Hargreaves - THE GERMANS IN NORMANDY

The German soldiers performance in Normandy will forever be immortalized in the history books.

Kurt Meyer

At the foot of the Cotentin peninsula, just off the main Caen Cherbourg highway which cuts through the Calvados countryside between Bayeux and Carentan, is a sprawling cemetery, meticulously maintained. Overshadowed by oak trees and small, simple, roughly cut black stone crosses, lie the graves of 21,160 soldiers, grouped around a great funereal mound which dominates the site. This is La Cambe, last resting place of soldiers, sailors and airmen who defended Normandy against invasion.

Four more patches of Norman soil are forever German; cemeteries scattered around this historic French region, the burial sites of a further 38,000 men who died in the summer of 1944 fr Fhrer, Volk und Vaterland for leader, people and Fatherland. Death had indeed reaped a terrible harvest.

Had these men succeeded sixty years ago, Normandy and perhaps the rest of France might yet be forever German.

In 1944 the fate of Western Europe rested on the actions of the German forces which held the shores and fortifications of occupied France and the Allied troops sent to dislodge them. Arguably the finest new divisions Germany formed or re-formed in the winter of 1943 44 were sent west to bolster the second-rate units who had watched over the English Channel since 1940, holding the much-vaunted Atlantic Wall. On these divisions, the Panzer Lehr , the Hitlerjugend , 21st Panzer and a handful of others, the Third Reich entrusted the defence of France. The flower of the German Armed Forces, the Wehrmacht , of 1944 vintage would fight and, if necessary, die on French soil to safeguard the future of the Fatherland.

Of course, it never came to pass. The Allies were not destroyed on the beaches. By Thursday, 8 June 1944, when the beachheads had merged, the enemy had a firm foothold on Festung Europa Fortress Europe. He would not be driven out.

In the years since American, British and Canadian soldiers swept over the beaches of the Seine Bay, Normandy has been seen more as an Allied victory than a German defeat. The men who defended Caen and Cherbourg, who escaped the hell of the Falaise pocket, have been poorly served by history and historians. Perhaps this is not entirely surprising. British, Canadians and American accounts focused on the achievements of their respective armed forces. Beyond divisional historians, German writers have concentrated their researches on the Eastern Front and rightly so; even when the Battle for Normandy was at its peak, the number of men involved on the German side never came close to matching the Third Reichs commitment in the titanic struggle with Russia. From 1941-45, the Eastern Front was the engine of the war in Europe.

Yet in 1944 it did not appear that way. The gaze of the German public, of Germanys leaders, of her generals, was fixed towards the west, not east. The Reichs strategy for the year could be neatly summed up as: thwart the invasion then shore up the Eastern Front. And the Reich was confident of its strategy. Those who believed the invasion would succeed were in the minority in the spring of 1944. From Adolf Hitler down, the leaders of the Third Reich were confident the Allies would be smashed on the beaches. It would be a ferocious battle, yes, but the invader would be driven back whence he came.