Omaha should not be thought, as all surviving German generals falsely stated in postwar interviews and memoirs, that the OKW was supremely professional and almost always right and that Hitler was a wrongheaded amateur who single-handedly cost Germany the war For the generals were often wrong on operational matters and Hitler was sometimes correct, standing where they would have retreated, pulling back when they wished to continue attacking For instance, it was the OKW that delayed a powerful armored strike at Moscow by Army Group Center when the path was still unblocked in October 1941 And it was the generals and staff officers of OKW who badly exposed Army Group Center by overreaching for the Russian capital six weeks too late in Operation TAIFUN Conversely, it was Hitler who probably averted a total catastrophe by telling the Wehrmacht to “stand fast” (issuing a Haltebefehl order), rather than allowing a retreat to turn into a Napoleonic-style rout in the snow when the Red Army launched its devastating Moscow offensive operation (December 5, 1941–January 7, 1942) Similarly, it was some of the generals who later aggressively pushed for Operation ZITADELLE that led to defeat at Kursk, where Hitler was already edging toward adopting a defensive posture all along the Eastern Front and stopped the attack after just a few days It is certainly true that Hitler’s later assumptions of operational authority in September 1942, during the first Operation BLAU and its EDELWEISS extension into the Caucasus, wrecked the OKW as a useful command tool But it is important to recall that the OKW endorsed both operations, even though they were fundamentally flawed in basic conception By the end of 1942 the OKW was divided from the OKH As Hitler sacked more of his professional Generalfeldmarschälle in favor of more overtly political and ideological generals, the OKW, OKH, and Wehrmacht, as a whole, fell increasingly under the baleful influence of two of the worst uniformed toadies in the history of the German Army: the aforementioned Jodl and Keitel The elimination of an effective OKW meant there was no brake left to slow or stop the Wehrmacht acting on the whims and more foolhardy operational impulses of the Führer Then again, despite its putative professionalism, the OKW had proven on multiple occasions that it was no constraint on the Führer’s plans for aggressive war or for mass murder To the contrary, the OKW all along assisted in execution of the worst Nazi plans by authorizing illegal special orders and agreeing to merciless methods in fighting partisans, which was frequently merely code for killing Jews By the end of the war a morally stained OKW and morally insensible dictator found each other’s true level: huddling in the Führerbunker 100 feet beneath the rubble of the streets of bombed-out Berlin OLYMPIC Code name for the planned American invasion of Kyushu originally scheduled for September 1, 1945, then postponed and finally canceled See DOWNFALL; nuclear weapons programs; Potsdam Conference OMAHA Code name for the U.S invasion beach on the Calvados coast of Normandy See D-Day (June 6, 1944); OVERLORD 813