Hitler, increasingly micromanaging the war from hundreds of miles away, insisted that he alone would decide how and when these tanks would be used. The role of these tanks in France would be decisive in defending France from the Allies. Germany's tank force and accompanying mobile infantry had been key to Germany's victory over France in 1940, and had been the backbone of the Wehrmacht ever since. What was at stake in this argument was the operational control of Germany's reserve of panzer forces in France. Rommel's superior, Gerd von Rundstedt, the supreme commander of all German armies in France, believed that Allied superiority in air power and naval guns meant that Rommel's plan was untenable and that a more mobile defense behind the beaches was necessary. Erwin Rommel, the famed Desert Fox of the North Africa campaign, believed that the only way to stop the Allied invasion was to deny the American and British forces the chance to create a beachhead, effectively destroying them on the beaches as they landed. Overlord would finally open up a second front in Europe and help to take pressure off the beleaguered USSR.Īs the German High Command prepared for the coming invasion, two very different schools of thought appeared among the generals. Churchill and Roosevelt promised Stalin that the operation would launch the following spring. President Franklin Roosevelt - made preparations for an invasion of France, and even gave it a name, Operation Overlord. By 1943, even Hitler conceded that an Allied invasion was just a matter of time, and he began to heavily fortify the coastline of Western Europe, from the Arctic Circle in northern Norway, down the coast of Denmark, Germany, Holland, Belgium, through the length of the Atlantic French coast to the Pyrenees - the Atlantic Wall.ĭuring the Tehran Conference in late 1943, the “Big Three” - Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and U.S.
As the war in Russia intensified and America joined the conflict, an invasion of Western Europe became a major Allied goal. The next year saw the Germans apparently preparing to invade England, while in reality Hitler was preparing to invade the Soviet Union. A major reason why the D-Day invasion proved so successful was because of Operation Fortitude, a massive deception plan designed to fool Adolf Hitler and the German High Command.įrance had fallen to Hitler's Wehrmacht in June 1940. On June 6, 1944, in the face of ferocious German opposition, the Allies successfully landed in Normandy, France.
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