D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

15th Scottish Division, which had proved its bravery beyond all doubt. That Dempsey missed a great opportunity through his caution is almost unquestionable. The delays in launching Epsom meant that VIII Corps ended up fighting the greatest concentration of SS panzer divisions which had been assembled since the Battle of Kursk. Yet the impressive performance of the British troops involved was let down at the last minute by the hesitation of their army commander. The only consolation was that the Germans never again managed to launch a major counter-attack against the British sector.
    Eisenhower’s frustration with Montgomery over strategy is not hard to understand. The confident messages Montgomery had been sending out about a ‘show-down’ simply did not tally with what he said in private. An intelligence officer with the 7th Armoured Division had recorded with amazement in his diary on 22 June what he heard from Major General Erskine on his return from a conference at 21st Army Group headquarters prior to Epsom. ‘General talked about what Monty had said to him,’ he wrote. ‘Complete change so far as we are concerned as Monty doesn’t want us to make ground. Satisfied Second Army has drawn all enemy panzer divisions, now wants Caen only on this front and Americans to press on for Brittany ports. So VIII Corps attack goes in but we have very limited objective. Monty reckons he lost the battle of the build-up - five days behind on account of weather.’ So perhaps Dempsey’s caution was dictated by Montgomery.
     
    Rommel visited Geyr’s headquarters on 1 July, the day after the battle ended. Both men were shaken by the effect of shelling from warships at a range of nearly twenty miles. Geyr demanded figures from both divisions on the number of tanks knocked out by naval gunfire. Even Hitler was persuaded that they could do no more than hold their present line for the moment. But Geyr was furious that every available panzer division had been thrown at the British offensive. This had caused huge disruption to his plans.
    Above all, Geyr opposed the splitting of formations as an emergency measure, which also caused chaos in resupply. He told Rommel that the newly arrived infantry divisions should be used to hold the line while the panzer forces were withdrawn and reorganized for a proper blow. Rommel refused. ‘The infantry cannot do this any more and is not prepared to do it,’ was his reply. He did not believe that the newly arrived infantry divisions were capable of holding the British. This attitude happened to fit in with Hitler’s obsession of not yielding any ground. Geyr railed against ‘the armchair strategists of Berchtesgaden’ and their ‘lack of knowledge of panzer warfare’. He despised Jodl, an artilleryman: ‘The artillery developed the unfortunate characteristic of the Bourbons - neither to learn nor to forget - and was in many respects more backward than the infantry.’
    Geyr wrote a report in which he did not mince his words. He demanded a flexible defence and, as a result of Epsom, the withdrawal of panzer troops south of the Orne, out of the range of Allied naval gunfire. ‘Decisions are taken directly by OKW itself,’ he continued. ‘As that headquarters is not in possession of first hand or personal knowledge of the situation at the front and is usually thinking very optimistically, its decisions are always wrong and arrive too late.’ Rommel endorsed his conclusions and passed the report up to OKW. Hitler decided to relieve Geyr immediately. He replaced him with General der Panzertruppen Hans Eberbach.
    Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt as well as Rommel had been summoned back to the Berghof on 28 June, at the height of the battle for the Odon crossing. Rundstedt ‘returned in a vile humour’, according to his chief of staff. Having driven over 600 miles from Saint-Germain-en-Laye to Berchtesgaden, he was kept waiting from three in the morning until eight the next evening, ‘and then was given the opportunity to exchange only a few words with the Führer’. Just after his return, Rundstedt, with Blumentritt listening in, rang Keitel. He ‘told him bluntly that the whole German position in Normandy was impossible’. Allied power was such that their troops could ‘not withstand the Allied attacks, much less push them into the sea’.
    ‘What should we do?’
    ‘You should make an end to the whole war,’ the old field marshal retorted.
    Next day at noon, Keitel rang