The 5 Hours Germany Waited for Hitler to Wake Up

WW2, from the records. https://warshelf.com/ June 6, 1944, a quarter to five in the morning. Rundstedt's chief of staff telephones the High Command and asks for the armoured reserve: the 12th SS, Panzer Lehr, the 17th SS. Allied paratroopers have been down in Normandy for four hours. Jodl refuses. Those divisions can move only on Hitler's personal word, and Hitler is asleep on the mountain above Berchtesgaden, and nobody will wake him for a report nobody trusts. Rommel is at home in Germany for his wife's birthday. The Seventh Army's generals are driving to a war game about an Allied landing in Normandy. Rundstedt's staff calls the landings a feint. The release finally comes around three in the afternoon, ten hours after the request. The one panzer division that needed nobody's signature reaches the sea at Lion-sur-Mer and pulls back. The 12th SS spends half its march in roadside ditches under the fighter-bombers. Seven months later, the one commander who attacked without waiting is court-martialled over where he was the night before.