Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  By then Garbo and Tomás Harris had dreamed up some amazing inventions, not least the Brothers in the Aryan World Order, a group of twelve ‘fiercely anti-semitic Welshmen dedicated to bringing National Socialism to the valleys and toppling the British Government by a campaign of assassination’. If the Germans believed in these Celtic Fascists – which they did – they would believe in anything that Garbo told them – as when he made an alleged visit to the coast between Southampton and Weymouth, where huge numbers of troops were already assembling, and reported, ‘There is no concentration at special points.’

  Towards the end of May his agents stepped up their flow of misinformation. One reported that the 4th US Armored Division was in Bury St Edmunds, another that the 6th Armored Division had been seen in Kent. The imaginary Wulf Schmidt, Agent Tate, was notionally sent from a farm in Hertfordshire to another in Kent, so that he could watch the build-up of FUSAG at first hand. ‘Have found first-class lodgings with elderly couple in Wye,’ he told his German handler. ‘So far as I can see, ideal for radio purposes.’ Through a non-existent friend – allegedly a clerk at Ashford railway station – he obtained and transmitted details of the plan for FUSAG’s embarkation. Garbo himself reported troops of the 83rd Division forming up in a Dover car park, and then had the nerve to claim that he had got a job in the Ministry of Information, which meant that he ‘now had access to propaganda documents intended to “hide the facts in order to trick us”’.

  Further evidence of the existence of FUSAG was provided by the antics of its (all too real) commander, the rip-roaring, foul-mouthed American General George S. Patton. Earlier in the year he had created a scandal by slapping the face of a man in hospital, telling him there was no such thing as shell shock, and that it was an invention of the Jews. Forced by Eisenhower to apologize, he lost his chance of commanding the ground forces in the Overlord invasion. Instead, he was assigned the command of FUSAG.

  Crashing about England, making appearances here and there, he dropped loud and apparently careless remarks in public – ‘See ya in the Pas de Calais’ – and distinguished himself particularly in April by appearing at the official opening of a Welcome Club for US servicemen at Knutsford, in Cheshire. He was under orders to make no public speeches, but because he had been told that reporters and photographers were banned from the meeting, he went ahead and spoke, apparently insulting the Russians when he failed to mention them as one of the nations, alongside Britain and America, destined to rule the world. Inevitably, his remarks appeared in the press, and Eisenhower sent him a furious letter of reprimand, whereupon he complained that he had been set up. In fact he had – by British intelligence officers, who wanted to make sure the enemy knew he was in England. The Germans regarded Patton as one of the ablest Allied officers, and his command of FUSAG confirmed their estimate of the formation’s crucial importance.

  As the phantom army was created in April and May, the prime growing season, it caused farmers no small aggravation to find that during the night their crops of hay and corn had been flattened by the arrival and installation of bogus military equipment. Then, in the final days before Overlord, they were still more circumscribed, when movement into and out of coastal areas was restricted. Travel to and from the Republic of Ireland was banned, and a news blackout put members of the public on edge: people knew that an immense event was imminent but they could not discover details. All they saw was interminable convoys of military vehicles streaming southwards.

  Unknown to the Double Cross Committee – unknown even to the ubiquitous and apparently omniscient Garbo – in London and Windsor, at the highest level, there was in progress another tense struggle whose outcome might have altered the whole balance of the war. Churchill, the indispensable Prime Minister, had proposed that he should sail towards Normandy on the cruiser HMS Belfast, flagship of the invasion fleet, and he had persuaded King George to accompany him.

  The King’s Private Secretary, Tommy Lascelles, was appalled: as he recorded in his diary, he thought the idea was madness, and set out to stifle it by confronting the monarch directly. ‘I think I shook the King,’ he wrote, ‘by asking him whether … he was prepared to face the possibility of having to advise Princess Elizabeth [then eighteen] on the choice of her first Prime Minister, in the event of her father and Winston being sent to the bottom of the English Channel.’

  On Wednesday 31 May he persuaded the King ‘without much difficulty’, that it would be ‘wrong, from many points of view, for either him or Winston to carry out their proposed Overlord jaunt’. Next day he took a handwritten letter from the King to Downing Street and gave it to John Martin, Churchill’s parliamentary private secretary. He found that Winston, ‘who is just like a naughty child when he starts planning an escapade’, had said nothing about his plan to Martin, ‘who was much relieved that the King was trying to deter him’.

  After lunch on 1 June, Lascelles went with the King to the map room in the Downing Street Annexe in Storey’s Gate. There Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, Naval Commander-in-Chief of the Expeditionary force, expounded to the visitors exactly what would be involved in Winston’s scheme. It was soon obvious to Lascelles that any passenger on the cruiser would run serious risks from mines, torpedoes, bombs and shellfire, ‘and would see devilish little’, as the ship would at no time be closer to the French coast than 14,000 yards.

  When Ramsay was told that Operation WC (as he called it) might include his Sovereign as well as the Prime Minister, ‘the unfortunate man, naturally enough, reacted violently’. The King soon accepted ‘with good grace’ that he should not go; but Churchill was still determined to take part. Lascelles was worried: he thought that if the Prime Minister were killed in the early stages of Overlord, ‘the news of his death might easily have such an effect on the troops as to turn victory into defeat’. He also saw that Churchill’s presence on board Belfast would inevitably ‘cramp the style of those engaged in fighting her’.

  On 2 June, with three days to go, the King again wrote to Churchill, saying that it would be most unfair of him to embark, after he himself had advised his monarch not to, and that it was quite unnecessary for him to risk his life on a wild goose chase which could have no military value whatever. The letter went by courier from Windsor Castle to Downing Street, but Churchill had departed to spend the night in his special train, which was parked somewhere in Hampshire, and did not reply until next day. Only then, on 3 June, did he agree to abandon his idea, and Lascelles concluded triumphantly: ‘We [I and the King] have bested him, which not many people have succeeded in doing in the past four years.’

  Deceptive hints of many kinds were being dropped, some small, others heavy. Every morning The Times published a short weather report covering the Straits of Dover. RAIN CLOUDS was the headline on 5 June:

  After a day of cloud and sunshine, with a gusty, south-westerly wind, it was cool in the Straits of Dover last night. The wind had moderated a little, but there were still white-capped breakers in the straits … Rain clouds were gathering at nightfall after a further drop in the barometer.

  What was the point of printing that – when wireless forecasts were banned – except to suggest that the weather off Dover was of prime importance? As for heavyweight emphasis of the deception: on the night of 2–3 June a force of nearly a thousand American bombers, escorted by 500 fighters, attacked the Wehrmacht’s military installations in the Pas de Calais. To the Germans, a raid of this magnitude could mean only that the Allies were trying to soften up the defences in advance of their invasion.

  In the run-up to D-Day – set for Monday, 5 June 1944 – the paramount need was to keep both the date and the destination of Operation Overlord secret. The Germans knew that an invasion of the Continent was imminent, but they did not know where or when the Allies would strike; every precaution was therefore taken to prevent information leaking out. Much of southern England was brought almost to a standstill by the tremendous build-up of troops as they moved down from concentration areas to marshall
ing areas, and by the security measures designed to prevent any escape of intelligence. Units briefed for action were confined to barracks or camps by barbed-wire barriers and extra guards; telephone lines were disconnected and letter boxes sealed.

  Stan Blacker, of 606 Royal Marine Flotilla, remembered how ‘the whole of Hampshire was becoming a vast arsenal, every roadside jammed with vehicles, every grass verge loaded with ammunition’. The Hamble river, leading to the Solent, was packed with landing craft, whose crews were marshalled and housed in the wooden huts of HMS Cricket, the Combined Operations base hidden away in woodland. Canvas villages sprang up in adjacent fields and woods, temporarily housing another 4000 men. Footpaths were closed, and the public were excluded from the area.

  Veronica Phipps, whose husband Alan had been killed fighting in Greece, had gone to stay with friends at their home near the coast in Hampshire. She found she had to drive down lanes and byways because the main and secondary highways were choked with convoys of military lorries, trucks, personnel carriers, jeeps, tanks – ‘all the frightening might of a great army on the move’, heading for their designated marshalling areas. The Winchester bypass, completed just before the war, was closed to civilian traffic and jammed with parked armoured vehicles of every description.

  It was the same all over the south of England. On roads leading to the Channel coast it became impossible for civilian traffic to move, as vast military convoys were driving for five minutes and then stopping, so that the main roads were continuously blocked. As women came out offering cups of tea and sandwiches, GIs tossed pennies, threepenny bits and sixpences to children, convinced that they would never need them again.

  On the Thursday before D-Day, as the Marines at HMS Cricket paraded on a road, RAF pilots flew captured German aircraft over them, so that they would recognize different types. Then, on D-Day minus one, at another parade on the main road, a local priest stood on a box and said prayers – ‘God, teach us not to show cowardice … God, give us strength to face the enemy’, ending with the Lord’s Prayer.

  D-Day had been set for Monday, 5 June 1944, with H-hour (the beginning of the assault) at 6 a.m. But on Friday the 2nd the Meteorological Office warned Eisenhower that a violent storm was approaching over the Atlantic: sure enough, a gale whipped up waves in the Channel to a dangerous level, and early on the 4th the Supreme Commander ordered a twenty-four-hour postponement. Hope rose again when the Met Office predicted a lull between that depression and the next: a thirty-six-hour window of opportunity, from the afternoon of Monday, 5 June until late on Sunday the 6th. Backed by his senior commanders, Eisenhower took the momentous decision at 5 a.m. on the 5th: ‘OK – we’ll go.’

  On the 6th, the fateful day, people all over England were roused by the noise. The inhabitants of Lincoln were woken only half an hour after midnight by the roar of engines warming up on the airfields that ringed the city. At 5.45 Tommy Lascelles, in Buckingham Palace, became aware of an endless stream of aircraft passing overhead. Molly Lefebure, secretary to the Home Office forensic pathologist Professor Keith Simpson, woke ‘dazedly in a green and silver dawn which shook with the noise of the outgoing planes streaming across the sky’, and she hurried off to work ‘in a state of tremendous excitement and apprehension’.

  This was the day we had all been waiting for, and working for, and praying for, during the past four long years, and we all both delighted in it and dreaded it. Everybody held their breaths, waiting for news of what was happening on the landing beaches. The entire British nation had its fingers crossed.

  On her first call of the day, at Wanstead mortuary, a depressing surprise awaited her. On the slate post-mortem table lay the body of a soldier in battledress. The man had been found dead in his berth on one of the ships about to sail for Normandy. When the pathologist opened his body, it released a strong smell of bitter almonds – the unmistakable call sign of cyanide. Clearly, he had lost his nerve. ‘That was our first p.m. on D-Day,’ wrote Molly sadly. ‘The young soldier who was cut up in Wanstead mortuary while his erstwhile comrades were landing in Normandy.’

  Agent Garbo and his orchestra continued their bravura performance right to the wire. At 3 a.m. on 6 June he and four colleagues assembled in the upstairs bedroom at his home, and Charles Haines, his dedicated wireless operator, started trying to pass a message to the regular Abwehr operator in Madrid.

  The content of the transmission – initiated by the Double Cross team and sanctioned by Eisenhower – seemed an explosive betrayal of secrets: it said, in a roundabout way, that the invasion had started. But the British knew that even if the message went straight through, it could not reach Berlin before 6 a.m., because the delay in transmission between Madrid and Berlin was three hours – so that by the time German High Command received the news, Allied troops would already be going ashore under heavy fire on the Normandy beaches.

  As it happened, the Spanish operator in Madrid was either asleep or away from his post, and did not come on the air until 8 a.m. – by which time it was far too late for the information to give the Germans any advantage. Garbo sent angry messages complaining that the idle Spaniard had ruined his efforts to be helpful – and the episode merely strengthened his credibility still further in Nazi minds, leading them to believe him when he continued to tell them that the Normandy landings were only a feint, and that the real invasion was going to be aimed at the Pas de Calais.

  German intelligence reports, captured later, estimated that on 6 June there were at least forty-two Allied divisions and 500 large landing craft assembled in the south-east corner of England, poised to swarm across the Channel. In fact there were fifteen divisions, held in reserve, and no real landing craft at all. Hypnotized by the XX Committee’s masterly deception, German High Command kept the Panzer divisions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth German armies on station in the Pas de Calais until it was too late for them to move down the coast and repel the assault on the Normandy beaches.

  Garbo’s work was by no means finished. On 9 June he sent the Abwehr a long message, re-emphasizing that the landings in Normandy were only a diversionary manoeuvre, and that the main Allied attack would probably take place in the Pas de Calais area. ‘The whole of the present attack,’ he said, ‘is set as a trap for the enemy to make us move all our reserves in a hurried strategical disposition which we would later regret.’ His message went all the way up to Hitler, and the resulting intelligence assessment showed that German High Command had swallowed the bait. A week after D-Day, only one German division had been moved from the Pas de Calais to Normandy, and both Eisenhower and Montgomery later agreed that the strategic deception had been an immeasurable help in allowing the Allies to establish a bridgehead on the Continent.

  The Germans’ faith in Garbo, and their gratitude to him, remained indestructible. On 29 July, six months after the British had thanked him for his services by making him a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, he received a wireless message informing him that the Führer had awarded him the Iron Cross for his ‘extraordinary merits’.

  Twenty-Four

  Flying Bombs

  Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky

  With hideous ruin and combustion down

  To bottomless perdition …

  John Milton, Paradise Lost

  Within a week of Overlord’s launch Hitler retaliated with a vicious new device, the Verwaltungswaffe Nummer Eins – Revenge Weapon No. 1 – or V-1 – the flying bomb soon known as the doodlebug. Inspired detective work by the staff of the Allied Central Interpretation Unit at RAF Medmenham, and the consequent bombing of launch sites, had set back the start of his campaign by several months; but the first doodlebug was sighted coming in over the Kent coast at 00.40 on the morning of Tuesday, 13 June 1944. Observers in Folkestone thought the town was being heavily shelled; but then it was reported that an aeroplane flying fast, and in flames, was heading for London. In fact it crashed at Swanscombe, and within four minutes it was accurately reported a
s a pilotless aircraft.

  So began a nightmare that lasted for the next six months. The first doodlebug to hit London landed in the East End early that same morning – 13 June – shaking people by the suddenness of its arrival and the size of the explosion it caused. A pilotless missile looking like a small, slender aircraft, twenty-seven feet long, with stubby, square-ended wings, a pointed nose and the pulse-jet engine belching flame from its raised position above the tail, a V-1 carried a warhead containing nearly 2000 lb of explosive. It flew at 350 mph and at a height of between 2000 and 3000 feet. Within a day people in Kent and Sussex, and also in London, were all too familiar with the noise of its engine – a rough, harsh roar like that of a badly tuned motorbike. As long as that sound continued, you were reasonably safe; but the moment it cut out – take cover! – for the sudden silence meant that the bomb had run out of fuel and gone into its terminal dive, about forty-five seconds from impact.

  Weapons of mass destruction, the flying bombs were aimed at central London, but once they were airborne the length and direction of their flight could not be further refined, so that the Germans had no means of knowing exactly where they would strike. There could be no pretence that these devices were aimed at military or industrial targets: indiscriminate murder was the means by which Hitler hoped to pound the British into submission – and no doubt he was gratified when he learned that on Sunday, 18 June, a doodlebug scored a direct hit on the Guards’ Chapel in Wellington Barracks during morning service, killing 121 members of the packed congregation.