Repulsing the Normandy Landings

[Ikeni]

I always take documentaries with a pinch of salt, but a few days ago I was watching one on Rommel (it's more for the entertainment value rather than learning because it's pretty much going over what I already know) and it stated that he was right in thinking that armour needed to be deployed near the beaches so as to enable the Germans to react quickly to any potential landing.

Was he right?

Rundstedt was convinced that armour needed to be deployed further inland so that the required forces in the event of a landing could be mustered and then deployed in to the battle to deal a powerful blow inland that would require an Allied withdrawal. Rommel believed that the fate of the battle would be decided in the first 24 hours and that with armour near the beaches that the Allies could be pushed in to the sea. Now it's easy to say that it should have been deployed close to the beaches, but please just bear this in mind:

During the Allied landings in Italy, German and Italian troops supported by armour attacked the US landings both at Gela (Husky) and Salerno (Avalanche). Each time the troops would be repulsed by a mixture of desperate resistance supported by off-shore artillery (which completely devastated tanks). Now we have to acknowledge that a fleet far larger in size had been assembled for Operation Neptune and that should German troops have came rushing towards the beaches that this massive level of force could have been unleashed on the troops counterattacking. It would be risky because the Allies would be worried about hitting their own men too, but if they were able to interdict the German lines with the guns from everything from battleships to destroyers they could completely obliterate any organised resistance.

To counter this, it's easy to draw back to the experiences of World War I where colossal artillery bombardments at the Somme left the German lines untouched, but bear in mind these attackers would be in the open (unless you're somehow supposed to attack while firmly dug in).

My next point is that bringing forces up close to the beaches would mean they would incur losses from partisans destroying their trains or sabotaging their trucks on the way. During the bombing prior to the landings too, these troops would be in the open and might suffer heavy casualties. As an example, while the Panzer Lehr moved up towards Normandy they were constantly strafed by Allied fighter-bombers which slowed their progress and forced them to take cover in the bocage every single time an airstrike came along. Now since the Allies were very thorough with their intelligence these armoured forces would have been detected prior to the landing and they would obviously find a way to suppress these troops prior to hitting the beaches through artillery bombardment, sabotage or bombing from the air to damage communications and inflict losses.

There is the other side to this, but I would rather hear you guys' justification for your opinion rather than me stretching my opening post unnecessarily long.