Decisive Operations: The Normandy Campaign and the Fate of Hitler’s Germany

General Eisenhower

“Decisive operations,” according to the United States Army doctrine, “lead directly to the accomplishment of a commander’s purpose.”[1] The problem with the Army manual from whence that statement is lifted is that it uses the word “decisive” twenty-two times but never defines it. That one sentence, just quoted, is the closest it comes. The absence of a clear definition of the term leaves readers to interpret it as they see fit. Decisiveness, then, probably has much in common with beauty: its quality seems to mostly in the eyes of its beholder.

Like beholders of beauty, observers of military history can and do offer compelling descriptions of what they see. ‘Decisiveness’ seems to be one of their favorite terms, though some may be hesitant to use it overmuch. One historian, Williamson Murray, avoided the term ‘decisive’ in all his analyses of the Normandy campaign, though he did refer to it as “a great success.”[2] In calling the campaign a “flawed triumph,” it was almost as if Murray was saying that OVERLORD could have been decisive if it hadn’t been for the generals that fought it—““It was in the tragic nature of life,” he wrote, “and in the fact that no general can ever make perfect decisions that victory in Europe would not come until May 1945.” Max Hastings, on the other hand, called OVERLORD “the decisive western battle of the Second World War, the last moment at which the German army might conceivably have saved Hitler from catastrophe.”[3]

Still another historian, Cornelius Ryan, also believed that D-Day, the start of the Normandy campaign, was the decisive battle of the war. He called it “the battle … that ended Hitler’s insane gamble to dominate the world.”[4] More expansively, he observed that—

“Germany was still far from beaten, but the Allied invasion would be the decisive battle. Nothing less than the future of Germany was at stake, and no one knew it better than Rommel.”[5]

Ryan began his account of D-Day by quoting Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, one of the war’s commanders. Rommel, somewhat of a historian himself, saw the battle of Normandy for what it was before it was even fought. In a remark to his aide, Captain Hellmuth Lang, Rommel said—

“Believe me, Lang, the first twenty-four hours of the invasion will be decisive … the fate of Germany depends on the outcome.”[6]

Apparently, Erwin Rommel was of the same opinion as Cornelius Ryan, believing that the first day of the operation would be decisive. One of Rommel’s biographers described the field marshal’s thinking—

“Germany, on 7 June, was facing what Rommel had always regarded as certain to lead to ultimate disaster in the field, a protracted war on two fronts”[7] … “by the end of what the enemy called D-Day, France had been successfully invaded. What Rommel had hoped to forestall had happened.”[8]

One member of Rommel’s command, Major Werner Pluskat, commanded of “four batteries of the 352nd [Infantry] Division—twenty guns in all [which] covered one-half of Omaha Beach”[9] also felt the Normandy campaign was decisive. From his observation post behind the beach, “one hundred feet above the beach,”[10] near the French town of Ste. Honorine, Major Pluskat held a commanding view of the sea. On the night the invasion began, just after the initial paratrooper landings had taken place, Pluskat went to this observation post. With “high powered artillery glasses”[11] he swept the view from left to right. He saw nothing the first several times he searched. But just before dawn, the vast Allied naval armada came into view. This officer survived the war and was interviewed for Cornelius Ryan’s book, The Longest Day. Writes Ryan, “At that moment [when he saw the ships] the world of the good soldier Pluskat began falling apart. He says that in those first few moments he knew, calmly and surely, that—quoting the major—‘this was the end for Germany.’”[12] To me, that sounds as if Major Pluskat considered the Normandy Campaign a substantially decisive operation.

Major Pluskat’s Fuehrer agreed with his young major. In Fuehrer Directive No. 51, Adolf Hitler acknowledged that, while the threat from Soviet Russian remained, “the situation [had] changed … an even greater danger looms in the West: the Anglo-American landing! …. If the enemy … succeeds in penetrating our defenses [in the West] on a wide front, consequences of staggering proportions will follow within a short time.”[13] A ‘greater danger looms,’ he said, and ‘consequences of staggering proportions, but the dictator wasn’t finished; he actually used the D-word: “There [meaning at the Allied point of attack] will be fought the decisive … battle.”[14] (Emphasis added).

German armed forced high command chief of operations, General Alfred Jodl, as early as 7 November, 1943 told a friendly audience in Munich that the coming invasion by the western Allies’ “will decide the war.”[15] British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in a speech to the House of Commons on 28 September 1944, called the battle of Normandy “the greatest and most decisive single battle of the entire war.”[16]

As 1944 dawned, Hitler faced this problem: that a successful Soviet offensive in the east would probably cost him the Ukraine and Belorussia—potential areas of German lebensraum, but space that was not essential to the Reich’s existence. A successful U.S.-British invasion in the west, however, could well cost him the Rhine-Ruhr region—the life’s blood of his Army. The former areas were expendable, but not the latter. Therefore, by all means possible, Germany must prevent the western Allies from gaining a foothold on the continent. The Axis’ central problem, therefore, was for the Wehrmacht to throw the invaders back into the sea. The Wehrmacht certainly tried to accomplish this, but obviously failed. Hence the decisiveness of D-Day.

“For the Germans,” wrote John Keegan in the introduction of one his histories—

“Normandy was not their worst defeat. As a turning point, Stalingrad counted for much more; as strategic catastrophes, perhaps Kursk or White Russia. Yet tens of thousands of Germans are buried in Normandy and there they lost a third of their armored divisions. [Germany’s] capacity to deal a disabling blow to the [Allies] [was] destroyed in Normandy.”[17]

Keegan’s conclusion was that to dispute that Normandy was the decisive battle of the Second World War was to give heed to frivolous objections. “Brussels’s liberation (celebrations had continued their “without restraint” for three days and nights) confirmed beyond cavil the result of the Battle of Normandy.”

“It now ranked to stand beside the three other great disasters which had overtaken the German Army … Stalingrad, Tunisia, and the recent battle in White Russia, which was simply known as the Destruction of Army Group Center … if strict comparisons are made between its results and those of Normandy, it may yet appear that the Western Allies’ victory was the greater.”[18]

In war, an operation may be decisive; yet, it may not be the decisive event of all. An operation may be decisive without its necessarily determining a conflict’s outcome. In World War II, D-Day was not only decisive, but it determined the course of the Normandy Campaign. The Normandy Campaign was both decisive and the most obvious determiner of the war’s eventual outcome.

Could the Russians have defeated Hitler without a second front in the West? Probably. Authors Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet tell us that the Soviets, by the end of the war, were the best among all the wars’ combatants at the operational level of war, and that the Russian victories in the was last twenty-four months were “superior to anything to Germans had achieved early in the war.”[19] So, it stands to reason that the Soviets could have beaten the Germans even if there had been no second front in the West. But, in light of all this, perhaps the question to ask is not whether the Russians could have beaten the Nazis, but whether they could have beaten them decisively.

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[1] Army Doctrine Publication 3-0 Unified Land Operations (Department of Defense, 10 October 2011), 13.

[2] Williamson Murray, “Flawed Triumph,” (MHQ : The Quarterly Journal of Military History, 2004. 6), http://search.proquest.com/docview/223681371?accountid=8289 (accessed 9 July 2012).

[3] Max Hastings, OVERLORD: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy, (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 11.

[4] Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day: June 6, 1944 (London: Quality Book Club, 1959), 13.

[5] Ibid., 19.

[6] Ibid., 11.

[7] David Fraser, Knight’s Cross: A Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 492.

[8] Ibid., 491.

[9] Ryan, 98.

[10] Ibid., 99.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid, 142.

[13] Gordon A. Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack: United States Army in World War II: The European Theater of Operations (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1951), 464.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Michael Veranov, Ed., The Third Reich at War (New York: Galahad Books, 1997), 487.

[16] Winston S. Churchill, Ed., Never Give In: The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches (New York: Hyperion, 2003), 364.

[17] John Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), xvii.

[18] Ibid., 314-315.

[19] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 483.