Meyer’s men were so experienced and their equipment was so sensitive that they were even able to pick up calls from radio transmitters in military-police jeeps in England more than a hundred miles away. This had been a great help to Meyer. American and British MPs, chatting with one another by radio as they directed troops convoys, had helped him no end in compiling a list of the various divisions stationed in England. But for some time now Meyer’s operators had been unable to pick up any more of these calls. This was also significant to Meyer; it meant that a strict radio silence had been imposed. It was just one more clue to add to the many he already had that the invasion was close at hand.
With all the other intelligence reports available to him, items like this helped Meyer develop a picture of Allied planning. And he was good at his job. Several times a day he sifted through sheaves of monitored reports, always searching for the suspicious, the unusual—and even the unbelievable.
During the night his men had picked up the unbelievable. The message, a high-speed press cable, had been monitored just after dark. It read: “URGENT PRESS ASSOCIATED NYK FLASH EISENHOWER’S HQ ANNOUNCES ALLIED LANDINGS IN FRANCE.”
Meyer was dumbfounded. His first impulse was to alert the headquarters staff. But he had paused and calmed down, because Meyer knew the message had to be wrong. There were two reasons why. First, there was the complete absence of any activity along the invasion front—he would have known immediately if there had been an attack. Second, in January, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, then chief of German intelligence, had given Meyer the details of a fantastic two-part signal which he said the Allies would use to alert the underground prior to the invasion.
Canaris had warned that the Allies would broadcast hundreds of messages to the underground in the months preceding the attack. Only a few of these would actually relate to D Day; the remainder would be fake, deliberately designed to mislead and confuse. Canaris had been explicit: Meyer was to monitor all these messages in order not to miss the all-important one.
At first Meyer had been skeptical. It had seemed madness to him to depend entirely on only one message. Besides, he knew from past experience that Berlin’s sources of information were inaccurate ninety percent of the time. He had a whole file of false reports to prove his point; the Allies seemed to have fed every German agent from Stockholm to Ankara with the “exact” place and date of the invasion—and no two of the reports agreed.
But this time Meyer knew Berlin was right. On the night of June 1, Meyer’s men, after months of monitoring, had intercepted the first part of the Allied message—exactly as described by Canaris. It was not unlike the hundreds of other coded sentences that Meyer’s men had picked up during the previous months. Daily, after the regular BBC news broadcasts, coded instructions in French, Dutch, Danish and Norwegian were read out to the underground. Most of the messages were meaningless to Meyer, and it was exasperating not to be able to decode such cryptic fragments as “The Trojan War will not be held,” “Molasses tomorrow will spurt forth cognac,” “John has a long mustache” or “Sabine has just had mumps and jaundice.” But the message that followed the 9:00 P.M. BBC news on the night of June 1 was one that Meyer understood only too well.
“Kindly listen now to a few personal messages,” said the voice in French. Instantly Sergeant Walter Reichling switched on a wire recorder. There was a pause, and then: “Les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne [The long sobs of the violins of autumn].”
Reichling suddenly clapped his hands over his ear-phones. Then he tore them off and rushed out of the bunker for Meyer’s quarters. The sergeant burst into Meyer’s office and excitedly said, “Sir, the first part of the message—it’s here.”
Together they returned to the radio bunker, where Meyer listened to the recording. There it was—the message that Canaris had warned them to expect. It was the first line of “Chanson d’Automne [Song of Autumn]” by the nineteenth-century French poet Paul Verlaine. According to Canaris’s information, this line from Verlaine was to be transmitted on the “first or fifteenth of a month … and will represent the first half of a message announcing the Anglo-American invasion.”
The last half of the message would be the second line of the Verlaine poem, “Blessent mon coeur d’une langueur monotone [Wound my heart with a monotonous languor].” When this was broadcast it would mean, according to Canaris, that “the invasion will begin within forty-eight hours … the count starting at 0000 hours of the day following the transmission.”
Immediately on hearing the recording of the first line from Verlaine, Meyer informed the Fifteenth Army’s chief of staff, Major General Rudolf Hofmann. “The first message has come,” he told Hofmann. “Now something is going to happen.”
“Are you absolutely sure?” Hofmann asked.
“We recorded it,” Meyer replied.
Hofmann immediately gave the alarm to alert the whole of the Fifteenth Army.
Meyer meanwhile sent the message by teletype to OKW. Next he telephoned Rundstedt’s headquarters (OB West) and Rommel’s headquarters (Army Group B).
At OKW the message was delivered to Colonel General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations. The message remained on Jodl’s desk. He did not order an alert. He assumed Rundstedt had done so; but Rundstedt thought Rommel’s headquarters had issued the order.*
Along the invasion coast only one army was placed on readiness: the Fifteenth. The Seventh Army, holding the coast of Normandy, heard nothing about the message and was not alerted.
On the nights of the second and third of June the first part of the message was again broadcast. This worried Meyer; according to his information it should have been broadcast only once. He could only assume that the Allies were repeating the alert in order to make sure it was received by the underground.
Within the hour after the message was repeated on the night of June 3, the AP flash regarding the Allied landings in France had been picked up. If the Canaris warning was right, the AP report must be wrong. After his first moment of panic, Meyer had bet on Canaris. Now he was weary, but elated. The coming of the dawn and the continued peacefulness along the front had more than proved him right.
Now there was nothing to do but wait for the last half of the vital alert, which might come at any moment. Its awesome significance overwhelmed Meyer. The defeat of the Allied invasion, the lives of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen, the very existence of his country would depend on the speed with which he and his men monitored the broadcast and alerted the front. Meyer and his men would be ready as never before. He could only hope that his superiors also realized the importance of the message.
As Meyer settled down to wait, 125 miles away the commander of Army Group B was preparing to leave for Germany.
*Rommel must have known about the message; but from his own estimate of Allied intentions it is obvious that he must have discounted it.
6
FIELD MARSHAL ROMMEL carefully spread a little honey on a slice of buttered bread. At the breakfast table sat his brilliant chief of staff, Major General Dr. Hans Speidel, and several members of his staff. There was no formality. The table talk was easy and uninhibited; it was almost like a family gathering with the father sitting at the head of the table. In a way it was a kind of close-knit family. Each of the officers had been handpicked by Rommel and they were devoted to him. All of them this morning had briefed Rommel on various questions which they hoped he would raise with Hitler. Rommel had said little. He had simply listened. Now he was impatient to leave. He looked at his watch. “Gentlemen,” he said abruptly, “I must go.”
Outside the main entrance Rommel’s chauffeur, Daniel, stood by the field marshal’s car with the door open. Rommel invited Colonel von Tempelhof, besides Lang the only other staff officer going with them, to ride with him in the Horch. Tempelhof’s car could follow behind. Rommel shook hands with each member of his official family, spoke briefly to his chief of staff and then took his usual seat next to the chauffeur. Lang and Colonel von Tempelhof
sat in the back. “We can go now, Daniel,” said Rommel.
Slowly the car circled the courtyard and drove out through the main gate, passing the sixteen square-cut linden trees along the driveway. In the village it turned left onto the main Paris road.
It was 7:00 A.M. Leaving La Rouche-Guyon on this particular dismal Sunday morning, June 4, suited Rommel fine. The timing of the trip could not have been better. Beside him on the seat was a cardboard box containing a pair of handmade gray suede shoes, size five and a half, for his wife. There was a particular and very human reason why he wanted to be with her on Tuesday, June 6. It was her birthday.*
In England it was 8:00 A.M. (There was one hour’s difference between British Double Summer Time and German Central Time.) In a house trailer in a wood near Portsmouth, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander, was sound asleep after having been up nearly all night. For several hours now coded messages had been going out by telephone, by messenger and by radio from his headquarters nearby. Eisenhower, at about the time Rommel got up, had made a fateful decision: Because of unfavorable weather conditions he had postponed the Allied invasion by twenty-four hours. If conditions were right, D-Day would be Tuesday, June 6.
*Since World War II, many of Rommel’s senior officers have stood shoulder to shoulder in an effort to alibi the circumstances surrounding Rommel’s absence from the front on June 4 and 5 and for the best part of D Day itself. In books, articles and interviews they have stated that Rommel left for Germany on June 5. This is not true. They also claim that Hitler ordered him to Germany. This is not true. The only person at Hitler’s headquarters who knew of Rommel’s intended visit was the Führer’s adjutant, Major General Rudolf Schmundt. General Walter Warlimont, then Deptuy Chief of Operations at OKW, has told me that neither Jodl, Keitel nor himself was even aware that Rommel was in Germany. Even on D Day, Warlimont thought that Rommel was at his headquarters conducting the battle. As to the date of Rommel’s departure from Normandy, it was June 4; the incontrovertible proof lies in the meticulously recorded Army Group B War Diary, which gives the exact time.
7
LIEUTENANT COMMANDER GEORGE D. HOFFMAN, thirty-three-year-old skipper of the destroyer U.S.S. Corry, looked through his binoculars at the long column of ships plowing steadily across the English Channel behind him. It seemed incredible to him that they had got this far without an attack of some sort. They were on course and exactly on time. The crawling convoy, following a circuitous route and moving less than four miles an hour, had sailed more than eighty miles since leaving Plymouth the night before. But at any moment now Hoffman expected to meet trouble—U-boat or aircraft attack or both. At the very least he expected to encounter mine fields, for as every minute passed they were sailing farther into enemy waters. France lay ahead, now only forty miles away.
The young commander—he had “fleeted up” on the Corry from a lieutenant to skipper in less than three years—was immensely proud to be leading this magnificent convoy. But as he looked at it through his glasses he knew that it was a sitting duck for the enemy.
Ahead were the mine sweepers, six small ships spread out in a diagonal formation, like one side of an inverted V, each one trailing in the water, off to its right, a long, saw-toothed wire sweep to cut through the moorings and detonate floating mines. Behind the mine sweepers came the lean, sleek shapes of the “shepherds,” the escorting destroyers. And behind them, stretching back as far as the eye could see, came the convoy, a great procession of lumbering, unwieldy landing ships carrying thousands of troops, tanks, guns, vehicles, and ammunition. Each of the heavily laden ships flew an antiaircraft barrage balloon at the end of a stout cable. And because these protective balloons, all flying at the same altitude, swung out in the face of the brisk wind, the entire convoy appeared to be listing drunkenly to one side.
To Hoffmann it was quite a sight. Estimating the distance separating one ship from the next and knowing the total number of vessels, he figured that the tail end of this fantastic parade must still be back in England, in Plymouth Harbor.
And this was only one convoy. Hoffman knew that dozens of others had been due to sail when he did, or would leave England during the day. That night all of them would converge on the Bay of the Seine. By morning an immense fleet of five thousand ships would stand off the invasion beaches of Normandy.
Hoffman could hardly wait to see it. The convoy that he led had left England early because it had the farthest to go. It was part of a massive American force, the 4th Division, destined for a place that Hoffman, like millions of other Americans, had never heard of before—a stretch of wind-blown sand on the eastern side of the Cherbourg peninsula that had been given the code name “Utah.” Twelve miles to the southeast, in front of the seaside villages of Vierville and Colleville, lay the other American beach, “Omaha,” a crescent-shaped strip of silvery strand where the men of the 1st and 29th divisions would land.
The Corry’s captain had expected to see other convoys near him this morning, but he seemed to have the Channel all to himself. He wasn’t disturbed. Somewhere in the vicinity, he knew, other convoys attached to either “Force U” or “Force O” were sailing for Normandy. Hoffman did not know that because of the uncertain weather conditions a worried Eisenhower had permitted fewer than a score of slow-moving convoys to set sail during the night.
Suddenly the bridge telephone buzzed. One of the deck officers reached for it, but Hoffman, who was closer, picked up the phone. “Bridge,” he said. “This is the captain.” He listened for a moment. “Are you quite sure?” he asked. “Has the message been repeated?” Hoffman listened a moment longer, then he replaced the receiver on its cradle. It was unbelievable: The whole convoy had been ordered back to England—no reason given. What could have happened? Had the invasion been postponed?
Hoffman looked through his glasses at the mine sweepers ahead; they hadn’t changed course. Neither had the destroyers behind them. Had they received the message? Before doing anything else he decided to see the turnabout message for himself—he had to be sure. Quickly he climbed down to the radio shack one deck below.
Radioman Third Class Bennie Glisson had made no mistake. Showing his skipper the radio logbook, he said, “I checked it twice just to be certain.” Hoffman hurried back to the bridge.
His job and that of the other destroyers now was to wheel this monstrous convoy around, and quickly. Because he was in the lead his immediate concern was the flotilla of mine sweepers several miles ahead. He could not contact them by radio because a strict radio silence had been imposed. “All engines ahead full speed,” Hoffman ordered. “Close up on the mine sweepers. Signalman on the light.”
As the Corry raced forward Hoffman looked back and saw the destroyers behind him wheel and swing around the flanks of the convoy. Now, with signal lights blinking, they began the huge job of turning the convoy around. A worried Hoffman realized that they were dangerously close to France—just thirty-eight miles. Had they been spotted yet? It would be a miracle if they got away with the turnabout undetected.
Down in the radio shack Bennie Glisson continued to pick up the coded postponement message every fifteen minutes. To him it was the worst news he had received in a long time, for it seemed to confirm a nagging suspicion: that the Germans knew all about the invasion. Had D Day been called off because the Germans had found out? Like thousands of other men, Bennie did not see how the invasion preparations—the convoys, the ships, men and supplies that filled every port, inlet and harbor from Land’s End to Portsmouth—could possibly have gone unnoticed by Luftwaffe reconnaissance planes. And if the message simply meant that the invasion had been postponed for some other reason, then it followed that the Germans had still more time to spot the Allied armada.
The twenty-three-year-old radio operator turned the dial of another set and tuned in Radio Paris, the German propaganda station. He wanted to hear sexy-voiced “Axis Sally.” Her taunting broadcasts were amusing because they were so inaccurate, but y
ou never could tell. There was another reason: The “Berlin Bitch,” as she was often irreverently called, seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of the latest hit tunes.
Bennie didn’t get a chance to listen because just then a long string of coded weather reports began coming in. But as he finished typing up these messages “Axis Sally” put on her first record of the day. Bennie instantly recognized the opening bars of the popular wartime tune “I Double Dare You.” But new lyrics had been written for the song. As he listened, they confirmed his worst fears. That morning a little before eight Bennie and many thousands of Allied troops who had steeled themselves for the invasion of Normandy on June 5, and who now had another agonizing twenty-four hours to wait, heard “I Double Dare You” with these pertinent, if chilling, lines:
“I double dare you to come over here.
I double dare you to venture too near.
Take off your high hat and quit that bragging.
Cut out that claptrap and keep your hair on.
Can’t you take a dare on?
I double dare you to venture a raid.
I double dare you to try and invade.
And if your loud propaganda means half of what it says,
I double dare you to come over here
I double dare you.”
8
IN THE HUGE Operations Center at Allied naval headquarters in Southwick House outside Portsmouth, they waited for the ships to come back.
The long, high room with its white-and-gold wallpaper was the scene of intense activity. One entire wall was covered by a gigantic chart of the English Channel. Every few minutes two Wrens, working from a traveling stepladder, moved colored markers over the face of the chart as they plotted the new positions of each returning convoy. Clustered in groups of two and three, staff officers from the various Allied services watched in silence as each new report came in. Outwardly they appeared calm, but there was no disguising the strain that everybody felt. Not only must the convoys wheel about, almost under the very noses of the enemy, and return to England along specific, mine-swept tracks; they were now faced with the threat of another enemy—a storm at sea. For the slow-moving landing craft, heavily loaded with troops and supplies, a storm could be disastrous. Already the wind in the Channel was blowing up to thirty miles an hour, with waves up to five feet, and the weather was due to get worse.