The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Marie also worked at Pointe-de-la-Percée (the western edge of Omaha), building radar sites for the German Kriegsmarine (navy). He recalled the time in early 1944 when it was announced that Rommel was coming to inspect. The Germans gave the French workers an order to doff their caps when the field marshal appeared. “Very quickly,” he says, “the word was spread and when Rommel came there was not a single man in Port-en-Bessin wearing a cap or hat and consequently no obligation to salute.”19

  Naturally, Rommel did not notice such a small act of defiance. Anyway, he needed more workers to make up for the absence of heavy equipment. (In many ways the Atlantic Wall was constructed in exactly the same way as the Great Wall of China, by human labor; the big difference was that the Germans had concrete and steel reinforcing rods.) “Get the French countryfolk to help erect the obstacles,” Rommel told a division near Le Havre. “Pay them well and promptly for it. Point out that the enemy is least likely to invade where the most obstacles have been erected! The French farmers will be only too glad to line their purses.”20

  Naturally, the Germans never did pay enough—they established an exchange rate between the mark and the franc that was ruinous to the French—nor did they feed the workers well enough to win their loyalty. So the workers complained, and grumbled among themselves, and a few of them passed information along to active Resistance figures.

  SOE had many ingenious ways of getting the information back to London, including the use of carrier pigeons dropped from airplanes. André Rougeyron was a Resistance member in Normandy; in a memoir, he described this curious wedding of an ancient method of communication with the most modern technology as follows: “I receive a visit from Ernest Guesdon. He is very happy since he found in his pasture a carrier pigeon that had been parachuted in. This is one of many pigeons discovered. This method of British information services works remarkably well. The birds are dropped at night in a cage attached to a small parachute. They are found the next morning by the user of the pasture or orchard. The equipment to accomplish this communication is meticulously put together: a packet of food for the bird, parchment envelope containing all the necessary instructions, and two moulded tubes for sending messages.

  “The tubes are attached to the ring encircling the pigeon’s leg. There is some very thin special paper, a pencil, and instructions on how to feed and return the bird, a questionnaire about the occupying troops, their moves, their morale, to say nothing of the defensive works.”

  Rougeyron was head of an escape section that rescued many young American pilots and crews shot down over France. He used the pigeons to send messages saying that the men—last names only, no rank—were safe. “We did not want to say anything else, fearing the pigeon might be shot down on its way.”21

  • •

  The Germans built a four-gun battery on the cliff just west of Port-en-Bessin. Big fortifications, big guns—155mm. Beautifully camouflaged with nets and dirt embankments, they could not be seen from the air.

  The farmer on whose land they were built was furious because he could not graze his cattle or grow crops on the field. He paced off the distances between the bunkers, from the bunkers to the observation post on the very edge of the cliff, from the cliff to the bunkers, and so on. He had a blind son, eight or nine years old. Like many blind people, the boy had a fabulous memory. Because he was blind, the Germans paid little attention to him.

  One day in early 1944, the boy hitched a ride to Bayeux. There he managed to get in touch with André Heintz, an eighteen-year-old in the Resistance. The boy gave Heintz his information; Heintz sent it on to England via his little homemade radio transmitter (hidden in a Campbell Soup can; today on display in the Battle of Normandy Museum in Caen); thus the British navy, on D-Day, had the exact coordinates of the bunkers.22

  • •

  At the little village of Benouville, on the bank of the Caen Canal where a bridge crossed the waterway, Mme Thérèse Gondrée had a café. The Germans who bought wine and snacks there did not know that she spoke German. She passed on what she picked up from their conversations to Mme Vion, the head of the local maternity hospital (and of the local Resistance), who passed it on to her superiors in the Resistance in Caen, who passed it on to SOE agents in the area, who got it back to England via radio or small airplane. Thus Maj. John Howard of the Ox and Bucks, 6th Airborne Division, who was training his company for a coup de main operation against the bridge on D-Day, knew a great deal about the enemy, including the location of the button that would set off the demolition charge to blow the bridge to prevent capture.23

  • •

  The 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR) of the 101st Airborne had as one of its D-Day objectives the village of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont. Thanks to the Resistance, Lt. Richard Winters of Company E of the 506th knew, among other things, that the local German commander was seeing the local teacher and that he took his dog for a walk every day at precisely 1700 hours.24

  M. Guillaume Mercader of Bayeux owned a bicycle shop. He had been a professional bicycle racer before the war. In an interview he related, “I could, under the occupation, renew my license and under the pretext of training I was able to travel about without difficulty.” Thanks to the compulsory labor policy, he was able to gather from workers specific intelligence on defense construction, on infrastructures, on armaments, on troop locations, on beach obstacles and the like. “My responsible departmental person was M. Meslin, alias Cdt. Morvin, head of the subdivision. Every week at No. 259 Saint-Jean Street in Caen I met with him so I could hand over to him requested information we had obtained.”25

  Thanks to the information gathered and passed on from the French Resistance, supplemented and enhanced by Ultra intercepts and aerial reconnaissance, the AEF undoubtedly had better information on the enemy dispositions and strength than any attacking force in history.

  • •

  Sabotage was another Resistance specialty. In the period 1941–43 it consisted of sporadic, uncoordinated pinpricks against war industries, railroads, canals, and telephone and telegraph systems. It was not of such a scale as to cause the Germans much worry. But beginning in early 1944, after SOE came under SHAEF control, railway sabotage was greatly accelerated and tied into the Transportation Plan. A resister with a stick of dynamite who knew where to place it on a bridge could be much more effective than a B-17 dropping a 500-pound bomb from 15,000 feet on the same target. The man on the spot could also time the explosion so as to take out a locomotive when the bridge went up. In the first three months of 1944 the Resistance destroyed 808 locomotives compared to 387 damaged by air attack. After the Transportation Plan went into effect, the figures were reversed: in April and May the bombers put 1,437 locomotives out of action compared to only 292 credited to the Resistance.26

  The British hoped for more direct support from the Resistance. A committee consisting of representatives from SOE and the army considered the possibility of a national uprising. The Resistance could make a strategic contribution to Overlord if it were “backed by a general strike or by a rising on a national scale.” Calmer heads prevailed. A French officer pointed out that the notion of a mass uprising “posited the existence of universal courage, whereas courage inspired only a few men—as it has always inspired the few rather than the many. And the idea of mass uprisings implied battling against modern tanks with the stone-throwing catapults of Caesar’s time.”27

  SHAEF was more realistic. It wanted to use Resistance groups to prepare demolitions to blow main trunk lines leading into the lodgment area, beginning on D-Day. Plan Vert, it was called. By May, SOE was able to report to SHAEF that 571 railroad targets were ready for demolition. Plan Vert was supplemented by Plan Tortue, a project for blocking enemy road movements through guerrilla action—which meant in practice firing Sten and Bren guns into German columns, then running off into the woods, hoping the Germans would follow.

  As the Germans were regularly picking up Resistance members and torturing them to get information, the Resist
ance could not be told in advance the date of D-Day. Therefore arrangements had to be made to order the execution of sabotage plans by code messages broadcast over the BBC. Leaders were told to listen to BBC broadcasts on the 1st, 2nd, 15th, and 16th of each month. If the invasion was imminent, they would hear a preparatory code message. They would then remain on alert to listen for a confirmatory message “B,” to be followed within forty-eight hours by a code launching the units into action. Each region had a different code.

  In Bayeux, the action code for M. Mercader’s unit was “It is hot in Suez,” followed by “The dice are on the carpet.” He recalled the day he heard them over the BBC: “In Bayeux, in my cellar, the radio was on. At 6:30 P.M., the first message said: ‘It is hot in Suez. It is hot in Suez.’ Twice. Then a definite silence. Then, ‘The dice are on the carpet. The dice are on the carpet.’ Twice again, as well as other messages which didn’t concern us. Stunned by listening to these messages, an instant of emotion invaded me, but quickly enough, I came to myself and after having turned off the radio and climbing the steps from the cellar four at a time, I informed in the first place my wife of what I had heard. I then took my bicycle and went to contact my principal responsible people of an imminent landing. The night was going to be long.”28

  SHAEF considered limiting the sabotage activity on D-Day to lower Normandy. A strong argument for doing so was to wait in other regions until the destruction of bridges would be immediately helpful to the AEF. This applied especially to the south of France, where another landing was scheduled for mid-August. Further, if the Resistance went into action all across France, it would expose its members to identification and capture by the Germans, who meanwhile would have time to repair the damage. Those arguments gave way to the view that it was preferable to obtain the maximum amount of chaos behind enemy lines at the moment of landing, and anyway SHAEF figured that it would be impossible to keep the various Resistance groups quiet after the news of D-Day broke.

  Anthony Brooks, a twenty-year-old Englishman who had grown up in French-speaking Switzerland and had been studying in France when the war began, was in 1944 an SOE agent in southern France, near Toulouse. He had been receiving airdrops of explosives, which he distributed to his Resistance people, who hid them in cesspools or even on locomotives when the drivers were Resistance. (“We would hide the explosives on an electric locomotive,” he recalled, “and no German soldier is going to open up a thing that says 16,000 volts on it and it has got a key.”) Some went into lavatory water tanks; they would hold up to twenty kilos of explosive. Like most SOE agents, Brooks found that his recruits were impatient, eager for action, so “we had to let them blow up trains every now and again even if it was too soon and we had no orders. Every now and again we derailed the wrong one and we had some bad press you might say and one train we derailed was a Swiss Red Cross train and there were four enormous vans full of eggs and people were trying to scoop the yolks out of the river to make omelets and cursing us all the while.”29

  In April 1944, the 2nd SS Panzer Division (the Das Reich) moved into a town near Toulouse named Montauban. It was refitting after hard service on the Eastern Front, receiving brand new tanks, Tigers, the biggest and best Germany could produce. The tanks were gas-guzzlers (Tigers weighed sixty-three tons and got one-half mile to the gallon). They were subject to mechanical problems. They had only steel tracks, which wore out quickly on highway travel. Therefore the Germans always moved the Tigers for any distance on railroad cars. The Tigers were concentrated in Montauban and kept under heavy guard. The railway cars they rode on were hidden in village railway sidings round Montauban, each concealed by a couple of worn-out French trucks dumped on top. These transporter cars were unguarded.

  Brooks put his subagents to work. One of them was a beautiful young sixteen-year-old girl named Tetty “who was the daughter of the local boss who ran a garage and she had long ringlets and her mother was always smacking her and telling her not to play with them.” All through May, Tetty and her boyfriend, her fourteen-year-old sister, and others sallied out after dark by bicycle to the cars, where they siphoned off all the axle oil, replacing it with an abrasive powder parachuted in by SOE. Brooks told Tetty and the others to throw away the oil, but “of course the French said it was ludicrous to throw away this beautiful green oil so they salvaged it as it was real high quality motor oil” that fetched a fine price on the black market.

  On D-Day, the Das Reich got orders to move out for Normandy. The Germans loaded their Tigers onto the railway cars. Every car seized up before they reached Montauban. The damage was so extensive to the cars’ axles that they could not be repaired. It was a week before the division found alternative cars, in Perigueux, a hundred kilometers away—bad luck for the tanks’ tracks and fuel supply. The Resistance harassed the division from Montauban to Perigueux. As a consequence the Das Reich, expected by Rommel in Normandy by D plus three or four, actually arrived on D plus seventeen. Furthermore, as Brooks notes with a certain satisfaction, “No train went north of Montauban after the night of the Fifth of June until it went out flying the French flag or the Union Jack.”30

  • •

  The contributions of the paratroops on the night before D-Day, and of the bombers and the Resistance in the weeks before D-Day, cannot be appraised with precision. But it is clear that while Eisenhower never had to worry about his rear, Rommel always did.

  * * *

  I. In addition, Montgomery hoped that his seaborne British 3rd Division at Sword Beach would be able to overrun Caen in the first hours of the invasion.

  6

  PLANNING AND PREPARING

  ACCORDING TO General Eisenhower, before the battle is joined plans are everything.1 As supreme commander, he directed a planning operation that seemed infinite in scope, was complex almost beyond description, and on which the outcome of the war depended. He insisted on and got an all-out effort from staff officers at SHAEF down through Twenty-first Army Group (Montgomery’s headquarters), British Second and American First armies, the corps, divisions, battalions, and companies, and all levels of staff at the various air force, navy, and coast guard commands. As a result, Overlord was the most thoroughly planned amphibious operation in history.

  When Eisenhower visited Bradley’s headquarters, he told the officers, “This operation is not being planned with any alternatives. This operation is planned as a victory, and that’s the way it’s going to be. We’re going down there, and we’re throwing everything we have into it, and we’re going to make it a success.”

  (In a 1964 interview with Walter Cronkite, Eisenhower repeated those words. He spoke with intensity, frowning a bit, giving some reminder of the power of his voice, body posture, attitude, and aura of certainty and command that he had displayed in 1944. Then he visibly relaxed, let that shy grin creep up the corner of his mouth, and added, “But there’s nothing certain in war. Unless you can put a battalion against a squad, nothing is certain.”2)

  The job of the planners was to make certain of as much as possible. To do that they needed to be in constant touch with troops in the field, monitoring the results of exercises and training maneuvers to decide what would work, what might work, and what wouldn’t work. They had to put all that information together with the input from the other services to come up with a comprehensive plan that everyone agreed to.

  The process started at the top and worked down. Eisenhower decided where and when. To deal with the objection that adding the Cotentin (Utah Beach) would be too costly because of the flooded areas behind the beach, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Smith, suggested using airborne divisions to seize the causeways leading inland over the flooded areas. There was intense opposition from the airborne commanders, but Eisenhower ruled for Smith.3

  By late January, Eisenhower’s basic decisions were in place. On February 25 Bradley’s headquarters had an outline plan drawn up; British Second Army had one completed a month later. The process moved down to corps, division, regiment, battalion
levels.

  Gen. Freddie de Guingand, Montgomery’s chief of staff, recalled that right along the chain of command “nothing was ever proposed that didn’t meet with heated opposition.” If corps wanted it, division didn’t. If the army proposed something and the navy agreed, the air force was sure to object.

  De Guingand reported that it was Monty’s Twenty-first Army Group staff that made the decision to send the DD tanks (the swimming tanks) in on the first wave, with naval guns firing over their heads. “Our reasons for using DD tanks in the van were to achieve an element of surprise which might be effective in demoralizing the enemy; also they would provide rallying points for the infantry.”4

  At the higher levels, the temptation to reach down to solve lower echelons’ problems was great, but it was overcome. General de Guingand explained, “At first we all tried to discover a school solution to the composition of the assault waves—guns, engineers, tanks, infantry, in what order, where, etc., but after the first training rehearsal we decided the notion of a single formula was nonsense and we let the particular assault section solve its own problem.”5

  • •

  “Its own problem” depended on the nature of the defensive works facing the particular corps, division, regiment, battalion. Each had a different problem, depending on the shape of the beach it would assault, and even more on Rommel’s defensive works. But Rommel could not plan, only prepare. Planning made possible a concentration of energy and force, but it required a knowledge of where and when that Rommel did not have. Preparation for an attack anywhere required a dispersal of energy and force.

  On every beach that was remotely suitable for an amphibious landing, Rommel built defenses. Offshore, the Germans’ first line of defense consisted of mines anchored in the Channel, not enough to satisfy Rommel but enough to cause a major problem for the Allied navies. Onshore, the defenses differed to suit local terrain conditions, but the beach obstacles on the tidal flat between the high- and low-water marks were similar on Omaha, Utah, and the British beaches.