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Hitler's army had come to France in 1940 in a lightning campaign thta lasted six weeks during which they penetrated the French defences at the foot of the Ardennes and, leaving some of the infantry divisions behind, drove north towards the French coast.
The British Expeditionary Force under Lord Gort was pushed across the Channel with the loss of almost all its equipment: Dunkirk was but the first in a series of setbacks.
photo: Horse Transport in 1940 - Frontier Crossing
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The capitulation of the French Army left Hitler and his Generals in a state of euphoria tempered with a indeterminate static nervousness unable to decide what to do next.
Guderian, forever the thinker and doer, had suggested and very nearly obtained approval for a thrust down through Spain to Gibraltar and into the French Colonies within North Africa.
The euphoria concealed immediately emerging cracks to which few dared to draw attention.
These cracks were in the German economy and illustrated the country's inability to exist without imports, food and what can only be classified as strategic war material.
There was only a small rolling stock industry for the railways and, surprisingly for a country that could later produce the best main-battle tank in the world, a motor-transport industry that was totally inadequate for the country's means.
However this is not to say that the army, for example, was not equipped to a high standard - it was.
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But the rate of attrition in battle and the expansion of the forces as a whole outpaced the abilities of every part of the war production industry.
Perhaps, more curiously, Hitler seemed to have no long-term strategic plan for the prosecution of the war.
click on the photograph to view a larger image
The broad sands of Utah Beach lead to a countryside scarred by remains of German fortifications. D Day landing craft, pushed off-course by strong tides, dropped US Troops at Utah sites that were, luckily, weakly defended. Germans flooded low fields behind the beach dunes, but that merely slowed down the Americans. By late afternoon they had fought their way inland, connecting with paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne, who had reached points along the road that paralleled the shore. In 15 hours more than 20,000 troops and 1,700 vehicles went ashore at Utah.
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