FIGHTING IN A DICTATORSHIP - 1944 - The Wehrmacht Facing the Landings

A fresh perspective on the Wehrmacht at its twilight. Jean-Luc Leleu sets out to explore the overall functioning of the Wehrmacht as it faced the spectre of defeat. The aim is to understand the actors rather than recount the events. To do so, the German armed forces are examined through the lens of the Battle of Normandy in the summer of 1944: a confrontation in which some 640,000 soldiers of the Reich opposed nearly 2 million Allied combatants for twelve weeks.

Two sections structure the book. The first seeks to understand how German strategists anticipated the Allied offensive and prepared their troops for it. In this regard, the Landings are analysed in terms of reactions in a situation of extreme urgency. How did the actors in a chain of command respond to a major event with ill-defined contours, on the basis of sometimes erroneous, often imprecise and always fragmentary information? Did those in command make — or fail to make — the right decisions in time? It thus emerges that the first German counter-measures were far from effective, owing to the inability to pinpoint the exact axis of the Allied effort.

The second major section concerns the attitudes encountered in combat within a military institution operating under the Nazi dictatorship. An analysis of casualties (killed, wounded, sick and prisoners of war) first allows us to determine the degree of consent to sacrifice and to measure which categories of personnel — by age, rank, role and unit — bore the burden of combat.

It also allows us to gauge the intensity of the fighting week by week and to identify the breaking points in the troops' fighting spirit. Behind a subject — the Wehrmacht — that has been explored many times, this eminent specialist in the Second World War delivers a rich and original study.