Defense of Normandy

The article deals with the defense of the French landing zone in the Battle of Normandy by a flotilla of the German Kriegsmarine, between June 5 and June 15, 1944, during world war II.

In Paris, at dusk on June 5, 1944, the General Staff of the admiral of the Western Front receives the reports from the radioelectric detection stations. They have nothing to communicate, since air attacks on the “Atlantic Wall” by allied aviation are now part of the routine. They generally appear late in the afternoon, before nightfall, flying almost at the level of the water, they discharge their bombs with the sun behind them and then withdraw. The Germans who make up the “Atlantic Wall” crew are already accustomed to these afternoon “visits” and hide in the lower floors what can be destroyed, to take it out again as soon as the attack is over. As it is, the Allied planes cause little damage. The air attacks have been repeated in the same way since January 1944; From Ostend to Brest, the stations are attacked, making it impossible to determine a possible landing place.

June 5, 1944

.

That June 5, the competent officer of the General Staff announced at dusk: “The surveillance stations do not indicate anything of particular”. The German State is not unaware that the Allies have carried out a large-scale landing exercise on the southern coast of England several weeks ago. They also know that said exercise was done in the light of the moon and at low tide. The Germans draw a conclusion from this: the actual landing will take place at moonlight and at low tide. The Germans also hope that this landing will take place between June 2 and 7, 1944, since the Allies will not have those favorable conditions again until after several weeks. In the first days of June a storm breaks out that produces strong waves, which convinces the General Staff of the impossibility of such action. Admiral Krancke, head of Group West, takes advantage of this circumstance to inspect the south of France.

Only the Cape Hague station, in Cotentin, records many contacts near the English Isle of Wight, but they attribute this to the presence of an ordinary convoy in the area. At the headquarters of the Naval General Staff, in the Bois de Bologna, in Paris, only two officers remain on duty. At 1:50 a.m. the phones begin to ring: Captain Wegener, head of the Third Bureau, urgently summons them to the conference room; He ends up saying on the phone: “I think the landing has just taken place”.

Admiral Hoffmann, Chief of the General Staff, is informed that the first acts of sabotage have occurred. No phone communicates with Contentin anymore. The French Resistance cut the telephone lines at 1:45 am. The Germans have anticipated these acts of sabotage and radio communication is established. The first accurate reports from the monitoring stations, particularly the one on the Contentin peninsula and its surroundings, arrive via radio, and they are quite strange. One station notes:

“The Braun radars point out very many echoes. Perturbation in very curious operation. The screen is full of echoes. To avoid enemy interference, we have gone to use another frequency, but echoes remain. They are very numerous”

Report of the Barfleur station at the start of the landing#GGC11C

The General Staff in Paris understands the situation: those echoes are not interference, but the Allied landing fleet heading towards the French coast. But there are still skeptical officers who consider that the echoes are too numerous and may be seagulls.

At 2:30 a.m. more precise news arrives at the General Staff. Paratrooper descents, of real glider squads, are announced on the Contentin peninsula. From the radar echoes it is easy to deduce that the ships are converging on Contentin. After overcoming the moments of confusion and misinterpretation of the data that comes to them from their detector equipment, the stations begin to faithfully transmit what the screens indicate regarding the importance and direction followed by the enemy squadron. The aviation attacks with particular violence. Even though the stations are now transmitting accurate data, the Paris Headquarters and the Führer Headquarters refuse to believe what is happening. The reaction of the German forces took place in the late afternoon.

Meanwhile, they have informed Admiral Krancke of the events and he orders: "Immediately issue the conventional phrase: grand landing in the Bay of the Seine." This phrase should trigger the counterattack of the Kriegsmarine, the German navy. Shortly after, everything that the navy has on this coast, which is not much, begins to attack the flank of the enemy navy; It is the largest agglomeration of ships the world has ever known.

The defense of the Kriegsmarine

The commander of the old German torpedo boat “Möwe” does not believe that, with the bad state of the sea - waves of more than 4 m, low clouds and visibility of less than 3 km - the Allies will try today the landing, but a new telegram informs him that Allied paratroopers have landed near Caen. The “Möwe” together with the torpedo boats “T-28” and “Jaguar” are heading at high speed towards “the objectives marked in the English Channel. From the messages it is deduced that, indeed, the Allies have launched the landing. The commanders of the three torpedo boats do not know how their three fragile vessels can act against the British fleet. The three torpedo boats catch up with a Rhine tug that is moving painfully through the rough seas: it is a 1910 tugboat, which is traveling on the same route, powered by two wheels.

At dawn, the three torpedo boats pass through a dense layer of artificial fog and are 10 km from the landing support fleet, made up of battleships and cruisers, duly protected by destroyers; the core of the landing fleet comes behind. The closest British ship is the battleship “Warspite” which is at 8500 m.

The torpedo boats in their attack launch 18 torpedoes against the British squadron, which are answered by infernal fire against them. The English ships emerge unscathed from the torpedo attack. The German torpedo boats withdraw, realizing that they will never reach the troop transports.

The forces that the Kriegsmarine can group against the Allied landing fleet are: 5 torpedo boats in Le Havre, 16 fast surveillance boats in Cherbourg, 7 in Bologna, another 7 in Scheveningen and Ostend, and by forcing the situation, 4 destroyers from Gironde and 3 torpedo boats from Brest can still be added. That's all. They must attack, according to official English figures, 6 battleships, 2 monitors armed with 380 mm artillery, 22 cruisers, 119 destroyers, 133 frigates and corvettes, 80 patrol boats, 60 fast surveillance ships and 25 minesweeper flotillas. In the following torpedo boat attacks, the Allies react violently, but despite the overwhelming superiority, they only sink 2 destroyers, 1 torpedo boat and several surveillance ships.

On the first day of the landing, 4,266 Allied ships and landing ships arrived on the French coast. In the course of the first six days, 64 ships were sunk and 106 were hit and damaged. Although the losses were “a mosquito bite” for the huge Allied fleet, the English High Command decided to finish off the German flotilla once and for all on the night of June 14, 1944..

That night an air attack is launched on Le Havre. After two and a half hours, only the “T-28” emerges unscathed; The others have disappeared and the “Möwe” burns tied by its moorings next to the dock. Thus the Kriegsmarine flotilla based on the French Atlantic coast disappears in a single night: it is 5:30 a.m. on June 15, 1944.

From now on, the Kriegsmarine continues the fight with the surviving fast surveillance ships, some submarines and “assault weapons”: human torpedoes, explosive boats and midget submarines.