Oddly enough, both sides of that coin probably hold some water. Many experts believe that even if the Allies hadn’t landed at Normandy, by the time they did, German defeat was already basically inevitable. The Russians were already starting to turn the tide even before D-Day, and the German army was starting to have manpower and fuel concerns.

So in this sense, they were definitely weakened.

But from the point of view of the Americans landing at Normandy, they were still fighting an experienced, well equipped, modern army. They weren’t some rabble that just needed to be sneezed on to be sent running back to Berlin. The Germans were not pushovers. It’s not really until they’re eventually pushed right back to Germany proper that they start having to enlist the young and the old, and that’s where you get that perception of them as a shadow of their former selves sort of stereotype.

In fact, if it wasn’t for some intelligence operations, D-Day could genuinely have failed. Juan Pujol Garcia, a double-agent who is a sorely under-appreciated part of the D-Day story, actually convinced the Germans that the landings of June 6 were a diversion and a bigger landing at Calais was imminent. Because of this, several German armoured divisions were kept out of the first week of D-Day fighting when it was certainly no guarantee that the Allies would definitely be able to hold the peninsula.

So in short, by mid 1944, the German Wehrmacht, and army on the whole could still have been considered a formidable opponent. If they were in front of you, you were right to fear them. But on a strategic level, they were basically living on borrowed time. Everyone knew their strength could only diminish from this point, and obviously if you watch how things progress over the next year or so you can see that steady weakening plays out, particularly once they fail in their last ditch attempt to turn things around in the Ardennes, at which point they really begin to fall apart

Part 1

The German Army present in France in the summer of 1944 reflected the effects that five years of indecisive conflict had had on a nation that relied on speed to emerge victorious. As Robert Citino has argued, as far back as the era of The Great Elector, Frederick William, Germany always relied on the rapid destruction of enemy forces through bold operational maneuver in order to secure victory. This centuries-old overarching concept of warmaking emerged from and was sustained by the fact that first Prussia and later Germany proper found themselves sandwiched between major powers possessing the finances, industry, natural resources, and manpower to fight protracted conflicts. The Prussian/ German state, unable to compete with these formidable neighbors in terms of wealth of resources, thus turned to perfecting the art of operational maneuver and building armies that, for lack of a better word, were trained to be war-winners. In essence, Germany knew it couldn’t win a war of attrition, so it focused on building an exceptionally competent army led by exceptionally competent officers and generals that would be able to exploit the operational and tactical weaknesses of their enemies in order to destroy their armies in the field in the opening salvoes of a war. The German Army of the Second World War was no exception to this rule, and while the German Army may have been among the best (if not the best) in the world in the early years of the war, by 1944 it was a shell of its former self. To again reference Citino, in taking a long view of the war we find that in 1941 the German Army (which to this point had suffered very little casualties in the war) is capable of launching a theater-wide offensive- Barbarossa- that includes three million men and three army groups. Ferocious resistance by the Soviet Red Army combines with logistical nightmares to stop this initial drive in the waning days of 1941, after which the Soviets mount a winter offensive that threatens to collapse the entire German front, which by now is quite overextended for lack of adequate reinforcements and replacement equipment. The following year, 1942, sees the big summer offensive occur in the south- Case Blue- and it involves a single army group of 1.5 million men rather than three. This drive culminates in the battle of Stalingrad and the destruction of the German Sixth Army. Again the Red Army goes on the offensive, with the result that by summer of 1943 the German Army in the East is capable of committing only two field armies (780,000 men) to their renewed drive to reduce the Kursk salient. Following the failure of Operation Citadel the strategic initiative in the East is permanently transferred to the Soviets and the German Army never again conducts a strategic offensive in the East. In viewing the path of the war through this lens the trend is obvious: Germany starts running out of men and material as early as late 1941/ early 1942, and this attrition continues through the end of 1942 and into 1943 until their final gasp is not a theater-wide effort nor on the scale of an army group but reduced to two field armies. Accordingly the manpower involved shrinks as well, from three million men in 1941 to 1.5 million men in 1942 to 780,000 men in 1943.

So what does this mean for troops stationed in the West from 1941-1944? It means that those that are unengaged with the enemy (essentially everyone that isn’t fighting in the Mediterranean) is subject to being swapped out with shattered formations being pulled out of the line in the East. The Western Front, dormant since 1940, becomes a revolving door of “torso” divisions returning from the East for reconstitution and fresh formations heading out to take their place. Due to the manpower and material deficiencies present by 1944 a substantial number of divisions in France were comprised of men who were overage, foreign or ethnic German, previously wounded, or medically or physically unfit for duty and equipped with a variety of captured equipment types including tanks and vehicles. Of 58 divisions stationed in Western Europe only 24 were considered capable of deployment in the East. Furthermore, over half of those in France were “static” divisions: these lacked a reconnaissance battalion, motor transport, and featured a reduced allotment of artillery. These units were assigned to cover the coast and were meant to fight in place until they were destroyed. Finally, most units were infantry divisions of the 1944 type, which possessed only six maneuver battalions rather than nine. The icing on the cake was that the majority of units in France relied on horse transport to move their supplies and artillery, this curtailing their mobility considerably.

Based off of the above it’s safe to say that many of the German forces stationed in the West were, at a minimum, of a questionable caliber. It was not all bad, however. There were a handful of upper echelon units, and those that were not were by and large commanded by veteran officers and NCO’s. In addition there were several armored divisions in France, although they were somewhat dispersed and their availability questionable as a result of which headquarters controlled them. When these forces were committed in the weeks after the landing they constituted the greatest armored concentration of the war, in terms of the number of units crammed into a small battlefield. Therefore, while the rank and file of the German forces in France were largely deficient in some way, they could potentially fight quite tenaciously provided they were used properly and led capably. These second rate troops could also rely on first rate reserves to bolster their defense of the “Atlantikwall” when the Western Allies decided to land.