Thanks aequitas et veritas for your post which outlines in more detail the various points about D-Day which you feel suggest that its outcome was significantly influenced by German officers who wanted the Allied invasion to succeeed. For whatever it’s worth, here are a few comments on some of those points.
But forgive me when i say that i have trouble buying that the whole D-Day depended on A.H.s decision wheter or wether not getting the Reserves freed. <<
The whole outcome of D-Day didn’t depend on that factor. I mentioned in my previous post that it was a contributing factor, within a context of other strategic and tactical failures, but I wasn’t trying to imply that it was the single decisive factor and I apologize if I somehow gave that impression.
The matter of the Panzer reserves is actually one element of a much larger disagreement that existed within the German high command in the months leading up to D-Day – specifically, a disagreement between the Commander-in-Chief West (von Rundstedt) and Rommel. In von Rundstedt’s opinion, the correct way to handle the anticipated Allied invasion of western Europe was to have a thin defense on the coastline itself, and to keep the bulk of Germany’s forces held back as a mobile reserve. His rationale was it was foolish to deploy most of Germany’s forces on the Atlantic Wall, in static positions, because this violated the principle of concentration of force: regardless of where the Allies landed, only a fraction of Germany’s forces would be in the right place to fight them and the rest of Germany’s forces would be sitting uselessly on the wrong part of the front. The Germans beat the French in the Maginot Line in 1940 for pretty much the same reason. Rommel disagreed with von Rundstedt’s analysis. In Rommel’s opinion, the fatal flaw with the concept of keeping most of Germany’s forces in the rear as mobile reserves, and then sending them to the correct part of the front once the Allies had landed, was that Allied air supremacy would prevent those mobile forces from ever reaching their intended destination: they’d be attacked by day, and forced to travel only at night, which would both slow down their response and cut down their numbers. In Rommel’s opinion, the Allied invasion therefore had to be defeated on the invasion beaches themselves, head-on.
Hitler ultimately arbitrated the dispute, and he opted for a compromise solution that (like many compromises) ended up being worse than the two options by themselves. The Panzer-reserve restriction was one element of that poor compromise; it wasn’t decisive, but it added one more complication to the German response and it was a complication that Germany would have been better off not having to deal with. In any case, von Rundstedt and Rommel both turned out to be right in their own way. Rommel was right that Allied air supremacy impeded Germany’s mobile response, and von Rundstedt was right that the Atlantic Wall served to disperse Germany’s forces and that it gave the Allies the luxury of attacking the Atlantic Wall at a comparative weak point (Normandy) rather than at its strongest point (the Pas de Calais). And incidentally, even after the D-Day landings, Hitler remained convinced (for about two weeks, as I recall) that Normany was a feint and that the real attack was going to occur at the Pas-de-Calais…so if one is going to argue that a high-ranking Nazi leader can be credited for the success of D-Day, that leader would arguably be Hitler himself.
The Germans knew precisley an Invasion was to come and where.
Only the exact time when it should happend was known 48hrs before landing. <<
There are interesting parallels between the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor…including, a bit oddly, the fact that both operations were the subject of big-budget motion pictures produced by Elmo Williams (The Longest Day and Tora Tora Tora). Both movies devote a good deal of time (and dramatic tension) to the fact that the intelligence services of Germany (in the case of D-Day) and the U.S. (in the case of Pearl Harbor) had picked up information strongly suggesting an imminent attack. In the case of D-Day, it was (most significantly) the two-part Verlaine poem broadcast by the BBC to the French Resistance to indicate that the invasion was going to occur in 48 hours. In the case of D-Day, it was (most significantly) the 14-part telegram to the Japanese ambassador telling him to deliver to the U. S State department Japan’s final response at precisely such-and-such an hour on such-and-such a date, and telling him to destroy the code books and cypher machines and the Japanese embassy in Washington.
I’m mentioning these points because they’ve been the source of essentially the same question in both cases:
Did Germany know exactly where and when the Allied invasion of western Europe (which was widely expected and was no secret in and of itself) would take place?
Did the U.S. know that Japan was going to attack Pearl Harbor, and would probably do it at a particular time on a particular date?
The problem in both cases is that a simple yes/no answer isn’t adequate, and that the “simple yes” answer in both cases (and especially as regards Pearl Harbor) forms the basis of conspiracy theories which basically say, “Yes, but senior leaders allowed it to happen anyway because this served their personal or political agendas.” The conventional interpretation is more nuanced, and it goes like this: Yes, some elements within the intelligence community and the military had long suspected that the attack would occur, and yes, information pinpointing the attack did get picked up soon before it happened, but that pinpointing information was “too little, too late” and it didn’t work its way up the chain of command (from the lower-level intelligence officers to the country’s senior leadership) in time to make a difference, and in any case those senior leaders weren’t convinced that the information was real and/or correct and/or urgent.
Moreover, in both cases (as far as the Allied side was concerned with regard to D-Day, and as far as the Japanese side was concerned with regard to Pearl Harbor), both operations were treated with a high consideration for security. The Allies devoted massive resources to deception (Operation Fortitude, for example) and counter-intelligence (taking control of Germany’s spies in Britain, for example) in the two years leading up to D-Day. Germany received all sorts of reports from its agents “identifying” where D-Day would take place…and these reports pretty much all contradicted each other. Fortitude was intended to reinforce Germany’s preconceived notion (always a good strategy in deception work: making the enemy believe what he’s already predisposed to believe) that the Allies would invade in the Pas-de-Calais area, which is in fact where Germany’s strongest forces were on D-Day. Japan, rather than using deception to misdirect an an enemy about where an expected attack would occur, used the strategy of keeping their plans super-secret (such as picking a route to Hawaii far from the normal shipping lanes, and using a freighter to test it out ahead of time) in the hope that the Americans would not suspect that an attack was coming.
In other words: the conventional view is that D-Day and Pearl Harbor succeeded through a combination of good planning and good deception and/or security on the attacking side, plus various errors (including the failure to interpret or use intelligence data properly) on the side that was attacked. The non-conventional view is that D-Day and Pearl Harbor succeeded because of conspiratorial machinations by higher-ups (such as Roosevelt) on the side that was attacked.
