(no subject)

[stormdog]

The BBC has a list of "things you didn't know about D-Day." Amazingly enough, at least one of them is wrong, or at least misleading and irrelevant. I would have thought they would do better fact-checking. They claim that Hitler was asleep at the time of the invasion and no one dared wake him, so the Nazis got a late start on responding.

Hitler being asleep at the time of the Normandy invasion likely had no real effect on it's success or failure, and it's really unclear whether or not people were afraid to wake him. When I saw that 'fact', it immediately struck me as one of those stories that's just too good to be true, no matter what the source. A discussion of this on Quora is informative.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Since the invasion started in the small hours of the morning he may well have been asleep.

A lot of people would have been at that time of day!

Many of Hitler's senior commanders refused to believe the evidence of their own sources at first- and given how paranoid the Fuhrer had become by that stage, who was going to be the one to tell him?

[stormdog]

On Quora, someone pointed out that Hitler refused to move troops to respond at 10:00, and only changed his mind by 14:30. If he had been awake at 3 AM, he'd surely have refused then too.