Beach obstacles on the Normandy coast were a key part of the Atlantic Wall. German soldiers are seen here diving for cover as the Allied reconnaissance plane sweeps overhead.
GEORGE LANE VIEWED his life in much the same way as a professional gambler might view a game of poker: something to be played with a steady nerve, a dash of courage and a willingness to win or lose everything in the process.
His addiction to risk had driven him to join the commandos; it had also led him to volunteer for a perilous undercover mission codenamed Operation Tarbrush X. In the second week of May 1944, Lane was to smuggle himself into Nazi-occupied France using the cover of darkness to paddle ashore in a black rubber dinghy. His task was to investigate a new type of mine that the Germans were believed to be installing on the Normandy beaches.
Lane had the air of a quintessentially British adventurer, one whose tweedy façade would not have looked out of place on the great Scottish hunting estates. His hair was waxed in the fashion of a young Cary Grant and divided into two by a carefully scoured parting. But there the similarity ended. His stare was colder than any actor could contrive and it was overlaid with a rigid sense of purpose. Lane would later recount his derring-do stories in an accent of such cut-glass clarity that it almost sounded fake. There was good reason for this. He was actually Hungarian – his real name was Dyuri Lanyi – and his formative years had been spent as a member of the Hungarian water polo team.
He had pitched up in Britain almost a decade earlier and had volunteered for the Grenadier Guards on the outbreak of war. But his foreign ways and Central European background had caused officials in the Home Office to serve him with a deportation order. Only swift action by his high-flying contacts ensured that the order was rescinded.
‘Absolutely English in outlook and mentality.’ So thundered his mentor, Albert Baillie, the Dean of St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, who added that Lane had ‘a genius for getting on with people’.1 This was just as well, for he was to need every last drop of that genius in the weeks preceding D-Day.
The shoddy treatment he received from Whitehall bureaucrats might have put him off the Allied cause for good. Instead, it galvanized his stubborn spirit. In 1943 he signed up for the elite X-Troop, a British-led commando unit consisting of foreign nationals whose countries had been overrun by the Nazis.
Once accepted into this polyglot squadron he was given a fake identity and an invented backstory. He was also allowed to choose a pseudonym. He elected for Smith on the grounds that it was as English as a cup of tea. ‘Don’t be a bloody fool,’ was the reaction of Bryan Hilton-Jones, the guts-of-granite commander of X-Troop. ‘You can’t even pronounce it properly.’2 This was unfair – Lanyi’s English was almost too perfect – but Hilton-Jones couldn’t afford risks. He told him to settle for Lane (an Anglicization of Lanyi) and pretend to be Welsh, in order to explain away the occasional slips in his artificially clipped speech.
In the second week of May 1944, Lane was given a detailed briefing about his mission. Hilton-Jones told him that a new German mine had been discovered during an RAF bombing raid. A Spitfire had inadvertently dropped a bomb into the coastal shallows of northern France, triggering a series of spectacular detonations. It was fortuitous that these explosions had been caught on reconnaissance film, for it allowed scientists to assess them. They were concerned that the Nazis had developed ‘some kind of new mine’3 that could be detonated along an entire length of foreshore. The film was too grainy to reveal the working mechanism of the mine, but it was clear that such a weapon represented a potentially catastrophic threat to the planned Allied landings.
Hilton-Jones knew there was only one way to discover more and that was to send a man ashore. To this end, he began planning an audacious act of burglary, one that would require stealth, guts and an extra-large dose of bravado.
The plan was this: a high-speed motor torpedo boat would escort Lane and three comrades across the English Channel. They would then paddle ashore in a small black dinghy. Once there, two of the party would remain with the dinghy while the other two would slither up the beach, photograph the mine with an infrared camera and then beat a hasty retreat. If all went well, they would be back in England in time for breakfast.
But there was also the possibility that everything would go wrong. If so, the consequences would be grim indeed. Hitler’s Commando Order dictated that all captured commandos were to be executed. That was terrifying enough, but before being shot, Lane and company were certain to be tortured by the Gestapo, whose agents were desperate for information about when and where the Allied landings might take place.
Most men would have weighed up the pros and cons when asked to take part in such a deadly mission, but Lane gave the same unflinching answer as he had when Hilton-Jones first asked if he would like to join the commandos. ‘You bet I would!’4
Operation Tarbrush X was scheduled for 17 May, when a new moon promised near-total darkness. Lane selected a sapper named Roy Wooldridge to help him photograph the mines, while two officers, Sergeant Bluff and Corporal King, would remain at the shoreline with the dinghy. All four were fearless and highly trained. All four were confident of success.
The mission got off to a flying start. The men were ferried across the Channel in the motor torpedo boat and then transferred to the black rubber dinghy. They paddled themselves ashore and landed undetected at exactly 1.40 a.m. The elements were on their side. The rain was lashing down in liquid sheets and a stiff onshore squall was flinging freezing spray across the beach. For the German sentries patrolling the coast, visibility was little better than zero.
The four commandos now separated, as planned. Bluff and King remained with the dinghy, while Lane and Wooldridge crawled up the wet sand. They found the newly installed mines just a few hundred yards along the beach and Lane pulled out his infrared camera. But as he snapped his first photograph, the camera emitted a sharp flash. The reaction was immediate. ‘A challenging shout in German rang out and within about ten seconds it was followed by a scream which sounded as if somebody had been knifed.’5 Soon after, three gunshots ricocheted across the beach.
It was the signal for a firework display unlike any other. The Germans triggered starshells and Very lights (two different types of flare) to illuminate the entire stretch of beach and then began firing wildly into the driving rain, unable to determine where the intruders were hiding.
Lane and Wooldridge scraped themselves deeper into the sand as they tried to avoid the bullets, but they remained desperately exposed and found themselves caught in a ferocious gun battle. Two enemy patrols had opened fire and it soon became apparent that they were shooting at each other. ‘We might have laughed,’ noted Lane after the incident, ‘if we had felt a bit safer.’6
It was almost 3 a.m. by the time the gunfight ended and the German flashlights were finally snapped off. Sergeant Bluff and Corporal King were convinced that Lane and Wooldridge were dead, but they left the dinghy for their erstwhile comrades and prepared themselves for a long and exhausting swim back to the motor torpedo launch. They eventually clambered aboard, bedraggled and freezing, and were taken back to England. They would get their cooked breakfast after all.
George Lane and Roy Wooldridge faced a rather less appetizing breakfast. They flashed signals out to sea, hoping to attract the motor torpedo boat and then flashed a continuous red light in the hope of attracting attention. But there was never any response. As they belly-crawled along the shoreline, wondering what to do, they stumbled across the little dinghy. Lane checked his watch. It was an hour before dawn, precious little time to get away, and the Atlantic gale was whipping the sea into a frenzy of crests and troughs. It was not the best weather to be crossing the English Channel in a dinghy the size of a bathtub.
‘Shivering in our wet clothes, we tried to keep our spirits up by talking about the possibility of a Catalina flying boat being sent out to find us and take us home.’ Wooldridge glanced at his watch and wryly remarked that it was the date on which he was meant to have been going off on his honeymoon. Lane laughed at the absurdity of it all. ‘There he was, poor bugger, with me in a dinghy.’
Any hopes of being rescued by a flying boat were dealt a heavy blow in the hour before dawn. As the coastal town of Cayeux-sur-Mer slowly receded into the distance, Lane suddenly noticed a dot in the sea that was growing larger by the second. It was a German motor launch and it was approaching at high speed. He and Wooldridge immediately ditched their most incriminating equipment, including the camera, but kept their pistols and ammunition. Lane was considering a bold plan of action: ‘shooting our way out, overpowering the crew and pinching their boat’.7 But as their German pursuers began circling the dinghy, Lane was left in no doubt that the game was up. ‘We found four or five Schmeisser machine guns pointed at us menacingly.’ The two of them threw their pistols into the sea and ‘with a rather theatrical gesture, put up our hands’.8
They were immediately arrested and taken back to Cayeux-sur-Mer, zigzagging a careful passage through the tidal waters. Lane swallowed hard. Only now did it dawn on him that he had paddled the dinghy through the middle of a huge minefield without even realizing it was there. ‘It was an incredible bit of luck that we weren’t blown to bits.’
The two men feared for their lives. They were separated on landing and Lane was manhandled into a windowless cellar, ‘very damp and cold’. His clothes were drenched and his teeth were chattering because of the chill. He was also in need of sustenance, for he had not eaten since leaving England.
It was not long before an officer from the Gestapo paid him a visit. ‘Of course you know we’ll have to shoot you,’ he was told, ‘because you are obviously a saboteur and we have very strict orders to shoot all saboteurs and commandos.’ Lane feigned defiance, telling his interrogators that killing him would be a very bad idea. The officer merely scowled. ‘What were you doing?’
Lane and Wooldridge had cut the commando and parachute badges from their battledress while still at sea, aware that such badges would condemn them to a swift execution. They had also agreed on a story to explain their predicament. But such precautions proved in vain. The German interrogator examined Lane’s battledress and told him that he ‘could see where the badges had been’. Lane felt his first frisson of fear. ‘They knew we were commandos.’
His interrogation took a turn for the worse when the Gestapo demanded information about the Allied landings, which they knew were imminent. ‘They kept threatening me and I kept saying, “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you anything important because I don’t know anything important.” ‘9 He was refused food and water – the price to be paid for keeping silent – and faced increasingly aggressive questioning. Not until dusk did the interrogation come to an end. The two of them were locked into separate cellars and prepared themselves for a sleepless night.
Lane had been trained in psychological warfare and retained a clarity of purpose. With D-Day imminent, it was imperative for him and Wooldridge to make their escape. In pitch darkness, he groped his way around the cellar and discovered that the chimney pipe was tied to the wall with a piece of wire. He unhooked the wire, shaped it and then inserted it into the lock of his cell. After a moment of fumbling there was a click and the door sprang open. Not for nothing were the commandos known as the elite.
The corridor was completely dark. Lane groped his way forward using the walls as his guide, but as he did so he tripped over a German sentry lying on the floor. ‘I’d go back if I were you,’ barked the guard. ‘There’s another sentry around the corner.’10 His escape attempt was over before it began.
Lane was always cool under pressure but even he got the fright of his life when his cell door was opened at dawn by a doctor dressed in a white gown. ‘I thought, My God, what’s going to happen now?’ He was blindfolded, as was Wooldridge, and the two of them had their hands roped behind their backs. They were then bundled into a car and driven off at high speed. Lane asked where they were going. He got no answer.
‘As I lay back in the seat, I realized they had tied the blindfold so tightly that I could see underneath it, through the gaps on either side of the bridge of my nose.’11 Unlike in England, the Germans had not removed the road signs so Lane was able to snatch glimpses of the passing villages. ‘Shortly before we stopped, I had been able to see a signpost that said: La Petite Roche Guyon.’12
He assumed that this was his journey’s end; that he would be dragged from the car and shot.
As the German military car came to a halt in a private drive, the doors were opened and Lane’s blindfold was removed by one of the sentries. When he looked up, he blinked in disbelief. ‘My God!’ he whispered under his breath. ‘What a strange place! Just look at it!’13 A fortified château stood bolted to the rock, a one-time feudal redoubt whose Enlightenment overlords had converted it into an eighteenth-century pleasure palace. The vertical outcrop behind was crowned by a medieval donjon, the original tower, while the castle itself still bristled with battlements and buttresses. Château de La Roche-Guyon was the hereditary fiefdom of the La Rochefoucauld dynasty, which had been ensconced here in pomp and splendour since the reign of the illustrious Sun King, Louis XIV. The addition of a sandstone façade had done much to tame the martial exterior, but the barbed-wire fences and concrete bunkers were testimony to the fact that this was once again a military edifice.
Lane had little time to admire the view. He and Wooldridge were shunted inside the entrance hall and led into two separate rooms. Just when Lane thought that his morning could not get any more bizarre, a guard appeared with a piping hot cup of tea.
The room in which he was being held had been left unlocked, so he unlatched the handle and peeked out. ‘There was the fiercest looking dog’ – an Alsatian – ‘that I’ve ever seen in my life.’ It growled and was heaved back by a guard. ‘And I thought, I better stay put.’14
Lane still had no idea why he had been brought here, but that was soon about to change. ‘After a little while, a very elegant officer came in and, to my amazement, we shook hands.’ The officer spoke English with an accent as sharp as a blade. ‘How are things in England?’ he asked. ‘It’s always very beautiful at this time of year, isn’t it?’15 Lane pinched himself as this Alice in Wonderland world grew ever more strange. A sharp pang of hunger brought him to his senses: he told the officer that he hadn’t eaten anything for almost forty-eight hours. The German apologized profusely and immediately ordered some food: fresh chicken sandwiches and coffee. ‘Simply marvellous’, thought Lane. His spirits were rising by the minute.
As he was eating, the officer turned to him and said, ‘Do you realize you are about to meet someone very important?’
Lane shrugged. Nothing could surprise him any more.
‘I must have your assurance,’ said the German, ‘that you’re going to behave with the utmost dignity.’
Lane gave the officer an audacious dressing down, telling him ‘that I happen to be an officer and a gentleman and I cannot behave in any other way’. But then he paused, for his curiosity was piqued, and he asked, ‘But who am I going to meet?’
The officer stiffened slightly as he snapped out his reply. ‘You are going to meet His Excellency Field Marshal Rommel.’
Lane was knocked sideways. Rommel, the Wüstenfuchs or Desert Fox, was one of the titans of the Third Reich, the seemingly invincible general who had won a string of victories in North Africa before meeting his nemesis in General Montgomery. Vanquished in the hot desert sands, yet still worshipped by his troops, he had been decorated by the Führer with the highest honour of all, the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds. There were some who murmured that his finest days were behind him, but he had nevertheless been given command of Army Group B, defenders of the northern French coastline. Château de La Roche-Guyon was his operational headquarters.
‘I’m delighted,’ said Lane to his officer, ‘because in the British army we have great admiration for him.’16 This was true enough: his conduct during the North Africa campaign had earned him a reputation for fair play and chivalry.
Lane was so enthused by the prospect of meeting Rommel that he forgot all fears of his probable execution. He was intrigued to come face to face with the man whose mission was to ensure that the Allied invasion of France would fail.
The officer suggested that he clean himself up as soon as he had finished the last of his sandwiches. Lane was the first to admit he was ‘pretty grubby’, but even he was taken aback when he was handed a nail file and asked to remove the dirt from his fingernails. Once the manicure was complete, he was led through the castle’s corridors towards the library. It was here that his meeting with Field Marshal Rommel was to take place.
The castle’s sumptuous interior left Lane breathless. The Rochefoucauld dynasty lived in a bauble of opulence, with a war-chest of treasures that had been acquired (or pillaged) over the centuries by a succession of gaunt-faced counts and dukes. Gobelin tapestries jostled with hunting trophies, and portraits of illustrious seigneurs crowded the walls of the Hall of Ancestors. Here, too, the plump-cheeked Duke François de La Rochefoucauld – celebrated author of maxims – peered at guests through layer upon layer of smoke-blackened varnish.
Lane was led towards the galleried library, where his gaze was immediately drawn to the figure seated behind a writing desk at the far end of the room. It was Field Marshal Rommel, with his glacial eyes and sharply cleft chin. He wore his hallmark expression of impatience.
Lane had heard stories of how Rommel liked to unnerve his visitors by making them ‘walk the whole length of a room’, a form of mild psychological torture that enhanced his own stature while diminishing that of his guest. But on this occasion, he ‘immediately got up, walked towards me, motioned to a round table on one side of the room and said, Setzen Sie sich’ – ‘sit yourself down’. Lane, who spoke perfect German, pretended not to understand: it would give him more time to field answers to the questions he was sure to be asked.
Several other high-ranking officials joined them at the table, including General Hans-Georg von Tempelhoff (Army Group B’s chief of staff) and Captain Helmut Lang (Rommel’s aide-de-camp). Once all were seated, Rommel turned to address Lane. ‘So you are one of these gangster commandos, are you?’
Lane waited for this to be translated into English before feigning indignation. ‘Please tell His Excellency that I do not understand what he means by gangster commandos. Gangsters are gangsters, but the commandos are the best soldiers in the world.’17
Rommel seemed to appreciate the answer for a brief smile swept his face. ‘Perhaps you are not a gangster,’ he said, ‘but we’ve had some very bad experiences concerning commandos.’
This much was true. Over the previous months, Lane’s fellow commandos in X-Troop had staged a series of hit-and-run raids on the coastline of France. But Lane was hardly going to admit such activities. He said that he had trouble believing what he was hearing from the field marshal.
‘Do you realize that you have been taken prisoner under very strange circumstances?’ continued Rommel.
Lane took issue with his choice of words. ‘I hardly think they were strange,’ he said. ‘More unfortunate and unhappy.’18
‘You know you are in a very serious situation.’ This bald statement of fact was followed by a piercing stare: Rommel accused him of being a saboteur. Lane considered this for a moment before launching himself on to a high-wire of bravado. ‘If the Field Marshal took me for a saboteur,’ he said, ‘he would not have invited me here.’
Even Rommel was taken aback by the boldness of Lane’s response. ‘So you think this was an invitation?’
‘Naturally, yes, and I take it as a great honour. I’m delighted to be here.’
Lane was playing his cards with abandon, aware (as the Dean of Windsor had remarked) of his genius for getting on with people. He knew he was halfway to winning the game when Rommel’s vulpine face broke into a broad smile. The ice was broken and the conversation now developed into something more akin to banter than interrogation.
‘How’s my friend Montgomery?’
‘Unfortunately I don’t know him,’ said Lane, ‘but he’s preparing the invasion so you’ll see him fairly soon.’ He added that he knew little more about Montgomery than what appeared in The Times. As an afterthought, he told Rommel that it was an excellent newspaper. ‘I think you ought to read it.’
Rommel was warming to the game. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I get it from Lisbon.’
‘Well then, you’ll see that he’s preparing the invasion and they’ll be here shortly, fighting you.’
Rommel scoffed. ‘Well that’ll be the first time that the English do any fighting.’
‘I beg your pardon!’ Lane spluttered offence. ‘What happened at El Alamein?’
‘That was not the English,’ said Rommel. ‘The English always get other people to do their fighting for them. The Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the South Africans.’19 Lane – a Hungarian Jew fighting for the British – found it hard to keep a straight face.
Rommel soon returned to the subject of the Allied landings, asking Lane where he thought the soldiers would land. Lane retorted that he was only a junior officer: he was not privy to the invasion plans. ‘If it was up to me,’ he said, ‘I would probably go for the shortest crossing.’20
Rommel nodded and then offered an opinion that took Lane by surprise. ‘The great tragedy is that the British and Germans are fighting against each other, instead of combining our strength and fighting against the real enemy, which is the Russians.’
Lane responded by criticizing Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jews. ‘We abhor the way you treat them.’
‘Ah well,’ said Rommel. ‘People have different ideas about it all. It’s impossible to talk about it.’
There was a lengthy pause and Lane surmised that the interrogation was coming to an end. He was determined to prolong it, for he found it fascinating. ‘I was enjoying myself tremendously, so I asked the interpreter if, as the field marshal had asked me so many questions, I would be permitted to ask a few of my own.’
Rommel scoffed at his impertinence but nodded nonetheless.
‘What I’d like to know is this,’ said Lane. ‘France is being occupied by you. How do the French people react to being occupied?’21
His question provided the cue for what Lane would later describe as ‘the most wonderful dissertation’ about the occupying army, with Rommel explaining in concise terms how Germany had brought leadership and order to France. ‘The French people,’ he declared, ‘had never been so happy and so well organised.’22
‘My goodness!’ exclaimed Lane. ‘I’d love to see that!’
‘You can see it for yourself,’ said Rommel, ‘as you travel through France.’
Lane laughed in scorn. ‘Every time I travel with your boys, they blindfold me and tie my hands behind my back.’ At this, Rommel turned to Lang, his aide-de-camp, and asked if this was strictly necessary.
Lang nodded. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘These are very dangerous people.’23
These ominous words signalled the end of the interview. The meeting was over. Lane was faultlessly courteous to the end, thanking the field marshal for his time. He was hoping for a stay of execution, but as soon as he was outside he was blindfolded once again. He and Wooldridge were then driven off at high speed to Gestapo headquarters in Paris, arriving early that evening. ‘It frightened the life out of me when I realized where I was,’ admitted Lane, who was even more terrified when he heard the screams of prisoners being tortured.
Yet his own Gestapo interrogation was conducted in such dilatory fashion that he couldn’t help wondering if Rommel had ‘interceded on our behalf and prevented both Roy and I from being executed’.24 In the event, he was neither shot nor tortured. Instead, he was sent to Oflag 9/AH, a prisoner-of-war camp in central Germany.
At the same time as Lane and Wooldridge were being transported to Paris, Rommel returned to his inlaid Renaissance desk – the one on which the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes had been signed – and wrote a letter to his beloved wife, Lucie-Maria. He told her of his extraordinary interview with a ‘sensible British officer’25 whose charm and bravado had spared him his life.
Those close to Rommel were not surprised by the field marshal’s generosity to his prisoners. ‘He upheld a code of chivalry that had become strange to our times.’ So thought Hans Speidel, his chief of staff, who added that Rommel’s behaviour was ‘regarded by many as a sign of weakness’.26 But it was also a private display of strength. In saving George Lane from execution, Rommel was directly contravening Hitler’s Commando Order.
In his daily letters to Lucie-Maria, Rommel confided all the tittle-tattle about life at La Roche-Guyon. ‘Meine liebste Lu’, he would begin, before recounting stories about his beloved dogs, Treff and Ebbo, his wild boar hunts with the Nazi-sympathizing duke and the fact that spring had yet to arrive in the valley of the River Oise.
‘The weather is still cold,’ he wrote on that same May evening, ‘and finally rain. The British will have to be patient a little longer.’27 He had no inkling as to when the Allies might come and his interrogation of Lane had left him none the wiser. Yet he had a hunch as to where they might come. He disagreed with Lane’s contention that they would land at the Pas de Calais. The gun batteries and beach defences at Cap Gris Nez were so formidable that any assault would end in slaughter. ‘They won’t come there, for sure,’28 he told the journalist Lutz Koch.
He was increasingly certain they would land in Normandy, on the shores of Calvados, where the sweeping sands made a perfect landing zone for infantry and artillery alike. During an inspection of the long beach at Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, he had turned to the officer in charge, Major Werner Pluskat, and said, ‘Pluskat, in my opinion, it is this very area that the Allies will land. This is exactly the type of place that the Allies will choose. They did so in Italy.’29
In this, as in so many of his military hunches, Rommel was to be proved correct. The Allies had indeed chosen it as one of their five landing beaches. They had given it the codename Omaha.
Beach obstacles on the Normandy coast were a key part of the Atlantic Wall. German soldiers are seen here diving for cover as the Allied reconnaissance plane sweeps overhead.