reinforced, at full strength
    and equipped with Panther and Tiger tanks, it was probably the most
    powerful single armored unit in Western Europe.

    Allied planners estimated it would take four days for Das Reich to
    reach Normandy. But thanks to air attacks on bridges and railroads
    and to some heroic actions by the French resistance in the Perigord
    and Limousin regions, blowing bridges and mounting doomed but valiant
    ambushes, and provoking the Germans into turning aside to commit
    hideous atrocities against civilians, it took three weeks for the
    division to come into action against the beachhead. (At the village
    of Oradour-sur-Glane, over 400 civilians, mainly women and children,
    were locked inside a church that was then set on fire by SS Das
    Reich; this was supposedly a reprisal for the killing of a German
    officer.) The official historian of Britain's Special Operations
    Executive, M.R.D. Foot, concluded that the delays in Das Reich reaching
    Normandy may have saved the invasion.

    D-Day, despite the ruse of Operation Fortitude, despite allied air
    power and command of the sea, and despite the bravery of allied troops
    (and the French Resistance), was a close-run thing. Had Hitler not
    been fooled, and had the panzer divisions been in the right place,
    the allies might well have been thrown back into the sea. Even when
    established ashore, it took the allies almost six weeks to break out of
    the beachhead and into France, so resourceful was the German defense.

    By the time the allies finally broke out from Normandy in later July,
    the cream of the German army in France and all available panzer
    divisions had finally been committed to the battle. Their defeat was
    total. The American breakout threatened to cut off the entire army,
    as the British and Canadians and Polish troops advanced from Caen to
    join up with the American pincer at Falaise. As the Germans fought
    desperately to prevent the jaws from closing, the Falaise gap was
    turned into a giant killing ground for the German troops trying to
    escape encirclement.

    Among those fleeing were the remnant of SS Das Reich. They had begun
    on June 6 with 23,000 troops and nearly 500 armored vehicles. But
    only 240 men and three tanks got out of the Falaise gap.
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