German 15th Army
▶ Explore on the mapThe German 15th Army held the coast of the Pas-de-Calais, north of the Seine, and was the formation that the German high command expected to face the main Allied invasion. Because the Allies maintained the fiction of a separate army gathering opposite Calais, Hitler kept the strongest divisions of the 15th Army in place for weeks after 6 June 1944, waiting for a second landing that never came. That decision, together with the destruction of the French railways, meant that reinforcements reached Normandy slowly and in far smaller numbers than they might have. The army remained largely inactive in its sector until the Allies advanced towards the Seine and the Belgian coast later in the summer. The position shown here is a schematic headquarters-area location in the Pas-de-Calais. Its long inactivity in the Pas-de-Calais was a direct result of the Allied deception plan, and it remained there until the general retreat of late summer.
Sources
- Wikimedia Commons — Charnwood (SVG, by EyeSerene)
- Wikimedia Commons — Operations Greenwood and Pomegranate, Normandy, July 1944 (EN.svg)
- Wikimedia Commons — Operation Tractable (SVG, by EyeSerene)
- Wikipedia — 352nd Infantry Division (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- Wikipedia — Falaise pocket (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- Wikipedia — Normandy landings (CC BY-SA 3.0)
- Wikipedia — Operation Overlord (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Related
Reuse this data: open dataset (GeoJSON / CSV, CC BY 4.0)