The Blitzkrieg Myth by John Mosier

Author:John Mosier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

The Stall

That the Normandy landings were a major success, perhaps the greatest Allied victory of the war, is beyond dispute, and their success was not—as is sometimes argued—because of German failure. As we noted earlier, although Rommel was correct in his understanding of the impact of tactical airpower, he had no real solution to the problem. Moreover, although he had devoted a great deal of energy to constructing beachfront defenses, these defenses were brushed aside, easily in the case of the British, and less so for the Americans at Omaha Beach.

But the sacrifices of the American infantry there, although to a certain extent unnecessary (had the Americans taken advantage of the British offers of special-purpose armor) were crowned with success. Although they lacked some of the right tools for the task, the Americans did have one potent weapon: close support from naval vessels. In the Pacific, flat-trajectory fire frequently did little damage to the Japanese defenders on what were essentially flat islands: They simply dug themselves in. But the cliffs overlooking the landing area rose up high enough for naval gunnery to be extremely effective, which suggests that von Rundstedt’s instincts to let the Allies land and then begin the battle, as had been the case at Anzio, may well have been correct.

The heavy American casualties should not blind us to the fact that by the end of that first bloody day, the Allies were ashore, they were ashore in great numbers, they were off the beach, and they were debarking on such a broad front that there was no real possibility of their being dislodged.17

Where the problem came in was in the weeks—and months—after the initial victory. Essentially the powerful American armored thrust never developed, choked off by the hedgerows of Normandy, which, among other things, turned all the existing roads into land canals, while the sturdy Norman villages and farmhouses were simply so many forts. This revealed the fundamental error in the American idea of mechanized warfare: it was a doctrine that took no account of the terrain. Consequently the Americans found themselves engaged in a sort of combat for which they were totally unprepared.

On their left Montgomery was marginally more successful, in that his army was able to tie down the bulk of the German armor. But his troops had been unable to secure the area around Caen in the first few days, as the original plan called for, and the fighting there degenerated as well. Moreover Montgomery was now operating with a great handicap: the British army, with substantial combat forces tied down in Italy, did not have enough manpower available to replace its infantry losses. The only way to keep infantry regiments at combat strength was to disband existing units and combine them.18

The Allied air commanders, habitually skeptical about the idea that a war could be fought and won on the ground in the first place, had opposed almost every aspect of the invasion, and immediately on the first checks, they promptly proclaimed there was a crisis on the battlefield.

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