ORIGINAL: captskillet
If I remember my Avalon Hills "The Longest Day" oob there were some Russian Ost. (yes Russian) battallions stationed close to the beaches on D-Day.
Yep. There was even an Indian SS unit in Normandy, the Indian Legion (consisting of Indian soldiers recruited in German POW camps) - their shoulder badge featured an Indian tiger with "Free India" (in German) - not sure whether they were near the beaches or further south, though.
The US units on Omaha beach stumbled over some of the few battle-hardened German elements residing in Normandy (352nd?) who fought in Russia before performing guard duties on the French coast - bad luck.
By the way,
capt, the link you provided is pretty interesting. If it's true - what the author is claiming in that book, the officers (and Stauffenberg) who intended to use the "Walküre"-plan ("Valkyrie") as instrument for removing the Nazis from governance, held back vital replacements from the army in the field, as they needed a strong home army (called "Ersatzheer", or replacement army) in order to counter possible resistance of SS units or Wehrmacht units in Germany.
After flying over the numbers in that book sample, you can see that a half million men, mostly newly trained recruits (many of them 17 yrs old), officer/cadre/HQ troops from depleted/decimated units), including troops recovering from wounds or rated as not fit for combat, were held back for the Ersatzheer. The group around Stauffenberg failed to kill Hitler, but the author is right: Their plan to end the war in the West (they wanted to keep fighting the Russians, in fact) asap kind of succeeded. A bit slower, and still with more casualties/victims than they initially planned, but putting their feet on the replacement "pipe", surely shortened the war in Europe. Himmler was put in charge of the replacement army after 20th of July (the date of the assassination attempt), where he tried to re-establish the flow of replacements along with his order to raise new divisions, the Volksgrenadierdivisions, which then the Wehrmacht high command was partially denied access to, regarding disciplinary power and judicial matters, at least.
Dunn suggests that the war would have lasted for another year (way into 1946), if these officers wouldn't have toned down the replacement queues for the units in the field.
I suggest that the Germans would have ended up with one or another A-bomb "test" in Germany, as the US feared a long attritional war in Europe.
By providing the link, Captskillets made me browse some Amazon books, and I stumbled over a really interesting book by a German veteran who operated the MG 42 in WN 62 ("Wiederstandsnest 62" - would translate to "pocket of resistance no. 62", a MG nest overlooking dog or fox green, i can't remember). Even Hemingway reported about this one MG-nest, as the gunner, Hein Severloh, kept firing, reloading, changing barrel and getting ammo for some 9 hours. Most veteran accounts recall this one pesky nest. The book reads somewhat like a German version of the beach part of "Saving private Ryan", just from the German POV. He also describes life on guard duty in France before D-Day, and delivers outlines and maps describing the beaches and defenses. There is no English version yet, tho.
http://www.amazon.com/WN-62-Erinnerunge ... 865&sr=8-1