The "Desert Fox" on the Beaches

Entrusted with the defense of Nazi-occupied Europe from the Allies, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel realized that he faced a most critical challenge. The Panzer and Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber units that he might want to defend the West were, instead, needed for the Eastern Front; and, of course, aircraft like the Stuka simply could not be expected to survive in the face of intensive Allied air and ground defenses. In 1940, France had confronted the specter of defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany. Now the shoe was on the other foot.

The "Desert Fox" emphasized meeting and defeating the invasion forces on the beach. Rommel understood that if the Allies got a toehold on the continent, it would be extremely difficult, probably impossible, to remove them. The field marshal discussed the upcoming invasion frequently with his naval aide, Vice Admiral Friedrich Ruge, and the Allied air threat figured prominently in his thoughts. On one occasion, as Rommel inspected a gun battery on the coast, two British fighters roared overhead. His staff members scattered at the low-level approach, but Rommel defiantly remained standing in plain view. Perhaps the "Desert Fox" was subconsciously attempting to offset, by this theatrical (if foolhardy) gesture, the crushing Allied air advantage that he knew was deployed against the German forces.

On April 27, forty days before the invasion, Admiral Ruge confided in his diary that he found the disparity between the Luftwaffe and the Allied air forces "humiliating." By May 12, he was reporting "massive" air attacks, though troops often exaggerated the amount of actual damage. On the 30th, with "numerous aircraft above us, none of them German," Ruge narrowly missed being bombed into the Seine by a raid that dropped the bridge at Gaillon. At 01:35 on June 6, as Ruge and other senior staff officers regaled themselves with tales of the Kaiser's army and real and imagined conditions around the world, the German Seventh Army reported Allied parachutists landing on the Cotentin peninsula. Overlord was underway. Time had run out for Rommel, and the countdown to the ignominy of the bunker in Berlin had begun.