There was an anecdote from a history professor who said that an officer that was in a bunker on D-Day looked out the front the concrete structure, which faced sideways by the way, and was stunned at the number of ships. He had never seen so many ships and didn’t know that there were that many ships in the Allied Navy’s all put together.

He telegraphed his headquarters that there were numerous ships and the landing was at Normandy.

The staff officer who recieved the telegraph was skeptical as they were still expecting Pas De Calais as the main beach and that Normandy must be a minor diversion. He telegraphed back and asked how many ships were there.

When the bunker officer recieved the question, telegraphed back, “Alle von ihnen.“ All of them!.

Another German soldier who had been captured and was waiting on the beach with several others who had been lucky to have been captured alive, was looking for something as the landing craft kept unloading vehicle after vehicle. He asked the US soldier who was guarding him, where are all your horses?

The American looked back at him increduously, we don’t have horses we have trucks and lots of fuel for them.

It stunned the Wehrmacht soldier whose own army relied primarily on trains and horses to transport supplies as they did not have enough fuel. He knew then that the war was over for Germany.

The quotes by Holger Eckhertz, Heinrich Runder, and Liesl Bradner are some of the best on what the Germans thought when they first saw the ships on D-Day.

I was astonished at this sight. I wondered if I was hallucinating, or if this was a delirium of some kind. I had never seen such an assembly of ships, and I’m sure nobody will ever see such a thing again, perhaps not in human history. The sea was absolutely solid with metal, that is no exaggeration.

Holger Eckhertz, D DAY Through German Eyes 2

Heinrich Runder, a German soldier, recalled his feeling on seeing the invading forces as being one of ‘pure fear’. He said: ‘A vast number of ships. Absolutely vast.

‘I can tell you that my throat went dry, painfully dry, and my hands began to shake. I wasn’t the only man to be affected that way, one of the very young lads began to retch as if he was going to be sick.’-Heinrich Runder

Liesl Bradner said this:

“As soon as we walked over the dunes and saw thousands of ships and all those landing boats and barrage balloons, I knew the war was lost”.-Liesl Bradner