rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

THE ALLIED INVASION OF WESTERN EUROPE AND THE ATTEMPTTO KILL HITLER 931Force meteorologist in Paris advised that because of the inclement weather noAllied action could be expected for at least a fortnight.On the strength of this and of what little information he had – the Luftwaffehad been prevented from making aerial reconnaissance of the harbors on England’ssouth coast where Eisenhower’s troops at that moment were swarmingaboard their ships, and the Navy had withdrawn its reconnaissance craft fromthe Channel because of the heavy seas – Rommel drew up a situation reporton the morning of June 5 reporting to Rundstedt that the invasion was notimminent, and immediately set off by car for his home at Herrlingen to spendthe night with his family and then to proceed to Berchtesgaden the next day toconfer with Hitler.June 5, General Speidel, Rommel’s chief of staff, later recalled, ”was a quietday.” There seemed no reason why Rommel should not make his somewhatleisurely journey back to Germany. There were the usual reports from Germanagents about the possibility of an Allied landing – this time between June 6and June 16 – but there had been hundreds of these since April and they werenot taken seriously. Indeed, on the sixth General Friedrich Dollmann, whocommanded the Seventh Army in Normandy, on whose beaches the Allied forceswere about to land, ordered a temporary relaxation of the standing alert andconvoked his senior officers for a map exercise at Rennes, some 125 miles southof those beaches.If the Germans were in the dark about the date of the invasion, they werealso ignorant of where it would take place. Rundstedt and Rommel were certainit would be in the Pas-de-Calais area, where the Channel was at its narrowest.There they had concentrated their strongest force, the Fifteenth Army, whosestrength during the spring was increased from ten to fifteen infantry divisions.But by the end of March Adolf Hitler’s uncanny intuition was telling him thatthe Schwerpunkt of the invasion probably would be in Normandy, and duringthe next few weeks he ordered considerable reinforcements to the region betweenthe Seine and the Loire. ”Watch Normandy!” he kept warning his generals.Still, the overwhelming part of German strength, in both infantry and panzerdivisions, was retained north of the Seine, between Le Havre and Dunkirk.Rundstedt and his generals were watching the Pas-de-Calais rather than Normandyand they were encouraged in this by a number of deceptive maneuverscarried out during April and May by the British-American High Commandwhich indicated to them that their calculations were correct.The day of June 5, then, passed in relative quiet, so far as the Germans wereconcerned. Severe Anglo-American air attacks continued to disrupt Germandepots, radar stations, V-l sites, communications and transport, but these hadbeen going on night and day for weeks and seemed no more intense on this daythan on others.Shortly after dark Rundstedt’s headquarters was informed that the BBC inLondon was broadcasting an unusually large number of coded messages to theFrench resistance and that the German radar stations between Cherbourg andLe Havre were being jammed. At 10 p.m. the Fifteenth Army intercepted acode message from the BBC to the French resistance which it believed meantthat the invasion was about to begin. This army was alerted, but Rundstedtdid not think it necessary to alert the Seventh Army, on whose sector of thecoast farther west, between Caen and Cherbourg, the Allied forces were now –toward midnight – approaching on a thousand ships.