Brave Genius

by Sean B. Carroll

  Our country is experiencing days that will count to be among the saddest that it has known. Excited by foreign propaganda, too many of her children are placing themselves at the hands of unscrupulous masters who want to create a climate that is the forerunner of the worst disorder. Odious crimes that spare neither women nor children grieve the countryside, the cities, and even the peaceful and hardworking provinces. The government has the responsibility to bring an end to this situation and is working toward that. But it is my duty to put you on guard personally against this threat of civil war that is destroying what the foreign war has spared to this point. Those who are pushing France onto this path are invoking the claim of liberating her. This alleged liberation is the most deceptive of the mirages that you could be tempted to believe … True patriotism is only expressed by total loyalty. Those who, from afar, are hurling you instructions for disorder want to lead France into a new adventure the outcome of which there can be no doubt. Frenchmen, whoever among you—public servant, serviceman, or simple citizen—participates in the Resistance compromises the future of the country. When the actual tragedy has ended and when, thanks to the defense of the Continent by Germany and to the united efforts of Europe, our civilization will be definitively sheltered from the danger of Bolshevism that weighs on her, the hour will come when France will again find her place.

  BUILDING AND BREACHING THE ATLANTIC WALL

  The Germans, however, had been preparing furiously to prevent that mirage of liberation. On November 3, 1943, Hitler had issued Directive Number 51 to his generals, which stated that while Germany had struggled for the previous two and a half years against the threat of Bolshevism, and “the threat from the East remains … an even greater danger looms in the West: the Anglo-American landing!… If the enemy here succeeds in penetrating our defenses on a wide front, consequences of staggering proportions will follow within a short time.” The Führer had concluded: “Only an all-out effort in the construction of fortifications, an unsurpassed effort that will enlist all available manpower and physical resources of Germany and the occupied area, will be able to strengthen our defenses along the coast in the short time that still appears to be left to us.” Hitler foresaw the need to counterattack quickly with mobile reserves in order to “throw the enemy back into the sea.” He ordered his generals to formulate and deliver their plans to him within twelve days.

  Hitler immediately asked Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox” who led the North Africa campaign, to make an inspection tour of the Atlantic defenses. Rommel surveyed the entire coast from the North Sea to the Pyrenees Mountains, and was shocked by what he saw. With the exception of the Pas-de-Calais area, where many expected the invasion to come, the fortifications were largely incomplete and entirely inadequate. Rommel was given command of the Atlantic defenses on January 15, 1944, and hurled himself into the task. Understanding that Allied air superiority would hinder movement of units inland, Rommel concluded that the decisive battle would be at the beaches, where the Allies would be weakest, and that he should concentrate his efforts on making them as impenetrable as possible. On every beach along the coast where a landing was possible, he ordered the erection of a phalanx of obstacles to impale or destroy landing craft—jagged steel triangles, sawtooth iron gates, and millions of metal stakes and concrete cones to which mines were attached. And if not destroyed by such obstacles, the craft would be held up long enough for them to be annihilated by shore batteries. And if some happened to get ashore and to offload troops and vehicles, they would emerge into preset zones of crossfire coming from concrete bunkers and pillboxes. And if some managed to advance up the beaches, Rommel had minefields laid at their paths of egress.

  Rommel also expected that an airborne assault would try to land gliders or parachutists behind the beaches. He ordered the flooding of fields for several miles inland, and had other open fields planted with “asparagus” stakes—steel poles that were strung with barbed wire that would shred a glider—or trip wires that would detonate when pulled.

  After several months of preparations, Rommel had gained confidence that his fixed defenses could hold up an invasion. The second key element in his view was to then counterattack while the Allies were bogged down on the beaches. On April 23, he wrote to Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the German armed forces High Command: “If, in spite of the enemy’s air superiority, we succeed in getting a large part of our mobile force into action in the threatened coast defense sectors in the first few hours, I am convinced that the enemy attack on the coast will collapse completely on its first day.”

  But across the Channel, American and British commanders were also confident that they had a plan that would succeed. They had arrived at the same conclusion as Rommel: that the battle would be won or lost on the beaches, and that is why they were planning the largest amphibious assault in history. They also thought that the Germans’ best chance to knock them back into the sea was to hurl their best Panzer divisions in a counterattack against the vulnerable beachheads as soon after the initial assault as possible, and that is why the Allies had developed extensive plans for the Resistance to thwart the movement of German units toward and near the beachhead. And unlike Rommel, who had to be prepared to defend every stretch of coastline along the entire western Atlantic coast from Denmark to the Spanish border at any time, the Allies had the decided advantage of knowing where, and controlling when, the landings would take place.

  The original target date, or Y-Day, for the landings, dubbed Operation Overlord, was set for May 1, 1944, at a summit attended by Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in Tehran in November 1943. The exact date, D-Day, was to be determined by landing conditions. In selecting where to land, the Pas-de-Calais area in northwest France was the most obvious, as it offered the shortest crossing, but it was so obvious that the Germans had built their strongest fortifications there. After investigating other options—Le Havre, Brittany, and the Cotentin Peninsula—and weighing the advantages and disadvantages, planners turned to the Calvados coast of Normandy. It offered thirty kilometers of gradually sloping open-sand beaches for landing craft; it had access to a road network inland; and, perhaps most important, it was not obvious. The main disadvantage was that it did not include a harbor where supplies could be offloaded quickly. Allied engineers came up with the idea of erecting two artificial ports (“mulberries”) that would be towed across the Channel and protected by sunken breakwaters. To keep the Germans guessing, elaborate deceptions were put in place to lead them to think that the landings were occurring elsewhere, as far away as Norway, or at the Pas-de-Calais. For the latter, deliberate leaks were made that indicated that Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, whom the Germans believed from his performance in North Africa to be the Allies’ best field commander, was in charge of an enormous buildup around Dover, across from the Pas-de-Calais. In fact, Eisenhower was holding Patton back for the land campaign to follow. The Free French were also to be held back until after the initial assault; indeed, they first had to be brought to England from Africa for outfitting and training.

  The initial landings were then to be an Anglo-American operation involving the British, Canadians, and Americans, but they would not take place in May. There was a shortage in landing craft. In his plans Eisenhower had doubled the number of divisions to participate in the initial assault on the first day. It became clear that there would not be enough boats available in May to handle the number of men and vehicles going ashore, so Y-Day was pushed back to June 1. On May 8, Eisenhower set D-Day to Y + 4: June 5, 1944.

  MORE ARRESTS, ANOTHER PROMOTION, AND MORE WAITING

  The month of May passed without any specific signal to the Resistance. Meanwhile, yet more of its leaders were arrested. On May 2, the head of the entire FFI in France, General Dejussieu, was captured by the Gestapo in Paris. The chief of the Paris region and Jacques Monod’s immediate superior, Pierre Pène (“Périco”), had also been arrested. The arrests necessitated more replacements and promotions: Gen.
Alfred Malleret (“Joinville”) took Dejussieu’s place as head of the FFI in France; Henri Tanguy (“Rol”), former head of the FTP, replaced Périco; and Monod (“Malivert”) was promoted to chief adjutant to the general staff of operations (Troisième Bureau) for the entire country.

  Monod asked Noufflard to become his secretary. It was a more interesting job than liaison agent, as she was able to read intelligence reports on factories, railroads, navigation canals, and enemy troop positions, but it also meant that she had even more work to do. She still made morning rounds, then spent the afternoon with “Malivert” at her house going over the information she had gathered. After more street meetings, she worked through the evening typing up orders and reports, burned the carbons and drafts, and tried to get to bed before two or three. She changed her alias from “Alix” to “Catherine Vernier.”

  Since Noufflard’s home had been frequented by so many people, she knew that it could be raided at any time. She and Monod worked out a simple signal so that he never went up to the door when she was not home. That way, if she was ever arrested, the Gestapo could not use her house to set a trap for others. She had a flowerpot that she put on the windowsill only when she was home. If someone came unexpectedly to the door, she moved it to the right, which would signal Monod to wait outside. If the situation was all clear, she moved it to the left.

  The streets of the capital became even more tense and dangerous. Fewer Parisians walked the boulevards, and those who did moved quickly. Métro stations were often closed, elevators did not work, and theaters were closed during the day. The Germans had installed machine-gun nests in basements of corner buildings so that they could sweep their fire across the streets and sidewalks. Rolls of barbed wire were deployed along the Tuileries and in the Place de la Concorde. Antitank barriers were installed on many streets. For Noufflard and her contacts, bicycling or walking through the city had become more perilous due to endless police controls and roundups. Streets and squares would be suddenly blocked off, and each pedestrian or bicyclist would be stopped; made to show identification, ration cards, and proof of employment; and searched. Those who did not pass inspection were hauled away to the Vel d’hiv, or worse. When carrying incriminating documents, Noufflard had to be constantly on the lookout for new control points.

  Monod also took extra precautions; he went completely underground. He told everyone he knew—his friends, those in the laboratory, and the concierge of his apartment building—that he was sick and had to leave the city to recuperate. In order to walk the streets without being recognized, he made up a disguise. He changed the color of his curly black hair and cut it very short. Instead of wearing his typical sheepskin coat without a hat, he changed to wearing a tailored coat, a black felt hat, gloves, and tinted glasses. He put his new look to the test at a street meeting with another FFI member. Monod was delighted when the man walked right by without recognizing him.

  Monod continued going back and forth to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt to visit Odette and the twins, only the train was no longer reliable. All of the damage to the rail system had made train journeys unpredictable. The short trip to Saint-Leu could take twenty minutes or four hours. So Monod bicycled home to the relative safety of the suburb. There were German troops stationed around Saint-Leu, air-raid alerts were very frequent, and shrapnel from flak and dogfights overhead sometimes fell on the roof, but there were no significant military targets close by that put the family at great risk. Nonetheless, Odette confessed to Jacques’s parents that she was having “apocalyptic visions” of what the invasion might bring, and that Jacques was “very tired.”

  He was tired, yes, but progress was being made. Arms were being dropped into his region and around France in anticipation of the landings. In the first part of 1944, many thousands of machine guns, pistols, and rifles, as well as bazookas, mortars, ammunition, and high explosives were dropped and distributed to fighters and saboteurs. Plan Vert had identified 571 rail targets near the coast and across the country that were to be demolished, and Plan Tortue marked thirty road cuts to be made once the invasion was under way. Monod and other commanders were awaiting the coded message to get their teams ready.

  Radio London frequently spoke openly about the anticipated landing (le débarquement). On May 10, listeners were told that “major events were preparing themselves.” On May 12, commentators announced a “state of alert” and declared that the watchwords were “discipline and preparation.” Citizens were instructed to make sure that they secured a supply of food. Subsequent broadcasts spoke of preparing for a national insurrection following the landings. On May 20, listeners received the first of several directives from a representative of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), telling them that the Allies counted on their cooperation at the time of the landing and asking them to begin taking note of enemy positions, supplies, and minefields. On May 27, they were instructed on their security and safety. Several times each day, the BBC also broadcast strings of “personal messages,” short phrases, many of which were meaningless and intended to confuse the Germans, but some of which were actual messages to Resistance groups, announcing arms drops, for example.

  On Thursday, June 1, a stream of almost two hundred personal messages was read and repeated, including:

  Ouvrez l’oeil et le bon.

  Je suis encore ingambe.

  Ma femme a l’oeil vif.

  That was it—“Ma femme a l’oeil vif” (My wife has a lively expression)—the specific message that Monod and the Paris region departmental commanders had been waiting for: the invasion was imminent. The scores of other messages were to other FFI regions and action teams. Noufflard heard the news that day when she met with a man she knew as “Pêchery.”

  It was time to make final preparations and to await the confirmatory signal that the invasion had been launched. On Saturday, June 3, Monod told Noufflard he was leaving Paris for Saint-Leu and would not be reachable again until Monday, when he had an FFI staff meeting to review preparations. On Sunday, Noufflard went to meet with a liaison agent for “Gildas” (Pierre Lefaucheux), who was Pêchery’s boss and the commander of the Department of the Seine, one of the four departments within the FFI’s greater Paris region. The young woman, Françoise, whom Noufflard had known since childhood, looked very upset.

  “Isn’t it terrible,” she said. “Know anything about Leroux?” Leroux was a mutual acquaintance in the organization.

  “No. What happened?” Noufflard replied.

  “I thought you knew, when you said you wanted to meet me,” Françoise said, and proceeded to tell Noufflard about a meeting the day before of chiefs of various sectors of the Paris region that had been raided by the Gestapo. Gildas’s wife had called Françoise when he did not return home, and they both had to move out of their homes immediately. Françoise did not know the names of all who were there and had been arrested, but it included at least Gildas and Pêchery.

  Noufflard was frantic. She knew that the Gestapo often recovered names and addresses, or the location of a meeting, from the papers or homes of those they arrested, or by torture. She had to find out what had happened to Leroux, and to warn him and others of the danger. She bicycled across Paris all day trying to find him or his address, but without success.

  By the next morning, June 5, she began to fret about Monod. She was pretty sure that at least one of those arrested knew about the meeting Monod had that day. She did not know how many, but the Gestapo had in fact arrested eleven people at Saturday’s meeting on rue Lecourbe. “What if he came back to Paris and went straight to his meeting without seeing me?” she worried. She knew that the meeting, at which Rol-Tanguy was also expected, could be extremely dangerous. The entire FFI organization around Paris was at risk.

  Monod appeared at last. He was shocked by the news of the arrests of so many heads. He quickly determined that Leroux was safe, and was in fact totally unaware of what had happened. He and Noufflard then proceeded carefully to the scheduled meeting in
Sceaux, a southern suburb, taking extra precautions to make sure that they weren’t followed. As Monod approached the street where the safe house was located, a thought occurred to him that he had pondered on the way to several previous meetings of Resistance chiefs: he could turn and walk into the meeting, and risk not seeing Odette and the children again, or just walk on by and go back home.

  He turned into the safe house. Then Rol-Tanguy arrived on his bicycle, followed by other officers of his staff. Noufflard was tremendously relieved to see that all had made it to the meeting, and that there was no sign of the police.

  Later that night, at 9:15 p.m., a BBC announcer speaking in a monotone broadcast another string of “personal messages” for six minutes, each sentence being repeated twice. Four of which were:

  Il est sévère mais juste.

  L’acide rougit le tournesol.

  Elle restera sur le dos.

  Allô, allô, James, quelles nouvelles.

  Each sentence was a specific, confirmatory message to the greater Paris FFI to execute Plan Vert (railroad), Plan Guérilla (guerrilla action), Plan Tortue (road), and Plan Violet (communications), respectively.

  The invasion was under way.