Just Finished Reading: D-Day Through German Eyes – How the Wehrmacht Lost France by Jonathan Trigg (FP: 2019) [294pp] 

They knew it was coming. The long awaited ‘Second Front’ - although technically the ‘third’ front with the ongoing campaign in Italy – was soon to open, but the questions remained: When, How and most importantly where? The hammer could fall just about anywhere, from the French south coast all the way up to northern Norway. But even the mighty Third Reich couldn’t defend everywhere equally. The most logical thing to consider was that the Allies would need a functioning port as soon as possible after landing. The most logical place for the attack on France was, therefore, Calais and logically this was the most heavily defended. But what about elsewhere? Normandy was considered a comparatively low risk with few usable ports nearby and, despite a flat beach along most of the area, radio intercepts and other information indicated an attack elsewhere. Despite that the defenders did what they could to improve their defences with thousands of mines being laid and thousands of tons on concrete being poured to create gun emplacements and bunkers. But what of the troops to man them? With a war of extermination raging in the East needing ever greater resources in men and material the Atlantic Wall and Fortress Europa wasn’t exactly in line to get the best of anything. The men came from units generally considered to be combat ineffective, either through a lack of experience or, in many cases, often too much experience on the Eastern Front complete with physical and mental injuries that would’ve, in normal times, removed them from fighting units entirely. The equipment wasn’t much better – with obsolete guns from occupied territories making up the majority of the weapons available to ‘throw the Allies back into the sea’. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The elite Panzer units held in reserve were under confusing and conflicted control. The very strategy on which the defence of France was being based was still under review with different commanders having very different ideas of how exactly to proceed. If that wasn’t bad enough, the Allies had created naval and air forces the like of which the world had never seen before. When the hammer did fall it would fall like the Hammer of God itself and heaven help anyone who was on the receiving end – as various units of a much-weakened Wehrmacht were about to find out. 

This was an excellent account of D-Day and the subsequent weeks and months following the landings from a very different perspective than I was used to. We don’t often hear about the German/Axis side of any encounter with the Allies, so it was very interesting indeed to ‘hear’ from German/Axis (actually not always German nationals as I discovered here) soldiers as they were bombed, bombarded and finally overwhelmed by British, Canadian and American forces. With lots of first-hand accounts this was at times a very visceral, frightening and bloody account of modern warfare up close and personal. If you’re in any way put off by the horrors of war you might just want to skip this one – or at least be aware that you might need to skip some of the more detailed accounts throughout this book. If you know D-Day from the Allied point of view only (as I did pretty much) this is a real eye-opener and will definitely round out your knowledge of the events surrounding that most important day. Highly recommended to anyone interested in how WW2 ended.    

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