Looking back on the history of ww2, it was a great ploy by the Allies not using Calais as the landings. Had they landed here they had less chances of making beach-heads and pushing the Germans back. Using the landings at Normandy the Allies had five points to push forward. Its easy now to look back but had i been in the German war office i am sure i would have mentioned that Calais was just a red herring. :der: Would you have done the same?
Speaking of which, I have three original great UPI and AP Press Photos from just after the invasion. All of them show German PWs. Some are being searched--others are being escorted to PW cages and one shows 2-3 Germans with hands raised under the guns of a couple of G.Is in a jeep who have them riding on the hood of their jeep. These will get posted here in due time.
Agree DT, you would have thought that the intelligence from the Germans war office would not have fallen for this. Maybe Hitler had more say in this than we know....
Hindsight, as they say is 20/20 vision. By the time of the Allied invasion on D-Day, the possibility of an invasion of Britain and the Battle of Britain was four years in the past, however, the Nazi plans for Operation Sealion (since captured at the end of the war) showed that their setting off points were to be from the areas between Calais and Boulogne. So, in the Nazi mind it was quite conceivable that any invasion the opposite way would land in the same general region. That, coupled with the amount of false information being fed to the German intelligence which was by then thought to be notoriously inaccurate and so tied down by dogma that not even a telegram from Churchill to Hitler would have convinced them otherwise. Apparently any changes to the defensive plans could only be implemented on the direct orders from Hitler himself; hence the delays in deploying their panzer reserves held in the Calais area. The Nazi defences on the north coast of France knew an invasion was imminent and thought that it would fall in an area somewhere north of Boulogne, and probably towards Dunkirk, after all, the Dunkirk beaches had already shown they were suitable for landing craft sized vessels. Added to all that, there was the much greater distance which any invasion force would have to sail, some 90 miles to Normandy rather than the fewer than 40 miles to the Pas-de-Calais. In the run up to D-Day, apart from a few in the Nazi hierarchy who weren’t listened to until it was too late, the softening up bombing raids on the landing beach areas were largely seen as diversionary tactics.
Thanks guys, i still find it hard to understand top Generals believing the bombings on Normandy were as you say Brian, diversionary tactics. :ehm:
The further the events of June 1944 slip out of living memory and into history, the more the little snippets of information seem to come to light which enable historians such as Dan Snow and his latest programme on BBC1; “D-Day: The Last Heroes” to present history “as it happened”. I have mentioned the work of the Photographic Interpreters based at RAF Medmenham, the codebreakers of Station-X at Bletchley Park, Operation Fortitude, RAF Bomber Command (of whom I’m a great advocate), the USAAF and so many other pre-invasion operations in many previous posts, and when all that preparatory work is considered as a whole, then it starts to be less clear where the invasion was actually going to land. So that attention would not be drawn to Normandy especially, the photo-reconnaissance aircraft flew over and photographed the entire length of the “Atlantic Wall” apparently building an archive of some three million pictures, and any softening up bombing raids on the Normandy defences were also repeated on other targets where an invasion could land. The previous disastrous raid on Dieppe, apart from teaching the allies valuable lessons about seaborne landings on hostile territory also led the Germans to believe that any future landing would come close to or on a channel coast port; in the end, the Allies took two of their own ports, codenamed “Mulberry”. The presence of General George Patton in command of the fictitious 3rd Army in Essex was a “master stroke” by Eisenhower, effectively keeping a large Panzer contingent in the Calais area ready to meet the perceived threat until the last minute. There was also the Nazi mindset, which by June ’44 in the main was convinced that a) the invasion was coming soon, but not yet and b) when it did come it would hit the beaches that the Germans would use and the shortest sea journey to suitable landing points. There was also the problem that following the surrender at Stalingrad Hitler had taken complete and personal control of all German fighting forces consequently nothing could move to reinforce the defence of Normandy until Hitler had woken up and had his breakfast and given the order; ridiculous as it seems now, but there was nobody who would even dare to disturb “The Fuhrer’s” slumber, no matter how grave the reason. Even Field Marshal Rommel, the architect of the Atlantic Wall was at home for his wife’s birthday! The weather on June 6th was at most marginal for an invasion, “Overlord” had already been delayed by 24 hours due to a summer storm in the channel, and on D-Day itself it was just a “short window” before the onset of another storm later that week which would also have had some effect on defending forces, just as the actual landings taking place at low tide, rather than at high tide when the distance to cover in the open on the beaches would have been shorter. Any talk over breakfast in the German high command that morning would probably have been about the liberation of Rome on the 5th June rather than "Today is the day that the allies are coming". So, taking everything into account, while it would seem that the Allies were making things more difficult for themselves, in the long run it was slightly “easier” or should I say less difficult, and even though it cost the lives of many thousands of brave men, it could have been a whole lot worse.
