Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  Roosevelt, who cared about none of this, was determined to exclude de Gaulle from any role in France’s liberation and governance. He told Churchill that the general and his forces must be kept in the dark about the planning for D-Day, including the landings’ actual date. He also barred de Gaulle and his committee from participating in the administration of their country once it was freed. According to FDR, U.S. military forces should govern France until it could hold postwar elections, a decision that Eisenhower and other U.S. military leaders strongly opposed. “An open clash with de Gaulle would hurt us immeasurably,” Eisenhower wrote, “and would result in bitter recrimination and loss of life.”

  Finally Churchill confronted FDR, telling him in May 1944 that de Gaulle could not be left entirely out of Operation Overlord; he must be invited from Algiers to London, brought up to date on the operation, and be included in discussions about the future administration of France. “Otherwise,” he explained to Roosevelt, “it may become a very great insult to France.” After FDR reluctantly gave his approval, de Gaulle arrived back in England—less than forty-eight hours before D-Day was launched.

  His encounter there with Churchill did not go well. “The prime minister, moved by a sense of history,” greeted the French general “with his arms outstretched,” Anthony Eden noted. “Unfortunately de Gaulle did not respond easily to such a mood.” That was, to put it mildly, an understatement.

  Bitterly resentful of being shut out of the invasion of his own country, de Gaulle exploded with rage when Churchill told him that Eisenhower would deliver a broadcast message to the French people on D-Day and asked him to do the same. Eisenhower’s proclamation, which had already been printed, called on the French nation to follow the orders of the Allied invasion force; it contained no mention of de Gaulle or his men. As de Gaulle saw it, his country, rather than being liberated, was about to be occupied. He refused to follow Eisenhower’s broadcast with one of his own, and his talk with Churchill turned into a nasty verbal brawl. At its end, according to de Gaulle, Churchill shouted at him, “We are going to liberate Europe, but it is because the Americans are with us to do it. For, let me tell you! Any time we have to choose between Europe and the open seas we shall always be for the open seas. Any time I have to choose between you and Roosevelt, I will always choose Roosevelt.”

  Eden and the other British officials who were present were appalled at Churchill’s outburst. “I did not like this pronouncement,” Eden later recalled, “nor did [Labor Minister Ernest] Bevin, who said so in a booming aside. The meeting was a failure.” After de Gaulle had gone, Churchill, shaking with rage, declared that the general was guilty of “treason at the height of battle” and ordered him to be sent back to Algiers, “in chains if necessary.”

  De Gaulle, for his part, would never forgive or forget Churchill’s tirade that day—just another manifestation, he thought, of the prime minister’s and FDR’s shabby treatment of him and his country throughout the war. The long-term result of those thorny relationships would be serious, lasting damage between de Gaulle and the English-speaking powers. According to Roosevelt biographer Jean Edward Smith, writing in 2008, “FDR’s pique against de Gaulle poisoned the well of Franco-American relations, the legacy of which continues to this day.” The same was true for the British-French relationship.

  At the time, however, Eden and French officials did yeoman’s work in calming the two men down. Thanks to those efforts, de Gaulle, putting aside his anger at least temporarily, agreed to deliver a broadcast to the French people, and Churchill’s order to expel him from the country was rescinded.

  That evening, several British officials, feeling considerable apprehension, escorted de Gaulle to Bush House for the recording of his broadcast. He had refused to give them a written version beforehand, and, fearing the worst, the officials grouped themselves around the glass walls of the recording studio “in deathly silence.” As the general began speaking, they looked at one another in amazement.

  “Without a trace of nervousness, he delivered a superb broadcast,” recalled Robert Bruce Lockhart, the head of the British government’s propaganda operations. “He began with a reference to England, which, when all seemed lost, had stood alone against the greatest military machine the world had ever seen.” It was only fitting, de Gaulle said, that “this old bastion of freedom” should be the springboard for the “liberation of France and all Europe.” De Gaulle’s paean to England “carried the conviction of sincerity in every word,” Lockhart wrote. The propaganda chief’s eyes welled with tears, and, self-conscious about his lack of control, he looked at his colleagues and found that they were teary-eyed, too.

  There was only one problem with the speech: de Gaulle had referred to himself and his committee as the government of France. With a written transcript in hand, Lockhart rushed to the Foreign Office to show the speech to Eden and point out the difficulty it would cause. After reading it through, the foreign secretary remarked, “I’ll have trouble with the prime minister about this, but we’ll let it go.” Lockhart noticed that Eden was smiling.

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  *1 Of all the wartime casualties suffered by the Big Three, the Soviets accounted for 95 percent.

  *2 In 1969, the British government ordered a review of the wartime inquiry’s findings. The staffer responsible for the investigation reported that “security at Gibraltar was casual, and a number of opportunities for sabotage arose while the aircraft was there.” He added, “The possibility of [Sikorski’s] murder by persons unknown cannot be excluded.”

  As dawn broke on June 6, 1944, the mightiest armada in history knifed through the windswept waves of the English Channel toward France. In the thousands of warships—and the serried ranks of bombers and fighters overhead—one could see the full power and grandeur of the Western Alliance.

  The invasion forces bearing down on the beaches of Normandy were, for the most part, British, American, and Canadian. But the countries of occupied Europe played a significant role on that historic day as well. The invaders carried with them detailed maps of the German fortifications on the coast to which they were heading—maps based on intelligence supplied by European agents. The ships ferrying and protecting the D-Day troops included Norwegian, Polish, Belgian, and French vessels, while Dutch, Belgian, Czech, Polish, and French pilots and aircrew flew overhead.

  As impressive as the June 6 spectacle was, it was only the first wave of what was to come. Over the next three months, nearly 2 million Allied soldiers and airmen—more than 200,000 of them from occupied Europe—would take part in the effort to break out of Normandy and fight their way across France. The French 2nd Armored Division would be the first major force from the exiled allies to land in continental Europe. A Polish armored division would follow soon afterward, as would smaller Belgian, Czech, and Dutch units.

  The European troops looked forward to the coming fight on the Continent with a passion unmatched by their American, British, and Canadian counterparts. For them, the chance to help liberate Europe would make up for the humiliation of their countries’ defeats and demonstrate their loyalty to the Allied cause. Above all, they yearned to liberate their nations and exact retribution against their occupiers. It was time to start settling the score.

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  AS THE ALLIED FLOTILLA approached the beaches of Normandy on that cloudy June morning, the BBC’s European Service broke into its scheduled programs to announce the D-Day landings. It was only fitting that the people of Europe should get their first news of the invasion from the broadcasters at Bush House. From June 1940 on, the BBC had helped them shed their despair and begin to believe in the possibility of liberation. Five years later, that possibility was finally on the verge of reality.

  BBC announcers read the message—in French, English, Dutch, Flemish, Norwegian, and Danish—from General Eisenhower, in which he declared that the landings in Normandy were “but the opening phase of the campaign in Western Europe.” The general’s broadcast was followed by recorded messag
es from de Gaulle, King Haakon, Queen Wilhelmina, Belgian prime minister Hubert Pierlot, and Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg.

  The night before, the BBC had performed another of its key wartime roles—as a conduit of information between London and the European resistance movements. Since the summer of 1941, the European Service, in addition to providing news and commentary, had broadcast specific coded messages to resistance members and SOE operatives in the field. The idea had originated with Georges Bégué, the first SOE agent parachuted into France. Worried that frequent use of his wireless set would give him away to the Germans, Bégué suggested to London that some of its instructions to him be sent in the form of short, prearranged phrases or sentences broadcast by the BBC, whose meaning only he and F Section would know.

  The BBC messages did not replace Morse code transmissions, but they became an important additional method of communication between London and those in the field. In France, Jean Moulin arranged for the widespread distribution of radio sets to resistance groups around the country, who were then instructed to listen to the BBC for certain private communications. As Georges Bidault, a resistance leader and future French prime minister, later put it, “In the undergrowth of the moors, in friendly streets of shadowy towns, word arrived from across the Channel and spread in miraculous fashion; and so a web was woven, invisible to the enemy.”

  The concept of personal messages rapidly spread to every country section in SOE, as well as to MI6. After the BBC broadcast its nightly news programs to the occupied nations, it would send out a series of brief, cryptic personal reports. Most of them sounded nonsensical to those who did not know their meaning: “Dandelions do not like the sardine,” “Father Christmas is dressed in pink,” “Louis has to see the pastor,” “The milk is boiling over,” “Jan, you have to cut your mustache.”

  From this stream of apparent gibberish, an agent would pick out the one sentence that meant something to him or her, and no one else would be able to decipher it. The message could indicate a number of different actions or situations: an impending parachute drop; the start of an operation; the dispatch of arms, supplies, or agents; the signal that an agent or courier had arrived safely in London or the field; the warning of someone’s arrest. Proving to be both efficient and foolproof, the personal messages became an integral part of agents’ communications and substantially reduced wireless operators’ airtime—and thus their chance of being detected.

  They also fulfilled a function that Bégué hadn’t foreseen: they enabled operatives in various countries to say to people whose help they needed but who doubted their identities as British agents, “You make up a short message—it doesn’t matter what—and I’ll arrange for it to be broadcast a week from now on the BBC.” In the words of Ben Cowburn, an SOE organizer in France, “That was the first manifestation of power: you’d been able to give an order to tell this formidable British broadcasting company what to say….And you were somebody from then on.”

  Most Europeans had tremendous trust in and affection for the BBC, which proved to be another great aid for SOE officers. In France, “active resisters were a very small minority but the majority of the French people listened to the BBC,” said Harry Rée, another SOE organizer there. “So on the whole, you could be pretty certain that anyone you didn’t know, if you asked for help in a difficult situation and said you were English, would help. They might be frightened and not help you for very long but they would certainly not give you up.”

  On an average night, the personal messages from the BBC’s French service would take no more than five minutes to read. On the eve of D-Day, they lasted more than half an hour. One by one, they tumbled through the air: “The dice are on the table,” “He has a falsetto voice,” “It is hot in Suez,” “Napoleon’s hat is in the ring,” “John loves Mary,” “The arrow will not pass,” “The giraffe has a long neck.” To members of the French resistance, each was a summons to battle.

  Throughout the country, thousands of resistance fighters left their homes and businesses, collected arms and explosives from hiding places, and embarked on the prearranged sabotage assignments that the coded messages had ordered. In Normandy and elsewhere, employees of the government-run telephone and telegraph company cut telephone lines, forcing German forces to use radio transmissions as their sole method of communication—transmissions that could be easily intercepted and decrypted by Bletchley Park. In the early days of the invasion, more than seventeen thousand messages were intercepted daily, including detailed information on troop and supply movements. Once they had pinpointed exact locations of enemy units, the Allies called in air strikes.

  Overall, the postinvasion sabotage efforts of the resistance were far more successful than anyone had thought possible. From June 6 on, the Germans could no longer rely on control of their own rear areas or lines of communication. On the first night alone, SOE and other sabotage teams carried out 950 of 1,050 planned disruptions of railway traffic throughout the country. All the main routes leading to the Normandy beaches were cut.

  In the north, SOE’s Farmer network severed the tangle of railway lines near the industrial town of Lille, rendering them useless until the end of the month. SOE courier Pearl Witherington, who had taken over part of the Stationer network after its organizer was captured by the Gestapo and renamed it Wrestler, was in charge of three thousand saboteurs who cut railway lines throughout the Indre region, in west-central France.

  The dozens of resistance groups in the south, meanwhile, brought railway traffic in their areas to a virtual halt, preventing the several German divisions stationed there from moving quickly to reinforce the German defenses in Normandy. Some, like Francis Cammaerts’s Jockey and Tony Brooks’s Pimento networks, consisted of thousands of men. Others were much smaller. A good many groups were communist-run, while some were organized and manned by local resisters with no outside affiliation at all.

  Whatever their origin, French saboteurs played havoc with German rail and other traffic, blowing up railway lines, barricading roads, derailing trains, immobilizing locomotives, and destroying fuel dumps and bridges. According to one historian, “the entire French railway system was so shot through with subversion that the Germans practically had to abandon its use.” In addition to troop reinforcements, crucial supplies like ammunition, fuel, and food were greatly delayed in reaching Normandy. As a result of these shortfalls, the Allies were given the time they needed to consolidate their beachheads in the crucial first hours and days of the assault.

  The stop-and-go journey of one German armored division from the south of France to the beachheads serves as a prime example of the effectiveness of the saboteurs and the ferocity of the Germans’ reprisals. The 19,000 troops of the fearsome 2nd SS Panzer Division “Das Reich” were regarded, according to Max Hastings, as “among the most formidable fighting soldiers of World War II.” Equipped with the latest heavy tanks, the unit had been sent in early 1944 to Toulouse, in the southwest of France, to rest, train, and refit after months of hard duty on the Soviet front.

  During the division’s stay there, its tanks were stored under heavy guard in the nearby town of Montauban, but the railway flatcars that had transported the tanks were left unguarded on railway sidings several miles away. Taking advantage of the opportunity, local saboteurs, among them a pair of teenage sisters, siphoned off all the axle oil from the flatcars and replaced it with ground carborundum, a fine abrasive powder made of stone.

  When Das Reich’s commanders received orders on June 7 to proceed immediately to the Normandy front, they sent for the flatcars, all of which broke down on their way to Montauban. As a result, the tanks were forced to travel by road, which took far longer and severely damaged their treads. At least 60 percent of the tanks were unserviceable by the time the division reached Normandy. Along the way, the Das Reich troops were incessantly harried by guerrilla fighters. As Eisenhower later wrote, “They surrounded the Germans with a terrible atmosphere of danger and hatred which ate into the con
fidence of leaders and the courage of soldiers.”

  In normal times, it would have taken the division no more than three days to reach Normandy. In the chaos of June 1944, the journey lasted seventeen days. What’s more, Das Reich reached the battlefield “in a state of extreme disorganization and exhaustion,” having been bombed by Allied planes as it approached the beachhead. The division, which had suffered heavy losses by then, did not actually begin to fight until July 10, far too late for it to have any impact.

  But its snail-like sluggishness in making its way to the front was not just the result of sabotage. It also slowed down because its commanders had received orders from Berlin to kill as many maquis as possible as it headed north. Das Reich’s troops, the order said, “must immediately pass to the counter-offensive, to strike with the utmost power and rigor, without hesitation.”

  Hitler’s rage at the maquis’s fierce resistance took priority over Germany’s need to summon as many reinforcements as possible, as quickly as possible, to Normandy. The Führer’s “obsession with retaining every foot of his empire once again betrayed him,” Max Hastings noted. “In the first vital days after the Allied landings, the German struggle to hold France against Frenchmen employed forces—above all, the 2nd Panzer Division—that could have made a vital contribution on the battlefield.” On June 16, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt urged Berlin to abandon all of France south of the Loire River and order the sixteen divisions located there to the Normandy front. That, replied Berlin, was “politically impossible.” Instead, Das Reich and the other divisions focused first on liquidating resistance groups. “Not even the most optimistic Allied planner before the invasion,” Hastings wrote, “had anticipated that the German high command would be so foolish as to commit major fighting formations against maquisards.”