The Longest Day

by Cornelius Ryan

  As the minutes passed, the face of the chart reflected the orderly pattern of the recall. There were streams of markers backtracking up the Irish Sea, clustered in the vicinity of the Isle of Wight and huddled together in various ports and anchorages along the southwest coast of England. It would take some of the convoys nearly all day to put back to port.

  The location of each convoy and that of nearly every other ship of the Allied fleet could be seen at a glance on the board. But two vessels were not shown—a pair of midget submarines. They seemed to have disappeared completely off the chart.

  In an office nearby, a pretty twenty-four-year-old Wren lieutenant wondered how soon her husband would make it back to his home port. Naomi Coles Honour was a bit anxious but not unduly worried yet, even though her friends in “Ops” seemed to know nothing about the whereabouts of her husband, Lieutenant George Honour, and his fifty-seven-foot-long midget submarine, the X23.

  One mile off the coast of France a periscope broke the surface of the water. Thirty feet below, crouching in the cramped control room of the X23, Lieutenant George Honour pushed his cap back. “Well, gentlemen,” he recalls saying, “let’s take a look-see.”

  Cushioning one eye against the rubber-cupped eyepiece, he slowly pivoted the periscope around, and as the distorting shimmer of water disappeared from the lens the blurred image before him straightened out and became the sleepy resort town of Ouistreham near the mouth of the Orne. They were so close in and his view was so magnified that Honour could see smoke rising from chimneys and, in the far distance, a plane that had just taken off from Carpiquet Airport near Caen. He could also see the enemy. Fascinated, he watched German troops calmly working among the anti-invasion obstacles on the sandy beaches that stretched away on either side.

  It was a great moment for the twenty-six-year-old Royal Navy Reserve lieutenant. Standing back from the periscope, he said to Lieutenant Lionel G. Lyne, the navigational expert in charge of the operation, “Take a look, Thin—we’re almost bang on the target.”

  In a way the invasion had already begun. The first craft and the first men of the Allied forces were in position off the beaches of Normandy. Directly ahead of the X23 lay the British-Canadian assault sector. Lieutenant Honour and his crew were not unaware of the significance of this particular date. On another June 4, four years earlier, at a place less than two hundred miles away, the last of 338,000 British troops had been evacuated from a blazing port called Dunkirk. On the X23 it was a tense, proud moment for the five specially chosen Englishmen. They were the British vanguard; the men of the X23 were leading the way back to France for the thousands of their countrymen who would soon follow.

  These five men crouching in the tiny all-purpose cabin of the X23 wore rubber frogmen’s suits, and they carried ingeniously falsified papers that would have passed the scrutiny of the most suspicious German sentry. Each had a false French identity card complete with photograph, plus work permits and ration cards bearing official-looking German rubber-stamped impressions, and other letters and documents. In case anything went wrong and the X23 was sunk or had to be abandoned, her crew members were to swim ashore and, armed with new identities, try to escape capture and make contact with the French underground.

  The X23’s mission was a particularly hazardous one. Twenty minutes before H Hour, the midget sub and her sister ship, the X20—some twenty miles farther down the coast, opposite the little village of Le Hamel—would boldly come to the surface to act as navigational markers, clearly defining the extreme limits of the British-Canadian assault zone: three beaches that had been given the code names Sword, Juno and Gold.

  The plan they were to follow was involved and elaborate. An automatic radio beacon capable of sending out a continuous signal was to be switched on the moment they surfaced. At the same time sonar apparatus would automatically broadcast sound waves through the water which could be picked up by underwater listening devices. The fleet carrying British and Canadian troops would home in on either one or both of the signals.

  Each midget also carried an eighteen-foot telescopic mast to which was attached a small but powerful searchlight that could send out a flashing beam capable of being seen more than five miles away. If the light showed green, it would mean that the subs were on target; if not, the light would be red.

  As additional navigation aids, the plan called for each midget to launch a moored rubber dinghy with a man in it and allow it to drift a certain distance toward shore. The dinghies had been outfitted with searchlights which would be operated by their crewmen. By taking bearings on the lights of the midgets and their drifting dinghies, approaching ships would be able to pinpoint the exact positions of the three assault beaches.

  Nothing had been forgotten, not even the danger that the little sub might be run over by some lumbering landing craft. As protection the X23 would be clearly marked by a large yellow flag. The point had not escaped Honour that the flag would also make them a fine target for the Germans. Notwithstanding, he planned to fly a second flag, a large white Navy “battle duster.” Honour and his crew were prepared to risk enemy shellfire, but they were taking no chances on being rammed and sunk.

  All this paraphernalia and more had been packed into the already cramped innards of the X23. Two extra crewmen, both navigation experts, had also been added to the sub’s normal complement of three men. There was scarcely room now to stand up or sit down in the X23’s single all-purpose cabin, which was only five feet eight inches high, five feet wide and barely eight feet long. Already it was hot and stuffy, and the atmosphere would get much worse before they dared surface, which would not be until after dark.

  Even in daylight in these shallow coastal waters, Honour knew that there was always the possibility of being spotted by low-flying reconnaissance planes or patrol boats—and the longer they stayed at periscope depth the greater was the risk.

  At the periscope, Lieutenant Lyne took a series of bearings. He quickly identified several landmarks: the Ouistreham lighthouse, the town church and the spires of two others in the villages of Langrune and St.-Aubin-sur-Mer a few miles away. Honour had been right. They were almost “bang on the target,” barely three quarters of a mile from their plotted position.

  Honour was relieved to be this close. It had been a long, harrowing trip. They had covered the ninety miles from Portsmouth in a little under two days, and much of that time they had traveled through mine fields. Now they would get into position and then drop to the bottom. “Operation Gambit” was off to a good start. Secretly he wished that some other code word had been chosen. Although he was not superstitious, on looking up the meaning of the word the young skipper had been shocked to discover that “gambit” meant “throwing away the opening pawns.”

  Honour took one last look through the periscope at the Germans working on the beaches. All hell would break loose on those beaches by this time tomorrow, he thought. “Down periscope,” he ordered. Submerged, and out of radio communication with their base, Honour and the crew of the X23 did not know that the invasion had been postponed.

  9

  BY 11:00 A.M. the gale in the Channel was blowing hard. In the restricted coastal areas of Britain, sealed off from the remainder of the country, the invasion forces sweated it out. Their world now was the assembly areas, the airfields and the ships. It was almost as though they were physically severed from the mainland—caught up strangely between the familiar world of England and the unknown world of Normandy. Separating them from the world they knew was a tight curtain of security.

  On the other side of that curtain life went on as usual. People went about their accustomed routines unaware that hundreds of thousands of men waited out an order that would mark the beginning of the end of World War II.

  In the town of Leatherhead, Surrey, a slight, fifty-four-year-old physics teacher was walking his dog. Leonard Sidney Dawe was a quiet, unassuming sort of man and outside of a small circle of friends he was unknown. Yet the retiring Dawe enjoyed a public following f
ar exceeding that of a film star. Every day upwards of a million people struggled over the crossword puzzle that he and his friend Melville Jones, another schoolteacher, prepared for each morning’s London Daily Telegraph.

  For more than twenty years Dawe had been the Telegraph’s senior crossword compiler and in that time his tough, intricate puzzles had both exasperated and satisfied countless millions. Some addicts claimed that the Times’s puzzle was tougher, but Dawe’s fans were quick to point out that the Telegraph’s crossword had never repeated the same clue twice. That was a matter of considerable pride to the reserved Dawe.

  Dawe would have been astonished to know that ever since May 2 he had been the subject of a most discreet inquiry by a certain department in Scotland Yard charged with counterespionage, M.1.5. For over a month his puzzles had thrown one scare after another into many sections of the Allied High Command.

  On this particular Sunday morning M.1.5 had decided to talk to Dawe. When he returned home he found two men waiting for him. Dawe, like everybody else, had heard of M.1.5, but what could they possibly want with him?

  “Mr. Dawe,” said one of the men as the questioning began, “during the last month a number of highly confidential code words concerning a certain Allied operation have appeared in the Telegraph crossword puzzles. Can you tell us what prompted you to use them—or where you got them?”

  Before the surprised Dawe could answer, the M.1.5 man pulled a list out of his pocket and said, “We are particularly interested in finding out how you came to choose this word.” He pointed to the list. The prize competition crossword in the Telegraph for May 27 included the clue (11 across), “But some big-wig like this has stolen some of it at times.” This mystifying clue through some strange alchemy made sense to Dawe’s devoted followers. The answer, published just two days before on June 2, was the code name for the entire Allied invasion plan—“Overlord.”

  Dawe did not know what Allied operation they were talking about, so he was not unduly startled or even indignant at these questions. He could not explain, he told them, just how or why he had chosen that particular word. It was quite a common word in history books, he pointed out. “But how,” he protested, “can I tell what is being used as a code word and what isn’t?”

  The two M.1.5 men were extemely courteous: They agreed that it was difficult. But wasn’t it strange that all these code words should appear in the same month?

  One by one they went over the list with the now slightly harassed bespectacled schoolmaster. In the puzzle for May 2, the clue “One of the U.S.” (seventeen across) had produced the solution “Utah.” The answer to three down, “Red Indian on the Missouri,” on May 22, turned out to be “Omaha.”

  In the May 30 crossword (eleven across), “This bush is a center of nursery revolutions” required the word “Mulberry”—the code name for the two artificial harbors that were to be placed in position off the beaches. And the solution to fifteen down on June 1, “Britannia and he hold to the same thing,” had been “Neptune”—the code word for the naval operations in the invasion.

  Dawe had no explanation for the use of these words. For all he knew, he said, the crosswords mentioned on the list could have been completed six months before. Was there any explanation? Dawe could suggest only one: fantastic coincidence.

  • • •

  There had been other hair-raising scares. Three months before in Chicago’s central post office a bulky, improperly wrapped envelope had burst open on the sorting table, revealing a number of suspicious-looking documents. At least a dozen sorters saw the contents: something about an operation called Overlord.

  Intelligence officers were soon swarming all over the scene. The sorters were questioned and told to forget everything they might have seen. Next the completely innocent addressee was interrogated: a girl. She could not explain why these papers were en route to her, but she did recognize the handwriting on the envelope. Through her the papers were traced back to their point of origin, an equally innocent sergeant at American headquarters in London. He had wrongly addressed the envelope. By mistake he had sent it to his sister in Chicago.

  Minor as this incident was it might have assumed even greater proportions had Supreme Headquarters known that the German intelligence service, the Abwehr, had already discovered the meaning of the code word “Overlord.” One of their agents, an Albanian named Diello but better known to the Abwehr as “Cicero,” had sent Berlin the information in January. At first Cicero had identified the plan as “Overlock,” but later he had corrected it. And Berlin believed Cicero—he worked as a valet in the British embassy in Turkey.

  But Cicero was unable to discover the big Overlord secret: the time and place of D Day itself. So scrupulously guarded was this information that up to the end of April only a few hundred Allied officers knew it. But that month, despite constant warnings by counterintelligence that agents were active throughout the British Isles, two senior officers, an American general and a British colonel, carelessly violated security. At a cocktail party in Claridge’s Hotel, London, the general mentioned to some brother officers that the invasion would take place before June 15. Elsewhere in England, the colonel, a battalion commander, was even more indiscreet. He told some civilian friends that his men were training to capture a specific target and he hinted that its location was in Normandy. Both officers were immediately demoted and removed from their commands.*

  And now, on this tense Sunday, June 4, Supreme Headquarters was stunned by the news that there had been yet another leak, far worse than any that had occurred before. During the night an AP teletype operator had been practicing on an idle machine in an effort to improve her speed. By error the perforated tape carrying her practice “flash” somehow preceded the ususal nightly Russian communiqué. It was corrected after only thirty seconds, but the word was out. The “bulletin” that reached the U.S. read: “URGENT PRESS ASSOCIATED NYK FLASH EISENHOWER’S HQ ANNOUNCED ALLIED LANDINGS IN FRANCE.”

  Grave as the consequences of the message might prove to be, it was much too late to do anything about it now. The gigantic machinery of the invasion had moved into high gear. Now, as the hours slipped by and the weather steadily worsened, the greatest airborne and amphibious force ever assembled waited for General Eisenhower’s decision. Would Ike confirm June 6 as D Day? Or would he be compelled because of Channel weather—the worst in twenty years—to postpone the invasion once again?

  *Although the American general had been a West Point classmate of General Eisenhower’s there was nothing that the Supreme Commander could do but send him home. After D Day the general’s case received wide publicity and later, as a colonel, he retired. There is no record that Eisenhower’s HQ even heard about the Britisher’s indiscretion. It was quietly handled by his own superiors. The Britisher went on to become a Member of Parliament.

  10

  IN A RAIN-LASHED wood two miles from the naval headquarters at Southwick House, the American who had to make that great decision wrestled with the problem and tried to relax in his sparsely furnished three-and-a-halfton trailer. Although he could have moved into more comfortable quarters at the big, sprawling Southwick House, Eisenhower had decided against it. He wanted to be as close as possible to the ports where his troops were loading. Several days before he had ordered a small compact battle headquarters set up—a few tents for his immediate staff and several trailers, among them his own, which he had long ago named “my circus wagon.”

  Eisenhower’s trailer, a long, low caravan somewhat resembling a moving van, had three small compartments serving as bedroom, living room and study. Besides these, neatly fitted into the trailer’s length was a tiny galley, a miniature switchboard, a chemical toilet and, at one end, a glass-enclosed observation deck. But the Supreme Commander was rarely around long enough to make full use of the trailer. He hardly ever used the living room or the study; when staff conferences were called he generally held them in a tent next to the trailer. Only his bedroom had a “lived-in” look. It was de
finitely his: There was a large pile of Western paperbacks on the table near his bunk, and here, too, were the only pictures—photographs of his wife, Mamie, and his twenty-one-year-old son, John, in the uniform of a West Point cadet.

  From this trailer Eisenhower commanded almost three million Allied troops. More than half of his immense command were American: roughly 1.7 million soldiers, sailors, airmen and coastguardmen. British and Canadian forces together totaled around one million and in addition there were Fighting French, Polish, Czech, Belgian, Norwegian and Dutch contingents. Never before had an American commanded so many men from so many nations or shouldered such an awesome burden of responsibility.

  Yet despite the magnitude of his assignment and his vast powers there was little about this tall, sunburned midwesterner with the infectious grin to indicate that he was the Supreme Commander. Unlike many other famous Allied commanders, who were instantly recognizable by some visible trademark such as eccentric headgear or garish uniforms layered shoulder-high with decorations, everything about Eisenhower was restrained. Apart from the four stars of his rank, a single ribbon of decorations above his breast pocket and the flaming-sword shoulder patch of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) Eisenhower shunned all distinguishing marks. Even in the trailer there was little evidence of his authority: no flags, maps, framed directives or signed photographs of the great or near-great who often visited him. But in his bedroom, close to his bunk, were three all-important telephones, each a different color; the red was for “scrambled” calls to Washington, the green was a direct line to Winston Churchill’s residence at No. 10 Downing Street, London, and the black connected him to his brilliant chief of staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith, the immediate headquarters and other senior members of the Allied High Command.