Writing for National Review Online, Mark Antonio Wright cited a map that was prepared by Andrew J. Rhodes, a career civil servant and expert in Asia-Pacific affairs who has served in the US Department of Defense. His map, which is reproduced below, superimposed an outline map of southern England and northern France over one of the Taiwan and the adjacent Chinese mainland. This shows that the shortest distance between mainland China and Taiwan is about the same as the distance between southeast England and Normandy.
D-Day 1944 is, indeed, the most relevant historical precedent for a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Operation OVERLORD was World War Two’s most complex military undertaking: a vast, three-dimensional, air-sea land operation. Those preceding it in the European theater of war were overtures to the main event; those occurring in the Pacific theater were much smaller in scale. What happened on and after 6 June 1944 is, therefore, a good template for a military analysis of a Chinese move against Taiwan.
This analysis will be presented in three parts: a brief summary of the historical record, followed by an application of the lessons derived therefrom to a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
D-Day 1944: The German Perspective
The German armed forces had been preparing for an Allied invasion of France since 1942. It was considered certain that the invasion, when it came, would strike somewhere between Brittany and Calais, and by 1944 two-thirds of the forces at the disposal of Oberbefehlshaber West (Commander-in-Chief West or OB West) were allotted to that sector. Heeresgruppe B (Army Group B or HG B) was responsible for the defense of Brittany and the Channel coast of France and Belgium and for that purpose controlled some 45 divisions of variable quality under Fifteenth Army (Pas de Calais sector) and Seventh Army (Normandy sector). An additional headquarters, Panzer Group West (later Fifth Panzer Army) controlled the armored forces allotted to OB West.
But precisely where in this area would the Allies strike? The obvious spot was the Pas de Calais, where the English Channel was at its narrowest, but there were reasons to think that the enemy might choose Normandy instead. The early seizure of a major port was an obvious Allied objective and Cherbourg at the tip of the Normandy peninsula fitted the bill. And this indeed was a major consideration in the Allies’ choice of Normandy. Hitler himself, though he agreed with his generals that the Pas de Calais was the Allies' most likely target, could not rid himself of a suspicion that they might strike in Normandy instead.
Two additional factors complicated this guessing game. First, there was Hitler’s anxiety concerning Norway, where he feared that the Allies might attempt a landing with the objective of barring Germany’s access to Swedish iron ore. Second, there was Operation FORTITUDE, an Allied deception plan designed to convince the Germans that the invasion would come at the Pas de Calais. A phantom army group was created in England, supposedly under the command of Lieutenant General George S. Patton. Fake radio traffic, dummy tanks and guns made of wood and canvas, and other deceptions were highly successful in convincing German commanders that Pas De Calais was indeed the Allied target. Not unreasonably, the Germans rated Patton as the Allies’ top combat commander, and his presence at the head of the FORTITUDE charade lent it additional credibility. Even on and after 6 June 1944, Rundstedt and other German commanders suspected that the Normandy landing was merely a diversion, and that the main invasion had yet to be launched.
The Germans also suffered from a dearth of hard intelligence. Air and surface reconnaissance was rendered almost impossible by Allied air and sea superiority. Moreover, German intelligence networks in Britain and been penetrated and turned by the British security services, which used them to feed the enemy a confusing amalgam of authentic and false information. With little to go on, the German intelligence effort thus boiled down to a guessing game.
Nor was there unanimity of opinion regarding operational and tactical matters. The HG B commander was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, whose task would be to conduct the defensive battle. He believed that it was vital to concentrate all reserves close to the coast, in readiness to meet the invasion on the beaches and throw it back into the sea. If the Allies were not promptly repulsed, he argued, they were unlikely to be driven out at all. Rommel’s experience in the North African campaign had convinced him that Allied air superiority would prevent reserves positioned inland from reaching the coast in time to stop the enemy from consolidating a bridgehead.
But Rommel’s superior, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, disagreed. Citing traditional military principles of concentration and mass, he and most of his OB West staff advocated the creation of a powerful armored reserve under Panzer Group West. This force, positioned well inland, would deliver a well-planned and prepared counterattack, smashing the invaders in their bridgehead before they could build up their strength. In the meantime, the German infantry divisions, withdrawn out of range of Allied naval gunfire, would dig in and cordon off the invasion zone.
Rommel and Rundstedt appealed their dispute to Hitler—who characteristically split the difference. Three of the six immediately available panzer divisions were placed under HG B. The other three remained with Panzer Group West and were not to be committed to action without the Führer’s personal authorization. In effect, this decision approved Rommel’s plan without giving him the forces necessary to do the job. The beaches were sown with mines, strewn with obstacles and covered by artillery. Protected fighting positions for the defending infantry were constructed with interlocking fields of fire. But the reserves—the panzer divisions especially—were not positioned as Rommel desired. On D-Day only one of them, the 21st Panzer Division, was immediately available to launch a counterattack—which failed. And just as the Desert Fox had predicted, the enemy was then able to consolidate a bridgehead from which he could not be dislodged.
The Germans thus violated a cardinal principle of war, unity of command, a mistake that was to have fateful consequences when the invasion came.
D-Day 1944: The Allied Perspective
As noted above, the Allies had been meditating an invasion of France since 1942. But where and especially when to invade were questions that generated forceful disagreements and considerable ill feeling between the Americans and the British. The former pressed for an invasion at the earliest possible moment; the latter, haunted by memories of sanguinary Great War battles and their recent, unfortunate, experiences fighting the Germans, argued for delay and various Mediterranean options. In the end, the dismal science of logistics resolved this dispute, the Americans coming gradually to accept that OVERLORD, as the invasion plan was christened, could not be launched until the spring of 1944.
The military problem confronting the Allies as they contemplated an invasion of France is well summarized by Clausewitz’s observation that in war everything is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. They had simply to transport an invasion force across the English Channel, land it along the Normandy coast, consolidate a bridgehead, and pour in the follow-on forces and supplies necessary to launch a breakout offensive.
As Hitler suspected they might, the Allies chose to invade through Normandy, with the capture of Cherbourg as their first major objective. And Cherbourg was duly captured—but not, alas, before the Germans had demolished the city’s port facilities. By the time they were restored to working order, the front was far away, close to Germany’s western border. But such was the Allies’ superiority, air and sea, that it proved possible in the short term to bring in sufficient supplies and reinforcements over the beaches.
In thinking about the Allied imperatives on D-Day and its sequel, four phases are distinguishable: (1) successful initial landings, (2) consolidation and expansion of the beachheads, (3) rapid buildup of reinforcements and supplies, and (4) the breakout from Normandy. The battle would begin at the water’s edge and progressively expand until it encompassed the whole of northern France. Successfully managing this process was the Allied armies’ mission; disrupting it was the German Army’s mission. When the smoke of battle cleared it was the Allies who were entitled to say: Mission accomplished.
Conclusion
In June and July 1944, there was little that the German Army could do once it failed to defeat the enemy on the Normandy beaches. It might, however, have avoided disaster if a couple of things had gone the other way. First, there was Hitler’s refusal to permit a withdrawal from the coastal zone. The defenders were thus condemned to an attritional battle that they could not win. Second, the Germans made no effective use of the one weapon available to them that might have given the Allies a lot of trouble.
By the spring of 1944, the first of German’s Vergeltungswaffen (vengeance weapons) was in operational service. The V-1 was a primitive cruise missile: a small, unmanned jet aircraft with a range of 150 miles, capable of delivering an 850-kilogram high-explosive warhead. It was not particularly accurate (circular error probability of about 15 miles), besides being prone to malfunction, but could be cheaply and quickly produced. Hitler decreed its use against British cities, especially London, as retaliation for the bombing of German cities. Beginning in June 1944, some 10,000 V-1s were so launched, causing considerable damage and casualties while forcing the British to deploy significant countermeasures.
But if the V-1 had been used instead to bombard the Allied bridgehead in Normandy and the ports of embarkation in Southeast England from which reinforcements and supplied were being dispatched, it might materially have aided the German defense. Though the missile was, as noted above, none too accurate, the Allied bridgehead was so congested that a strike anywhere could have been counted on to do serious damage. On the other side of the Channel, a maximum V-1 effort against the half-dozen ports supporting the invasion could have slowed the Allied buildup. Once the enemy was ashore, all the Germans could do was play for time, and in that respect the V-1 was the one strong card in an otherwise weak hand.
Though military art and science have moved on since World War Two, the lessons of D-Day remain valid and are particularly applicable to a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan. As will be seen, the challenges and opportunities that would confront both sides remain much the same as those that confronted the Allies and the Germans on 6 June 1944.
Read Part Two here.