Women played a key role in transmitting messages in the hours before D-Day. It was exhausting work for those on nightshift in Underground Headquarters, Portsmouth.
THIRTY MILES TO the south-west of Rommel’s headquarters, in the hamlet of Le Rousset d’Acon, Irmgard Meyer had spent that late May morning relaxing in the dining room of her new home. She was looking forward to the steamed asparagus that her French maid was preparing for lunch.
Frau Meyer was young, vibrant and in the early stages of pregnancy; her move to France had come as a bolt from the blue. She had been staring blankly out of the window of her parents’ house in Stuttgart when she noticed an open-top saloon sweeping up the drive. Out stepped her husband’s chauffeur who was bearing an important message from Normandy. All leave for officers had been cancelled, a sure sign of increasing tensions. Irmgard’s husband, Hubert, was an officer in the 12th SS Panzer Division. In the light of the new restrictions, he wanted his wife to come to Normandy. ‘Totally illegal,’ he later admitted, ‘but I hadn’t had any leave for ages.’1 He told her to travel back with his driver that very morning, ‘before things begin to happen’.
Irmgard Meyer knew that the Allies would land at some point soon. ‘People were always talking about the possibility of an invasion. It was an open secret that the English and the Americans were both expected somewhere up there.’ Now, on receipt of her husband’s message, she telephoned her cousin and asked her to take temporary care of her two young children. She then hurriedly packed her bags. ‘I just wanted to see my husband one more time, because neither of us knew whether we would meet each other again.’
It was a seven-hour drive to Normandy and it was evening by the time she arrived. She was enchanted when she first glimpsed the hamlet in which her husband had his lodgings. Le Rousset d’Acon was a place of bucolic charm and the house itself was uncommonly picturesque, with an artist’s studio and a patchwork garden studded with blooms. It was going to be ‘a beautiful spring’. After the bombing raids on Stuttgart, Le Rousset d’Acon was ‘just like peacetime’.
But the Meyers’ private idyll was not to last. The commander of the 12th SS Panzer Division, Fritz Witt, had also brought his wife to France, as had a number of other senior staff. Now, General Witt decided they should all live together in a requisitioned mansion, Château de la Guillerie.
There was a touch of architectural fantasy to this communal home. With its leaded windows and monstrous brick chimneys it could almost have been conjured up by mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. In different circumstances it might have been a droll place to stay, but Frau Meyer was upset by the enforced move because she no longer had her husband to herself. ‘There were too many people and we were never alone, we had constantly to make conversation with other people in the evenings.’
There were but two consolations. One was the large lake in the park, a delightful place to swim. The other was getting to know the dashing young officers of the 12th SS Panzer Division. The men of Hubert Meyer’s panzer regiment certainly looked the part. Frau Meyer was particularly taken with the hawkish Max Wuensche, always decked in ‘his splendid black tank uniform’. He would strut around the drawing room of Château de la Guillerie with an air of imperious disdain, his blond hair oiled, his eyes piercingly cold. Hero of the Third Battle of Kharkov, in which he led a crushing assault on the Soviet front line, he had been decorated with the Knight’s Cross, the most prestigious military award in Nazi Germany.
Another master of armoured warfare was Kurt ‘Panzer’ Meyer, also a veteran of the Eastern Front, who was said to have ordered the massacre of the village of Yefremovka. His dutiful Nazi wife (also at the château) was pregnant with her fifth child. ‘Little Meyer,’ he would jest to Irmgard, who shared the same surname, ‘I’m going to have my son before you do!’2 It would be a moment of double celebration, for his wife would be rewarded for her fertility with the Mutterkreuz or Mother’s Cross.
Presiding over this group of elite officers was General Fritz Witt, their hollow-eyed commander. He had won his spurs in France, Greece and on the Eastern Front, where he was said to have ordered the massacre of 4,000 civilians in cold blood. Atrocities like this were never mentioned in front of the ladies at Château de la Guillerie. Instead, the men regaled their wives with tales of Arctic-style blizzards and the blood-bond camaraderie of life in the SS. Their lofty arrogance was epitomized by one of their lieutenants, Walter Kruger, who expressed his ‘absolute confidence in victory from first to last’. This confidence was predicated on the fact that his men had received ‘a proper training in the Hitler Youth’. They also had a ‘sense of order [and] discipline’,3 except when they swigged too many pitchers of sharp Normandy cider. Then, they would erupt into rowdy choruses of the Horst Wessel song, the Nazi anthem.
These Eastern Front veterans were the men on whom Rommel was pinning his hopes. He wanted them to swing into action as soon as the Allies landed on the beaches, engaging the invaders when they were still seasick and vulnerable. He warned Hans Speidel, his chief of staff, that if the panzers were not able to ‘throw them off the mainland in the first forty-eight hours, then the invasion will have succeeded and the war is lost’.4 It was a policy that put him in direct confrontation with Germany’s Commander-in-Chief in the West, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, and also with Hitler himself. They wanted these elite forces held in reserve.
One day, Irmgard’s husband, Hubert, paid a visit to the nearby Luftwaffe post responsible for conducting reconnaissance flights over England. The commodore told him that his pilots had ‘been unable to penetrate airborne defences in England for weeks, because of the fighters and flak, and that he simply could not say how advanced the invasion plans were’.
This ought to have caused deep alarm, for it suggested both the readiness of the Allies and the inadequacy of the Luftwaffe. Yet it did nothing to shake the confidence of Hubert Meyer and his officers. They were convinced they would be able to crush the Allied invaders within hours of the landings. They were also convinced that the showdown was in the offing. ‘It was going to be soon,’5 said Meyer with a hint of relish.
He just didn’t know when. And he didn’t know where.
The lack of news about Allied intentions was a source of particular anguish to Franz Gockel, a wide-eyed teenage soldier from north-west Germany. Young Gockel inhabited a different world from those battle-hardened SS officers. An unwilling conscript, he had been drafted into the army on his seventeenth birthday, in December 1942, and posted to Normandy in the following autumn. And it was here that his troubles really began, for he spent his days in a concrete bunker just above the beach at Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer. It was the very spot where Rommel had made his prediction of an Allied landing.
Gockel’s unwilling move to Normandy marked the abrupt end to a childhood already scarred by the Nazi school curriculum. He still had the smooth-faced chubbiness of a schoolboy, albeit one decked in oversized army fatigues. His jacket hung loose on his shoulders and his cap was too large for his head. The flattened hair underneath might have been licked and patted by an over-anxious mother. Shy and endearingly innocent, he was quick to blush when girls were mentioned. In letters to his parents, he told them about picking wild cowslips and drinking milk fresh from the cow. He was particularly sad at missing another Mother’s Day, ‘the second that I can’t spend with you’.6
His twenty-eight comrades were mostly teenagers like him. They were stationed a few hundred metres inland, where they manned the main compound of WN62, a Widerstandsnest or fortified strongpoint. It was one of fourteen on this five-mile stretch of coast. Each strongpoint was an interlocking chain of bunkers and dug-outs armed with a veritable arsenal of machine guns, field guns and mortars. The size of ninety tennis courts, or thereabouts, WN62 was self-contained and almost self-sufficient – equipped in the fashion of a medieval fort, complete with its own enceinte or enclosure, a ditch-like counterscarp and fortified redoubts that lay some distance from the principal bunker.
Gockel had pulled the short straw in its defence, for he was stationed just metres from the beach, crouched in a machine-gun pit scraped into a shoulder of cliff. It was so close to the sea that the stiff spring gale flung salt-spray through the narrow embrasure. If and when the Allies attacked, he would be the very first German soldier they encountered. He knew this and it filled him with dread. His task was to squat behind his M42 and spray the advancing troops with a hail of bullets.
For hour upon endless hour Gockel studied the soup-coloured swirl of the English Channel through his field glasses, searching for any hint of enemy vessels. But those long hours were always empty ones, for there was ‘nothing but the coming and going of the waves’.7 The only change to this forlorn vista came with each receding tide, when the submerged coastal defences were gradually exposed to reveal skeletal structures that resembled the carcass of some washed-up galleon. They included Czech hedgehogs, designed to thwart the movement of armoured vehicles, and ‘Rommel’s asparagus’, stout poles stuck upright in the sand and topped with Teller mines. Any flat-bottomed landing craft brushing against them would be blown sky-high. These were the outermost defences of the Atlantic Wall, that chain of fortified obstacles that stretched from the Arctic fjords to the beaches of southern France. By the first week of June 1944, they had been in situ for long enough to become slung with dense mantles of kelp.
The 1,000 or so young conscripts defending this lonely stretch of foreshore held an ace card up their sleeve. While the shoreline itself was ideal for an Allied landing, the land behind the beach presented a world of difficulties for any would-be invader. A stack of cliffs and bluffs sheared upwards from the shingle, extending fully five miles along the shoreline. The lower slopes were a tangle of briars as impenetrable as any barbed wire, while the upper reaches presented an even greater challenge. The contours stiffened into a chaotic redoubt of crumbling turrets and crenellated gullies. Here, amid the thick clumps of wild gorse, vast sandstone corbels projected outwards at dizzying heights.
Such a dramatic backdrop brought small comfort to these teenage defenders, who complained of hunger, homesickness and lack of sleep. Gockel had the additional anguish of a troubled conscience. ‘As a good Catholic boy, I know what to do and what not to do,’8 he wrote in a letter to his parents. Yet life in the Wehrmacht was giving him a catechism of such vulgarity that it could scarcely be repeated in the confessional. It reached its nadir in the sharp evenings of late spring, when he and his comrades would gather at their regiment’s orderly room, housed in a requisitioned manor in the hamlet of L’Épinette. Here, over pitchers of local cider, they would listen spellbound as rough-edged veterans of the Eastern Front bragged about fucking their way through the army whores. Gockel had not even kissed a girl: he had arrived in Normandy with romantic dreams of capering in the haystacks with local farm girls. He was not, as he put it, ‘envisaging encounters like these’.9
He was particularly mortified when he found himself caught up in a bar with a bunch of foul-mouthed veterans. The bar girl was dressed in a décolleté bodice that provoked a string of obscenities from his well-sluiced comrades.
‘Dammit,’ roared one in guttural German, ‘I’d like to see this one naked.’
‘Don’t get excited,’ interjected another. ‘She’s probably got the Property of the Wehrmacht stamped on her round arse.’
Gockel turned ‘red with embarrassment’ and was led away by his friend, Heinrich, who saw his discomfort and told him not to ‘pay attention to these show-offs’.10 Gockel never repeated such stories to his parents. Instead, he sought solace in the burgeoning landscape. In one letter home, he wrote that ‘everything feels like spring; nature is displaying itself at its most peaceful.’11 As the sun grew in warmth, the apple trees of Calvados gave a coquettish display of brilliant pink and white buds. But paradise is rarely free from menace and the orchards of Normandy were no exception. ‘Above us, at about 8000 or 9000 metres, observation planes were circling, leaving a white trail of condensation behind them.’12
At the end of May, an officer named Lieutenant Hans Heinze came to inspect Gockel’s bunker. As he did so, a German plane crash-landed into the foreshore, having been hit and damaged during a rare reconnaissance mission over southern England. Lieutenant Heinze ran over to the concussed pilot, only to find him muttering incoherently. ‘My God,’ he kept repeating, ‘England is completely awash with ships.’ Heinze told Gockel and his friends not to worry, saying that it was the deluded ramblings of someone in severe shock. ‘If there really were a lot of ships, then our Luftwaffe would bomb them.’13 Yet he was clearly rattled, for he repeatedly reminded the young soldiers of the importance of keeping a close watch on the sea.
Gockel despaired of those endless hours spent staring at the horizon. There was nothing to break the slate-grey monotony of it all, not even ships, for the fishing skiffs of Grandcamp were no longer allowed out of port. What he never realized was that while German pilots were spying from the air, the Allies were spying from the ground. And they were doing so in most unusual fashion.
Guillaume Mercader was one of those rare individuals who seemed to have it all, a dashing Gallic pin-up with a beaky nose and a slick of jet-black hair. His powerful physique was matched by an enviable winning streak. Mercader was a champion cyclist whose stash of mantelpiece trophies bore testimony to his competitive spirit. In 1936 he had received the sponsorship of La Perle, the racing-bike manufacturers. He had soon proved his worth, winning the prestigious Caen to Rouen road-race just a few months after being signed up. He had subsequently become something of a legend in his native Bayeux.
Over the previous three years, he had used his local stardom to good effect. He ingratiated himself with the local Gestapo and then requested permission to continue his training along the coastal road that led from Courseulles-sur-Mer to Grandcamp, a distance of forty miles. The road had been declared a forbidden zone by the German military authorities for obvious reasons: it was the main point of access for all the defences of the Atlantic Wall.
Mercader’s charm was such that he was granted permission to use that off-limits road. The soldiers who saw him on his bike had no inkling that he was diligently noting every pillbox, bunker and machine-gun nest. It was an espionage de folie: Mercader was the only spy in history to gather intelligence from the saddle of a La Perle racing bicycle, dressed in lightweight shorts and a skintight jersey.
He always carried the requisite papers, signed and stamped by the Gestapo. But his work was nonetheless dangerous, as he knew only too well. ‘I was very often stopped close to Pointe du Hoc, an area under intense surveillance, and also a long way from my home.’14 Tucked into his vest and pants was a stash of plans and diagrams that would have got him executed if discovered.
By the spring of 1944, Mercader had been gathering intelligence for more than three years and his ‘circuit’ of resisters, the Calvados Organisation civile et militaire, was working with the smooth efficiency of a derailleur gear. Mercader was in contact with almost ninety agents, including three gendarmes and a handful of railway workers. The former supplied him with identity cards ‘for agents in difficulty’,15 while the latter kept a close eye on troop movements. Farmers also proved their worth. Mercader had won the confidence of local men like Jean Coulibeuf and Jean Picot who ‘could move about the countryside without being suspected’. They were invaluable in supplying ‘important information about the minefields, the defences deeper inside the land, and the type and importance of the units and the ammunition dumps’.16
Once in possession of all the latest information, Mercader would cycle over to 1 Rue Saint-Malo in Bayeux (headquarters of the local resistance) where the intelligence reports were collated and handed to a local engineer named Eugène Melun. He transmitted them by wireless to England where they were processed by staff of the Special Operations Executive and forwarded to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. Within a day or two of Guillaume Mercader cycling along the coastal road of Normandy, the architects of Operation Overlord were in possession of the very latest news of the German beach defences.
This was invaluable, for the success or failure of D-Day would be dependent on the seaborne assault on the coastline. Mercader knew that a great number of men – more than 2 million troops in fact – were stationed across England, all of them awaiting shipment to France. The lives of many of those soldiers, and certainly those in the first wave, would be dependent on the accuracy of the French intelligence.
On Friday, 2 June, Guillaume Mercader caught a train to Paris in order to meet with a solicitor by the name of Robert Delente, a fellow native of Normandy. Delente’s skills went far beyond resolving legal disputes. For more than three years he had been orchestrating the Calvados circuit of resisters, in which Mercader was the star turn. He now had some sensational news for his young protégé, informing him that there was to be ‘an imminent landing’17 of Allied forces. Furthermore, he said that the exact date of the landing would be broadcast on the BBC as one of the hundreds of coded messages personnels that filled the airwaves every evening. Each of these messages transmitted information to the resistance.
Delente was very specific in his instructions to Mercader. ‘For what concerned specifically our region, we had to listen at 6.30 p.m. for the phrase, Il fait chaud à Suez [It is hot in Suez]. This would be repeated in quick succession. It would then be followed by a second message, Les dés sont jetés [The dice are thrown]: also broadcast twice.’18
As soon as he heard these two duplicated messages, Mercader was to inform his fellow resisters that the Allied landings were imminent. It would be the signal for them to start their acts of sabotage, blowing bridges and cutting communication wires. It would also be the signal that D-Day had finally arrived.
Women played a key role in transmitting messages in the hours before D-Day. It was exhausting work for those on nightshift in Underground Headquarters, Portsmouth.