Yes, there was certainly a chance that the D-Day landings might be defeated.
The Germans knew that the landings were coming, and they had done their best to fortify the ‘Atlantic Wall’ to prevent them. The weather was touch and go – the original planned date was June 5, and many of the troops had gone aboard the ships in preparation for that day, only to have to wait because of bad weather.
Eisenhower got a favourable weather forecast from Ireland and he decided to go ahead on June 6, but it was still a gamble. Rommel was convinced that the Allies would not risk an invasion in such conditions and had taken the opportunity to visit his wife in Germany.
If the weather had been a little worse, and if Rommel had been on the scene, the Germans might have been able to defeat the landings. There was a precedent: they had comprehensively defeated Operation Jubilee, a landing in force at the port of Dieppe in August 1942.
This is a German photo of the aftermath:
Eisenhower was well aware of this. In case Operation Overlord also failed, he had prepared a statement taking responsibility:
Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available.
The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.
There were many reasons why Overlord succeeded: the experience gained in the landings in North Africa, Sicily, and the Italian mainland; the use of deception, which convinced the Germans to hold forces back from the Normandy beaches in the belief that the main landing would come in a port; the Allied control of the air (on the 17th of July Rommel himself was shot up and badly wounded by low-flying fighters); and assistance from the French Resistance.
Even so, amphibious landings are the most difficult operations in warfare, and, as the subsequent fighting at Caen and Arnhem showed, fortune did not always favour the Allies.
D-Day might have failed. At a minimum, that would have meant the prolongation of the war. It might have allowed Germany to stabilise the Eastern Front or even reach a separate peace in the East.
Or it might have meant that the Soviet Union would end up occupying all of Germany. It is impossible to say. But it is certainly possible to say that there were no guarantees with Overlord.
This question largely depends on how the definition of “won” is interpreted.
Are we only discussing a complete victory — Allies are driven back across the English Channel with heavy losses…
Or can a Pyrrhic victory also apply?
If the former, the only possible way this could have hypothetically occurred, is if the Panzer divisions located north near Pas-de-Calais had been sent to Normandy BEFORE the landings took place.
With extra tanks and heavy infantry divisions present to reinforce the coastal defenders, they might have been able to rout the invasion completely, or at least inflict enough losses so that the Allied advance would have frozen — giving the Germans time to recuperate and counterattack.
Incredibly, Adolf Hitler had correctly believed that Normandy — and not Pas-de-Calais — was the real Allied prize, but he was “persuaded” into giving his commanders on the Western Front the benefit of the doubt that Pas-de-Calais was the intended site, prompting him to relocate his Panzer Divisions shortly before the invasion took place.
If we are looking at a mere Pyrrhic Victory, than the Germans actually did sort of achieve this — at least, they were much closer to doing so than what initial reports from the Allies had previously suggested.
Contrary to their previous estimate of approximately 2,400 dead of all nationalities, historians have now identified the names of 4,414 attackers who are now known to have been killed on June 6, 1944 — and this list may still not be complete — in addition to several thousand injuries.
As it turned out, those who died from their wounds after June 6, 1944, or those who went missing, and whose bodies were not found until after that date were not included in the official reports.
Having not wanting to alarm the public back home, the Allies would have tried to downplay the severity and costs of the D-Day landing by playing a game of numbers manipulation.
How many people were actually killed will probably never be known.
Either way, that the number of confirmed dead eighty years later is now nearly twice what it was strongly indicates that the Allied command was hurting far more than they had acknowledged, which probably also explains why in some sectors, the advance halted for weeks on end, and a sense of stalemate comparable to the trenches of the First World War began developing.
In the end, even this was not a German victory.
And depending on one’s definition, not even a Pyrrhic victory for the Allies.
Nonetheless, they still inflicted far greater losses in 1944 than the likes of Dwight Eisenhower were willing to admit.
Who knows how many more names will be added after 2024.
Some historians believe that we have finally documented every case, while others have argued that the real Allied death toll was in excess of 5,000, with some whose records may have been permanently lost.
The only conclusive thing we do know, is that the history of the D-Day landings now needs a REAL historical revision.
And deservedly so.
No. Normandy is a great example of what Sun Tzu meant when he said that a battle is already won or lost before the first arrow flies.
Hitler essentially delivered a strategy of defense in depth and flexibility of response but that also meant his army was very diffused. His approach effectively conceded the landing areas, the much vaunted Atlantic Wall notwithstanding, in the belief that he could knock out the Allied force by Invasion + 15.
However his biggest problem was that Germany had lost all command of the air or even the ability to effectively contest the Allied air power over the Channel or in France. This meant that whatever Rommel et al did or were allowed to do, the outcome was going to be the same.
Pull the panzers and elite infantry units closer to the beaches, and they simply would have died sooner, devastated by the same Thunderbolts and Typhoons that killed so many of them 6–8 weeks later.
This question also intersects with a question earlier today about Enigma. Not only did the Allies fake out the Germans and make them expect an invasion at the Pas de Calais but they also knew what divisions were in Normandy, which were moving up and which were stationary. What they did not have a complete knowledge of was how bad off the Luftwaffe was in northern France.
The Luftwaffe had changed its Enigma code structure in January 1944 and the Allies had not caught up by D-Day.
Allied pilots were shocked at being almost unopposed in the air. The Heer high command had already stripped the Luftwaffe units to help protect the Fatherland against the incessant bombing raids, but SHAEF thought they still had a lot of aerial power in theater on June 6, largely because they were not able to read the Luftwaffe codes at that time.
