The Economics of the Normandy Invasion

This past week, the United States and Europe commemorated 80 years since the Allied invasion of Normandy, a colossal military offensive that helped turn the tide against Nazi Germany in World War II. D-Day, as it came to be known, marked the largest seaborne invasion in history at the time. It brought about the liberation of France and accelerated the final stages of the war.

How much of the operation’s success can be attributed to economic and industrial factors? How innovative was the warfare? And are the lessons of Normandy relevant to modern-day military strategists?

Those are a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast that we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: First off, I thought I’d ask whether D-Day was decisive in some sense in ending World War II. Or, alternatively, was the real decisive action conducted by the Soviet military in the east, despite all the nostalgia over D-Day?

Adam Tooze: So this is an argument that rages back and forth among professional historians. By our best estimate, a staggering 80 percent of the battle casualties of the Wehrmacht, of Adolf Hitler’s army, were inflicted not in the west fighting the British and the Americans but on the Eastern Front. So, 4 out of 5. And that, on one level, says everything you need to know about where the main struggle was conducted between June 22, 1941, and all the way down to May 1945. Over that protracted period, the Wehrmacht and the Red Army delivered the most serious heavyweight bout in military history, bar none anywhere in the world, ever. It’s just a rolling series of massive campaigns, two big waves of German invasion and then counterattack after counterattack after counterattack across a gigantic stretch of territory. I went to see the World War II museum [in Moscow]. And they have this hall there that is filled with the books that commemorate Russian casualties, more than 20 million. And it’s truly extraordinary to see the level of casualties all the way down to the last moments in Berlin when Soviet infantry squads competed to be the last men to risk their lives to capture the German parliament building. So, 80 percent—that’s the metric we need to start with. And even in the month of D-Day, the Soviet Union launches a far larger ground offensive against Army Group Centre [Germany’s forces in the east], holding down the central bit of the German front, and essentially destroys it in a gigantic, sweeping, monthlong campaign. So arguably, even in military terms, even in June, the month when D-Day happened in 1944, the action on the Eastern Front was more significant.

But I think we shouldn’t downplay D-Day too much. One could go too far in this kind of revisionism. And I think maybe the best way to think about this is that D-Day didn’t by itself decide the war—but it decisively shaped when and how the war ended. Crucially, from our point of view, what it did was to ensure that it wasn’t just the Red Army, it wasn’t just the Soviet forces that invaded Germany, but it was British and American troops that got there. And they occupied much of West Germany. And they met Soviet forces in central Germany in May 1945. If the British and the Americans had tried to fight their way up from the south, from Italy, which they occupied in ’43, or through the Balkans, it would have been much, much slower. And in the process, of course, what they also did was to draw very high-quality German troops to the west. The air war, in any case, is overwhelmingly Western-driven through the extraordinarily high-intensity bombing campaign the British and the Americans waged against Germany from ’42. And in terms of industrial production, 40 percent-plus of the German war effort goes into aircraft. Not manpower but aircraft construction consumes 40 to 45 percent of the German armaments production. So that’s a huge drain.

But one shouldn’t also discount the quality and numbers of troops that were sucked into the Normandy campaign. There were very, very high-quality German tank units and Panzergrenadier units [of armored vehicles] fighting against the Allies in 1944 that get consumed and destroyed on the Western Front as well. It’s not on the same scale as the East, but it’s significant. And that, of course, accelerates the pace of Soviet advance as those troops are drawn away. So it becomes this fascinating race between a war that’s being waged in the sky and on two different fronts on the land, which then culminates in Germany’s defeat and stupendous casualties in 1945. About a million and a half German soldiers are killed in the first five months of 1945. A million and a half. There’s one month where they lose over 500,000 men in a single month because they’re basically being chewed up from both sides on the ground and through tactical and strategic airpower. It’s absolutely devastating. We think of the Japanese as being the kamikaze nation, right? But the Japanese had the sense to surrender before we invaded the home islands. The Germans didn’t. They fought to the absolute finish. There were only dead German bodies between the Americans and the Soviets when they finally met. So the German defense has this suicidal quality as well that shouldn’t be underestimated. And it takes this double meat grinder to get us to the final conclusion in the spring of ’45.

CA: Wow. Some grim numbers involved there. I did want to ask, though, what the economic factors were that helped produce the victory in the Battle of Normandy. Were there special technologies developed among the Allies that organized D-Day? Was it fundamentally a matter of extraordinary logistical organization? Or was it more a matter of coordination between the state and industry?

AT: Yeah, it’s a fascinating question. This is typical of democracies when they fight wars and they’re trying to minimize casualties against essentially a suicidal opponent that has no business continuing to fight you because it’s clear the war is over. So why put any of your citizens in harm’s way? So the thing that you do is to create a very sharp spear and support it with absolutely massive firepower and just bludgeon your opponent to death with massive, capital-intensive warfighting. Which is the air war summarized, right? But the thing about D-Day is that it’s on the ground. So D-Day is clearly the most capital-intensive campaign ever waged because it involved a huge logistical operation, this extraordinarily ambitious amphibious operation. We think there were about 50,000 German troops on the ground along the relevant beaches at the moment of the invasion. The allies attacked them with 6,000 ships, a thousand aircraft, and managed to get 133,000 troops onto the beaches on the first day—24,000 of them dropped from the air. So this is absolute overkill.

And you can take that kind of risk because you know you have massive materiel superiority, right? That’s part of the logic of the war in the west. And so that’s the basic determinant. And we see this in all of the Normandy films. There’s that moment when Germans wake up early on the June 6 and sort of train their binoculars on the sea, and the fog begins to lift, and all of a sudden they realize, “Oh my God, look what’s there.” And it’s this giant fleet that is about to open up on you and erase you. So it’s this terrifying scene. But to get onto the beach was itself a huge technological operation. And it’s all very well to cite all these numbers. And the Allies did more-or-less well with this problem. So, at one level, they were extraordinarily inventive. They built the mulberry harbors, which are floating concrete, massive concrete boxes that were floated, filled with air across the channel and then filled with water and sunk onto the beaches to create basically a breakwater. They experimented with high-pressure petrol pipelines to pump petrol. Because these armies were more mechanized than anyone had ever seen, they needed huge amounts of petrol. How are you going to get that there? Well, they thought they would use pipelines to do this. In the end, neither of those technologies proved to be terribly decisive because the beaches themselves were just more efficiently managed than anyone had reckoned. And they managed to just land huge quantities of petrol that way, using very primitive technologies like jerry cans.

On the beaches themselves, in the fighting, there were a whole variety of gadgets that were like bouncing bombs or floating harbors or flail tanks that would mash minefields with giant kind of rotating flails of steel balls or tanks that could lay carpets that you could go up the beach on or tanks that had flamethrowers for destroying German bunkers. Unfortunately, what the Allies didn’t spend much time on, and this is where there’s a really profound technological failure, is actually on the level of combat. Not on the first wave but on the next phase, because the Normandy campaign has three phases. Get onto the beach—that’s the first couple of days. Then what you’ve got to do is survive the counterattack, which is going to come from high-quality German troops that have been held in reserve. And then you’ve got to break out and then charge across France. This is where U.S. Army Gen. George S. Patton comes in, right? And the crucial problem they had is in the second phase, because in the second phase, the Germans mobilized crack divisions, tank divisions, SS divisions from the Eastern Front that fought with superior technology against British and American troops who just had never encountered anything like this before and didn’t have just the basic kit, like competent middle-sized tanks. Sherman tanks were very, very poor tanks in comparison with what the Germans were able to mobilize.

And so there’s this middle phase where the campaign gets stuck for week after week after week. And then finally the dam breaks after the Allies have thrown everything at the Germans, including strategic bombing of tactical targets. So you basically fly giant aircraft over a tactical target and try to hit it from the sky, and then the Allies break out and it’s this very rapid advance across France. And at that phase, they start innovating again. So what you see is really the first kind of modern linkage of tanks with tactical aircraft. They would have what we call taxi ranks of aircraft that would hover over the armored columns, and all of the tanks would be equipped with radios, and they could call down relatively precise strikes on German positions ahead of them, which had never been done before. The Germans had done relatively coordinated blitzkrieg tactics—but not with direct radio contact where the tank units could call a radio station that would then direct the pilots on to a target. No one had ever done that before. So, as it were, the breakout phase and the initial landing are quite impressive. It’s the grinding fight in between where the D-Day campaign really disappoints.

CA: So then, finally, I thought I’d ask what D-Day teaches us about amphibious operations in general. Obviously, these days a lot of people are thinking about a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Does D-Day teach us anything about whether that is realistic?

AT: Well, one thing I read online made a really funny point that we should never use the word “D-Day” as an analogy because “D” is like deliverance. It’s a happy thing. What we should call this scenario was “Z-Day,” which obviously reminds us now of Ukraine, but it apparently was coined by Winston Churchill to describe the horrible scenario of the Germans trying to invade Britain in 1940. So imagine a Taiwan Z-Day and how would it go? I mean, I think what D-Day tells us is that it’s incredibly unlikely that competent Chinese military technicians will seriously attempt to do this because the Taiwan Strait, if anything, is wider than the English Channel. You can only do that if you have complete naval superiority. There were literally just a few German attack boats with torpedoes on them marauding in this space—but no serious naval opposition and more-or-less complete air superiority. And again, there was virtually no German Luftwaffe presence over the beaches. So basically, from the side of the air and the sea, the D-Day operation was very, very safe. And the opposite would be the case if you were trying to do the Taiwan Strait operation because the Chinese would be going into the teeth of massive U.S. naval power. So the chances of the Chinese being able to put the kind of number of troops across the strait that they would need to seriously challenge the Taiwanese—who are not underequipped themselves and do have a reserve structure—are not high. And apparently, if you know the geography of Taiwan, you’ll know that there are hardly any decent beaches for them to land on on that side, unlike in France where you’ve got these wide-open spaces, which don’t offer much cover but certainly don’t pose any real difficulty for getting ashore. So I just think what it tells you is that the serious military operators on the Chinese side would not take this seriously.