In Newcastle that May, the Home Guard waited anxiously for the impending invasion of the Continent. Irene’s husband, Tom, and other members of the Home Guard were issued supplies to thwart possible German retaliation when the Allied second front was opened – Tom believed that German paratroopers would attempt an invasion on the north-east coast. As for Irene, the anticipation was maddening. ‘Waiting, waiting, waiting and yet how terrified that there’ll be hell-let-loose on second front,’ she wrote in her diary. Still, she told M-O, ‘I hope we have news tonight that second front has started and Germany has collapsed.’ By the end of May, regardless of the necessary death and potential retribution, everyone in Britain seemed impatient for the push to begin.
Chapter Eleven: Worst Raid Ever Last Night
1 Quoted in Lambourne, War Damage in Western Europe, p. 150.
2 Quoted in Fred Taylor, Dresden, Tuesday February 13, 1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 128.
3 Quoted in Gilbert, The Second World War, p. 319.
4 Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 169.
5 Gardiner, Wartime Britain, p. 547.
6 Quoted in Ibid., p. 610.
7 Churchill, His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963: Vol. 7, 1943–1949, 26 March 1944, p. 6907.
CHAPTER TWELVE
OH! WHAT A LEISURELY WAR
Natalie and Hugh Tanner were up early on the morning of 6 June 1944. Hugh’s regular business trip to firms in the north-east was scheduled for that day and, as usual, Natalie was to accompany him. Every month, Hugh visited clients and suppliers in Darlington, Middlesbrough and Newcastle. As they prepared to leave, Natalie switched on the wireless and caught the 8 o’clock news. The details were unclear, but it ‘sounded as though we were going places at last’. Hugh was positive that the much-anticipated second front was underway, while Natalie, on the other hand, decided to reserve judgement until further news came through.
Later that morning, Natalie and Hugh stopped in at Darlington and had coffee before moving on to Newcastle. As they approached Chester-le-Street, south of Newcastle, Natalie knew that her husband’s instinct was right. Numerous lorries had been stacked along the dual carriageway leading into the city for months, but now, save a few being worked on by female mechanics, they had disappeared.
Preparations for D-Day had been in the works for some time on both sides of the Channel. Everyone seemed to realize that the impending invasion would be the decisive moment of the war, and overall victory hinged upon its success. General Erwin Rommel, once head of German forces in Northern Africa, was now in charge of building the ‘Atlantic Wall’ to defend against the massive Allied force that was expected to invade the Continent. Labourers, forced or paid by the Germans, beefed up defences along the French and Belgian coasts. Steel and concrete gun nests sprang up along the coast, while obstacles to both ground and air invasion troops were strewn across the beaches and countryside.
Across the English Channel, build-up for invasion was evident nearly everywhere. Thousands had been employed in constructing the specialized support equipment necessary for fighting on the beaches of Normandy. Shrouded under a veil of utmost secrecy, workers built huge floating harbours, code-named ‘Mulberry harbours’, designed to help transform the Norman coastline into usable ports.1 The size of the port of Dover, the Mulberries were built to ride tides over twenty feet high and handle thousands of vehicles and 10,000 tons of supplies for the invading forces daily. As the Mulberries took shape, huge concrete structures began slowly to dominate the skylines of Merseyside, Southampton, Portsmouth and Goole in the spring of 1944. Sixty feet high, over fifty feet wide and two hundred feet long, these massive, hollowed-out, concrete caissons (code-named ‘Phoenix’) were built to float initially, but when in place, doors were opened and the structures sank, creating instant breakwaters to shelter the Mulberries and landing operations.2 Most of the necessary 4,000 landing craft (‘landing ships, tanks’, or LSTs) designed to carry troops onto the shore were constructed at factories located in the eastern half of the US.
With artificial ports and breakwaters to tame the seas, and landing craft to ferry soldiers ashore, Major General Percy Hobart used his technological savvy to create vehicles designed to overcome the various obstacles troops were expected to encounter on the beaches. Hobart’s ‘funnies’ certainly raised a few eyebrows, especially American ones (US commander Omar Bradley refused to use the silly-looking contraptions at Omaha Beach). But aesthetics did not matter in battle – functionality did, and Hobart’s ‘funnies’ helped to ease British landings on D-Day. The ‘funnies’ included vehicles designed to clear mines, fill in bomb craters and anti-tank trenches, lay canvas across soft terrain to provide footholds for assault troops, blast concrete pillboxes with powerful mortars (nicknamed ‘flying dustbins’) and belch fire from the mouth of the ‘crocodile’ – a flame-throwing tank capable of incinerating anything within 360 feet.3 ‘Swimming tanks’, or DD Shermans, and US-designed DUKW (nicknamed ‘ducks’ and used primarily for landing equipment on shore) rounded out the innovations which gave landing troops an edge in their harrowing mission.4
While thousands of workers set about building the necessary equipment for the assault, Allied troops needed to prepare. Troops descended on quiet villages and fertile farmland across England to train on terrain similar to what was expected to face them in France. In April, Helen Mitchell escaped the domestic drudgery and the aerial operations that drove her nearly insane at home in Kent. Searching for solitude and quietude in her beloved Somerset, she instead became caught up in these Allied training manoeuvres. Troops swarmed the town of Minehead and overran the surrounding hills that Helen so enjoyed rambling. American GIs loitered below her window at night, beaches were cordoned off, and paved roads were cut through the hills (‘the worst bit of vandalism ever’, according to Helen). Locals seemed excited at all the activity – a novelty for them, but a well-worn nuisance for the seasoned Mitchell.
Late that spring, as the wit-shattered Helen Mitchell coped with her own Allied invasion in Minehead, her son was involved in a secret operation to support the invasion. At the same time that troops and workers across Britain prepared to invade the beaches of Normandy under Operation Overlord, William Mitchell and thousands of others were engaged in an elaborate subterfuge designed to throw the Germans off the true invasion scent in Normandy. The deception plan, code-named Operation Fortitude, paralleled Overlord, spinning a multitude of believable lies about the invasion and feeding them to the Germans.
Fortitude operatives led the Germans to believe that a build-up in Scotland, which was in reality little more than radio chatter and double-agent misinformation, signalled an impending attack on Hitler’s U-boat installations in Norway. Other hoaxes pointed to potential diversionary landings in the west and south of France, all the way through the Balkans. Allied secret operations pressed double agents and resistance movements into action in order to distract and pin down Axis troops all across Europe. The Red Army also agreed to hold off offensives in the east until the opening of the second front. The objective of such complicated and widespread machinations was to divert German resources away from the targeted landing beaches in Normandy, thus increasing the probability of Allied success, and saving lives.
The most important ruse to this end was the one that confirmed what many Germans thought was the most strategically viable invasion site: the Pas-de-Calais. Calais was the sensible choice: close to England and a straight line to the heart of Germany. The reinforcing deception of Fortitude made the German command confident that Allied forces would indeed land on the coast around Calais. Accordingly, Rommel spent most of his time in the area, strengthening defences and awaiting his enemy.
Helen’s son, William, was recruited to assist in the Pas-de-Calais deception. As an architecture student and amateur carpenter, he was well-suited to help pull off a staged build-up of forces in the Thames Estuary and on the Kent and Essex coa
st closest to Calais. Dummy landing craft, wooden gliders and inflatable tanks sprang up throughout the area. Even a massive wooden model of an oil dock, complete with fighter defence and fog machines to shroud the illusion, was constructed on site according to the specifications of Basil Spence (the architect who would later rebuild Coventry Cathedral and design Sussex University). William and his team built and camouflaged the fake equipment to look realistic, yet the camouflage could not be too effective: the point was for the Germans to see it.
Equipment was important, but to lend even more credence to the deception, armies had to be created. Thus Fortitude operatives conjured American and British army groups out of thin air. With the help of cleverly constructed radio communications, news ‘leaks’, high-level visits to the area and other actions, the non-existent First United States Army Group (FUSAG), supposedly commanded by General Patton, occupied the area around the Thames Estuary in preparation for the supposed invasion at the Pas-de-Calais. The British Twelfth Army, complete with motorized infantry and armoured divisions, was also deployed and equipped, but only on paper. Allied bombers disabled many of the German radar and listening stations on the French and Belgian coasts, allowing British intelligence to control most of the information flowing to German command. Discreet radio noise was piped out over the east coast, while the ionosphere over the real D-Day port of Southampton remained silent; this silence was assisted by the laying of radio cables directing communications miles away from Southampton. Furthermore, double agents in Britain fed the Germans intelligence that supported the Pas-de-Calais invasion route.
From the air, the elaborate ruse made the area look as if it was bustling with activities associated with an impending invasion. Workers trudged through the long grass to create the illusion of troop activity in the area. Clothes lines and laundry hung on the fake landing vehicles, and disabled and older soldiers loitered on the decks of ships to provide human evidence of the build-up for the benefit of German aerial operations. To add to its authenticity, the King and Queen, as well as Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, made periodic inspections of the site.
But in May and June of 1944, as Natalie and Hugh Tanner had witnessed on their business trip to Newcastle on 6 June, vehicles and convoys began to descend on the south coast. Hampshire turned into a massive military store, military vehicles and ammunition shrouded from above by the canopy of the New Forest. Schools, homes and businesses in the real embarkation point of Southampton were requisitioned for the military, and the roads leading into the city were choked for miles with war materiel as the day for invasion rapidly approached.
Two days before D-Day, on 4 June, Allied troops captured Rome. ‘Hurrah … and beyond Hurrah’, Edie Rutherford exclaimed when she heard the news. Although relieved, when Natalie Tanner learned that Rome had fallen, she was also quite bitter about the Italians’ ‘easy’ defeat. When so much had been destroyed across Europe, why should Rome get off ‘scot free?’, she wondered. After all, Natalie thought, ‘The Italian fascists are just as bad as the German Nazis only less efficient and I think less sincere.’ Furthermore, she reasoned, they were largely responsible for the devastation loosed upon Europe. ‘Without Mussolini,’ Tanner was convinced, ‘Hitler would never have got where he has, but would have spent his time in a lunatic asylum’.
Regardless of the relative reprieve handed to the Italians and their capital, there was little time for rejoicing over the fall of Rome; all activity rolled inexorably towards the invasion of Western Europe. Helen Mitchell’s first indication that something was afoot was the sound of gliders overhead on the night of 5 June, and stillness in the morning – the guns had gone silent over Minehead. Her instincts were confirmed at noon by the BBC. Still, so few people talked about the invasion around town that she ‘wondered if I had dreamed it’. ‘Six intelligent females talking of this and that but no mention of invasion,’ she told M-O of her D-Day experience in Minehead. ‘Walked about streets and listened, but only talk among crowds personal affairs or grumbling about supplies. Went to 3 shops – no one mentioned it!’ Helen exclaimed.
Desperate for information, she spent the evening in an ‘orgy of listening’, awaiting news, and was appalled to hear the BBC present the invasion in the ‘usual happy picnic atmosphere’ that she felt inappropriate to the gravity that the death and destruction of war dictated. Mitchell went to bed that night fearing German retribution. ‘But not a plane to be heard.’
All around Britain, everyone was, as Edie Rutherford reported, ‘glued to the radio as at Dunkirk time and as never since’. Alice Bridges listened in at 7 a.m., but had no indication that anything was brewing until later in the morning, when she was dusting. The radio next door seemed to be louder than usual, and ‘the insistence of the radio voice’ floating through the walls encouraged her to ‘switch on’, at which she ‘heard the great news’. ‘Exhilarated and pleased’, she looked out of her window and expected to see everyone rushing out into the streets to ‘make whoopee’ and celebrate together. But not a soul could she see, so she turned back to her work and then took a nap.
Later, it occurred to her that she needed to find out what others were thinking for the benefit of M-O. Alice got dressed, put on her face and went into downtown Birmingham. Everything was ‘bustle and business’ down at the Bull Ring in the centre of town, but, as Helen had experienced, no one talked about the invasion. She walked up New Street and Corporation Street and found everyone was going about as normal. Unsuccessful in judging the tenor of the people, she breezed into the ‘amusement place’, set up specifically, she told M-O, to entertain ‘Yanks’ and take their money. Finding only a young American airman who didn’t seem too intelligent in Alice’s estimation and worse, had no money, she moved on to the casino nearby. There, she asked a few women their feelings, but got very pat replies. Later, a man asked her to dance; he wasn’t a good dancer, but she spent two and half hours talking to him about his rocky marriage. ‘The human case book, that’s me,’ she said. When she left him at the end of the night, she advised him to be firm with his wife or leave her. There was no talk of D-Day.
At work in Sheffield, Edie and her office mates listened in. Tears streamed down the faces of some of the ‘girls’ who had brothers, sons, husbands or fathers ‘in it’. Some simply could not bear to hear the reports and left the room. As the news came through, Edie wondered ‘How many wives at 6 a.m. are by now widows???’
In the pre-dawn of 6 June, the main contingents of British troops landed at the beaches code-named Sword and Gold – Ouistreham and Arromanches respectively. Those who fought their way across Gold Beach were expected to take the town of Bayeux that day, while soldiers at Sword were supposed to make it eight miles inland to the town of Caen. By midnight of 6 June, 150,000 Allied soldiers had come ashore at designated beaches on the Norman coast. (Americans landed west of British troops at Utah and Omaha beaches, and Canadians at Juno, between Sword and Gold beaches.) Although none of the troops made it to their objective that first night, an important foothold was established in German territory and casualties were much lighter than feared. Churchill expected at least 10,000 casualties that day, but fewer than 5,000 perished on the first day of action. To illustrate the success of the operation: approximately 350 Canadian soldiers died on 6 June, whereas in the ill-fated debacle at Dieppe in 1942, nearly 1,000 died. To answer Edie’s musings, back home in Britain, over 1,600 wives, mothers or sisters would soon learn they’d lost their loved ones.
When the Tanners reached Newcastle on 6 June, they had lunch and caught the ‘fag end of the one o’clock news’, confirming their hunch: the second front had indeed begun. Afterwards, Hugh left Natalie in town while he went to his business meeting, and as usual on her trips to Newcastle, she caught a tram to the Odeon theatre. The tram was empty, so Natalie chatted with the conductress, who agreed with her that though necessary, the invasion must be ‘wicked’ for the soldiers. On her way to the theatre, Tanner passed a crowd of onlookers who, despite th
e biting wind and rain, stopped to watch respectfully as a convoy of soldiers passed. There were no flags waving or cheers of excitement, only grave anticipation. Natalie paused for a moment, then carried on to the theatre.
The movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat starring Tallulah Bankhead, she thought particularly well done – better by far, she thought, than the much-touted (all-male) Noël Coward film, In Which We Serve. Afterwards, Natalie waited for her husband and read in the hotel’s lounge until the King spoke on the wireless. Hotel guests gathered round to listen and everyone stood up when ‘God Save the King’ was played at the conclusion of his speech. Natalie felt sorry for George VI; though they all raved about the BBC’s coverage of D-Day, no one in the group mentioned the King and she personally found him particularly uninspiring.
The next day, a little frayed at the edges from a rough night’s sleep (not so much from worries over the mortal conflict across the Channel as from the trains, trams and buses that scurried along beneath her window all night long), Natalie went down to the theatre to buy tickets for that evening’s production of ‘Is Your Honeymoon Necessary?’ The Tanners were entertaining Hugh’s clients, the Williamsons, and Natalie was tickled that she managed to get four well-positioned stalls for a little less than £2.
Later that day, Mrs Williamson met Natalie in town and brought her home for the afternoon. It was a nice stone terraced house that the childless couple had only just moved into – a ‘family house’, Natalie imagined. Mary Williamson and her mother were entertaining and accommodating, but Natalie felt somewhat out of sorts. Mary was easily in her early thirties and Tanner was nagged by the fact that Mary hadn’t been ‘roped into National Service’. It was odd, Tanner reflected later, to spend the afternoon ‘with two women who were doing nothing apart from running a home … positively prewar’.
Domestic Soldiers Page 24
