What's the beach at Normandy like now? What was it like before WW2?

ETA - No “drifting off course”. Apparently a frontal assault of those cliffs was thought to be the only way to remove some heavy guns that had been installed there.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that the Germans weren’t 100% sure where the invasion was going to be. They’d made an educated guess for Normandy, but there was also a school of thought thinking that were going for Round II at Dieppe, or perhaps that they weren’t even going to bother with a landing in Northern France and were going to focus all their energy coming in through Italy or Southern France instead.

By the time the local commanders had gotten through to their superiors, and their superiors had gotten through to Berlin, and someone had woken Hitler up, and Hitler had ranted for a bit and then ordered a counter-attack, and then Berlin got back to the superiors of the local commanders, who got in touch with the local commanders, who got in touch with the troops to tell them what to do, it was too late and there were nearly 200,000 allied soldiers along with mind-boggling numbers of tanks, half-tracks, jeeps, and field guns ashore and in control of the areas immediately inland- not to mention the Royal Navy, RAF, and USAAF sitting offshore or flying overhead pounding anything in feldgrau that moved.

The Germans expected the invasion to be over the shortest route ie Calais or thereabouts. There was a huge disinformation campaign to reinforce this belief. General Patton was in charge of a non-existent Army, a non-existent Army that somehow managed to have a goodly amount of radio traffic, for instance.

However, remember the Allies had great Naval power at Gallipoli and it did no good (virtually) as the guns were not howitzers. The angle plays against them. Helpful yes- and the terrain was radically different.

Also the British made use of double-agents who fed misinformation back to their supposed masters in Germany suggesting that the Pas-de-Calais was the likely invasion area. During the pre-invasion bombing campaign the Allies dropped twice as many bombs on the Calais area than in Normandy, planting yet another hint in the German’s minds that the former area was the main place to deploy their best troops.

There’s a great book Bodyguard of Lies by Anthony Cave Brown which details all manner of deceptions used by the Allies. A constant refrain whilst reading it is “Oh, you fucking devious bastards!”.

As in The Man Who Never Was for the invasion of Sicily (from memory).

Interesting story, that- they found a man who had died of pneumonia and got permission from his family to use his body as part of an elborate ruse to fool the Germans.

They dressed the dead man in an Royal Marines uniform and a Mae West life jacket, and then placed several papers in a briefcase attached to his person alluding to the quality of Sardines and other such coded things which were basically the Intelligence equivalent of a big neon sign saying “THE ALLIES ARE GOING TO INVADE SARDINIA & CORSICA”.

The body was taken by submarine to a spot just off the coast of Neutral-but-pro-Axis Spain and put into the water (after a reading of the 39th Psalm), and allowed to drift ashore.

The idea was the German agents in Spain would think they had found the body of a courier travelling with sensitive documents who had been killed in an aeroplane crash.

The plan- Operation Mincemeat- was a complete success.

The interesting thing is that rather a lot of this sort of thing went on during the war, and this was by no means the weirdest or most unorthodox thing that MI5 or the OSS came up with during the war, either.

I assume you’re talking about Pointe Du Hoc - Rangers scaled those cliffs on ropes attached to rocket-propelled grappling hooks, as well as ladders, under fire, then stayed there for 2 days repelling German counter-attacks on the far right flank of Omaha beach. They started D-day with 225 men and finished with 90. The cliffs were 100ft high.

Pointe Du Hoc info.

It was also a bit of luck that Rommel and his officers were on leave at the start of the invasion.

Even after the Normandy invasion Hitler was inclined to believe that this was a diversion to draw his troops away from the “main target” of the Pas-de-Calais. For several weeks after D-Day he held back forces in the Calais area which could have been used in Normandy.

My understanding was that he was convinced that no ‘real’ invasion would be led by Montgomery; he was sure it would be led by Patton. Patton was still in England running lots of radio traffic to ensure the Germans though he was coming soon at Calais. Meanwhile, 1 million men landed at Normandy and poured into the hedgerows.

It was a masterful piece of intelligence work and very very well done.