Postscript: Fortitude and the Spies
‘In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’
Winston S. Churchill
This account has addressed the military aspects of Overlord. Yet, with the passage of time and declassification of documents, it has become increasingly apparent that there was an additional reason for the triumph of Overlord from D-Day onwards. In parallel to the uniformed activities we have examined, both sides used spies in attempts to lever the maximum advantage against their foes. Earlier narratives, including for example Defeat in the West, The Struggle for Europe and The Longest Day, and all the major memoirs, from Eisenhower and Churchill to Bradley and Montgomery, were unaware or unable to reveal that alongside the more tangible facets of Operation Fortitude, a network of double agents were highly successful in inducing Hitler to order a series of mistaken moves based on false intelligence. Several relevant aspects of the espionage war are analysed here, and although in every case the results were not obvious until well after D-Day, their success meant that the Normandy landings would not be defeated.
Dressed ‘in richly embroidered brocade, shoes with turned up toes, a fez with a tassel, and an immense scimitar’, Elyesa Bazna was the valet of the British ambassador to Turkey. By day, he guarded his master’s door, but at night the thirty-nine-year-old Kosovar Muslim rifled his master’s safe. As adept a cameraman as he was a locksmith, Bazna photographed Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen’s most sensitive documents and sold the negatives to the local SD agent in Ankara for large sums (alas for him, partly paid in forged Sterling notes).1 The German embassy code-named him ‘Cicero’, after the Roman orator, for his ‘astonishing eloquence’. Not that Bazna was a gifted communicator – but his documents spoke volumes about British strategic thinking.
He copied diplomatic notes of the Roosevelt–Stalin–Churchill Tehran Conference and it was through him the Germans first learned of the code name ‘Overlord’. Following a telegram to Churchill on 13 December 1943, reporting that the Turks were demanding ‘impossible amounts of armaments’ before they allowed Britain the use of Turkish airbases or would enter the war on the Allied side, Eden replied, ‘To sum up. Our object is to get Turkey into the war as early as possible, and in any case to maintain a threat to the Germans from the eastern end of the Mediterranean, until Overlord is launched.’2
The document also carried the BIGOT security classification, prompting the Germans to look for further documents of this type. However, this memo revealed no operational details, and Cicero’s information fell victim to the Reich’s aforementioned ‘stove-piping’ of intelligence – it was not widely circulated. Even within Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office, due to the volume and clarity of Cicero’s documentation, opinion was divided as to whether he was a double agent – though in all probability he was not.3 Intelligence from other Axis-leaning powers was important, too: on 30 May 1944, Finnish codebreakers decoded a US diplomatic message indicating that Ira Hirschmann (an influential Washington businessman and War Labor Board executive) would be in Europe with Overlord on 6 June. However, Finland was neither a willing ally of the Axis powers nor a permanent belligerent, and although their intelligence service realised this might have been referring to the Allied invasion, they did not pass it on.4
Other formal Axis partners, though enthusiastic, proved to be a liability. In November 1943, the Japanese ambassador Lieutenant General Hiroshi Oshima was given a four-day conducted tour of the Atlantic Wall fortifications; on his return to Berlin, he wrote a twenty-page report of his visit, detailing the location of every German division, as well as its manpower and weaponry. He noted obstacles, armament of turrets on bunkers, and available mobile forces. On 27 May 1944, Hitler discussed with him the belief that Allied ‘diversionary attacks’ would take place in Norway, Denmark, south-west France and the Mediterranean coast, with a major diversionary assault against Normandy or Brittany. Once consolidated, it would be followed by the main attack in the Calais area.5
Three days after D-Day, he confirmed to Tokyo (copied to his opposite numbers in Istanbul, Sofia, Madrid and Lisbon), ‘because one separate Army Group is stationed on the southeast coast of Britain, it is expected that plans will be made for this to land in the Calais and Dunkirk areas’. He would also communicate FUSAG’s demise, reporting on 25 October 1944 that it had been disbanded, due to the success of the other formations already on the Continent.6 Oshima meticulously wrote detailed reports on all he saw and heard, which he transmitted to Tokyo using the Japanese ‘Purple’ diplomatic code. Alas for him, this had been broken by American cryptanalysts in 1940; consequently, much of the intelligence gained by Eisenhower on the Atlantic Wall defences came from Oshima’s reports rather than from Enigma decodes at Bletchley Park; they also confirmed that Hitler was taken in by the notion that Normandy would be a diversionary assault.
By 1944 most German spies had been turned by the British – we will come to them shortly – but there was one not controlled by the Allies: Paul Fidrmuc alias ‘Ostro’, a former Austrian military officer living in Portugal. Able to speak six languages besides his native German – English, Italian, French, Danish, Spanish and Portuguese – he was a natural candidate for espionage. In 1940, Fidrmuc, a member of the Nazi Party, moved to neutral Portugal, garnering US and British intelligence for the Nazis, through a fabricated network of non-existent subagents – for which he was paid a good deal of money.
The British were very aware of his activities and astutely fed him fake information in the hope of discrediting him, though in February 1944 it was noted he had recently been awarded the Iron Cross. His file overview at the UK National Archives reads, ‘a freelance Abwehr agent in Lisbon, whose prolific reporting was based on gossip, speculation and press reports. Most of it was inaccurate; however, in the run-up to Overlord his reports were sufficiently close to the truth, that he was for a time considered as a candidate for elimination’.7 It is rare to find in official archives such a blatant reminder that this was total war, not a time for the normal niceties of liberal democracies, and occasionally such extreme measures were required.
In fact, Ostro survived the war and was debriefed afterwards because his information was occasionally very accurate. According to information he’d received from ‘a staffer of Field Marshal Montgomery’ – almost certainly non-existent – the Allies had massed ‘twenty thousand soldiers for an invasion in early June on the Manche (i.e. Cherbourg) peninsula’. Isigny and Carentan were mentioned as areas for attention – but as well as the Channel Islands. Maybe the result of guesswork and speculation, and without knowing it was the intelligence coup of the century, Ostro sent this report marked ‘urgent’ to Berlin on 1 June 1944, where it was added to a huge pile of others from many sources – and there it sat.8
If the conceptual component of Operation Fortitude comprised the Quicksilver I and II notion of Patton’s FUSAG and associated phoney radio transmissions, its physical expression was the Quicksilver III fake landing craft fleet and other bogus military equipment strewn across south-east England, and Quicksilver IV bombing of the Pas-de-Calais defences. However, dominating Fortitude was the moral – human – dimension of key German agents in Britain leaking information to Berlin. This was Operation Bodyguard, yet another aspect of the Fortitude plan, and devised by the London Controlling Section (LCS), a secret department established in 1941 to coordinate Allied strategic military deception, answering directly to the War Cabinet.
The LCS realised it could not conceal the build-up of forces in southern England, and chose instead to use German agents – who were in fact working for the British – to mask the target of the invasion. Bodyguard was approved on Christmas Day 1943, being agreed in outline a month earlier at the Tehran Conference. Its script – generally that Normandy was a diversionary landing, with the main effort arriving across the Pas-de-Calais forty-five days later – would be carefully fed to the Germans over time. Amongst the members of the LCS was the prolific, bestselling author Dennis Wheatley. Though initially only an RAF flight lieutenant (later wing commander), he used his fame to disarm sceptical high-ranking officers, while his fertile imagination and writing skills crafted many a plausible scenario to ‘leak’ to Berlin.
The LCS worked closely with ‘R’ Force at the 21st Army Group, and General Thorne in Edinburgh, who was also in charge of Fortitude North. Both required notice of every fake military location or movement – and, of course, genuine ones – to be disclosed to the Germans, so the necessary imitation tanks, guns, aircraft or landing craft could be readied in case of Luftwaffe overflight, and scripted military radio transmissions prepared for the benefit of Wehrmacht listeners. Nothing could be left to chance, and BIGOT-cleared officer despatch riders were daily travelling between headquarters – the operation was so sensitive that even encoded radio transmissions were forbidden – to ensure there were no lapses in the deception story.
The principal misinformation would come from three double agents code-named ‘Brutus’, ‘Tricycle’ and ‘Garbo’. All were controlled by Colonel J. C. Masterman’s highly secretive ‘Twenty Committee’, named after the Roman numerals XX, also signifying a double-cross, which met 226 times during the war and acted as the clearing house to review all the true and the false information passed to the Abwehr. ‘Brutus’ was a diminutive Polish officer called Roman Czerniawski, alias Walenty, Hubert or Armand, who had successfully run the Interallié Resistance network in France, was arrested by the Abwehr in Montmartre, but persuaded his interrogator, Feldwebel Hugo Bleicher, to send him to England as a German agent in 1942.
Despite the seeming naivety of Czerniawski’s approach, Bleicher, his identity concealed by the moniker ‘Colonel Heinrich’, was one of the most effective Abwehr agents operating in France against the Resistance and hoped to bask in the reflected glory of his man in London. However, once across the Channel, Czerniawski immediately offered his services to the British – technically making him a triple agent – who code-named him Brutus, unsure as to whether he might switch sides yet again, and stab them in the back. Yet ‘Brutus has proved one of the most outstandingly successful double agents’, one of his MI6 handlers wrote in documents declassified only in 2018.9
‘Tricycle’, so named because of the three spy networks he supposedly ran, was the wealthy Serbian lawyer Dušan Popov, a pre-war student in Germany and from 1940 an agent of the Abwehr, who code-named him ‘Duško’. Popov moved freely around Nazi-occupied Europe and, when later recruited by MI6, between London and neutral Portugal under the guise of an import–export businessman.10 Brutus compiled fake reports on Polish, Free French and American airborne units, while in February 1944 Tricycle hand-delivered a list of FUSAG units to his German contact in Lisbon. Both continued to submit data concocted by Allied counterintelligence that contained enough truth to make them believable, slowly creating the picture of Patton’s army group forming in south-east England throughout the spring of 1944, alongside Montgomery’s in the south and west.11
The extent and detail of these regular reports fooled both the SD and Abwehr, but there is evidence that Oberst von Roenne of the German Army’s Foreign Armies West was more sceptical, suspecting that FUSAG was not what the double agents said it was. However, Roenne, with much of the Abwehr’s senior hierarchy, was disillusioned with the war, wanted peace with the western Allies, and thus had his own reasons to support the exaggerated estimates of Allied strength.12 Other UK-based double agents, such as ‘Tate’ (the Danish-born Wulf Schmidt) and ‘Treasure’ (the Russian-French Nathalie Sergueiew) also supported the Fortitude ruse, the former reporting fake railway movements of FUSAG units towards the coast, and the latter claiming to have a boyfriend in the notional US Fourteenth Army.
‘Bronx’ (Peruvian Elvira Chaudoir) further confused the Germans with Operation Ironside, which hinted that a two-division landing might take place in the Bordeaux region – in order to fix the 11th Panzer Division stationed there.13 In New York, another double agent, ‘Albert van Loop’ (in reality the Dutchman Walter Koehler), allowed the FBI to feed the Abwehr information in his name about the fake FUSAG divisions that were embarking on America’s east coast, bound for the British Isles.14
The final piece of the espionage jigsaw lay with ‘Garbo’. Known to the Abwehr as ‘Alaric Arabel’, the British recognised the sheer creativity of the Spanish fantasist and double agent Juan Pujol García by code-naming him after ‘the best actor in the world’, Greta Garbo. Perhaps the most inventive and influential of wartime double agents, Garbo had been recruited by the Germans in 1940 when posing as a fanatically pro-Nazi Spanish government official and was instructed to move to Britain to spy. Instead he relocated to Lisbon, sending in fake reports gleaned from newsreels, reference books and magazines in the Lisbon Public Library.15 MI6 – for whom he had wanted to work all along – became aware of his misinformation campaign, recruited him and moved García and his family to London in 1942, in spite of considerable opposition from Mrs García.16
With British help, Garbo concocted a network of twenty-seven fictional agents who fed him titbits of information about Allied shipping and troop movements which he reported to his Abwehr control in Madrid, who relayed them to Berlin. His messages were a blend of facts of limited military value, fiction, and valuable military intelligence artificially delayed. Between January 1944 and D-Day the ‘Garbo network’ bombarded their German paymasters with over five hundred radio messages (four transmissions a day), but Garbo’s key transmission was sent after, not before, D-Day.17
On 8 June, Brutus would assess that the future boundary between Montgomery and Patton ‘will be roughly along the Seine’ – hinting at a Pas-de-Calais assault.18 The same day, Garbo began to transmit information on those units already identified by the Germans as being in Normandy, pointing out that many FUSAG units had not participated in the invasion, and therefore the ‘first’ landing should be considered a diversion.
After personal consultation on 8 June in London with my agents, Jonny, Dick and Dorick, I am of the opinion, in view of the strong troop concentration in southeast and eastern England, which are not taking part in present operations, that these operations are a diversionary manoeuvre designed to draw off enemy reserves in order to make an attack at another place. In view of the continued air attacks on the concentration area mentioned, which is a strategically favourable position for this, it may very probably take place in the Pas-de-Calais, particularly since in such an attack the proximity of air bases will facilitate the operation by providing continued strong air support.19
This was a high-risk stratagem, but Garbo had already established his credentials. However, no one in the Allied team realised that his transmissions were being shown to Hitler personally. This last message was forwarded to Hitler’s Berchtesgaden headquarters at 1030 hours on 9 June. Oberst Friedrich-Adolf Krummacher, the senior Abwehr Verbindungsoffizier (Abwehr liaison officer, now working for Schellenberg) on the Führer’s staff, had underlined in red the words ‘diversionary manoeuvre designed to draw off enemy reserves in order to make a decisive attack in another place’ and added the marginalia ‘confirms the view already held by us that a further attack is expected in another place (Belgium?)’, while Jodl had underlined the words ‘in southeast and eastern England’ in his signature green ink.20
This signal – found at Berchtesgaden after the war, and marked by Jodl as having been shown to Hitler – has been wildly described as the ‘message that changed the war’. Although some able historians conclude the battle for Normandy was already lost, Garbo’s signal would certainly have had an effect on the campaign. On 8 June, under pressure from Rundstedt and Rommel, OKW had released the 116th and 1st SS Panzer and two infantry divisions from the Fifteenth Army and directed them to Normandy. However, at 0730 hours on 10 June this was countermanded, when Generalfeldmarschall Keitel ordered, ‘As a consequence of certain information, a state of alarm has been declared for the Fifteenth Army in Belgium and North France.’ The same day’s intelligence summary parroted Garbo’s message: ‘The fact that not one of the formations still standing by in the southeast and east of England has been identified in the present operation, strengthens the supposition that the strong Anglo-American forces which are still available, are being held back for further plans.’21
On 11 June, the FUSAG threat was still being devoured whole, as Garbo was informed, ‘The reports received in the last week have been confirmed almost without exception, and are to be described as especially valuable. The main line of investigation in the future is to be the enemy group of forces in the south eastern and eastern England.’ A month later, on 8 July – still under the sway of Garbo – Hitler would order that reserves behind the Fifteenth Army’s front were to remain ‘until such time as it can be ascertained whether the American Army Group [FUSAG] is going to undertake another landing operation, or whether its forces will follow Montgomery’s Army Group into the present beachhead’.22 Of course, no attack would ever come in the Calais area, and some of the success of keeping the Fifteenth Army there can be attributed to one man: Garbo.
How to measure the success of Fortitude – or indeed whether it was successful? In the fixing of Salmuth’s Fifteenth Army at Calais, instead of it immediately decamping and streaming straight to the aid of Dollmann’s Seventh Army in Normandy, the deception campaign, with all its subsidiary aspects, notably Quicksilver and Bodyguard, would appear to have been a victorious formula. Indeed, as a direct consequence of Garbo’s signal received at Berchtesgaden on 9 June, Theodor Wisch’s 1st SS Panzer Division was switched from moving to Normandy, to an assembly area west of Bruges in Belgium, a decision admittedly reversed within the week. Graf von Schwerin’s 116th Panzer was retained on the Seine, between the two armies, where it would remain until late July; and Kurt Chill’s 85th Infantry Division, stationed north of the Somme, had its orders to move to Normandy cancelled.23 On the same day, 9 June, when Dollmann’s Seventh Army asked Army Group ‘B’ for reinforcements, Rommel’s response was to refuse, claiming expectation of a ‘big landing higher up the coast in the course of the next few days’.24 However, this is not the whole story.
Do we attach too much importance to Garbo and his colleagues? The traditional narrative of Normandy was that the Fifteenth Army had to be prevented at all costs from moving swiftly to the invasion front. But had it arrived earlier and en masse, would it have made a difference? Even if it had been ordered to march west, this would have been beyond the Fifteenth’s ability for at least four reasons. First, the majority of infantry divisions within Salmuth’s Army were ‘static’ formations. Second, they were mostly not battle-hardened, comprising some surprisingly young and old soldiers, many convalescing from wounds received in Russia. Third, as with the Seventh Army’s static units, those designed to lurk in concrete emplacements for purely defensive purposes lacked vehicular transport, much support weaponry and possessed a bewildering mixture of hardware seized from conquered nations. And finally, of Salmuth’s formations, the 17th and 18th Luftwaffe Field Divisions were still coping with the notion of air force personnel being rerolled as infantry, were half the size of their army counterparts, but had more motor transport and better anti-aircraft guns.
The ribbons and decorations on Obergefreiter Otto Schmidt’s tunic showed him to be a much-decorated veteran of the Russian Front; his black wound badge was a reminder of the shell splinters he had received in Crimea – he would receive more in Normandy. Schmidt remembered his relief at being posted to the 85th Division in March 1944 on the Channel coast, near the old battlefield of Crécy. His battery commander had a fixation about it, and kept reminding them that they would see off the Allies, as the English had beaten the French there in the summer of 1346. Yet Schmidt was far more worried about a comb-out and transfer back to the Eastern Front than an appearance of the English on his doorstep. Their day-to-day concerns were the increasingly frequent attacks by Allied aircraft, and looking after their horses. ‘Without our loyal friends [the horses], we in the 7th Battery were powerless to do anything,’ Schmidt argued. He thought his 185th Artillerie-Regiment was ‘hopelessly understrength and ill-prepared for the invasion; Russia was an equal man-to-man struggle, but in the West, we were up against endless machines: we had no machinery and no transportability, so we couldn’t win.’25
Even those allegedly mobile infantry formations sent to Normandy fielded only 10,000 or fewer men. Each had earlier been labelled ‘static’ but given a few vehicles, this somehow transformed them into ‘fully mobile’ units. Ordered to Normandy on 6 June, Generalmajor Diestel’s 346th Division in the vicinity of Le Havre had, in the words of his report to Rommel, ‘one regiment completely mobile; the other had one horse-drawn battalion, the men rode bicycles, and the artillery regiment was horse-drawn’.26 Its total strength was 9,534. The 326th Infantry at Le Touquet was designated as an ‘improvised mobile division’ and, using confiscated French vehicles, despatched westwards, crossing the Seine on 22 July. The 331st Infantry had only just returned from Russia and was reorganising at Boulogne when the invasion began; they belatedly started their journey to Normandy on 28 July. The newly formed 84th and 85th Infantry Divisions, raised in February 1944, had just been ‘declared operational, having reached their reduced establishment strength of eight thousand men each’ (according to an Ultra intercept of 17 May).27 None of these Fifteenth Army formations would have made much difference to the battle in Normandy, whenever they arrived.
Once the campaign was under way, all German deployments – whose intentions had often been plotted by Ultra – were harassed continuously and very effectively from the air. This brake on movement was compounded by the effectiveness of the Resistance’s Tortue (sabotage of roads) and Vert (damage to railways) plans. Together these all served to slow down – but did not prevent – German arrivals in Normandy, who also trickled into the battle space, rather than arriving as concentrated units. The 1st SS and 116th Panzer Divisions stationed with the Fifteenth Army certainly worried the Allies, and the former was very potent, battle-hardened and fully mobile. However, Gerhard, Graf von Schwerin’s 116th, the Windhunds, was a different matter. They had been formed only in March 1944 by merging two formations, the 179th Reserve Panzer with the 16th Panzergrenadier Division, decimated at Stalingrad. It was not ready for battle on D-Day, possessing 13,621 personnel, 252 half-tracks and 86 Panzer IVs (half its allocation of tanks), had only twenty-nine operational guns in its artillery regiment, no flak detachment, and was desperately short of trucks.28
Its Panther tank battalion was still training in Germany; when ordered into battle, it had to borrow those of another panzer division. With impaired mobility and harassment from the air, if ordered to Normandy on D-Day, they would probably have arrived in separate groups – as indeed they did when they eventually arrived in July. If we accept Rommel’s dictum that the fight would be won or lost on the beaches, it seems unlikely that these poorly-equipped panzer and infantry divisions, dribbling into the western battle space of Normandy any earlier than they actually arrived, would have made much difference against the crushing preponderance of air and materiel superiority the Allies had assembled.
Furthermore, it will be recalled that the earlier Allied air forces’ Transportation Plan – apart from pulverising the French railroad system – had destroyed the thirty-six significant bridges over the Seine between Paris and Rouen before 6 June. As a result, all reinforcements from beyond Normandy to the east would have to arrive ponderously, usually on foot, by road and ferry. Finally, the Fifteenth Army was critically short of fuel: the Transportation Plan had also contributed towards difficulties in the distribution of benzin, Keitel complaining on 1 May about delays in the repairs of railways; on the tenth, he was asking OKW if he could use POWs to repair railway damage.29 On 2 May, the 12th SS Panzer Division communicated a lack of fuel for training – so even those formations with vehicles were beginning to be constrained from using them. It was on 8 May that OB West with great foresight informed Berlin, ‘The enemy is already effectively hampering our supply and troop movements, and in the event of active operations, would hamper the latter in particular.’30
Thus, although most of Salmuth’s divisions were only tardily sucked into the Normandy campaign, this was not – or not only – because Fortitude induced them to linger around Calais, but also because they couldn’t actually move anywhere very fast.
It should also be remembered that there was another purpose entirely for the defence of Calais, to which Hitler had referred in his Führerbefehl No. 51 of 3 November 1943: the protection of his V-weapon sites, which would begin their deadly trade of hurling buzz bombs at London a week after D-Day, on 13 June.
This, however, overlooks the evidence of OKW’s deployment of other German divisions towards the invasion. Careful analysis of the mobile infantry divisions based in southern France with Blaskowitz’s Army Group ‘G’ reveals that four were sent to Normandy. These travelled over longer distances, when fuel was in short supply, and were despatched before the (much nearer) mobile formations in Salmuth’s Fifteenth Army. They were the 276th Infantry Division, despatched from Biarritz on 14 June; the Narbonne-based 277th, sent on 23 June; the 271st, which departed Montpelier on 30 June; and the 272nd Infantry Division at Perpignan, which started out on 2 July. Thus it seems that OKW were hedging their bets, in feeding divisions to Normandy from southern France, also others from Brittany, ahead of those from the Pas-de-Calais. This also emphasised the success of Fortitude North, which not only fixed German units in Norway fearing an invasion there, but prevented their redeployment to France.31
While the double agents reinforced the Quicksilver aspects of Fortitude, what no one could anticipate was whether and how much Brutus, Tricycle and Garbo – and the others – would be believed. The results were surprising. Operation Fortitude, and its Bodyguard subcomponents, are normally lauded as a triumph of Allied planning. And yet, despite the many pointers from methodical signals analysis, and penetration of the French Resistance, the Reich’s internecine war between its own intelligence agencies masked any significant achievements it might have made.
What is astonishing is the often overlooked admission in one official British record that ‘the OKW Lagebericht – daily intelligence summary – provides no single example of the wireless deception programme having brought any item in the Fortitude story to the knowledge of the Germans in the first instance’.32 So the vast Quicksilver II operation – which included signaller John Emery from HMS Largs and Corporal Les Phillips transmitting their scripted phoney signals that supported the notion of FUSAG – was not even noticed, except when double agents brought it to their attention.33
Even more surprisingly, neither have any OKW, Luftwaffe or other German documents come to light indicating the extensive presence of Quicksilver III’s imitation landing craft erected by Lieutenant Colonel White of the Royal Engineers and his colleagues, that Ray Marshall remembered seeing in the Thames estuary – or the other military weaponry in south-east England created by Arthur Merchant and ‘R’ Force, the Shepperton Film Studios, the 603rd Camouflage Engineers and 406th Engineer Combat Company. Thus this aspect, too, of Fortitude’s fake invasion preparations seems to have been completely missed by the Germans, though much written about in the extensive literature on D-Day.34
Overall, it seems that Fortitude was a qualified success, mostly (and surprisingly) in terms of the contribution of Masterman’s agents – rather than the more well-known aspects of FUSAG and Quicksilver. As one of the LCS members later crowed, ‘every phase in the story can be directly attributed to the three double-cross agents, Garbo, Brutus and Tricycle’.35 The Führer’s inclination previously had been to accept Normandy as the Schwerpunkt, despite his asides to the Japanese. This is not to say that FUSAG and Quicksilver should have been abandoned: they were, after all, the insurance policy against any doubts about the veracity of Garbo and the others – and vice versa.
The London Controlling Section was fortunate, and could not have known in advance that in the ivory tower that was Hitler’s headquarters at the Berghof in Berchtesgaden – the lair of the mad mountain king, surrounded by the Bavarian Alps and far from the military bustle of Berlin or the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) HQ in East Prussia – Hitler’s whim would induce him to believe Garbo over the SD and Wehrmacht’s patiently assembled mass of military intelligence.
Garbo’s credibility remained sufficiently high for a surprise signal from Berlin, dated 29 July 1944: ‘With great happiness and satisfaction I am able to advise you today that the Führer has conceded the Iron Cross to you for your extraordinary merits.’ It seemed only right under the circumstances to reciprocate, and in a secret ceremony in December, Garbo was made a Member of the British Empire (MBE) by King George VI, who also awarded Brutus and Tricycle each an Order of the British Empire (OBE).
In May 1984, the author Nigel West identified and tracked down the elusive Juan Pujol García, then living undercover in Venezuela. In recognition of his specific contribution to Fortitude and Overlord, he was immediately flown to London ‘to attend a private audience with HRH The Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace’, went on to see some old comrades at the Special Forces Club, and on 6 June 1984 was escorted to Normandy to tour the invasion beaches.36 ‘Connoisseurs of double cross’, wrote Sir John Masterman in 1945, ‘have always regarded the Garbo case as the most highly developed example of their art’ – an unintended pun, for Garbo, the supreme example of the double-cross, had indeed been awarded two crosses.37
It is easy to assume that the Normandy landings have always been celebrated with the dignity, pomp and circumstance we have come to expect from recent commemorations. However, this was not so until 1984, when President Ronald Reagan decided to make the fortieth anniversary of D-Day the highlight of a three-nation tour. He would deliver a speech using the lessons of 6 June 1944 to remind the free world of the contemporary threat from Soviet Russia. To his direction, a new White House speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, crafted a stirring address that emphasised the deeds of James Rudder and his Rangers in overcoming adversity on the Pointe du Hoc.
Noonan also suggested that the key moment of Reagan’s visit be moved from the traditional setting of the Colleville military cemetery to the Pointe. Appropriately, on 5 June 1984 present-day Rangers re-enacted the famous climb – accompanied by Herman Stein, formerly of Company ‘F’, who insisted, at sixty-three, on doing again what he had accomplished once before, aged twenty-three. On reaching the top, Stein was movingly given a bear hug by his old company commander, Captain Otto Mansy; the drama of their endeavour coincided perfectly with the dramatic backdrop of the landscape and coastline.
It was Ronald Reagan who first instituted the tradition of US Presidential attendance in Normandy for key D-Day anniversaries. In 1984, on the shrewd advice of speechwriter Peggy Noonan, the main focus of commemoration moved from the cemetery at Colleville, symbolising sacrifice, to the Pointe-du-Hoc, representing achievement – in this case, of Rudder and his Rangers. It was an occasion at which the author was present. Here the Reagans are pictured viewing the Channel from the German observation post, on top of which sits the Rangers’ memorial. Since the Reagans’ visit, D-Day celebrations have evolved into unofficial world summit meetings, first with German and latterly Russian presence. (Getty Images)
That Reagan’s visit was a personal pilgrimage, not just politics, was evidenced by one of those invited to join him, Kathryn Morgan Ryan, widow of Cornelius, who had died of cancer ten years earlier. Her Irish-American husband, author of The Longest Day, had been part of John F. Kennedy’s campaign team in the 1960 election campaign, and had remained close to his Democrat administration. Thus, although no political friend of the Republican Reagan, Kathryn Ryan’s presence underlined Reagan’s personal fascination with the Second World War, respect for its veterans, and his belief that he should do all in his power to prevent World War Three. Others present included another widow, Margaret Rudder, in addition to sixty-two of her late husband’s surviving Rangers.
Reagan was the first president to attend a D-Day anniversary in person; it has since become a tradition, but none of his predecessors had made the journey. Eisenhower in office turned his invitation down, perhaps understandably due to the slower nature of air transport and more primitive means of communication in those Cold War days. Instead, he issued a tenth-anniversary statement that echoed contemporary East–West tensions, talking of ‘the spirit of that wartime union, if some of the peoples who were our comrades-in-arms have been kept apart from us, that is cause for profound regret, but not for despair’.
Lyndon B. Johnson at the twentieth anniversary addressed the 1964 Normandy delegation led by Omar Bradley: ‘Your country remembers and will never forget, the resolve born on that D-Day. When this nation has stood for two thousand years, we shall not have forgotten the lands where our sons lie buried, nor the cause for which our sons died. Where we have commitments to the cause of freedom, we shall honour them – today, tomorrow and always.’ The shadow of Vietnam then pushed the Second World War into the background in the minds of a generation drafted once again to fight an overseas war, though one whose cause was more opaque.
Reagan’s bold departure from the norm would also represent the first major occasion, since before Vietnam had torn America apart, when the nation could acknowledge its Second World War veterans and celebrate their achievements. More recently, Barack Obama at the sixty-fifth anniversary in 2009 was able to cite his grandfather, a US Army supply sergeant stationed in southern England, crossing the Channel six weeks after D-Day. Reagan’s 1984 message would echo a piece written by Thomas L. Wolf in the Smithsonian magazine, ‘D-Day – the first time when the free world hurled its might, its treasure and the lives of its young men and women against the most powerful fortress ever erected: Festung Europa’.38
Also incorporated in Reagan’s fortieth-anniversary address was a moving appeal by a later generation; Lisa Zanatta Henn had written movingly to the President months before of her desire to travel to Normandy to see where her father, Private Peter Zanatta of the 37th Combat Engineer Battalion, had fought on Omaha Beach. For their household, 6 June anniversaries were like Father’s Day, Independence Day, Memorial Day and Veterans Day all rolled into one. The double tribute, to the Rangers and Private Everyman, represented by Zanatta, became one of the defining moments of Reagan’s first presidency and was reckoned to have helped his re-election that November, as well as rekindling the flame of recognition in Normandy.
As the 40th President was making his famous address at the Pointe, surrounded by hundreds of veterans – an occasion I witnessed – far away in West Palm Beach, Florida, forty years to the day since he had scaled the cliffs, Robert Fruhling, the radio man who had climbed that day with Sergeant Bud Lomell, ended the mental battle he had been fighting ever since. He took his own life – a reminder that some scars from D-Day never healed. Twenty years on in 2004, President Ronald Reagan would himself join the Great Muster Beyond, sixty years to the day after those veterans he had lauded set sail for their 1944 rendezvous with the Normandy coast. He could have no finer epitaph than his closing words on the Pointe, given in 1984: ‘We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free.’
Before leaving the world-changing events of 6 June 1944, we owe ourselves a moment of contemplation. Did the Allies make the right call in selecting Normandy in June 1944? Was there any other choice? Could the Germans have won? The London detective Sherlock Holmes (who first appeared in print in the year of Bernard Montgomery’s birth – 1887) was fond of declaring that a challenging case was a ‘three-pipe problem’, demanding a lengthy period of contemplation before the solution was clear. He would settle before his fire and think hard about the facts as he knew them. ‘I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes’, he would say to his companion Dr Watson. ‘It is a capital mistake to theorise before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.’ Pipe or no pipe, the reader will have taken more than Holmes’ allotted fifty minutes to ponder these important questions.
Although several German commanders – not just Erich Marcks – war-gamed a theoretical Allied invasion, they could not know the scale of resources available to Eisenhower. They had little awareness as to the extent of training the invaders had received. Neither did they anticipate the inventiveness of their opponents. German thinking revolved around capturing ports; Churchill’s two ‘synthetic harbours’ liberated COSSAC and SHAEF from this constraint, allowing a greater range of options.
The greatest gift of Normandy came in the form of operational surprise. Given that some of England’s south-eastern coast is visible with the naked eye from France, a distance of eighteen nautical miles, it is impossible to conceive of any major assault against the Fifteenth Army around Calais being made with secrecy.
In German minds, the events of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain in 1940 had driven home the advantages of Allied air power operating from bases close to France, ten to fifteen minutes’ flying time away. By 1944 this had morphed into a terrible destructive capacity, and for this reason, many German commanders assumed the Allies would play to this advantage and mount landings under the tightest – and closest – umbrella of airpower. Thus the Calais area beckoned. To OB West the option of Normandy, being further away, required more flying time and fuel, and would require greater numbers of aeroplanes to maintain continuous air cover over an invasion. Fortitude and the spies played to these German assessments.
In fact, distance mattered not to Leigh-Mallory, who had enough aircraft, aircrew and fuel at his disposal. Dependent on the location of their airbases, Allied fighters and other fast aircraft took around 30–40 minutes to reach Normandy in 1944. US troop transports flying from further inland deposited airborne troops in Normandy after an average of three hours, less for the British.
Examining other locations, the Allies correctly feared a landing in Brittany would be too easily contained. An assault around the Somme, as Rommel feared, offered little in the way of good beaches. Apart from Calais, the other German anxiety was the major port of Antwerp (Anvers to the French), forty miles inland along the River Scheldt. However, this involved the Allied risk of a lengthy sea crossing, whilst both river banks were well-guarded, as was the former island of Walcheren at its head. (This would play out as a costly battle in October–November 1944.) While the Somme, Calais and Antwerp offered quicker routes to the Third Reich, they also offered faster avenues for German reinforcement. The other alternatives of Norway, Southern France, Italy and the Balkans amounted to no more than Allied subterfuge or Churchillian whim. Generals Paget and Morgan had earlier come to the same conclusions, confirmed by SHAEF.
Time-wise, Overlord had to be mounted in the summer of 1944. Time was of the essence. Mindful of the Japanese, Roosevelt was impatient. Stalin needed appeasing, and his armies were already making stupendous headway in eastern Europe. Every day’s delay meant the Atlantikwall grew stronger, and – as Chapter 16 has demonstrated – the Germans were beginning to unravel the secret of the objective.
Could the Reich have prevailed? Both the German Seventh and Fifteenth Armies were far weaker and less mobile than the Allies had imagined. Bletchley Park gave little insight into the fact that the defenders were old, often unfit and frequently non-German, and therefore of limited motivation. The panzer divisions had far fewer tanks, less transport and more limited fuel than expected. The vast array of captured weaponry and equipment proved a logistical nightmare. Air cover was negligible. Their transportation routes were shattered.
The land forces were shackled by a convoluted chain of command, with the headquarters of each Army, each Army group, OB West, Panzer Group West, OKW and Hitler all possessing a veto over proposed tactical moves. Despite a profusion of liaison officers, none worked in concert with the Kriegsmarine or Luftwaffe. This resulted in a glacial speed of reaction. The only leader with the energy and authority to sidestep this tendency – Rommel – was away in Germany when he was needed most in France. Yet, even with the Army Group ‘B’ commander at the helm, it is difficult to foresee any other result. The Desert Fox was hampered as he had been two years earlier at Alamein, by dwindling resources and a lack of air power.
Yet, there was one factor that might have spelled disaster for the Allies, over which they had no control: the weather. High winds scattered the airborne forces, and at least ten per cent of the seaborne fatalities on 6 June were due to drowning. Another point on the Beaufort scale might have been enough to literally sink the assault, while a delay to 19 June – with its tempest – would have been catastrophic. The choice of times and dates was dictated by the necessity for a full moon and low water, though a decision to land at high water (which in practice most units ended up doing) might have yielded some different dates.
The airborne operations were successful and achieved their objectives, additionally distracting German reserves away from the beaches at a crucial time. The Commandos and Rangers also proved their worth. It was German tactical professionalism, rather than any American mistakes, that held up the 1st and 29th Divisions at Omaha. The same cannot be said of Sword beach, where an over-ambitious plan, and the timidity of a brigade commander – possibly the divisional commander also – led to a disappointing result, even if the only major German counter-attack of the day was halted in its tracks. The late morning change of plan for 9th Infantry Brigade and wounding of its brigadier also meant that those on Sword failed to link-up with the Canadians on their right – a potentially fatal gap which fortunately the Wehrmacht did not exploit. On Utah, Gold and Juno, the assaulting troops delivered in style, overcoming the weather and the Germans (which was worse is a moot point). The Canadians slew the ghost of Dieppe and deserve more praise than they have usually received. The seaborne assaults, including the slender hold at Omaha, created an adequate beachhead from which to launch a victorious campaign.
None of this would have been possible without Eisenhower’s team. COSSAC under Morgan had produced the blueprint for attack, inherited by SHAEF. Air power was vital but poorly managed in an arena containing many prima donnas. Montgomery – probably a better trainer of Allied troops than he was a subsequent battle captain – superbly prepared the armies for battle. Bertram Ramsay got them across the Channel and sustained them. The unsung admiral, whose contribution to victory was of Nelsonian proportions, deserves far more recognition than history has accorded him. However, managing all of this was the Supreme Commander, supported by Tedder and Bedell Smith, who rose to the challenges with aplomb.
No other destination would have delivered quite the same shock and surprise that stunned virtually every significant German headquarters into inactivity. The time this bought the Allies was exploited to the maximum. Assessing all this evidence during the course of his three pipes, Mr Sherlock Holmes, from the comfort of his armchair at 221B Baker Street, would have arrived at the same conclusion. Eisenhower made the correct call. D-Day in Normandy was launched at the right time and in the right place.