Granell handed out Spanish Republican tricolour flags of red, yellow and violet to sew on to his men’s uniforms. They were under French orders, but they knew who they were, and what they were fighting for.
They had been stationed in Rabat for a while, where they had been fitted out with US Sherman tanks, armoured cars and Jeeps. The Spanish gave each vehicle a name, often the name of a battle from the Civil War – words like ‘Brunete’ or ‘Teruel’ would be painted in white on the side. A group of anarchists wanted to call their armoured car Buenaventura Durruti after their charismatic leader, killed during the siege of Madrid in 1936, but the French would not allow it. They called it Les Pingouïns instead. Granell’s car got the name Los Cosacos – ‘the Cossacks’.
In the run-up to D-Day, La Nueve was transferred along with the rest of Leclerc’s division to Britain as part of the troop build-up. Billeted in Pocklington, west of York, the company waited for the moment when the invasion would begin, itching to be a part of the new chapter in the war.
20
Britain, France and Germany, Spring 1944
ON THE EVE of the Normandy landings Germany had over a million men available to fight in France. Even after three years of heavy fighting in the east the Wehrmacht was still a large, powerful and well-equipped military force. Many on the Allied side were anxious about the success of the landings. Just hours before D-Day British Chief of the Imperial General Staff Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke wrote in his diary of his concerns. ‘At the best’, he said, ‘it will fall so very very far short of the expectation of the bulk of the people, namely all those who know nothing of its difficulties. At the worst it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war.’
On the German side, by contrast, many thought they would win once the Allies finally landed. Generalleutnant Fritz Bayerlein, commander of the Panzer Lehr Division, was convinced that what had happened at Dieppe in 1942 was ‘proof that we could repel any invasion’.
Hitler himself was confident of success, betting on the destruction of the Allied forces in France so that he could get on with fighting the Soviets. He had adopted a defensive stance in the west, which went against the grain of German military thinking. A vast ‘Atlantic Wall’ of reinforced coastal positions had been erected from Norway down to the French border with Spain. Dunkirk, Calais, Boulogne, Le Havre, Cherbourg, Brest, La Rochelle and Bordeaux – all ports – had been designated ‘fortresses’ which would be defended to the last man.
Along the northern French coast – the most likely target for invasion – the German 15th Army, with a total of eighteen divisions, and the best men and materiel that the Wehrmacht could muster, was stationed around the Pas-de-Calais. To its left was the 7th Army, less well equipped, set to defend the Normandy sector.
Despite the optimism of some, there was a degree of nervousness about the coming invasion on the German side, however. Overall command was held by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, based at St Germain just outside Paris. He was unimpressed by the coastal defences, regarding them as ‘just a bit of cheap bluff’. The main assault, he was convinced, would come over the Pas-de-Calais, hence the positioning there of the 15th Army.
Von Rundstedt was not a lone commander in total control of his forces, however. The German command structure in the west was complicated, following Hitler’s liking for arrangements where more than one agency was performing the same task – a competitive set-up, according to Nazi post-Darwinian thinking, brought out the best in people.
Under von Rundstedt, in nominal control of the Panzer forces, was General Leo Freiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg. Meanwhile, in command of Army Group B, the German forces grouped across northern France and the man responsible for the coastal defences, was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Rommel wanted the Panzer divisions to be kept close to the seaboard for a quick response to the invasion. He was, however, only given control over three of the total six Panzer divisions available. Of the remainder, two were of the Waffen-SS: the 12th SS Panzer Division made up of boys of the Hitler Youth and with an average age of about 18; and the 1st SS Panzer Division LAH. Rommel had no say over how these key, crack formations would be deployed.
The three-way split of authority between von Rundstedt, von Schweppenburg and Rommel was further exacerbated by the fact that Hitler himself insisted on having final command over the Panzer divisions, convinced that the Allied landings would be ‘the sole decisive factor in the whole conduct of the war’.
Rommel and Hitler agreed, unlike von Rundstedt, that Normandy might be a target for the invasion. In the weeks leading up to the assault, Rommel reinforced his units there, his intuition, like the Führer’s, telling him that landings of some sort might happen along these beaches.
This confusion at command levels might favour the Allies’ chances come D-Day, but on the ground at least German soldiers were better equipped and in general more experienced than any of the ‘citizen soldiers’ that the Allies could send against them. A key element in this superiority was that of the Germans’ tanks.
By this point in the war the basic German workhorse tank was the Mark IV. It had a 75mm gun, armour up to 80mm thick and a top speed of just under 40 kph. In terms of numbers produced, it was the most important German tank in the conflict, and was equal, if not considerably superior, to the Shermans and Cromwells of the Allies. The Mark IV was already being superseded by an even better tank, however, one that is commonly regarded as the best produced by any country in the war: the Panther. This tank had a 75mm gun like the Mark IV, but also had three machine guns, armour up to 110mm thick and a top speed of 46 kph.
In addition, the Germans had Tiger tanks – heavier and slower than Panthers, but with thick armour and a massive 88mm gun that could easily take out any Allied opponent.
By comparison, Shermans, which were produced in great numbers by the Americans and were set to be used by all Allied forces in Normandy, had a short 75mm gun, armour only 51mm thick at its strongest point, and a top speed of just 38 kph. They were also tall, which made them relatively easy targets. Soldiers used to call them ‘Ronson Lighters’ owing to their unfortunate habit of catching fire once they had been hit.
After the landings had begun, Allied tank crews became all too aware of the superiority of the Germans’ tanks.
‘There was, I think, no British tank commander’, one officer wrote, ‘who would not happily have surrendered his “fringe benefits” for a tank in the same class as the German Panther or Tiger.’ Once a Sherman, Churchill or Cromwell had been hit by one of these steel monsters, the results were commonly fatal.
Even in lighter weaponry, the German soldier enjoyed a clear advantage. The MG42 machine gun – the ‘Spandau’ – could fire 1,200 rounds per minute, compared to an equivalent 500 rpm from a British Bren or BAR. Meanwhile, the German anti-tank weapon, the Panzerfaust, was also superior to the American bazooka or British PIAT.
Only in artillery and air power could the Allies claim superiority.
Battle hardened from the Eastern Front, the best fighting unit within the German military forces now based in the west – the 1st SS Panzer Division LAH – was regrouping in Belgium having finished its tour of duty in the Ukraine. Fighting the Soviets it had been reduced to a mere Kampfgruppe – an ill-defined ‘fighting group’ – after heavy losses had reduced it from a full division. Now, however, its numbers had swelled once more to around 20,000 men, and it had been re-equipped, reaching a near-capacity 103 Mark IV tanks and 67 Panthers.
The LAH was part of the 1st SS Panzer Corps, which also included the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitler Youth. The Corps was led by former LAH commander General Sepp Dietrich, a one-time petrol-pump attendant and Hitler’s erstwhile chauffeur and brutal sidekick. His place in the LAH had been taken by General Theodor ‘Teddy’ Wisch.
At the age of twenty-eight, Jochen Peiper had been promoted to Obersturmbannführer – Lieutenant Colonel – in charge of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment. His brutality had continued in the same vein after the
victory at Kharkov. In one encounter with Soviet forces his men killed a total of 2,280 Red Army men and took only three prisoners. The complete annihilation of the village of Pekarshchina using the now famous blowtorches was also added to his tally.
Hitler himself awarded Peiper his latest decoration and the following notice was published in German newspapers: ‘In grateful recognition of your heroic actions in the struggle for the future of our people, I award you the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves as the 377th member of the German Wehrmacht so honoured. Adolf Hitler.’
The fighting in the east was taking its toll on Peiper. Fuelling himself with coffee, cigarettes and Pervitin, a German-manufactured amphetamine, had caused his heart to suffer, leading to exhaustion and fainting spells. At the start of 1944 he began a lengthy period of leave, staying with his wife and two young children at their home in Bavaria. Sigi was heavily pregnant with their third child.
Late April saw Peiper back with his regiment, stationed in the Belgian town of Hasselt. The new recruits brought in to fill the LAH’s numbers needed to be trained up to the high, fanatical standards demanded by the Waffen-SS. As well as the hard training and familiarisation with weaponry, two one-hour education sessions were held each week to teach the troops about the American forces they were expecting to face. The USA, Peiper’s men were told, was a decadent country ruled by Jews, made morally corrupt by Jewish artists and Black music.
Peiper took this seriously and upheld the ‘moral’ values of the SS more than other commanders. Sexual relations were only for breeding purposes, to preserve the race. For Peiper there was none of the ‘Jewification’ – Verjudung – of the soul by giving in to the sex drive. He was even abstemious towards drink, following Himmler’s example of avoiding alcohol and prostitutes. The Reichsführer had trained as a young man in a Jesuit seminary and had taken many of the ideas of the Society of Jesus and applied them to his ‘Black Order’.
But the pep talks and air of monasticism were not enough for Peiper. Some of the new recruits were not up to standard. They needed teaching a lesson, an experience that would turn them into the ruthless, brutal and indoctrinated fighters that the SS expected them to be. An opportunity arose in May. Five young new soldiers were caught shirking their duties. The boys admitted, in addition, that while away from their posts they had stolen food, including some chickens and a ham. It was a relatively minor offence.
Nevertheless, a court martial found them guilty, and Peiper was merciless. On 28 May he had the five recruits executed by firing squad in front of the entire regiment. Afterwards, every man in the unit was forced to walk past the dead bodies where they had fallen to the ground. Some of them, then still in their teens, never forgot the experience.
It was an important moment for Peiper. When the war had started five years earlier, he had witnessed mass shootings in Poland. Now he was giving the same lessons to his men. The boys who had been shot were, in his mind, mere schlechtes Menschenmaterial – ‘bad human material’. They could be dispensed with. Meanwhile he had shown his soldiers the kind of mentality that was expected of them now that they were in the Waffen-SS, now that they were Peiper’s men.
Fully armed and psychologically prepared, the 1st SS Panzer Regiment, the leading tank formation within the LAH, with Peiper at its head, was now ready for anything that the Allies could send its way.
PART SIX
‘A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets a chance to put its pants on.’
Winston Churchill
21
London, Lisbon and Berlin, Spring 1944
IN THE SPRING of 1944 Pujol and Araceli were keeping their marriage going, but only just. Sexual fidelity had become a problem, with Araceli forming an attachment to an Allied naval officer later captured in action and made a prisoner of war. Pujol himself may also have been unfaithful. Real people were now playing the roles of some of the Garbo network’s fictional characters: Harris was effectively Pedro, Agent 3; Cyril Mills was Agent 5 in Canada; and Charlie Haines was Agent 4(1) the radio operator. Was there any parallel between Garbo’s mistress Agent J(5) and Sarah Bishop? Both of them were former War Office secretaries. Certainly Pujol had never had any difficulty finding girlfriends before meeting Araceli. His wife’s letters from Lisbon showed a jealous side to her – did Pujol give her reason to suspect him?
The complications of their sex life aside, Pujol and Araceli were no longer living in Hendon. In December 1943, after rumours had circulated of new secret German weapons designed to terrify Allied civilian populations, Kühlenthal warned his London agent to move out of the capital. No reason was given, but MI5 assumed that it was a reference to the imminent arrival of whatever the Germans had been cooking up over the past months. Pujol packed his bags and took his wife and two boys down to a hotel in Taplow, Buckinghamshire.
Others took the hint, and moved out of the centre, including Harris, who left his Mayfair home for Logan Place, a house with a large garden in Earl’s Court. But so far, no mysterious new bombs had fallen on London, and everything appeared set for Operation Fortitude.
Something was bothering Harris, however, a niggle in the back of his mind that refused to go away. There was a weak link in the Garbo chain, indeed in the entire double-cross system. In a bizarre role reversal, in 1943 Dusko Popov – MI5’s agent Tricycle – had asked his own Abwehr case officer, Johannes ‘Johnny’ Jebsen, to work for the British with him. Jebsen was an old friend of Popov’s, based in Lisbon, a chain-smoking, champagne-drinking devotee of P.G. Wodehouse who shared Popov’s penchant for the high life.
Like Popov, Jebsen was also anti-Nazi. It was becoming increasingly evident by this stage which way the war was going, so he agreed to Popov’s proposal – he too would become a double agent, still working for the Abwehr, but in reality acting for MI5 with the code name ‘Artist’.
It seemed a good idea, but brought a new problem: Jebsen’s recruitment meant that for the first time a fully paid-up member of German intelligence knew that Popov was a double agent. In addition, Jebsen had given indications to MI5 through Popov that the Abwehr in Madrid had a large spy network operating across Britain with its head – a Spaniard – based in London.
This was a clear reference to Garbo. Yet MI5’s failure to act on Jebsen’s intelligence meant that Jebsen would now have deduced that Garbo as well as Popov – Tricycle – was a front man for a British scheme to fool the Germans. In March 1944 he told the British that he thought that all of Kühlenthal’s ‘spies’ were in reality British double agents.
Jebsen knew too much. He might have changed sides by this stage, but he posed a threat. Could he really be trusted? What if he let slip a piece of information that led the Germans to unravel the vastly complex deception puzzle that MI5 had built up? His own position was under threat at times. What if he were suspected by the Germans themselves and forced to talk, perhaps under duress?
The British had to limit any potential damage, but there was not much they could do. They tried telling Jebsen that Kühlenthal was the kind of spymaster who frequently made up much of his ‘intelligence’. It was not MI5 who was feeding disinformation to him, but the Abwehr official himself who was liberally peppering his reports to Berlin with ‘facts’ drawn from his own imagination.
It worked, to a degree, but there was no guarantee that Jebsen would believe them. Harris in particular was nervous about the threat Jebsen posed.
‘Unless steps are immediately taken to cease contact with Artist completely or evacuate him forthwith from Spain, then grave risks of blowing the Garbo case are inevitable.’
So much was riding on the success of Garbo and the double-cross system as a whole, that he even suggested ‘liquidating’ the Garbo case before it was too late, otherwise all the double agents might be in danger.
The men in charge of double-cross – John Masterman of the Twenty Committee, Tar Robertson of B1A, and the head of MI5’s B section Guy Liddell – refused. They should wait and see, they sa
id. Best not be too hasty.
The blow came in early May.
Jebsen was not feeling comfortable with his Abwehr masters. Doubts had been raised about some of his financial dealings while he had also been putting his nose into internal affairs that they thought did not concern him. So when he was asked to travel to Biarritz to meet a superior officer for a meeting about Popov’s expenses, he smelt a rat and made his excuses.
Soon after, however, still in Lisbon, Jebsen visited the German Embassy to collect a medal for his war work – the Kriegsverdienstkreuz First Class. This was meant to be a moment of vindication, when all doubts about him within the service were expelled. Instead, once inside, he was punched unconscious, sedated and thrown into a trunk placed in the back of a car with diplomatic plates. The car was then driven over the border, across Spain to France. From there he was taken to Berlin, and placed in the Gestapo prison on Prinz Albrecht Strasse for interrogation.
MI5 first became aware of Jebsen’s disappearance on 6 May, when Bletchley transcripts showed that the other German intelligence agency in the city, the SD, was getting worried about the fact that they could not find him. The following day, the British learned that he had been kidnapped and taken to Berlin.
For MI5 it was a crisis: their worst fears had come true. Johnny Jebsen, the man who knew too much, was now in the hands of the Gestapo, almost certainly being tortured to make him talk. The question was, would he blow Tricycle, Garbo and the entire double-cross operation?
Harris was beside himself. After years of preparation, and less than a month before D-Day, everything hung in the balance. He suggested liquidating Tricycle immediately. That way, he said, a cut-out could be placed between Popov and Garbo. The assumption was that Jebsen would betray Tricycle at the very least. And once the Germans started comparing Tricycle and Garbo’s intelligence, they would quickly see that the two agents were saying virtually the same thing – namely that the build-up of Allied troops in south-east England was for a major assault on the Pas-de-Calais. The natural conclusion, according to Harris, would be that if Popov was feeding them misleading information, then so was Garbo.
The Spy with 29 Names Page 16
