I just finished a couple of interesting books on Amazon Kindle Unlimited:
These books are transcripts of interviews conducted 10 years after D-Day. One question that they answer is “Why were German soldiers fighting?” If they saw the war in the same way that we did, for example, why not simply surrender and walk over to the side with both Might and Right?
Here’s one example:
Helmut Voigt was a Grenadier (Rifleman) with the 716th Static Infantry Division, based in the Saint Aubin area, inland of Juno Beach.
My father, being in the banking profession, had affected my thinking about the war completely. My father was very sympathetic to the National Socialist (Nazi Party) view of the world. In this view, a United Europe was trying to assert its independence and its very right to exist, against certain powerful international forces. America and the English were in an unholy alliance with the Bolsheviks, and it was these Russians who were orchestrating world events from Moscow. Moscow –that word! During the war, so many bad things were explained by saying that ‘Moscow arranged it’ or ‘Moscow has done this to us.’ Even when the Americans and the English bombed our cities, when they began destroying whole towns, the newspapers would often say this was done ‘at the command of Moscow.’
Russia actually was responsible for the German defense strategy, according to one interviewee:
Gert Hoffmann was a Festungswerkmeister (Fortification Development Officer) attached to the 352nd Artillery Regiment, 352nd Infantry Division, in the sector of Carentan on the Southern Cotentin peninsula, inland from the American Omaha beach.
I must first clarify that the phrase ‘Atlantic Wall’ is itself rather misleading. There certainly was a ‘wall’ along the North East coast of France, around the Pas de Calais, where there were enormous concrete bunkers and gun emplacements, … But the further West you went, the less substantial the fortifications became, because the Western area, including Normandy and Brittany, was not originally considered a likely site for an invasion. Up until the autumn of 1943, the Normandy defences were quite simple, being mostly small bunkers, minefields, anti-tank barricades and so on, with a few larger concrete emplacements. Many of the smaller bunkers were actually civilian stone barns or houses, which had been reinforced and fortified, not at all like those massive concrete blockhouses of the Pas de Calais zone. It was when General Rommel was put in charge of the Atlantic Wall that the Normandy area began to be more heavily reinforced with more barricades, anti-tank ditches, much bigger bunker structures and so on. But this process was not finished when the invasion came, which was very fortunate for the Allies. We had many other plans for the Normandy coast which were only just coming to fruition.
I was a Fortress Officer of the Divisional artillery. Our role was vitally important, although today it is largely forgotten. We humble Wehrmacht engineers and builders have been eclipsed by the panzer men and the infantry and all the rest.
My role was in the creation of zones of fire on a large scale. This meant that we found ways of altering the landscape of the battlefield, using mounds, ditches and other means, in order to influence the way that an enemy attack, especially an armoured attack, would progress inland. We have to be honest today and say that the function of the coastal defences, I mean the emplacements on the shoreline itself, on the sea wall, was only to slow down an attack and give time for the alert to be sounded and a counterattack to be implemented. Of course, the infantry men inside those sea wall emplacements didn’t know this! On the contrary, they were told repeatedly that their mission was to drive the enemy back into the sea, to prevent them moving off the beaches, that not one enemy boot must step past the shore line, and so on. But this was purely to motivate them. We could hardly tell those boys on the sand, ‘You’re only there to slow the Allies down.’ It was expected that, at least in the first few hours, a determined Allied attack using armour would progress inland. In fact, it would be better if it did progress some small distance: this would bring large volumes of troops and armour into a prepared zone where they could be surrounded and ground down. This would destroy the enemy’s capability and also, very importantly, deter future attacks.
this was a bitter lesson which we learned in several places, but above all at the battle of Kursk in Russia in 1943. You may know the story of Kursk? Well, at Kursk we made the dreadful mistake of allowing the Soviets enough time to prepare a defence in depth against our panzer formations. Those Russian engineers took over a zone of ten thousand square kilometres, and they built a huge series of traps for our armour, with endless ditches, forts, traps, minefields and so on. None of these defences was insurmountable by itself, and over several days they were finally overcome, but the cumulative effect was to bog down our panzers, and turn them from a thrusting attack force into a slow or static target. The Russians showed us how to defeat an armoured attack properly! Not with a single line of fortifications, as the French tried to do with their absurd Maginot Line in 1940, but by taking a whole geographic zone and making it into a swamp for panzer forces, a swamp for men and vehicles. Making the entire landscape into a swamp for the invaders. That was what we planned to do in Normandy, in the absence of a true shoreline ‘Atlantic Wall.’
an example would be the landscape we created around the base of the Cotentin Peninsula. There, we opened the canal sluices and we flooded a wide area of fields to a depth of two metres, which panzers cannot cope with. Then, we placed a series of incendiary barges along one side; these were river craft fitted with burning material which would explode as the enemy approached, deterring them from trying to ford the water. We created a lane around one side which could be used to cross the floods, defended lightly so that the enemy would think they were fighting their way through. As the enemy came out of this, they would be faced with an anti-tank ramp system camouflaged by nets, which would hold up their panzers as they broke through. Onto this zone, we had Nebelwerfer (rocket mortar) batteries calibrated to fire on the stranded vehicles. Any panzers that finally crossed the ramps would become caught up in a system of bunkers armed with PAK guns, firing down a slope. And so on, and so on. The enemy would find himself with a long, thinly spread spearhead of armour which grew less powerful with each phase, very vulnerable to being isolated and ground down. This was all very closely based on what the Russians had done to us at Kursk.
Related:
- “Fake Russian Facebook Accounts Bought $100,000 in Political Ads” (nytimes on how Russians spent enough to reach one third of Americans for 0.6 seconds via a Super Bowl ad)
More: Read
The historical focus given to the landings themselves is entirely misplaced. They were always going to be initially successful. The big question was always who would be able to reinforce the battlefield faster. The germans, which had land supply lines but had to operate under the constant threat of allied air power? Or the allies, whose supply lines were virtually immune from enemy interference, but who had to somehow get all their kit across the surf zone?
The German solution was to heavily fortify the deep water harbors, and prepare them for demolition. They reasoned that there was simply no way that the Allies could bring enough troops, materiel, fuel, and ammo over an open beach, so whatever penetration they might achieve would be eventually crushed as more and more German divisions piled on them.
What they hadn’t considered was that the Allies were planning to take two precast concrete harbors with them (Mulberry harbors). This is what made the success possible, by allowing them to attack where the Germans thought impossible, and then allowing them to pour men and resources into the battlefield at a rate that they had not planned for.
it looks like “Russia is responsible” narrative goes back even a bit farther than WWII.
“With the support of several national newspapers and periodicals, they succeeded in getting across to the British public the idea that the defence of the principalities against Russian aggression was vitally important for the broader interests of liberty and free trade on the Continent. In a series of almost daily articles in the Morning Advertiser, Urquhart joined their calls for intervention in the principalities, although he was more concerned about the defence of Turkish sovereignty and Britain’s free-trade interests than about the Romanian national cause. As the Russian invasion of the principalities progressed, Romanian propagandists grew bolder and made direct appeals to the public on speaking tours. In all their speeches the main theme was the European crusade for freedom against Russian tyranny
…
the origins of the Crimean War cannot be understood by studying only the motives of statesmen and diplomats. This was a war – the first war in history – to be brought about by the pressure of the press and by public opinion.
Figes, Orlando. The Crimean War: A History. Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.
For the Germans, “Moscow” was short-hand for “Jewish-Bolshevism”, i.e. Jews were always linked to Bolshevism and it was the Jews that had started Bolshevism, etc.
paddy, are you sure? Goebbels had nightmares about cossacks overrunning germany. Were they Jewish cossacs?