THE RAIN WAS still tipping down on the following morning, 5 June, with a sky so filled with menace that it felt as if summer had packed its bags and left for good. In a thousand army encampments and in 279,000 khaki tents, men slouched under flapping canvas and waited in vain for the skies to clear. They drank tea by the urn and chain-smoked their Player’s Navy Cut until their lungs ached.
The previous months had seen southern England transformed into a vast marshalling yard that stretched from Dover to Devon. Eleven thousand planes and a third of a million vehicles had been parked and concealed to hide them from the Luftwaffe’s prying eyes. But as the great day approached they were moved to the coast, and by the first week of June the backwater lanes of six counties had been churned to sludge by monstrous mechanized vehicles, the like of which had never been seen before: armoured bulldozers, amphibious half-tracks and Dodge four-by-fours. Bumper to bumper they travelled, with the open-backed Chevrolet trucks carrying sharply dressed GIs with pressed kit and parted hair.
That summer, fields sprouted munitions instead of wheat – thousands of acres of mortars, howitzers and anti-aircraft guns. A staggering 23 million tons of matériel had been shuttled across the Atlantic from North America; so much, indeed, that it required 170 miles of new railway lines to shift it across the British countryside. And in the skies above, British Spitfires and Lancasters were now flanked by American Liberators, Dakotas and twin-boomed P38 Lightnings.
O America! To one little boy evacuated from Clapham to the West Country, the arrival of the spick-and-span GIs was more entrancing than any travelling circus. The Americans gleamed. They had white teeth. And (better still) their low-slung pockets were stashed with endless packs of Spearmint chewing gum. By contrast, their British counterparts looked dour and downtrodden, like ‘jumble-sale champions’ with ill-fitting fatigues and outsized boots.
That boggle-eyed little boy* watched mesmerized as the Americans swept by ‘in magnificent, gleaming, olive-green, pressed-steel, four-wheel-drive juggernauts, decked with what car salesmen would call optional extras of a sort never seen on their domestic equivalents’. These included ‘deep-treaded spare tyres, winches, towing cables, fire-extinguishers’. In their wake came the motorized jeeps, ‘caparisoned with whiplash aerials and sketchy canvas hoods which drummed with the rhythm of a cowboy’s saddlebags rising and falling to the canter of his horse across the prairie’.1
By the end of May, all these vehicles – American, British, Canadian – had been travelling on a one-way road to the coast. The countdown to Operation Overlord had begun in earnest and all the soldiers heading to Normandy were ‘enclosed’ in marshalling camps that were sealed off from the outside world. ‘All of a sudden, barbed wire appeared all the way around.’ So noted one sergeant in the artillery. ‘Red caps, blue caps with dogs, patrolling outside. Nobody was allowed to leave, nobody could come in.’2
There were 1,200 such camps, along with a dozen marshalling zones near the coast and 133 airfields spread right across the British Isles. And it was at one of these airfields, tucked neatly into a fold of rural Dorset, that an operation of the greatest secrecy was about to be launched. This anonymous base was to be the starting point for the opening act of D-Day, a curtain-raiser of such bravado that none of those taking part expected to come through it alive.
The men had been transported to the airfield in sealed wagons. It was crucial – lest there be any traitor in their midst – that the camp’s location remain unknown. En route from their previous billet on Salisbury Plain they saw nothing of Blackmore Vale and the Stour valley, they glimpsed none of the surrounding villages with names so redolent of Olde England: Lytchett Matravers, Winterborne Stickland, Gussage St Michael. They knew only that they were being locked into ‘one of the many high-security tented camps behind guarded barbed-wire fences’. There was a sign on the main gate: ‘SECRET – KEEP OUT UNLESS ON DUTY’.3 Armed guards patrolled the perimeter. Dogs were on standby. If any of the troops were to break out, they risked being shot.
The camp to which they had been transported was Tarrant Rushton in Dorset, an RAF airfield, and Denis Edwards and his pals from the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry had been brought here amid rumours that ‘something was definitely about to happen’.4 But as hours drifted into days and the rain continued to sluice down, they wondered if they would ever get airborne.
These men’s D-Day mission was crucial: they were to spearhead the initial assault on occupied France with an audacious coup-de-main – a swift and surprise attack that would require them to be dropped deep behind enemy lines. Long before the seaborne forces landed, they would be fighting their way through the French countryside with the goal of seizing two vitally important bridges, one at the village of Ranville and one at Bénouville.
The capture of these bridges was vital to the success of D-Day. They were the principal crossing points for two waterways, the River Orne and the Caen Canal, which ran northwards to the coast. If they remained in German hands, the Allied troops landing on Sword Beach risked being trapped inside their beachhead. If that happened, the SS panzer divisions would be able to sweep across the bridges and drive the newly landed men back into the sea.
Nineteen-year-old Denis Edwards looked too young to be entrusted with such a hazardous mission. With his scrubbed cheeks and boyish grin, he might have been mistaken for a member of the Boy Scouts or Sea Cadets. Yet he was far from naïve and harboured no illusions as to the perils that lay ahead. ‘Terrifyingly dangerous’, is how he described it. ‘There were so many possibilities for things to go badly wrong.’ His young comrades in D Company were equally twitchy. ‘What if the Germans counter-attacked?’ they asked. ‘What if the seaborne forces didn’t break through the German defences in time?’5 The architects of the operation could provide few answers. Like everything else on D-Day, the outcome would rest with those on the ground.
The unpredictability of their mission made them jumpy, and none more so than Edwards himself. He was praying that he would be able to display the same bravery as his father during the Great War. Old Man Edwards had earned himself the nickname of Rubber-Guts because of his willingness to report on enemy artillery positions from the precarious vantage point of a hot air balloon. The balloon had become a favourite target for German pilots, who would strafe it with bullet holes and then watch it sink to the ground at ever increasing speed. But they never managed to puncture it completely and Rubber-Guts had the last laugh when he got to bury the fabled German fighter ace, the Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, after he was shot down over his sector of battle.
The lads in Denis Edwards’s team had one critical advantage over the thousands of other men about to be deployed. Their commander, John Howard, had proved himself a veritable alchemist when it came to training them, knocking base metal into something approaching gold. A thirty-two-year-old Oxfordshire policeman with a deep sense of purpose, Howard had the rugged features of an outdoorsman – one whose tough working-class childhood had left him with deep resources and a powerful sense of self-belief.
Over the course of several months, he had pushed his men through a training programme unlike any other, with a relentless focus on physical fitness. He forced them to swim glacial rivers (naked, and in midwinter), trudge thirty miles through bog land and slither across firing ranges on which live-bullet exercises were under way.
His programme might have dropped straight from the sports curriculum of one of Britain’s more draconian boarding schools. Edwards and his friends had grown used to being ‘roughly roused’6 from their beds in the shivering chill of midwinter and transported to the ice-bound wilderness of Salisbury Plain. They would then have to find their way back to camp without being captured by the patrols sent to hunt them down.
It was a gruelling regime. For the first few months, the men were half broken by hardship. One of Denis Edwards’s comrades, Wally Parr, had almost collapsed from exhaustion and there were times when he ‘wanted to chuck it in’, especially in midwinter. ‘Your feet are raw and you’ve got blisters and blood everywhere and your back’s aching and you’re spending night after night on Salisbury Plain, sleeping on the frozen ground in the freezing fog.’7
One thing alone kept them going and that was their absolute devotion to their commander. They cursed him for being ‘the hardest of task-masters’8 and they hated him when he wrenched them from their early morning slumbers. But they knew he was a consummate professional, one whose mantra was blunt and uncompromising: ‘Win at everything.’9
Only when they were near broken would he allow them a night out in Salisbury, where they played as roughly as they trained. They ‘would drink the pubs dry and engage in pitched battles with the Americans’, challenging them to violent fist-fights. Even in this, they strove to win. The Salisbury locals grew to dread the days on which Howard’s men were unleashed. ‘We were seen as a bunch of hooligans as we fell upon the city.’10
Trained, briefed and furnished with weapons, they now waited for the big day to arrive. But the skies turned grey and the rain tipped down and there was no hope of an airborne operation for the foreseeable future. And then the news got worse. They were told that the 12th SS Panzer Division and the 21st Panzer Division had both been moved closer to the two bridges they were charged with capturing. ‘Just our bloody luck,’ they said to each other when they were warned that these ‘were the elite of the zealous Hitler Youth movement and Nazi fanatics every one’.11
By Monday morning, 5 June, the men were tetchy and anxious to get under way. It was still blowing a gale and rain was whipping through the canvas encampment, but there was a whisper afoot that they would soon be given the green light. Edwards was told that although conditions ‘were far from ideal for an airborne operation’,12 the seaborne troops could not be held aboard their ships for much longer. It was possible, indeed probable, that they would be heading to France within the next twelve hours.
Guillaume Mercader awoke early on that grey Monday morning and slipped into his La Perle cycling gear: he was to spend much of the day in the saddle, fighting the stiff westerly as he pedalled through the Forêt de Cerisy towards Lamberville. It was no weather to be on a bike: the gusts were so strong that he had to pump hard to make any headway.
Mercader was due to meet several members of his resistance circuit, including Père Martin, the local Catholic priest, and a chatelaine named Mademoiselle de Siresme. The latter was not only the proprietor of the village château, but she also owned a significant tract of land. As such, she was able to provide information on where the latest German anti-glider posts had been positioned.
Mercader covered a great deal of ground that day and it was mid-afternoon by the time he headed back to his home in Bayeux. As he cycled northwards, he was surprised to see what he later described as ‘very important and unusual activity of the Allied air force’. There were many more planes in the sky than was normal and they seemed to be heading for targets deep inland. Puzzled as to why they had chosen such an overcast day for a large-scale raid, he wondered if it heralded anything of significance. He was none the wiser when he unlatched the front door, stowed his bike and made his way down to the cellar in order to listen to the BBC’s messages personnels on his clandestine wireless.
There were hundreds of these messages each evening and they were gibberish to everyone except the intended recipient. Napoleon has lost his hat might be the signal for sabotage. John has a long moustache might refer to a bridge in need of destruction.
It was now more than seventy-two hours since Mercader had been forewarned of the message that would alert him to the Allied landings. Two phrases were to be broadcast at around 6.30 p.m., the signal for his saboteurs to go into action. They would also signify that the Allied landings would be happening within hours.
On this particular evening, he tuned into the BBC at 6 p.m. as usual, paying only cursory attention to what was being said. Listening to such gibberish was both monotonous and tiresome. But on the dot of 6.30 p.m., he got the surprise of his life.
Il fait chaud à Suez. It was the first part of the phrase for him.
There was a short pause in the broadcast. And then came the second message. Les dés sont jetés.
He was ‘stunned by listening to these coded messages’ and found it hard to take in the enormity of it all. This, then, was it. The Allied invasion was about to begin.
He suddenly stood up, thinking on his feet. ‘Quickly enough, I came to myself.’ He snapped off the wireless and dashed back upstairs, ‘climbing the steps from the cellar four at a time’. Breathless with excitement, he told his wife, Madeleine, what he had just heard. ‘The night,’ he said, ‘was going to be long.’
Still weary after an exhausting day, he climbed back on his bicycle and set off to inform his agents ‘of an immediate landing’.13 It was essential that everyone in the circuit should get the news.
Guillaume Mercader was not alone in hearing the message that evening. Fellow resister Robert le Nevez had been listening to the same BBC broadcast when he heard the call to arms for his Saint-Clair circuit of saboteurs. Le champ du laboureur dans le matin brumeux. (The field of the ploughman in the morning mist.) It was the signal for them to swing into action. He immediately cycled over to the house of his friend, André Héricy, and broke the extraordinary news. ‘It’s this evening! D’you understand!’14
Héricy was an impulsive twenty-three-year-old carpenter who had joined the Saint-Clair resistance circuit two years earlier, one of a generation of youngsters who felt that their youth had been stolen by the Germans. He had been waiting for this moment since 1940. Now, he blew a hasty kiss to his wife and ten-week-old son and followed his friend out into the wind and drizzle. ‘I took my bike and, hop, nothing was going to stop me that night!’15 The two young men sped across the moonlit countryside to a dank coppice behind the farm at Saint-Clair, the agreed rendezvous for their fellow saboteurs.
Twelve others had already gathered by the time they arrived, along with their bandit leader, Captain Jean. His real name was Jean Renaud-Dandicolle and he was revered by the younger lads. The captain’s first display of Gallic brio had come a few weeks earlier when he parachuted into Saint-Clair like an avenging angel, a transmission set tucked neatly into his backpack. He told the would-be saboteurs how he had spent the previous months serving with General de Gaulle in London.
He was well briefed on what needed to be done. Their primary mission was a most important one: to blow up the main railway line between Caen and Laval. This railway was ‘essential for the conveyance of German weapons towards the beaches’.16 It was also essential for the movement of troops. Unless it was destroyed, the Germans would be able to move thousands of soldiers northwards to the coast.
Captain Jean asked for five volunteers from that band of twelve. Héricy was quick to raise his hand, as were Nevez and three others. The captain gave each of them a gift from his box of tricks: a pistol, some detonators and a large bag of explosives. He then offered them a choice of Sten gun or automatic rifle – weapons that had been dropped into the area just a few nights earlier. The men changed into American jackets, a disguise of sorts that was intended to confuse any German sentry they might encounter. ‘We had to make the Germans believe that it was the work of an American commando [group], rather than the French resistance.’17 This would minimize the risk of reprisals against the civilian population.
Lightly disguised but heavily armed, they now made their way to the village of Grimbosq, pedalling at speed through the darkness and ‘using back roads and making detours’. They concealed their bikes in the undergrowth and crept through the tangle of dripping briars that fringed the railway line. Up ahead was a high stone embankment that loomed into the night. Beyond it was a fork in the tracks. This was their goal, a crucial junction in the Caen to Laval line. It was a tense moment, for there were German sentries within spitting distance, but the saboteurs used the curve in the tracks to remain out of sight.
They now worked as fast as they could. ‘We collected the lumps of plastic explosive before kneading them and fixing them along each rail at a junction, so as to blow up eight rails at a time.’ They had been given three types of detonators: thirty seconds, three minutes and five minutes. Héricy conferred with the others as to which one to use. ‘Seeing as nobody had disturbed us, we opted for the green, five-minute detonator.’
His heart was thumping hard. All five had been dreaming of this moment for years. ‘Only one thing mattered to us,’ said Héricy, ‘to kick the Germans out of France.’18
They triggered the detonators and then ‘jumped like madmen towards the rampart’. Here, a damp woodpile offered protection from the blast. If all went to plan, they had just five minutes before this entire stretch of railway would be blown to the heavens.
Those long hours since dusk had proved no less eventful for Colonel Helmuth Meyer, a ‘thin-faced, exuberant and sly’ Nazi intelligence officer whose pinched features hinted at the devious brain within.
Colonel Meyer was in charge of counter-intelligence for the 15th Army and he also ran the only unit engaged in radio monitoring. He believed his work to be of paramount importance to the war effort and was bitter to discover that it was not taken seriously by his superiors.
Meyer insisted on his team adopting a methodical approach to their work. ‘He even went so far as to have his intercepting radio crew listen to the broadcasts made from the jeeps of the military police in England as they directed troops along the roads.’
But one thing took priority over all others. He was ‘ardently interested’ in learning more about the Allied invasion plans and felt sure that the clue lay in the infernal BBC messages personnels. ‘He had worked out all sorts of devices to ferret out the meaning of messages.’ These ‘devices’ included interrogation and torture: ‘Gestapo and SS methods to extract information from French resistance men who were caught’. Such methods, coupled with radio eavesdropping, had enabled him to gather a vast dossier of information as to the Allied intentions. But there was one vexing problem that seemed to have no obvious solution: ‘to decide what was true and what was false’.19
Meyer was based at Tourcoing, a provincial city some twenty minutes’ drive to the north of Lille. This was the headquarters of the 15th Army and its offices straddled a large tract of land between Rue de Melbourne and the Canal de Tourcoing. At its heart was a concrete bunker known as Maikäfer R608 (a Maikäfer is a large beetle) – the most secretive building on the site. Here, in a secure underground office divided by a glass partition, Helmuth Meyer’s team eavesdropped on the thousands of Allied messages transmitted each day.
By the late spring of 1944, he was directing a team of thirty counter-intelligence specialists whose skill at identifying individual Allied wireless operators was outstanding. Heinz Herbst claimed he could recognize operators by the manner in which they transmitted their Morse. ‘One might linger on a dash or falter with a dot.’ By such signs, ‘we would be able to recognize the individual operator, and we referred to them by nicknames we had given them.’20
Colonel Meyer had received a most tantalizing tip-off from the Berlin Abwehr, or military intelligence service, just a few months earlier. It was a tip-off that had the potential to change the course of the war. He had been informed that the Allies were intending to use their messages personnels to broadcast a general announcement to the French resistance, informing it of the forthcoming invasion. This message was to be the opening lines of a poem by Paul Verlaine. The first line would be transmitted exactly a week before the invasion. The second would signal that the Allied landings were imminent.
Listening to these messages was now moved to the top of the agenda – a painstakingly dull business for those working in Meyer’s intelligence team. Their principal goal, drummed into them time and again, was ‘to find out where the invasion would begin’.
The long hours of eavesdropping eventually yielded a choice nugget of gold. The first excerpt of the Verlaine poem was picked up at 9.20 p.m. on Thursday, 1 June. Les sanglots longs, des violons de l’automne. (The long sighs of the violins of autumn.) Sergeant Hans Reichling heard the phrase in his headphones and instantly switched on the wire-recorder in order to catch the repeat. He then rushed into the adjacent office where Meyer was seated at his desk. ‘Sir, the first part of the message is here.’
Meyer listened to the recording and gave a brisk nod. ‘Now something’s going to happen.’ It was vital not to miss the second excerpt of the poem, which would alert him to the fact that the invasion was imminent.
It duly came at 9.33 p.m. on Monday, 5 June. Reichling was once again listening to the BBC messages when he heard the second line of verse: Blessent mon coeur d’une langueur monotone. (Wound my heart with a monotonous languor.) It was the breakthrough he needed. Unless it was an elaborate hoax on the part of the Allies, the troops would be landing within hours.
This was such priceless intelligence that Meyer dashed through to the officers’ mess and thrust the message into the hands of Major-General Rudolf Hofman, the 15th Army’s chief of staff. He immediately realized its importance and flashed a general alert to the 15th Army headquarters. From here, it was transmitted to Army Group B, where it was received by Colonel Staubwasser. He forwarded it to von Rundstedt’s headquarters, from whence it was sent directly to the German Supreme Command (OKW) in Berchtesgaden. Within a very short space of time, it was in the hands of General Alfred Jodl, the all-important Chief of Operations Staff. But there it stopped. ‘The message remained on his desk.’
General Jodl was in a position to order a general alert. He could have sent a warning to every command post in northern France, as well as to the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe. But he hesitated. He simply did not trust Meyer’s intelligence. Over the past weeks there had been too many false alarms. He therefore declined to forward the warning to the very army charged with defending the Normandy coastline.
Colonel Meyer knew nothing of this at the time. Indeed he only learned of Jodl’s decision when it was too late. Not only was he furious, but he also declared himself ‘the most frustrated man’21 in the Wehrmacht. Not for the first time, his hard-won intelligence had been ignored. His exceptional team had discovered that the Allies were coming. They knew the landings were imminent. But on that critical evening, when so much was at stake, the commanders on the beaches had been left completely in the dark.
The Supreme Commander of Allied forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, had confirmed the launch of the invasion in the hours before dawn, having been reassured that the weather was set to improve. ‘Okay,’ he said briskly, ‘we’ll go!’22 It was a laconic send-off for the greatest seaborne fleet in history.
He would later return to his mobile headquarters, a large trailer parked in a gloomy nook of woodland just a mile or so from Southwick House. If circumstances had been different, it might have been a bucolic spot to camp. Wild clematis trailed through the lower branches and dog rose rampaged through the damp shadows. But the surrounding encampment was dismal, a place ‘where sunshine was exiled, where rain soaked our entire canvas headquarters days on end, giving everything a damp, musty odour’.23
If the setting was downcast, the trailer itself was positively regal, a three-carriage unit that Eisenhower jokingly referred to as his circus wagon. It had been specially designed by Mr G.V. Russell, whose pre-war years had been spent creating ‘lavish night clubs’24 for the starlets and roués of Hollywood. The advent of war had seen him turn his talents to mobile homes, transforming Eisenhower’s Lockheed trailer into a self-contained battle headquarters complete with kitchenette, shower and chemical lavatory, as well as air conditioning, portable power and state-of-the-art radio equipment. The floors were of polished black linoleum, the walls were tinted pearl-grey and the upholstered furniture was made of green leather. You could cook, watch films and plan an invasion – or you could do all three at once. In comparison to Rommel’s sumptuous headquarters at Château de La Roche-Guyon, it lacked the hunting trophies, duodecimo volumes and sculpted marble busts. But it was a uniquely self-contained unit. The invasion could falter or the world could come to an end, yet Eisenhower could continue to direct its aftermath from his high-tech wagon.
He was not alone that Monday evening. He was in the company of Harry Butcher, his personal aide, in whom he had placed his trust. Butcher was an unlikely candidate for such a demanding job. A handsome young journalist, he was a gregarious raconteur who served up his gossip with twin dollops of wit and charm. He had been first introduced to Eisenhower by the general’s younger brother, Milton, and the two of them immediately became friends. Eisenhower admired Butcher’s laissez-faire approach to life (he detested rules) while Butcher appreciated Eisenhower’s quiet intensity. When playing bridge, he was amazed to discover that Ike ‘could determine after the first round of bidding with astounding accuracy the number of cards of each suit held by the other three players’.25 When Eisenhower gambled, he did so to win.
Two years after their first meeting, Eisenhower was in need of a naval aide and asked Butcher if he wanted the job, even though he knew little of naval affairs. He had previously been editor of Fertilizer Review and his professional expertise was in chemicals and muck. Some would later claim that muck-raking was the only métier in which Butcher really excelled. Yet even muck can contain nuggets of gold and the memoirs that Butcher kept while working for Eisenhower were to provide an insight into the insecurities of a man about to send two and a half million men into battle.
He soon made himself indispensable, becoming – in the words of one admirer – Eisenhower’s ‘front office boy, full time aide, personal friend, eager publicist and chief diarist’.26 Butcher himself referred to his role as ‘kibitzer, water boy, cigarette girl and flunky’.27 He was certainly a jack-of-all-trades but he was also a master of one, as Eisenhower was quick to acknowledge. ‘Butcher’s job is simple,’ he confessed. ‘It is to keep me sane.’28 But keeping Eisenhower sane on the eve of D-Day was not easy. The Supreme Commander chain-smoked his Chesterfields as he pondered over the fate of the men he was sending into battle. ‘How many youngsters are gone forever,’29 he had written eight weeks earlier. Now, there were certain to be many more deaths and each one would weigh heavy on his soul.
Harry Butcher was not the only one with him on that tense Monday evening. Also present was Kay Summersby, his Irish chauffeur-cum-secretary who had been first introduced to him two years earlier. She had the wistful beauty of a 1940s movie star: high cheekbones, a retroussé nose and dark eyebrows that had been plucked and sketched into perfect arcs. Miss Summersby was living in the shadow of tragedy, for her fiancé had been killed by a landmine just eight months earlier. ‘She’s not a very well person,’30 confessed Eisenhower, who perhaps sensed a fellow traveller in her highly strung nature. As he took to her, so she also took to him. Indeed, she had a general preference for ‘the breezy easy-going Yanks to the stiff-upper-lip swagger stick-carrying British officers’.
There were abundant rumours (never proven) that she was Eisenhower’s mistress. ‘She was perky and she was cute,’ thought Ike’s son, John. ‘Whether she had any designs on the Old Man, and the extent to which he succumbed, I just don’t know.’ Eisenhower’s wife, Mamie, suspected something was afoot and was furious when, during a brief home leave in West Virginia, he kept calling her Kay by mistake.
Miss Summersby was certainly one of the few who seemed able to soothe his anxieties. She was also unique among army chauffeurs: ‘better than any man at driving that big Packard in a total blackout and through London’s pea-soupers with those pinpoint headlights’.31 On arriving back at Southwick House, she would knead and buffet Eisenhower’s shoulders in an effort to reduce his stress. ‘Um, that’s good,’ he would say to her in that slight, mid-Atlantic accent of his. But he never really relaxed, and certainly not in the hours when the great fleet was sailing for France. ‘In those tense pre-dawn hours, no matter how much strength I used, I could not undo the knots at the base of his neck.’ Eisenhower was indeed in an alarming state of nervous exhaustion. ‘His eyes were bloodshot and he was so tired that his hands shook when he lit a cigarette.’32
Summersby feared that the responsibilities were too much for one person. She noticed that he had tears in his eyes when she drove him back from meeting the American paratroopers about to depart for Normandy. He was, she said, ‘the loneliest man in the world’.33
The tensions of that Monday evening grew almost too much to bear. The three of them sat in virtual silence in Ike’s nickel-plated trailer, ‘each with his own thoughts and trying to borrow by psychological osmosis those of the Supreme Commander’.34 This little trio, with their hang-ups, insecurities and feigned bravado was like a microcosm of every platoon heading for Normandy.
By 1.15 a.m., Butcher had had enough. ‘To hell with it,’ he said, and took himself off to bed. Summersby stayed for longer, trying to persuade Eisenhower to rest. ‘I think you ought to go and lie down for a little while.’ Finally, hours later, he agreed. ‘You should do the same.’35
As she made her way back to her quarters through the tented encampment, she had the dreamy impression that she was wandering through a Native American village. She felt rootless, displaced and sad. War had changed them all.
André Héricy and his band of saboteurs had been hiding behind their damp woodpile for what seemed like an eternity. ‘We waited. Waited. And then, one by one, we lifted our heads and looked at each other anxiously.’ There was no explosion. Just silence. ‘Those five minutes seemed to last an hour.’
When it finally happened, it did so quite without warning. There was an eruption of such magnitude that the very core of the earth seemed to shudder. ‘We dived down again, covering our heads with our hands.’ They were fortunate to have the protection of the woodpile, for the explosion was one of unbelievable violence and was followed by a downpour unlike any other as ‘debris and gravel rained down from the sky.’ Ballast, track and even the sleepers were hurled into the surrounding woods.
When the deluge finally came to an end, the five saboteurs rushed forward to inspect the damage. They could scarcely believe the destructive force of the explosion. For more than fifty metres, the railway had simply disappeared. The ballast had been stripped away. Even the tracks were missing. In the few places where they were still in situ, they were sticking into the air like giant metal fingers. Héricy was exhilarated. ‘We felt like kings.’36 They were so fired with adrenalin that they reached for their guns and opened fire on the surrounding apple trees, shooting up that year’s crop.
Then, realizing the foolishness of what they were doing, they darted back into the forest before the German sentries could get on their trail. After retrieving their bikes, they set off into the night, cycling as fast as possible back to Saint-Clair. As they did so, they could hear the low growl of planes in the midnight sky.
It was D-Day.
* That little boy, John Keegan, was to become one of the most celebrated military historians of the twentieth century and author of Six Armies in Normandy.