Yes, there was a second invasion of France that took place two months after the Normandy landings, called Operation Dragoon. Even if the Normandy beachhead had to be evacuated there’s no reason Dragoon couldn’t still go ahead (assuming the invasion fleet was still available).
Realistically though, Overlord was never really in any serious danger of failing. By mid-44 the Allies were in such a dominant strategic position that they could pretty much do whatever they liked and there wasn’t much the Germans could do about it. Even if the Germans had somehow got the upper hand in Normandy and driven the invasion force back into the sea, they still would have suffered a crushing defeat in the East when the Soviets launched Operation Bagration in late June. Bagration caused the collapse of German resistance in the east and the loss of the whole of Army Group Centre, so the Wehrmacht would have still gone from a bad strategic situation to a worse one.
Then the Allies would have landed in the south of France with Operation Dragoon.
Dragoon was very successful for a couple of reasons:
German units in the south of France were low-grade garrison units
German operational and strategic reserves were tied down by Overlord and Bagration
Major ports were captured intact, something Overlord never achieved. This allowed the southern forces to advance rapidly during their breakout
With a failed Overlord it’s possible some additional panzer divisions would be available to oppose Dragoon, but it’s also just as likely that the Germans would lack the fuel reserves or rail capacity to redeploy them to the south, or that they would have been sent east to try and deal with the disaster of Bagration.
Ultimately most of France was liberated by troops advancing northwards from Dragoon anyway, with a failed Normandy landing that would just mean that Normandy got liberated last and would probably have been spared some of the heavy fighting. The timeline of the war and the post-war map might change slightly, but the outcome wouldn’t.
A lot of people assume that the Normandy landings were some kind of pivotal event in the course of the war. Actually they were the fourth of five big amphibious landings in the European/Med theatre and came at a point in the war when the Allies were closing in on final victory. Germany was already beaten and retreating on every front. The point of the Normandy landings was to hasten the end of the war by ramping up the already hefty mismatch between Allied and Axis ground forces.
Source: Andy Duffell (Quora)
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