What’s going on behind the German defenses?
Nazi ‘expendables’ on Channel to seek to delay the invasion
Axis wants time to ‘dope’ attack
By Nat A. Barrows
How tough an opposition will our invading forces encounter when they land in Western Europe? What is really going on behind Hitler’s Atlantic Wall? From his observation post in neighboring Sweden, Nat Barrows has been collecting closely guarded information about Germany’s ability and willingness to cope with the titanic forces assembled in England for Allied victory. In a most important series of articles, of which the following is the second, Mr. Barrows reveals many hitherto unknown facts about the men directing the German war effort, Germany’s heavy industry, and other hitherto undisclosed information about the German war machine.
Stockholm, Sweden –
Waiting there inside the Nazi Atlantic Wall, they think they have posts of honor – 200,000 German troops and their mixture of satellites, tensely and nervously alert along the coast of France, unaware that their casemates and pillboxes may soon become sacrificial altars.
They are entbehrlich – write-offs and expendables, sacrifices for time.
By their crushed and lifeless bodies, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel hopes to gain enough time to concentrate mobile striking forces behind the wall at the area threatened with the breakthrough.
They have to die so that the real fighting men of Germany, based well inside the wall, may know where to strike back.
The men behind the wall, the very flower of Germany, must be overwhelmed before Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower can drive his invasion wedge into France and turn it toward Germany. Battlewise, grim and fanatical, they comprise Waffen-SS, panzer troops, motorized infantry and grenadiers such as the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler Division, seasoned on the Eastern Front, and remnants of Rommel’s old Afrika Korps.
Hard and ruthless
They are hard and they are ruthless. They will fight as they have never fought before, fully confident that they are going to throw us back through the Atlantic Wall and into the English Channel.
In France, Rommel’s Channel coast commander, Field Marshal Karl Gerd von Rundstedt, has 600,000 men ready for the invasion, carefully trained in all three phases around which the Germans have based their plans to meet attack.
The defensive blueprint for the 52 divisions in France and the 14 in Belgium is effectively the same as the basic plan for other troops along the Atlantic Wall: eight divisions for Holland, six for Denmark, eight for Norway and 12 highly trained, handpicked divisions stationed inside Germany as the Nazis’ last strategic reserve.
Phase of operation
As a result of a long, thorough investigation of sources from inside Germany, this correspondent submits that Rommel’s anti-invasion blueprint is broken down into the following German phases of operation:
- PHASE I: The Allies still at sea
In this phase, Rommel plans to utilize radio-steered bombs, fighter-bomber planes, 750-ton submarines and the new 30-foot, two-man midget submarines, all attacking in coordination with destroyers of the 2,000-ton Narvik class and the 1,100-ton Elbing class.
E-boats based at Rotterdam, IJmuiden, Antwerp and Saint-Malo, and smaller motor torpedo boats, will converge into the Channel with destroyers racing out from their Brest anchorage.
Electrically exploded minefields will point 12-inch, 13-inch and even 15-inch naval coastal guns in smashing hot lead among the Allied landing barges. As the invaders draw near their selected beachheads, land-based torpedo tubes will open up, firing both at surface level and underwater.
In the countryside behind the Atlantic Wall, an armored “parachaser” unit will begin scouring for allied paratroopers and airborne soldiers the minute the “Fourth of July” rocket bursts – the signal of the invasion.
- PHASE II: The battle for the Atlantic Wall
The Germans in this phase intend to inflict the greatest number of losses to the invading shock troops in order to delay to the last possible moment the Allied breaking of the wall and the plunge into the open country behind the wall.
This is the stage where the 200,000 “write-offs” in the French sector of the wall must fight – and die to the last man, if necessary, German officers must have time to find out where Gen. Eisenhower is really making his drive and where he is only attempting a diversionary landing.
It is clear from authentic information reaching Stockholm that the Germans no longer think their Atlantic Wall impregnable. Rather, they conceive the Atlantic Wall as a series of spaced fortifications, an obstacle for delaying the breakthrough, thus allowing them time to concentrate mobile troops behind the breach.
- PHASE III: The battle behind the wall itself
Here the Luftwaffe finally must take flight with every possible machine, no longer able to conserve its strength by refusing combat except for the most vital targets. D-Day will be the Luftwaffe’s greatest battle… and its final chance to dispute Allied air might.
In addition to fighting unending hordes of Allied planes, the Luftwaffe will have the problem of trying to guard its own supply lines and to give some kind of support to German ground troops.
It is more than likely that the first defensive unit to crack will be the Luftwaffe, subjected as it will be to the most formidable air attack in history.
TOMORROW: The above is one part of the picture of how the Germans see the Atlantic Wall and D-Day. What weapons will they use against our soldiers? What are the weaknesses in the wall? The answers will be given tomorrow in another article of this series, telling how Germany is prepared to meet the invasion.