THE WIND HAD stiffened since lunchtime and now it was blowing a gale. It was sweeping in from the English Channel, a short sharp blast that was tugging at trees and snatching at the late spring blooms. In the formal gardens of the Abbaye aux Dames, the neatly clipped topiary had been whisked to a tangle.
For nine long centuries the abbey had loomed over the skyline of Caen, in northern France, a brooding monument to piety and power. Home to canonesses and nuns, saints and sinners, its God-fearing sisters had swished through the cloisters as they headed to the twilight service of evensong. They had prayed here until the revolution, when the candles were snuffed and the chanting faded.
But now, in the spring of 1944, the abbey had become home to a new type of novice. Eva Eifler was an unwilling German conscript who had spent that stormy June afternoon squinting at the clouds from one of the abbey’s top-floor windows. With her prim dress and oval-rimmed spectacles, she might have been mistaken for a schoolmistress or governess, but she was too shy to be the former and too young to be the latter. Just eighteen years of age, and bashful to boot, there was still much of the child to be found in her awkward gait and gawkish smile.
Fräulein Eifler had been sent to Caen as a wireless operator with the Luftwaffe. Her job was to listen to messages, transcribe them on to paper and then forward them to be decoded. It was work that required intense concentration. ‘Nothing was allowed to disturb me.’ These words were drummed into her from the outset. ‘Two seconds of inattention or disruption and I could miss the beginning of a message.’ One mistake, one little slip, could send a Luftwaffe pilot to his death.
Now, as she stared at the sky on the afternoon of Monday, 5 June 1944, she was pleased to see yet more storm clouds banking up in the west. There would be little air activity that night, which meant a quiet time at work. It was a rare piece of good news. She had been working night shifts for the better part of a month and was suffering from extreme fatigue. She had no idea that events outside her control were about to turn the world on its head.
Fräulein Eifler’s life had taken its first unwelcome twist in the previous year when she was drafted into the obligatory Reich Labour Service, bringing her schooling to an abrupt end. Shortly afterwards, while still just seventeen, she was sent to a training academy in the coastal port of Danzig where she learned to transmit military telegrams in Morse. Once proficient, she was ordered to pack her bags and prepare for a new life in France – one in which her loyalty was to the Luftwaffe and her duty was to the Nazi state.
She was distraught at the prospect of being wrenched from her siblings and confessed to being ‘very nervous to be leaving my parents for the first time’. Life was so happy at home. But she had no choice in the matter. After the briefest of farewells she was transported into a world in which family and acquaintances no longer had any place. She had never felt so lonely in her life.
She was not entirely by herself. She shared her lodgings in the Abbaye aux Dames with four other young girls who also worked for the Luftwaffe. The five teenagers spent much of their time together, more out of solidarity than friendship, for it was dangerous to be alone in a city whose population was outwardly hostile. They tried to avoid ‘even the smallest interaction with the civilians’ lest any conversation be misconstrued. The only exception was their dealings with the local baker’s daughter, a kindly girl who brought them ‘chocolate biscuits in the shape of boats’.
If circumstances had been happier, the Abbaye aux Dames might have been a fine place to live: a palatial Benedictine convent founded by Matilda of Flanders. On the brighter days of spring, the sun tipped liquid light through the plate-glass windows and played a merry dance on the walls and floors. But the girls’ working life was spent in an underground bunker known as R618: it was situated in the centre of town, deep below Place Gambetta. The R stood for Regelbau – one of hundreds of ‘standard design’ bunkers constructed from heavily reinforced concrete. Secure and virtually indestructible, it was one of the Luftwaffe’s principal telecommunications centres.
It was a grim place to work and Fräulein Eifler loathed every minute of her time there. ‘The air was confined and humid, the light was artificial, and the accumulated weariness of the night made my eyes prick. I hated this room in which I was forced to spend most of my life. I had become some sort of robot.’ She felt that her youth ‘was being stolen’ by the Nazis. The only bright point came during a ‘severely chaperoned’ trip to Paris in order to have her broken spectacles repaired. While she was there, she spent her hard-won savings on a pink negligée for her wedding night. It was an odd purchase given that she had neither fiancé nor suitor, and she surprised herself by making it. Hitherto, her only interaction with the opposite sex was with the coarse young lads who lurched around her desk in the bunker making jokes laden with innuendo.
The evening of Monday, 5 June had begun like any other. It was around 7 p.m. when Fräulein Eifler got changed into her grey-blue Luftwaffe uniform, with its lightning-flash symbol on the upper sleeve. Soon after, she set off for work in the company of the other girls, going on foot from the Abbaye aux Dames to Place Gambetta.
Their shift began punctually at 8 p.m. ‘Each one of us had taken her seat at her work place,’ she said, seated in front of a control panel linked to the port of Cherbourg. Fräulein Eifler sat perched on the edge of her chair with headphones clamped to her ears. She was soon transcribing the first of the incoming messages from field stations across Normandy. To her ears, they always sounded like gibberish. ‘Endless lists of letters and numbers – A-C-X-L-5-O-W – that didn’t mean anything to me.’ As soon as each message had been transcribed, she would hand it to an officer who would take it to be decoded in the adjoining room.
This particular night was quieter than most. The weather had taken a turn for the worse and the girls were told that ‘nothing abnormal was expected or signalled’. But as the clock slowly ticked its way towards midnight, Fräulein Eifler detected a change to the pace of the incoming messages. ‘The movement suddenly accelerated.’ There was a sense of urgency. They were coming faster. Every few seconds. And then, at exactly 01.00 hours, ‘everything erupted’.
Messages began arriving at a stupefying rate from right across the coastal zone. Some came from the Cotentin peninsula. Others came from the countryside to the east of the city. They came from the Orne, the Dives and from Sainte-Mère-Église. Fräulein Eifler found herself ‘working faster and faster, and as soon as I had finished, a hand behind me grabbed the paper straight away’. She didn’t have time to turn around, nor even ask for a coffee. ‘I was glued to my table, in front of jumbled-up alphabets.’
She lost all sense of time and had no clue as to how long she had been at her post. She knew that something momentous was happening – ‘I could feel it’ – but she had no idea of exactly what was taking place. ‘Poised on my chair, headphones on, I wrote; I wrote like a maniac. I wrote until my wrists ached.’
In the small hours of the morning, when she was close to fainting from exhaustion, she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was an officer in the marines, coming to relieve her. Her night shift was finally at an end.
‘What’s happened?’ she asked. ‘Is it something serious?’
‘Something serious.’ He repeated the words in a grave tone of voice. Then he took his seat without adding anything more and began jotting down the latest message to be transmitted through the headphones.
Eva Eifler was drained by her work that night. She had a cramp in her hands and a crick in her neck. She noticed that her four girlfriends looked similarly exhausted. All had ‘the same haggard, anxious look’.
The five of them followed each other into the control room that adjoined the one in which they worked. And it was only now – to their utter astonishment – that they realized what was taking place. ‘The spectacle was incredible. On one wall, an enormous map of the French Channel coast was pinned with little markers and different coloured flags’ – hundreds of them. Each flag denoted an Allied parachutist who had been dropped into the heart of Normandy. Those garbled messages that Fräulein Eifler had been transcribing were the very first reports of the Allied landings.
A soldier was standing in front of the map and adding or moving the flags, depending on the messages being received. New intelligence was arriving every second. Eva felt the atmosphere turn as chill as the grave. ‘The look in everyone’s eyes was tense. Their gestures were rapid and hasty. Yet no one was shouting.’ Senior officers had been arriving all night and the room was now abuzz with commanders, many of them crisply dressed types in Nazi uniform. There was even a general or two. She had never seen that before.
As she stood there, staring at the map, she suddenly felt very frightened indeed. This, then, was it. This was the long-awaited Invasiontag. She had never imagined that she would be one of the very first people to know that D-Day had begun; that Allied paratroopers had started to land.
She stared at the map for a few more minutes, trying to take in the enormity of what was taking place. Then she rejoined her friends and they made their way back to their lodgings in the Abbaye aux Dames. ‘We tried to reassure ourselves, but we had only questions without answers.’ The sky was darkly menacing and the gutters were dripping with rain. Eva had a knot in her stomach and felt ‘dumbfounded and anxious’.1
She was worried for herself and she was worried for her family. But most of all, she was worried about what the coming day would bring.