D-DAY FORTIFICATIONS IN NORMANDY STEVEN J ZALOGA ILLUSTRATED BY HUGH JOHNSON © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com FORTRESS • 37 D-DAY FORTIFICATIONS IN NORMANDY STEVEN J ZALOGA ILLUSTRATED BY HUGH JOHNSON Series editorsMarcus Cowper and Nikolai Bogdanovic © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com Contents Introduction 4 Design and development 5 Case 3a: Normandy • Principles of defense • Fortification construction Tour of the site 14 Shore defense • Fortified strongpoints • Coastal artillery fortifications • Other fortifications The living site 31 The site in war 34 Pre-invasion attacks • Naval gun duels • Utah Beach • Bloody Omaha Gold Beach • Juno Beach • Sword Beach Aftermath 57 The site today 59 Further reading 62 Index 64 © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com Introduction German defenses along the Normandy beaches were part of the larger Atlantic Wall fortifications, intended to defend Fortress Europe from an Allied amphibious invasion. Hitler’s grandiose scheme for impregnable coastal defenses proved unrealistic due to the enormous length of the coast to be defended and the limited resources available to the exhausted German war economy. Due to strategic misperceptions about the Allied plans, German coastal defenses were concentrated on the Pas de Calais rather than in Normandy. In addition, German doctrine preferred to concentrate coastal defenses around key ports and to repel amphibious landings away from ports using mobile forces. When Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was appointed to take command of the invasion front in late 1943, he re-examined the basic assumptions about coastal defense and began a program to enhance The most potent fortification to fortifications along the Normandy coast. Rommel believed that any Allied take part in the D-Day fighting invasion would have to be stopped immediately on the beach, and so insisted was the Crisbeq battery of that more effort be made to defend the coastline between the ports. His most 3/HKAA.1261 located near Saint- important contribution to the defenses was an extensive program of Marcouf. Only two H683 casemates for its four Skoda 210mm K39/40 improvised beach obstructions to complicate any landing attempt. As a part guns were completed by D-Day. of this program, there was a belated effort in the spring of 1944 to fortify the After engaging in prolonged gun Côte de Nacre in lower Normandy, the D-Day beach area. German resources duels with Allied warships off Utah were inadequate to rapidly construct defenses-in-depth along the most Beach on D-Day, the battery was threatened areas of the coast, and those along the Normandy beaches were the scene later of intense ground hasty and incomplete at the time of the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944. The combat, which earned its German defenses quickly failed when assaulted by Allied forces on D-Day, a commander, Oberleutnant zur See Ohmsen, the Knight’s Cross. reminder of the military adage of Frederick the Great, “who defends (NARA) everything, defends nothing.” 4 © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com Design and development Coastal defense had been the responsibility of the Kriegsmarine (navy) since the reforms of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1888. Kriegsmarine doctrine focused on the defense of German ports, not on repelling major amphibious attacks. In World War I, the Kriegsmarine’s resources proved to be inadequate for coastal defenses outside of Germany, for example in Flanders, so the army had to be brought in to assist. After World War I, the Kreigsmarine remained responsible for coastal defense, so the army ignored this mission. German army fortification engineering concentrated on land defense, a capability influenced by the experiences of World War I and brought up to date with the construction of the Westwall (Siegfried Line) along the French border in the late 1930s.1 At the time of World War II, the Kriegsmarine did not have an autonomous coastal defense force, but rather the coastal defense mission was the responsibility of regional commanders. In the case of the Normandy beach area, Sea Defense Command-Normandy led by Rear Admiral Hennecke in Cherbourg was subordinate to Adm. Krancke of Naval Command West. From a naval perspective, coastal defenses included short-range submarines, torpedo boats, mine warfare and coastal artillery. Due to the limited space here, the primary focus is on the Navy’s shore-based coastal defenses. The Kreigsmarine coastal artillery was considered an adjunct of the sea force, and its traditional missions were to engage enemy ships near the shore, protect harbor entrances and support friendly warships in combat. Engagement of land targets and defense against enemy landing forces were only secondary missions. As a result, the Kriegsmarine coastal artillery force was based primarily on large-caliber guns suitable for engaging enemy warships rather than on small-caliber artillery more suitable for use against large numbers of landing craft. The Kriegsmarine’s coastal defense efforts in France were concentrated near the ports both due to its traditional doctrine, and the widespread view that the Allies’ main objective would be a port. The Kriegsmarine did not have the resources to conduct a defense along the thousands of kilometers of coastline under German control in 1941, so once again the army was gradually brought in to assume more and more responsibility for this mission. This began piecemeal in the autumn of 1940 when the army’s artillery branch was brought in to reinforce the navy’s coastal batteries for planned operations against Great Britain, including the construction of fortified long-range artillery positions on the Pas de Calais. When Operation Sealion failed to materialize, the mission of the Wehrmacht forces in France shifted from offense to defense. Gradually, German infantry divisions being used for occupation duty took over more and more of the coastal defense mission. In 1941–42 the German occupiers began to consider how to deal with future threats, and the planning concentrated on the most likely objectives such as ports and harbors. Starting in December 1941, the OB West (Commander-in- Chief West) began to designate some of these ports as fortified areas (Festungsbereichen). The port defenses would include both seaward and landward approaches since the Wehrmacht worried that the Allies could stage airborne landings behind the ports. These initial defensive efforts were quite modest due to a lack of resources and included ordinary field entrenchments as well as concrete fortifications. 1. For further information on the Siegfried Line, see: Neil Short, Fortress 15: Germany’s West Wall(Osprey: Oxford, 2004) 5 © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com ABOVELEFTThis provides a good The army did not have a specific coastal defense doctrine and its existing example of the type of kettle tactical doctrine was not inclined toward the use of linear coastal defense emplacements first built along the tactics as a response to an amphibious invasion. Instead, the German army Normandy coast, in this case one generally dealt with amphibious landings by staging vigorous counterattacks of the six 155mm K420(f) gun against the beachhead as soon as possible. This doctrinal preference was emplacements at StP 152 near Gatteville. This type of emplacement evident in the German response to the Allied landings on Sicily in July 1943, is patterned after the World War I Salerno in September 1943, and Anzio in January 1944; these landings were not style, and appropriately enough the contested in their initial phase with coastal defenses. The one exception was gun seen here is a captured French the Wehrmacht’s successful repulse of the British/Canadian raid on Dieppe in St. Chamond Modele 1916, a type 1942, which took place at a heavily defended port, already fortified by the widely used in Normandy due to Kriegsmarine in accordance with their traditional port defense mission. its excellent 21km range. (NARA) Germany was gradually provoked into linear coastal defense in France by the ABOVERIGHTThe shift from kettle frequent British Commando raids. In the wake of the British raid on St. Nazaire emplacements to fully enclosed in February 1942, Hitler issued Fuhrer Directive 40 on March 23, 1942, that casemates is well illustrated here ordered the construction of fortifications along the Atlantic coast. This scheme in this overhead view of one of was not based on accepted Wehrmacht doctrine, but reflected Hitler’s infatuation the batteries of 7/HKAA.1261 at with grand architectural projects and the romantic allure of impregnable Gatteville, to the northwest of Utah fortresses guarding continental Europe. The Wehrmacht high command, Beach, armed with the 155mm K420(f) gun. Four of the H679 were preoccupied with the war against Russia, paid little attention to this program. still under construction on D-Day, The Wehrmacht’s Festungspionere Korps (Fortress Engineer Corps) had been so the gun is still seen in its original created in the late 1930s for designing and supervising the construction of kettle emplacement. (NARA) fortifications. When the first major prewar fortification project, the Westwall, began in the late 1930s, the corps was too small to actually conduct its construction. As a result, the construction work was undertaken by the paramilitary Organization Todt that had been responsible for the construction of the German autobahn. This pattern remained the same in France, with the Festungspionere developing the fortification plan, and Organization Todt undertaking the construction. Much of the work in France was contracted out to local French firms and at its peak strength in mid-1943, only 6 percent of Todt’s workforce in France were Germans. On August 13, 1942, Hitler held a meeting with the Reichsminister Albert Speer and the senior OB West engineer staff and made clear the strategic aim of the Atlantic Wall. “There is only one battle front [the Eastern Front]. The other fronts can only be defended with modest forces.” He outlined a plan to defend the 3,800km (2,400 miles) of coastline from Spain to Norway using 15,000 bunkers and 300,000 troops to be completed by May 1943, the earliest time an Allied invasion was likely. Hitler insisted that priority would be given to the ports 6 and lower priority to the open beaches in between. Only two sites in Normandy © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com were given the Festung (fortress) designation, Cherbourg and Le Havre. Of the 15,000 Atlantic Wall bunkers, 11,000 were allocated to the Seventh and Fifteenth Armies stretching from Brittany to the Dutch coast, including Normandy. Organization Todt focused on the coasts closest to Britain along the Pas de Calais and Picardy since these were believed to be the most likely sites for an Allied invasion. Of the planned 15,000 bunkers, Organization Todt completed 9,671 permanent bunkers and 5,976 field-type bunkers by D-Day. However, a large fraction of the uncompleted fortifications were in areas away from the Festung ports, and the Seventh Army sector, which included the D-Day beaches, was generally about six weeks behind the Fifteenth Army sector on the Pas de Calais. The August 19, 1942, raid on Dieppe strongly influenced German fortification plans. The success of the defenses in repelling the attack reinforced Hitler’s view of the importance of the Atlantic Wall. The fighting suggested the need to reinforce gun batteries with infantry strongpoints and to replace the open “kettle” coastal gun emplacements (Kesselbettungen) based on World War I designs by more complete casemates that offered protection from air attack. The Atlantic Wall construction became a favorite subject of German propaganda with frequent newsreels and photographic coverage of the Rommel’s most important initiative impregnable defenses. The costs were substantial, even if the propaganda image in Normandy was to stiffen the of impregnable defense was a gross exaggeration. In the two years up to D-Day, defenses with coastal obstructions Organization Todt used 13 million cubic meters of concrete at a cost of DM3.7 to complicate any landing attempt. This stretch of beach near Dieppe billion, as well as using about 5 percent of total German steel production. gives a good idea of the density of Case 3a: Normandy these obstacles and they include the usual mixture of the large Belgian The OB West considered seven major invasion scenarios, designating a landing in gates, as well as smaller Czech the Seventh Army’s Normandy sector as Case 3a. In this scenario, the landing was hedgehogs, wooden stakes and expected to take place near the Seine estuary around Le Havre to the east of the steel tetrahedons. These two Canadian officers are examining eventual D-Day beaches. Since resources were still limited, priority went to areas a Panzerstellungbased on a tobruk. where invasion landings were deemed most likely, especially the Fifteenth Army The front of the World War I sector on the Pas de Calais. The only areas in Normandy that received any French Renault FT tank’s Girod significant attention were the Festungports of Cherbourg and Le Havre and, to a turret has been shattered by naval lesser extent, Dieppe. A final strategic assessment in March 1944 concluded that gunfire. (Ken Bell, NAC PA134448) the Allied invasion site would most likely be on the Pas de Calais, astride the Seine Estuary, or along the eastern shore of upper Normandy (Haute Normandie), in that order. Aside from the Festung ports, lower Normandy (Basse Normandie) including the Côte de Nacre (Pearl Coast) had few concrete fortifications until early in 1944. As an economy-of-force solution, the army deployed a network of interlocking coastal artillery batteries. At first, they were installed in inexpensive, open “kettle” emplacements and were equipped mainly with captured foreign artillery or obsolete German guns. German infantry units on occupation duty patrolled the areas between the batteries thinly. On his appointment as the new OB West commander in the spring of 1943, Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt ordered a comprehensive inspection of the coastal defenses that was completed in October 1943. The report was a scathing indictment of a program that had been cursed with a lack of resources due to the 7 © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com Rommel inspects the Normandy beaches in March 1944 while troops from the local infantry company install stakes using high-pressure water-hoses, a time-saving innovation that he promoted to accelerate the construction of beach obstructions. (MHI) low priority of the Western Front compared to Russia. The only zone assessed to have limited defensive readiness was in the Fifteenth Army sector on the Pas de Calais and, even there, the average divisional sector was 100km, permitting little more than a thin cordon defense. To put this in some perspective, German tactical doctrine of the time felt that a divisional frontage of 6 to 10km was prudent. To make matters worse, the quality of the troops manning these defenses was almost without exception below standard since the divisions in the west were regularly “combed out” by the army to send the fittest troops to Russia. What was left were older troops; ambulatory troops still suffering the effects of frostbite, wounds and illness; unreliable Volksdeutchetroops recruited from scattered German communities in Eastern Europe, and other second-rate troops. The situation was further exacerbated in 1943 when Berlin ordered OB West to turn over 20 of its better battalions in return for 60 battalions of Ost troops recruited from former Soviet prisoners-of-war. Hitler’s response to von Rundstedt’s inspection was Fuhrer Directive 51 on November 3, 1943, which accepted von Rundstedt’s findings and took steps to halt the constant drain of forces out of France to Russia. In theory, this reversed former priorities, and recognized the need to strengthen defenses in the West in view of the likelihood of an Allied invasion in 1944. The most immediate outcome of this directive was the assignment of Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel to head the newly created Army Group for Special Employment (later Army Group B) to direct the invasion front. Rommel’s first assignment was to inspect the coastal defenses. He began in Denmark, working his way down the coast to France. Although Rommel’s previous command in northern Italy had not involved him in the attempts to repel the Allied landings at Salerno in September 1943, the conduct of the operation worried him deeply. The Wehrmacht’s established tactics to deal with amphibious landings, namely a concerted counterattack by Rommel insisted that the 352nd Infantry Division put more of its forces in view of the beach, and one of the outcomes was that additional weapons were moved on to the bluffs overlooking Omaha Beach. This is a 75mm PaK 40 anti-tank gun, rarely seen on the Normandy beaches as it was reserved for assault infantry divisions, not the type of static divisions used for 8 coastal defense. (NARA) © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com panzer and panzergrenadier divisions several days after the landing, had failed to push the Allies back into the sea. Rommel began to question the existing Wehrmacht doctrine and sought other solutions. He recalled his own difficulties dealing with British defensive positions and minefields in the North African campaign, such as at El Alamein, and he began to ponder the role of defensive obstructions and fortifications in the defense of France against the expected Allied invasion. Construction of the fortifications along the Normandy coast was undertaken by Organization Todt’s Oberbauleitung Cherbourg (Chief Construction Directorate – Cherbourg), responsible for the coast from Cabourg to Mont Saint-Michel. Up to the time of the D-Day landings, OBL Cherbourg built 913 concrete emplacements including 540 permanent bunkers (176 shelters, 28 command posts, 262 combat bunkers, 34 observation posts, 8 communication centers and 32 supply bunkers); 28 artillery emplacements; and 345 field-type bunkers (tobruks, open gun pits) amounting to about 65 percent of the emplacements that had been assigned under Hitler’s 1942 plan. The diversion of the Organization Todt to other assignments in 1943, such as the reconstruction of the Ruhr dams after the British attacks and the construction of new V-weapon sites, delayed the completion of many fortification efforts in Normandy. Fortification in lower Normandy on the Côte de Nacre from the Vire to the Orne Rivers, the future D-Day beaches, was almost nonexistent by December 1943 except for a handful of scattered coastal gun positions. The army itself had a difficult time compensating for the shortfalls since its own fortification construction resources were very limited. The Festungspionere Korps generally allotted a single Festungspionere Stab (Fortification Engineer Staff) to each army corps. These units were roughly regimental in size, divided into three sector groups (Abschnittsgruppen) each with a geographic responsibility and assigned a single engineer battalion to carry out their tasks. In the case of the 7th Army’s 84th Corps responsible for the Vire-Orne sector, this was Festungspionere Stab 11 commanded by Col. Walter Garbsch from April 1943 to May 1944. Although it originally had the normal three sector groups, one of these had been removed to help construct fortifications in southern France. Abschnittsgruppen I covered the Cherbourg peninsula to the Isigny area (Utah Beach), while Abschnittsgruppen II covered further east to Riva Bella, thereby covering four of the five D-Day beaches. Col. Garbsch did not have specialized fortress architecture training, so the design of the Normandy beach defenses was entrusted to Col. von Stiotta, the head of the Seventh Army’s Festungspionere Stab 19, who had been a fortress engineer in the prewar Austrian army. When Rommel insisted that fortification efforts in Normandy be accelerated in January 1944, three more engineer battalions were put under the direction of Fest. Pio. Stab 11, two for constructing bunkers and one for mine laying. But the shortage of workers and supplies in the spring of 1944 meant that many planned fortifications were not completed or even started by D-Day. For example, there had been plans to complete a major defensive work near Utah Beach to secure Carentan, but this never took place. The Kriegsmarine intended to deploy heavy- caliber naval coastal batteries in Normandy, including 380mm gun batteries at both Le Havre and Cherbourg in range of the D-Day beaches. These plans were badly delayed and the Le Havre battery near Octeville was heavily damaged during construction by a major Allied air attack on April 10, 1944. Principles of defense The Kriegsmarine gradually lost control over coastal defense during the course of the war, especially in the areas away from ports. Isolated naval gun batteries such as those at Crisbeq and Longues-sur-Mer were subordinated to army command in 1943. The debate over tactics between the army and navy ended in late 1943 when von Rundstedt imposed a more unified command structure. 9 © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com ABOVELEFTOne of the most Once fighting began, each coastal defense sector (KVA: Küsten-Verteidigungs- common defensive positions on the Abschnitten) fell under a single commander. In the case of the Côte de Nacre, Normandy coast were open Vf600 this was the army’s local divisional commander: KVA-H1 covered the 716th gun emplacements like the one Infantry Division sector from the Orne River to Arromanches (Sword, Juno and seen here armed with a pedestal- Gold Beaches), KVA-H2 covered the 352nd Infantry Division sector from mounted 50mm gun. This particular example is armed with the shorter Arromanches to the Vire River (including Omaha Beach) and KVA-J1 in the KwK 39, based on obsolete tank 709th Infantry Division sector covered from the Vire River along the eastern guns of the type used earlier in the coast of the Cotentin peninsula to the west of Cherbourg (including Utah war on the PzKpfw III tank. (MHI) Beach). As a result of these trends, it was the army rather than the navy that shaped the defensive tactics in 1944. ABOVERIGHTPriority for defensive By the summer of 1943, the German high command began to realize that structures went to the ports, which the Anglo-American amphibious doctrine was not as dependent on the seizure often had elaborate enclosed bunkers of the type found on the of ports as had been expected; this was evident from the landings on Sicily and Westwall. This shows the interior at Salerno in Italy. Something had to be done about the areas between the of a machine-gun bunker in the ports, and a thin screen of coastal artillery batteries was little deterrent. port of St. Malo with its retractable The army had considerable experience in the defense of fortified lines, most MG34 machine gun with protected notably its experience from World War I. German tactics in 1917–18 evolved telescopic sight. This was a into a type of elastic defense that was based on defense-in-depth.2 German considerable contrast to the elementary machine-gun tobruks defensive tactics evolved since 1918 due to the advent of mobile warfare and and slit trenches used on the D-Day the experiences of the Russian front.3 However, conventional infantry tactics beaches. (NARA) were an inadequate model for the defense of the French coast since they did not exploit the vulnerability of the enemy amphibious force during its approach to the beach. The tactical doctrine that began to emerge in 1943 was based on tactics in use on the Eastern Front, but adapted to the peculiarities of coastal defense. Since the coast was too long for true linear defense, the tactics depended upon linear clusters of small strongpoints, a “chain of pearls,” that could serve as the skeleton of a defense. The tactics substituted concrete and firepower for manpower, allowing relatively weak infantry divisions to cover defensive sectors far longer than would be assigned to units with more conventional missions. Armed with small-caliber artillery and machine guns, these strongpoints could engage enemy amphibious forces during their approach to the beach. If additional infantry was available, the strongpoints could serve as the main nodes of the 2. For further information, see: Paddy Griffith, Fortress 24: Fortifications of the Western Front 1914–18, (Osprey: Oxford, 2004) 3. For further information on German defensive tactics, see: Gordon Rottman, Fortress 23: German Field 10 Fortifications 1939–45(Osprey: Oxford, 2004) © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com