He Missed D-Day for...

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had one job in 1944: stop the Allied invasion of France. If the Allies got a foothold, Germany would be fighting on two fronts, so he wanted to throw them back into the sea on the very first day. He turned the coast into a death trap with almost six million mines and steel obstacles. Then a storm hit the Channel, his weather experts said nobody could invade, and he drove home to Germany for his wife Lucie's fiftieth birthday on 6 June, with a pair of shoes he had bought in Paris. The Allies' meteorologists spotted a short break in the storm, and about 156,000 soldiers landed in Normandy while Rommel was hundreds of miles away. The panzer reserves needed Hitler's order to move, and Hitler was asleep. Rommel got the news by phone that morning and only made it back to his headquarters that night. By then the Allies were ashore, and he never got a second chance to push them back into the sea. Eleven months later, Germany surrendered. Sources: Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day (1959); The Rommel Papers (ed. B. H. Liddell Hart, 1953); David Fraser, Knight's Cross (1993); history.com, "D-Day: Hitler and Germany's defenses". #history #ww2 #dday