The principal reason for the withdrawal was that the squadrons were needed for the defense of the Reich, which for months had been coming under increasingly heavy round-the-clock Allied bombing attack. Under the circumstances it just did not seem reasonable to the High Command to leave these vital planes on exposed airfields in France where they were being destroyed by Allied fighters and bombers. Hitler had promised his generals that a thousand Luftwaffe planes would hit the beaches on the day of invasion. Now that was patently impossible. On June 4 there were only 183 day fighter planes in the whole of France,* of which about 160 were considered serviceable. Of the 160, one wing of 124, the 26th Fighter Wing, was being moved back from the coast that very afternoon.
At the headquarters of the 26th at Lille in the zone of the Fifteenth Army, Colonel Josef “Pips” Priller, one of the Luftwaffe’s top aces (he had shot down ninety-six planes), stood on the airfield and fumed. Overhead was one of his three squadrons, heading for Metz in northeast France. His second squadron was about to take off. It had been ordered to Rheims, roughly halfway between Paris and the German border. The third squadron had already left for the south of France.
There was nothing the wing commander could do but protest. Priller was a flamboyant, temperamental pilot renowned in the Luftwaffe for his short temper. He had a reputation for telling off generals, and now he telephoned his group commander. “This is crazy!” Priller shouted. “If we’re expecting an invasion the squadrons should be moved up, not back! And what happens if the attack comes during the transfer? My supplies can’t reach the new bases until tomorrow or maybe the day after. You’re all crazy!”
“Listen, Priller,” said the group commander. “The invasion is out of the question. The weather is much too bad.”
Priller slammed down the receiver. He walked back out onto the airfield. There were only two planes left, his and the one belonging to Sergeant Heinz Wodarczyk, his wing man. “What can we do?” he said to Wodarczyk. “If the invasion comes they’ll probably expect us to hold it off all by ourselves. So we might as well start getting drunk now.”
Of all the millions who watched and waited throughout France only a few men and women actually knew that the invasion was imminent. There were less than a dozen of them. They went about their affairs calmly and casually as usual. Being calm and casual was part of their business; they were the leaders of the French underground.
Most of them were in Paris. From there they commanded a vast and complicated organization. It was in fact an army with a full chain of command and countless departments and bureaus handling everything from the rescue of downed Allied pilots to sabotage, from espionage to assassination. There were regional chiefs, area commanders, section leaders and thousands of men and women in the rank and file. On paper the organization had so many overlapping nets of activity that it appeared to be unnecessarily complex. This apparent confusion was deliberate. In it lay the underground’s strength. Overlapping commands gave greater protection; multiple nets of activity guaranteed the success of each operation; and so secret was the entire structure that leaders rarely knew one another except by code names and never did one group know what another was doing. It had to be this way if the underground was to survive at all. Even with all those precautions German retaliatory measures had become so crushing that by May of 1944 the life expectancy of an active underground fighter was considered to be less than six months.
This great secret resistance army of men and women had been fighting a silent war for more than four years—a war that was often unspectacular, but always hazardous. Thousands had been executed, thousands more had died in concentration camps. But now, although the rank and file didn’t know it yet, the day for which they had been fighting was close at hand.
In the previous days the underground’s high command had picked up hundreds of coded messages from the BBC. A few of these had been alerts warning that the invasion might come at any moment. One of these messages had been the first line of the Verlaine poem, “Chanson d’Automne”—the same alert that Lieutenant Colonel Meyer’s men at the German Fifteenth Army headquarters had intercepted on June 1. (Canaris had been right.)
Now, even more excited than Meyer, the underground leaders waited for the second line of this poem and for other messgaes which would confirm the previously received information. None of these alerts was expected to be broadcast until the very last moment in the hours preceding the actual day of invasion. Even then the underground leaders knew that they would not learn from the messages the exact area where the landings were due to take place. For the underground at large the real tip-off would come when the Allies ordered the prearranged sabotage plans to go into effect. Two messages would trigger off the attacks. One, “It is hot in Suez,” would put into effect the “Green Plan”—the sabotaging of railroad tracks and equipment. The other, “The dice are on the table,” would call for the “Red Plan”—the cutting of telephone lines and cables. All regional, area and sector leaders had been warned to listen for these two messages.
On this Monday evening, the eve of D Day, the first message was broadcast by the BBC at 6:30 P.M. “It is hot in Suez…. It is hot in Suez,” said the voice of the announcer solemnly.
Guillaume Mercader, the intelligence chief for the Normandy coastal sector between Vierville and Port-en-Bessin (roughly the Omaha Beach area) was crouching by a hidden radio set in the cellar of his bicycle shop in Bayeux when he heard it. He was almost stunned by the impact of the words. It was a moment he would never forget. He didn’t know where the invasion would take place or when, but it was coming at long last, after all these years.
There was a pause. Then came the second message that Mercader had been waiting for. “The dice are on the table,” said the announcer. “The dice are on the table.” This was immediately followed by a long string of messages, each one repeated: “Napoleon’s hat is in the ring…. John loves Mary…. The Arrow will not pass….” Mercader switched off the radio. He had heard the only two messages that concerned him. The others were specific alerts for groups elsewhere in France.
Hurrying upstairs, he said to his wife, Madeleine, “I have to go out. I’ll be back late tonight.” Then he wheeled out a low racing bike from his bicycle shop and pedaled off to tell his section leaders. Mercader was the former Normandy cycling champion and he had represented the province several times in the famed Tour De France race. He knew the Germans wouldn’t stop him. They had given him a special permit so that he could practice.
Everywhere now resistance groups were quietly told the news by their immediate leaders. Each unit had its own plan and knew exactly what had to be done. Albert Augé, the station-master at Caen, and his men were to destroy water pumps in the yards, smash the steam injectors on locomotives. André Farine, a café owner from Lieu Fontaine, near Isigny, had the job of strangling Normandy’s communications; his forty-man team would cut the massive telephone cable feeding out of Cherbourg. Yves Gresselin, a Cherbourg grocer, had one of the toughest jobs of all: His men were to dynamite a network of railway lines between Cherbourg, St.-Lô and Paris. And these were just a few of the teams. It was a large order for the underground. Time was short and the attacks couldn’t begin before dark. But everywhere along the invasion coast from Brittany to the Belgian border men prepared, all hoping that the attack would come in their areas.
For some men the messages posed quite different problems. In the seaside resort town of Grandcamp near the mouth of the Vire and almost centered between Omaha and Utah beaches, sector chief Jean Marion had vital information to pass on to London. He wondered how he’d get it there—and if he still had time. Early in the afternoon his men had reported the arrival of a new antiaircraft battery group barely a mile away. Just to be sure, Marion had casually cycled over to see the guns. Even if he was stopped he knew he’d get through; among the many fake identification cards he had for such occasions was one stating that he was a construction worker on the Atlantic Wall.
Marion was shaken by the
size of the unit and the area it covered. It was a motorized flak assault group with heavy, light and mixed antiaircraft guns. There were five batteries, twenty-five guns in all, and they were being moved into positions covering the area from the mouth of the Vire all the way to the outskirts of Grandcamp. Their crews, Marion noted, were toiling feverishly to emplace the guns, almost as though they were working against time. The frantic activity worried Marion. It could mean that the invasion would be here and that somehow the Germans had learned of it.
Although Marion did not know it, the guns covered the precise route the planes and gliders of the 82nd and 101st paratroopers would take within a few hours. Yet if anybody in the German High Command had any knowledge of the impending attack, they hadn’t told Colonel Werner von Kistowski, commander of Flak Assault Regiment 1. He was still wondering why his 2,500-man flak unit had been rushed up here. But Kistowski was used to sudden moves. His outfit had once been sent into the Caucasus all by itself. Nothing surprised him anymore.
Jean Marion, calmly cycling by the soldiers at work on the guns, began to wrestle with a big problem: how to get this vital information to the secret headquarters of Léonard Gille, Normandy’s deputy military intelligence chief, in Caen, fifty miles away. Marion couldn’t leave his sector now—there was too much to do. So he decided to take a chance on sending the message by a chain of couriers to Mercader in Bayeux. He knew it might take hours, but if there was still time Marion was sure that Mercader would somehow get it to Caen.
There was one more thing Marion wanted London to know about. It wasn’t as important as the antiaircraft gun positions—simply a confirmation of the many messages he had sent in the previous days about the massive gun emplacements on the top of the nine-story-high cliffs at Pointe du Hoc. Marion wanted to pass on once again the news that the guns had not yet been installed. They were still en route, two miles away from the positions. (Despite Marion’s frantic efforts to warn London, on D Day U.S. Rangers would lose 135 men out of 225 in their heroic attack to silence guns that had never been there.)
For some members of the underground, unaware of the imminence of the invasion, Tuesday, June 6, had a special significance of its own. For Léonard Gille it meant a meeting in Paris with his superiors. Even now, Gille was calmly sitting in a train bound for Paris, although he expected Green Plan sabotage teams to derail it at any moment. Gille was quite sure the invasion was not scheduled for Tuesday, at least not in his area. Surely his superiors would have canceled the meeting if the attack was due in Normandy.
But the date did bother him. That afternoon in Caen, one of Gille’s section chiefs, the leader of an affiliated Communist group, had told him quite emphatically that the invasion was due at dawn on the sixth. The man’s information had proved invariably right in the past. This raised an old question again in Gille’s mind. Did the man get his information direct from Moscow? Gille decided not; it seemed inconceivable to him that the Russians would deliberately jeopardize Allied plans by breaking security.
For Janine Boitard, Gille’s fiancée, back in Caen, Tuesday couldn’t come soon enough. In three years of underground work, she had hidden more than sixty Allied pilots in her little ground-floor apartment at 15 Rue Laplace. It was dangerous, unrewarding, nerve-racking work; a slip could mean the firing squad. After Tuesday, Janine could breathe a little easier—until the next time she hid a flier who was down—for on Tuesday she was due to pass along the escape route two R.A.F. pilots who had been shot down over northern France. They had spent the last fifteen days in her apartment. She hoped her luck would continue to hold.
For others, luck had already run out. For Amélie Lechevalier, June 6 could mean nothing, or everything. She and her husband, Louis, had been arrested by the Gestapo on June 2. They had helped more than a hundred Allied fliers to escape; they had been turned in by one of their own farm boys. Now, in her cell in the Caen prison, Amélie Lechevalier sat on the bunk and wondered how soon she and her husband would be executed.
*After D Day the coincidences of these multiple departures from the invasion front struck Hider so forcibly that there was actually talk of an investigation to see whether the British service could possibly have had anything to do with it. The fact is that Hider himself was no better prepared for the great day than his generals. The Führer was at his Berchtesgaden retreat in Bavaria. His naval aide, Admiral Karl Jesko von Puttkamer, remembers that Hitler got up late, held his usual military conference at noon and then had lunch at 4:00 P.M. Besides his mistress, Eva Braun, there were a number of Nazi dignitaries and their wives. The vegetarian Hider apologized to the ladies for the meatless meal with his usual mealtime comment, “The elephant is the strongest animal; he also cannot stand meat.” After lunch the group adjourned to the garden, where the Führer sipped lime blossom tea. He napped between six and seven, held another military conference at 11:00 P.M., then, a little before midnight, the ladies were called back. To the best of Puttkamer’s recollection, the group then had to listen to four hours of Wagner, Lehar and Strauss.
*In researching this book I found no less than five different figures for the number of fighter planes in France. The figure of 183 given here I believe to be accurate. My source is a recent Luftwaffe history written by Colonel Josef Priller (see above), whose work is now considered one of the most authoritative yet written on the Luftwaffe’s activities.
13
OFF THE FRENCH coast a little before 9:00 P.M. a dozen small ships appeared. They moved quietly along the horizon, so close that their crews could clearly see the houses of Normandy. The ships went unnoticed. They finished their job and then moved back. They were British mine sweepers—the vanguard of the mightiest fleet ever assembled.
For now back in the Channel, plowing through the choppy gray waters, a phalanx of ships bore down on Hitler’s Europe—the might and fury of the free world unleashed at last. They came, rank after relentless rank, ten lanes wide, twenty miles across, five thousand ships of every description. There were fast new attack transports, slow rust-scarred freighters, small ocean liners, Channel steamers, hospital ships, weather-beaten tankers, coasters and swarms of fussing tugs. There were endless columns of shallow-draft landing ships—great wallowing vessels, some of them almost 350 feet long. Many of these and the other heavier transports carried smaller landing craft for the actual beach assault—more than fifteen hundred of them. Ahead of the convoys were processions of mine sweepers, Coast Guard cutters, buoy-layers and motor launches. Barrage balloons flew above the ships. Squadrons of fighter planes weaved below the clouds. And surrounding this fantastic cavalcade of ships packed with men, guns, tanks, motor vehicles and supplies, and excluding small naval vessels, was a formidable array of 702 warships.*
There was the heavy cruiser U.S.S. Augusta, Rear Admiral Kirk’s flagship, leading the American task force—twenty-one convoys bound for Omaha and Utah beaches. Just four months before Pearl Harbor the queenly Augusta had carried President Roosevelt to a quiet Newfoundland bay for the first of his many historic meetings with Winston Churchill. Nearby, steaming majestically with all their battle flags flying, were the battleships: H.M.S. Nelson, Ramillies and Warspite, and U.S.S. Texas, Arkansas and the proud Nevada which the Japanese had sunk and written off at Pearl Harbor.
Leading the thirty-eight British and Canadian convoys bound for Sword, Juno and Gold beaches was the cruiser H.M.S. Scylla, the flagship of Rear Admiral Sir Philip Vian, the man who tracked down the German battleship Bismarck. And close by was one of Britain’s most famous light cruisers—H.M.S. Ajax, one of a trio which had hounded the pride of Hitler’s fleet, the Graf Spee, to her doom in Montevideo harbor after the battle of the River Plate in December 1939. There were other famous cruisers—the U.S.S. Tuscaloosa and Quincy, H.M.S. Enterprise and Black Prince, France’s Georges Leygues—twenty-two in all.
Along the edges of the convoys sailed a variety of ships: graceful sloops, chunky corvettes, slim gunboats like the Dutch Soemba, antisubmarine patrol craft, fast PT bo
ats, and everywhere sleek destroyers. Besides the scores of American and British destroyers, there were Canada’s Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan and Ristigouche, Norway’s Svenner, and even a contribution from the Polish forces, the Poiron.
Slowly, ponderously this great armada moved across the Channel. It followed a minute-by-minute traffic pattern of a kind never attempted before. Ships poured out of British ports and, moving down the coasts in two-convoy lanes, converged on the assembly area south of the Isle of Wight. There they sorted themselves out and each took a carefully predetermined position with the force heading for the particular beach to which it had been assigned. Out of the assembly area, which was promptly nicknamed “Piccadilly Circus,” the convoys headed for France along five buoymarked lanes. And as they approached Normandy these five paths split up into ten channels, two for each beach—one for fast traffic, the other for slow. Up front, just behind the spearhead of mine sweepers, battleships and cruisers, were the command ships, five attack transports bristling with radar and radio antennae. These floating command posts would be the nerve centers of the invasion.
Everywhere there were ships. To the men aboard, this historic armada is still remembered as “the most impressive, unforgettable” sight they had ever seen.
For the troops it was good to be on the way at last, despite the discomforts and the dangers ahead. Men were still tense, but some of the strain had lifted. Now everybody simply wanted to get the job over and done with. On the landing ships and transports men wrote last-minute letters, played cards, joined in long bull sessions. “Chaplains,” Major Thomas Spencer Dallas of the 29th Division recalls, “did a land-office business.”
One minister on a jam-packed landing craft, Captain Lewis Fulmer Koon, chaplain for the 4th Division’s 12th Infantry Regiment, found himself serving as pastor for all denominations. A Jewish officer, Captain Irving Gray, asked Chaplain Koon if he would lead his company in prayer “to the God in whom we all believe, whether Protestant, Roman Catholic or Jew, that our mission may be accomplished and that, if possible, we may be brought safely home again.” Koon gladly obliged. And in the gathering dusk, Gunner’s Mate Third Class William Sweeney of a Coast Guard cutter remembers, the attack transport Samuel Chase blinked out a signal, “Mass is going on.”