But Rommel's was an overwhelmingly minority viewpoint. His immediate superior, the venerable Gerd von Rundstedt, supported a completely different approach to the defense of northwestern France. The Wehrmacht's senior active-duty field marshal found his position strongly supported by the commander of German armored forces in the West, General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg. The Rundstedt-Geyr von Schweppenburg operational solution basically posited that there was nothing they could do to prevent a successful Allied landing. Instead, they championed tactics much in consonance with German operational and tactical doctrine, as expressed in Die Truppenführung (Troop Leadership), the Wehrmacht's basic doctrinal manual. The two generals argued that German forces in the West should concentrate available armored forces for a massive counterattack against the Allies once they were ashore. From their perspective, the panzer forces should be held back from the coast; then once the Allies had landed, the panzers would concentrate and move forward to counterattack. German armor would also then be available to execute a mobile defense that would utilize superior Wehrmacht training, tactics and equipment.

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In retrospect, Rommel had a far better understanding of the military situation than either Rundstedt or Schweppenburg, who failed to give sufficient weight to the power that the Allies' air forces could bring to their attack. With the Luftwaffe deeply engaged in opposing the strategic bomber offensive over occupied Europe and in the East, it could do little to prevent swarms of Allied aircraft from destroying any large concentration of panzers the Germans were able to assemble. It would also prevent any sort of mobile defense. The inevitable result would be a huge Allied army advancing across Europe and the Reich's final defeat. Moreover, Rommel believed imposing heavier losses on the Allies would only serve to make them eager to impose a harsher peace on a defeated Germany.

In the end, the Germans instituted neither defensive concept. They did not deploy their armored reserves close to the beaches — as Rommel had wished — or in a concentrated reserve as Rundstedt and Schweppenburg had advised. Instead, Hitler placed the panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions under the OKW; thus, only he could authorize their movement forward to meet the Allied invasion forces. And if the Führer was not available to make that decision, nothing was going to happen. Because neither Rommel nor Rundstedt was in command of the reserve divisions, the chance of rapid intervention against Allied landings by the available reserves had evaporated even before the first Allied troops waded ashore.

Two relatively small incidents, one in which Rommel's superiors overruled him and the second where a subordinate deliberately disobeyed his direct orders, played a major role in the successful American landings on D-Day. In the first case, Rommel requested permission to move the fanatical Hitler Youth volunteers of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend to Carentan, which unknown to the field marshal was to lie equidistant between the American landing beaches of Omaha and Utah. In that position, the SS division would have been ideally placed to intervene against either of the American landing areas. Even if they had failed to stop the landings, the Germans would have made the linkup between the American beaches extraordinarily difficult. This request was not granted.

The second incident had to do with the commander of the 352nd Infantry Division, which had responsibility for the sector where the American 1st and 29th Infantry divisions and other supporting units would land on D-Day. One of the great myths of World War II has been that the 352nd Division's presence in the area of Omaha Beach was a surprise to Allied intelligence. It was not. In fact, while the 352nd was responsible for defending the area to the north and northwest of Bayeux, the division commander, Maj. Gen. Dietrich Kraiss, held most of his infantry battalions back from the beaches as a counterattack force — an approach again in accordance with basic German doctrine.

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