CH Gerd von Rundstedt, Commander and Chief Western Army, Defense of the Reich, 1944, Background, The Atlantic Wall, (Who was fooling who?) ATLANTIC WALL MYTH EXPLODED "The enemy probably knew more about it than we did ourselves," Von Rundstedt said in referring to the so-called Atlantic Wall as a "mere bluff." He confessed that such a wall did exist from the Scheldt to the Seine, "but further than that—one has only to look at it for one's self in Normandy to see what rubbish it was." According to Von Rundstedt, the wall consisted of a few pillboxes in holes in the sand so far apart that "you needed field glasses to see the next one." The only good thing was the fortresses, such as Cherbourg and Brest, but they were all fortified only toward the sea. He described the wall as "a dreary situation" south of the Gironde toward the Spanish border because "there was really nothing at all there." All the ballyhoo about the Atlantic Wall was simply propaganda, Von Rundstedt said, but he admitted that people believed it—"at least we believed it." He thinks, however, that it was no mystery to the Allies because their air photography probably revealed the bluff. Although a lot of material went into the defenses, Von Rundstedt complained that the Navy got most of the concrete. He pictured the German Navy as building higher and thicker roofs on their U-boat shelters every time the Allies dropped a heavier bomb. "It doesn't suffice to build a few pillboxes," Von Rundstedt pointed out. "One needs defense in depth. Moreover, the requisite forces were lacking—we couldn't have manned them, even if fortifications had been there." |
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