With one week to go before June 6th, Peter Margaritis presents a short biography of Josef Reichert, a officer who witnessed first hand the Allied paratrooper landings of Operation Neptune.
Josef Reichert, a decorated veteran of World War I, was a 48-year old colonel commanding the 6th Infantry Regiment on the Polish border when war broke out in 1939. He participated in the invasion of Poland, France, Yugoslavia, and then Russia. Appointed commander of the 711th Infantry Division on March 1, 1943, they were relocated to the Normandy coast and redesignated the 711th Grenadier Division.
At 1 a.m. on D-Day, General Reichert was sitting in the officer’s mess in Vauville, exhausted after a hard day of training, sipping some Calvados, wondering about the heavy enemy air traffic, when a flight of slow-moving aircraft flew over in the dark skies overhead. He ran into his command bunker to get his pistol, and as he was walking back in the courtyard, he spotted paratroopers floating down over his quarters, their dark forms silhouetted against the shadowy clouds. Two actually landed on his lawn and were immediately captured.
He and his men were desperately trying to defend the divisional headquarters a half hour later when General von Salmuth at Fifteenth Army headquarters called.
The general had heard a report that enemy paratroops were landing around the 711th’s headquarters at Cabourg on the coast. Fighting was supposedly going on all around the buildings. The report specified that the noise of battle could be heard over the receiver, but no other details were available. To von Salmuth, this sounded crazy. His army was already on full alert, and though enemy air raids had hit Calais, nothing much else seemed to be going on. Hence the call to Reichert.
Finally getting through, he grumbled, “Reichert, what the devil is going on down there?!”
Reichert coolly replied, “Mein General, if you will permit me, I will let you hear for yourself.”
He held up his receiver to the doorway. Von Salmuth waited a moment, listening sullenly. Suddenly, his eyes widened as he distinctly heard machinegun fire in the background.
“Thank you,” von Salmuth responded and hung up. He immediately raised the Fifteenth Amy alert to Level II and then called Speidel at Heeresgruppe B, telling him that, at the headquarters of the 711th, “the din of battle” could be heard.
Reichert’s division took severe losses in the next few months and finally was taken out of the line to reorganize in September. That was short-lived though because when Market Garden began on the 17th, the division had to take part in defensive operations.
His division was moved to Hungary in December to counter a Russian thrust there. Reichert was captured by the Americans a month after he was injured in an automobile accident on April 14, 1945. He was released in 1947.
He was 78 when he died on March 15, 1970, in Gauteng, Germany.
Josef Reichert and his role in the defence of the Atlantic Wall is explored in the new book, Countdown to D-Day, due to be released June 2019.
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