Invasion of Normandy
...all units but an immense concentration of power in a single main landing. The invasion site would have to be close to at least one major port and airbase to allow for efficient supply lines. Possible sites included among others, the Pas de Calais across the Strait of Dover, and the beaches of Cotentin. It was decided by the Allies that the beaches of Cotentin would be the landing site for Operation Overlord. In my opinion, the primary reason that the invasion worked was deception, deception to mislead the Germans as to the time and place of the invasion. To accomplish this, the British already had a plan known as Jael, which involved whispering campaigns in diplomatic posts around the world and various distractions to keep German eyes focused anywhere but on the coast of northwestern France. An important point to the deception was Ultra, code name for intelligence obtained from intercepts of German radio traffic. This was made possible by the British early in the war having broken the code of the standard German radio enciphering machine, the Enigma. Through Ultra the Allied high Command knew what the Germans expected the Allies to do and thus could plant information either to reinforce an existing false view or to feed information through German agents, most of it false but enough of it true-and thus sometimes involving sacrifice of Allied troops, agents or resistance forces in occupied countries-to maintain the credibility of the German agents. Six days before the targeted date of June 5, troops boarded ships, transports, and aircrafts, all along the southern and southwestern coasts of England. All was ready for one of history's most dramatic and momentous events. One important question was left unanswered though: what did the Germans know? Under Operation Fortitude, a fictitious American force-the 1st Army Group-assembled just across the Channel from the Pas de Calais. Dummy troops, false radio traffic, dummy landing craft in the bay of the Thames River, huge but unoccupied camps, dummy tanks-all contributed to the deception. Although the Allied commanders could not know it until their troops were ashore, their deception had been remarkably successful. As time for the invasion neared, the German's focus of the deception had shifted from the regions of the Balkans and Norway to the Pas de Calais. The concentration of Allied troops was so great, that an invasion of France seemed inevitable. Bombing attacks, sabotage by the French Resistance and false messages from compromised German agents all focused on the Pas de Calais with only minimal attention to Normandy. Also, German intelligence thought that the Allies had 90 divisions ready for the invasion (really only 39), so that even after the invasion of Normandy, the belief could still exist that Normandy was just a preliminary measure and the main invasion of the Pas de Calais was still to come. None of the German high command in France doubted that the invasion would strike the Pas de Calais. The Fü hrer himself, Adolf Hitler, had an intuition that the invasion would come to Normandy but was unable to incite his commanders to make more than minimal reinforcement there. Due to weather complications, the first step in the invasion began a day late, on June 6 around 12:15 am. An air attack on Normandy. The Germans saw the airborne assault as nothing more than a raid or at most a diversionary attack. As the airborne landings continued, Field Marshal von Rundstedt nevertheless decided that even if the assault was a diversionary attack, it had to be defeated. Around 4:00 am, he ordered two panzer divisions to prepare for counter attack, but when he reported what he had done to the high command in Germany, word came back to halt the divisions pending approval from Hitler. That would be a long time coming, for Hitler's staff was reluctant to disturb the Führer's sleep. ...