IN WORLD WAR I, the side undertaking an offensive always had to worry about an enemy counteroffensive almost anywhere along the line from the Swiss border to the Channel coast. Adequate forces had to be maintained all along that line. The same was true of the Germans in Western Europe in World War II. SHAEF had an enormous advantage here. There was no possibility of a German offensive against the United Kingdom, so the AEF was free to concentrate all its resources on the point of attack.
Before 1918, when the first bombing squadrons came into being and began initial (although still very small) operations, there was no physical way a World War I attacking force could reach behind enemy lines to disrupt the movement of the enemy’s men and supplies to the battle area. It could do so only through feints and deceptions. SHAEF made full use of feints and deceptions, but in addition the AEF had three means to prevent, or at least disrupt, the movement of German reserves and reinforcements to the lodgment area, isolating lower Normandy and turning it into a sort of strategic island. The three ways involved the airborne divisions, the French Resistance, and the strategic air force. Because they were new and untried, there was great controversy over how to utilize them effectively. But in the end, agreement was reached and the job was done.
The initial COSSAC plan had called for using the British 6th Airborne Division in and around Caen to take the city and the airfield at Carpiquet. That was a bold plan, too bold for Montgomery, who insisted on using the division in what was essentially a defensive role, dropping it into the area between the Dives and Orne rivers to isolate Sword Beach.I Bradley, meanwhile, decided to use the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions behind German lines in the Cotentin, to prevent the Germans from launching local counterattacks against Utah Beach and to seize the exits from that beach so that the 4th Infantry Division could move inland.
When General Marshall saw these plans, he was upset. At the beginning of the war, Marshall had held great hopes for the paratroops as a new element in warfare, but his hopes had not been realized. In September 1943, for example, a plan to drop the 82nd Airborne on airfields around Rome had been abandoned at the last minute as too risky and instead the division had been used for tactical support of the Salerno beachhead.
Early in 1944 Marshall told Eisenhower that the failure to use paratroops in a strategic role had been a severe disappointment to him. He thought the AEF could do much more to exploit its command of the air and the elite airborne divisions that had been built at such cost. Marshall felt there had been “a lack of conception” caused by a piecemeal approach, with “each commander grabbing at a piece to assist his particular phase of the operation.” If he had been given command of Overlord, Marshall said, he would have insisted on a single, large airborne operation, “even to the extent that should the British be in opposition I would carry it out exclusively with American troops.”
Marshall suggested to Eisenhower that the AEF use the airborne south of Evreux, some 100-plus kilometers inland from Caen. There were four good airfields near Evreux that could be quickly captured so the lightly armed airborne troops could be reinforced.
“This plan appeals to me,” Marshall declared, “because I feel that it is a true vertical envelopment and would create such a strategic threat to the Germans that it would call for a major revision of their defensive plans.” It would be a complete surprise, would directly threaten both the crossings of the Seine River and Paris, and would serve as a rallying point for the French Resistance. The only drawback Marshall could see was “that we have never done anything like this before, and frankly, that reaction makes me tired.”1
Eisenhower hated to disagree with Marshall and almost never did so. Thus his reply was long and defensive. He said that for more than a year one of his favorite subjects for contemplation was getting ahead of the enemy in some important method of operation, and the strategic use of airborne troops was an obvious possibility. Nevertheless, on this one Marshall was wrong.
First, Eisenhower told his boss, he had to have the airborne on the flank at Sword and behind German lines at Utah in order to get ashore. Second, and more important, an airborne force well inland would not be self-contained, would lack mobility, and would therefore be destroyed. The Germans had shown time and again in the war that they did not fear a “strategic threat of envelopment.” Using the road nets of Western Europe, they could concentrate immense firepower against an isolated garrison and defeat it in detail. Anzio was an example. An inland airborne force, cut off from all supply except what could be brought in by air, without tanks or trucks, immobile and inadequately armed, would be annihilated.
Eisenhower told Marshall that, far from being a strategic threat to the Germans, airborne troops at Evreux would just be wasted. “I instinctively dislike ever to uphold the conservative as opposed to the bold,” Eisenhower concluded, but he insisted on using the 6th, 82nd, and 101st Airborne divisions as Montgomery and Bradley wanted to use them—to keep German reinforcements away from the invasion beaches.2
• •
When Eisenhower took command, the Luftwaffe had been driven back into Germany to fight a defensive action, giving the Allies command of the air over France. Britain and America had put a tremendous effort into building their air fleets, including fighters but most of all medium and heavy bombers. The expense was staggering. One reason for the shortage of landing craft, for example, was the amount of steel, engines, and production capacity in general that had gone into building bombers. In addition, the air forces got first call on personnel, at the expense of the armies, where junior officer and noncom leadership suffered as a result. Building the air armadas, in short, had been a gamble in technology and technique. The armadas gave the Allies command of the air and thousands of planes to exploit it. Those two facts gave the AEF a great asset, unique in the history of war. Was it worth the effort? That was a question no longer worth asking; the asset existed. But it left an outstanding question: How to use it.
There was no dispute about how to use it on D-Day. Everyone agreed that just before H-Hour and through D-Day, every Allied bomber that could fly would participate in the attack on the Normandy coastal defenses. But there was intense dispute over the role of the bombers in the two months preceding the invasion.
Gen. Carl Spaatz of the U.S. Eighth Air Force and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris of RAF Bomber Command were wedded to the theory that bombers, by themselves, could win the war. Gen. J. F. M. Whiteley, a British officer who had served as Eisenhower’s deputy chief of staff in the Mediterranean, had gone to the Churchill-Roosevelt-CCS conference in Quebec in September 1943. Whiteley reported that there was much discussion in Quebec about Overlord. His impression was that within the RAF and U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF, commanded by Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold) there were powerful groups “who hoped Overlord would meet with every success, but who were sorry that they could not give direct assistance because, of course, they were more than fully occupied on the really important war against Germany.”3
Reduced to its essentials, the dispute between the airmen and the ground soldiers was simply put. Spaatz and Harris believed that the further behind the front lines their bombers operated—that is, within Germany itself, attacking strategic targets—the more effective they could be. Eisenhower and the SHAEF staff believed that the closer to the front lines the bombers operated—that is, within France, attacking tactical targets—the more they could contribute to Overlord.
There was in addition a dispute between the bomber commanders. Although they agreed that Overlord was not really necessary, Harris and Spaatz had their own strategies. Harris felt RAF Bomber Command could bring about a German capitulation through terror bombing of German cities; Spaatz felt the Eighth Air Force could bring about a German surrender through the selective destruction of certain key industries, especially oil and synthetic-fuel production facilities.
The army commanders, most of all Eisenhower, believed that the only way to bring about a German surrender was to overrun Germany on the ground, and that to do so required first of all a successful Overlord. They further believed that only air superiority made Overlord feasible.
As so often happens with the military, the dispute was fought out not over the straightforward question of targeting but rather over the more complex question of organization and command structure. Here things were well muddled. Although Eisenhower was the supreme commander, in fact he commanded only those forces assigned to him by the CCS, and these did not include the Eighth Air Force or Bomber Command. The only air power SHAEF possessed was the British tactical air force and the American tactical air force (Ninth Air Force), under the immediate command of Air Vice Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory. Leigh-Mallory’s experience had been solely with fighters; he was a cautious, pessimistic sort; Harris and Spaatz neither trusted nor liked him; they refused to serve under him, or SHAEF.
In January, Eisenhower argued with Marshall and Arnold about command. He insisted that Harris and Spaatz should be under SHAEF for a period of several weeks before the invasion so that SHAEF could pick the targets. He told Arnold he had “strong views” on the subject. To his surprise and relief, Arnold said he agreed that the bombers “should be placed under your direct command for the impending operations.”4
Eisenhower intended to use the bombers to paralyze the French railway system. He believed it could be done and that once accomplished it would hamper German movement of reinforcements to lower Normandy. The program, called the Transportation Plan, would take time—it could not be accomplished with a two- or three-day blitz on the eve of Overlord. The strategic air force commanders were offering to participate in an interdiction program that would begin shortly before D-Day and would concentrate on line-cutting, strafing, bridge-breaking, and the destruction of a few railroad focal points. The Transportation Plan called for a prolonged attack on rail yards, sidings, stations, sheds, repair shops, roundhouses, turntables, signal systems, switches, locomotives, and rolling stock.
Forrest Pogue, the official historian of SHAEF, writes that “in getting the[ir] proposal adopted, Eisenhower, Tedder, and Leigh-Mallory were vigorously opposed, on both strategic and political grounds, by most of the bomber commanders, by members of the 21 Army Group staff, and by the Prime Minister and most of the War Cabinet.”5
Harris and Spaatz led the protest. Harris argued that Bomber Command, built for night raids and area bombing, could not achieve the accuracy required to hit marshaling yards, repair facilities, bridges, and other pinpoint railroad targets. Tedder, the strongest advocate at SHAEF of the Transportation Plan, indeed the man who had convinced Eisenhower of its necessity, even accused Harris of juggling figures to prove that his bombers could not hit the proposed targets. Spaatz insisted that the continuing success of operations against German oil refineries would assure the greatest support for Overlord; he convinced Arnold to change his mind and support him. Spaatz argued that his Oil Plan would in the long run immobilize the Germans much more effectively than the Transportation Plan.
Eisenhower replied that the Oil Plan would have no immediate effect. The Germans had accumulated stocks of oil and gasoline in France in scattered and camouflaged depots. Only when those supplies were used up—that is, well after D-Day—would a stoppage of oil production affect German military operations in France. Spaatz shrugged off this point by saying that the Transportation Plan would be only of slight help in isolating the battlefield, while the Oil Plan would be of major help later. This was the crux of the matter: Spaatz assumed that it would be easy to get ashore and stay there; Eisenhower did not.
The Oil Plan would also allow Eighth Air Force to retain its independence from SHAEF, a point on which Spaatz insisted because of Leigh-Mallory. Eisenhower was embarrassed by Spaatz’s open hostility to Leigh-Mallory and tried to reassure Spaatz that Tedder would personally supervise the air campaign. Further, as Spaatz noted in his diary, Eisenhower “tried subtly to sell Leigh-Mallory [to me], saying that . . . he felt that maybe proper credit had not been given to the man’s intelligence. I told him that my views had not and would not change.”6
Unable to persuade the air commanders, Eisenhower turned to his superiors. He convinced Churchill that Tedder could act as the “aviation lobe” of Eisenhower’s brain—thus bypassing Leigh-Mallory so far as the bombers were concerned—but he could not persuade Churchill on the key point. The prime minister ruled that “there can be no question of handing over the British Bomber . . . Command as a whole to the Supreme Commander and his Deputy.” Further, Churchill insisted that SHAEF air plans should be subject to CCS approval. Eisenhower objected to submitting his plans to the CCS and “demurred at anything short of complete operation control of the whole of Bomber Command and the American Strategic Forces.” He felt so strongly that he told Churchill unless he was given command of the bombers he would “simply have to go home.”7
This extreme threat—all but unique in the history of war; it evidently never occurred to Rommel to tell Hitler that unless he got control of the panzers he would “go home”—brought the British around. The War Cabinet drew up a directive that gave Eisenhower “supervision” of the bombers. Marshall suggested the word be changed to “command.” The British refused, leaving Eisenhower “astonished.” On March 22 he wrote in his diary, “If a satisfactory answer is not reached, I am going to take drastic action and inform the CCS that unless the matter is settled at once I will request relief from this Command.” That same morning the British chiefs were meeting. When Eisenhower heard the results of their deliberations he added a postscript to his diary entry: “I was told the word ‘direction’ was acceptable. . . . Amen!”8
Tedder prepared a list of more than seventy railroad targets in France and Belgium (for the obvious reason that it would give away the invasion site, the bombing could not be concentrated around lower Normandy). On April 3 it went before the War Cabinet for approval. The British had previously forbidden air attacks on occupied countries if there was risk of high civilian casualties, and now they drew back from the Transportation Plan for that reason. “The argument for concentration on these particular targets,” Churchill wrote Eisenhower, “is very nicely balanced on military grounds.” He added that the Cabinet took “rather a grave and on the whole an adverse view of the proposal.” Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was especially adamant. He pointed out that after the war Britain would have to live in a Europe that was already looking to Russia “more than he would wish.” He did not want the French people to regard the British and Americans with hatred.9
Eisenhower replied that he was convinced the Transportation Plan was necessary to the success of Overlord, “and unless this could be proved to be an erroneous conclusion, I do not see how we can fail to proceed with the program.” He reminded Churchill that the French people were “slaves” and that they would benefit most from Overlord. “We must never forget,” Eisenhower added in his strongest argument, “that one of the fundamental factors leading to the decision for undertaking Overlord was the conviction that our overpowering air force would make feasible an operation which might otherwise be considered extremely hazardous, if not foolhardy.” He said it would be “sheer folly” to refuse approval to the Transportation Plan.10
Churchill put Eisenhower’s views before the War Cabinet. He spoke eloquently of Eisenhower’s onerous responsibilities. Care should be taken, he said, not to add unnecessarily to his burdens. Still, he complained that he had never realized that air power would assume so cruel and remorseless a form. The Transportation Plan, he feared, “will smear the good name of the Royal Air Forces across the world.”11
Churchill wanted the French consulted. Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Gen. Walter B. Smith, then talked to Gen. Pierre-Joseph Koenig, the representative of Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s Algiers-based French Committee of National Liberation. “To my surprise,” Smith reported, “Koenig takes a much more cold-blooded view than we do. His remark was, ‘This is war, and it must be expected that people will be killed. We would take the anticipated loss to be rid of the Germans.’ ”12
Churchill was almost, but not quite, beaten down. He decided to take the issue to Roosevelt and thus force the Americans to take their share of the responsibility for approval of the plan. He told Roosevelt of the War Cabinet’s anxiety about “these French slaughters” and of the British doubts “as to whether almost as good military results could not be produced by other methods.” Roosevelt must decide. Roosevelt replied that the military considerations must dominate. The Transportation Plan had won.13
SHAEF put the bombers to work on the French railway system. By D-Day the Allies had dropped 76,000 tons of bombs (seventy-six kilotons, or about seven times the explosive power of the atomic bomb used against Hiroshima) on railway targets. The Seine River bridges west of Paris were virtually destroyed. Based on an index of 100 for January-February 1944, railway traffic dropped from 69 in mid-May to 38 by D-Day.
But by no means was this accomplished exclusively by the bombers—the French Resistance played a major role. There was some French resentment, although not so much as Eden feared. Casualties were lighter than the pessimists in the War Cabinet had predicted.
• •
On June 3, in “Weekly Intelligence Summary No. 11,” SHAEF G-2 assessed the results to date. The report began, “The enemy controlled railway system in the West has undergone and continues to undergo an attack such as no transport system has hitherto experienced either in intensity or duration.” Some 1,700 locomotives and 25,000 wagons had been destroyed or put out of action, which sounded impressive, but which constituted only 13 percent and 8 percent respectively of the preraid figures. Worse, the Germans were able to replace rolling stock by taking it from French civilian needs. As the summary noted, “The prime sufferers have been the French people. French traffic has invariably been curtailed at the expense of German requirements and an already greatly strangled French economy has experienced further setbacks.” Consequently, the losses “are not such that the enemy will be prevented from moving up supplies and reinforcements as required, although such movement will be less efficiently operated.”
Beyond rolling stock, the Transportation Plan was directed against depots, turntables, and bridges. Some 58,000 tons of bombs had been dropped on ninety targets, inflicting great damage, but unfortunately the Germans were adept at repairs: “In many cases [the damage] has been cleared and the lines reopened within 24 hours, and in many more within 48 hours.” More encouraging was the report on railway bridges across the Seine from Paris to the sea; eight of the nine had been destroyed. Of the nine highway bridges attacked, seven had been destroyed or partially damaged.
On the eve of D-Day, the SHAEF G-2 conclusion was ominous: “Evidence as to the effect on German troop movements remains unsatisfactory, but the effects till now do not appear to have been very serious.”14
That judgment cast doubts on the wisdom of the Transportation Plan. The bomber commanders were never convinced that it was wise or effective; after the war, the official U.S. Army Air Force historians wrote, “Long after D-Day, there remained the sobering question as to whether the results of the plan were commensurate with the cost in air effort and the ruin inflicted on French and Belgian cities.”15
But those in the best position to know, the German generals, were “strong in their belief that the various air attacks were ruinous to their counter-offensive plans.”16
The plane that did the most damage was the B-26 Marauder, developed by the Glenn L. Martin Company. A medium bomber, it flew at low altitudes and could be extremely accurate, so it was the principal attacker of the railroad bridges and rail yards. After the war, Rommel’s chief of staff, Hans Speidel, said, “Destruction of railways was making regulated railway supply impossible as early as mid-May 1944. . . . Lack of fuel paralyzed all movement. The Seine bridges below Paris and the Loire bridges below Orléans were destroyed from the air before 6 June 1944.” (Speidel’s statement is inscribed on the B-26 Memorial at the USAF Air Museum in Dayton, Ohio.)
In a 1946 interview, General Jodl said that “the complete construction of the coastal defenses was not yet finished and never would have been because the necessary sand and cement could no longer be brought up.”17 Gordon Harrison, the official historian of the cross-Channel attack, concluded that by D-Day the “transportation system [in France] was on the point of total collapse,” and this was “to prove critical in the battle for Normandy.”18
• •
There was more involved in the disruption of the transportation system than just the bombers. The French Resistance played a part that was perhaps as important and that certainly was more efficient per pound of explosive.
The Resistance had grown from practically nothing in the dark days of 1940 to a considerable force by early 1944. Like all successful clandestine operations, its organization was complex and fragmented, divided regionally and politically. Its acknowledged head was Charles de Gaulle, but he was in Algiers, far from the scene and incapable of exercising anything like rigid control. Liaison was provided by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) established by the British in late 1940 (the first agents parachuted into France in the spring of 1941) and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), modeled on SOE. OSS began operating in 1943.
The Resistance had many significant weaknesses. It was always subject to German penetration. It was inadequately armed; in many cases totally unarmed. Lines of authority tended to be unclear. Communication within units was poor, between units almost nonexistent. It was mistrusted by the bulk of the population, as most French people wanted no trouble with the Germans and feared the consequences of stirring them up.
The Resistance had assets, including bravery, a willingness to make personal sacrifices for the goal of liberation, and fierce patriotism. Most of all, it was behind enemy lines. It could provide intelligence of the most accurate kind (“I saw it with my own eyes”), it could sabotage rail lines, bridges, and the like, and it could provide an underground army in the German rear areas that might be able to delay the movement of German forces toward the battle.
With regard to intelligence gathering, the Resistance was the best possible source on the Atlantic Wall because most of that wall was built by Frenchmen. M. Clement Marie of Port-en-Bessin in Calvados was one of many who in June 1942 was forced by the Germans to work on the construction of a major fortress at Pointe-du-Hoc (just west of what came to be called Omaha Beach). There was no heavy equipment; everything was done by shovel, by handcart, by horsepower, and manpower. The fortification was dug twenty-three feet deep into the ground. All the works, tunnels, trenches, and so on were covered; bunkers above soil level were also covered with topsoil and sod. Marie helped to pile earth on the sides of the bunkers, so that it gently sloped from the top to natural ground level.
Marie also worked at Pointe-de-la-Percée (the western edge of Omaha), building radar sites for the German Kriegsmarine (navy). He recalled the time in early 1944 when it was announced that Rommel was coming to inspect. The Germans gave the French workers an order to doff their caps when the field marshal appeared. “Very quickly,” he says, “the word was spread and when Rommel came there was not a single man in Port-en-Bessin wearing a cap or hat and consequently no obligation to salute.”19
Naturally, Rommel did not notice such a small act of defiance. Anyway, he needed more workers to make up for the absence of heavy equipment. (In many ways the Atlantic Wall was constructed in exactly the same way as the Great Wall of China, by human labor; the big difference was that the Germans had concrete and steel reinforcing rods.) “Get the French countryfolk to help erect the obstacles,” Rommel told a division near Le Havre. “Pay them well and promptly for it. Point out that the enemy is least likely to invade where the most obstacles have been erected! The French farmers will be only too glad to line their purses.”20
Naturally, the Germans never did pay enough—they established an exchange rate between the mark and the franc that was ruinous to the French—nor did they feed the workers well enough to win their loyalty. So the workers complained, and grumbled among themselves, and a few of them passed information along to active Resistance figures.
SOE had many ingenious ways of getting the information back to London, including the use of carrier pigeons dropped from airplanes. André Rougeyron was a Resistance member in Normandy; in a memoir, he described this curious wedding of an ancient method of communication with the most modern technology as follows: “I receive a visit from Ernest Guesdon. He is very happy since he found in his pasture a carrier pigeon that had been parachuted in. This is one of many pigeons discovered. This method of British information services works remarkably well. The birds are dropped at night in a cage attached to a small parachute. They are found the next morning by the user of the pasture or orchard. The equipment to accomplish this communication is meticulously put together: a packet of food for the bird, parchment envelope containing all the necessary instructions, and two moulded tubes for sending messages.
“The tubes are attached to the ring encircling the pigeon’s leg. There is some very thin special paper, a pencil, and instructions on how to feed and return the bird, a questionnaire about the occupying troops, their moves, their morale, to say nothing of the defensive works.”
Rougeyron was head of an escape section that rescued many young American pilots and crews shot down over France. He used the pigeons to send messages saying that the men—last names only, no rank—were safe. “We did not want to say anything else, fearing the pigeon might be shot down on its way.”21
• •
The Germans built a four-gun battery on the cliff just west of Port-en-Bessin. Big fortifications, big guns—155mm. Beautifully camouflaged with nets and dirt embankments, they could not be seen from the air.
The farmer on whose land they were built was furious because he could not graze his cattle or grow crops on the field. He paced off the distances between the bunkers, from the bunkers to the observation post on the very edge of the cliff, from the cliff to the bunkers, and so on. He had a blind son, eight or nine years old. Like many blind people, the boy had a fabulous memory. Because he was blind, the Germans paid little attention to him.
One day in early 1944, the boy hitched a ride to Bayeux. There he managed to get in touch with André Heintz, an eighteen-year-old in the Resistance. The boy gave Heintz his information; Heintz sent it on to England via his little homemade radio transmitter (hidden in a Campbell Soup can; today on display in the Battle of Normandy Museum in Caen); thus the British navy, on D-Day, had the exact coordinates of the bunkers.22
• •
At the little village of Benouville, on the bank of the Caen Canal where a bridge crossed the waterway, Mme Thérèse Gondrée had a café. The Germans who bought wine and snacks there did not know that she spoke German. She passed on what she picked up from their conversations to Mme Vion, the head of the local maternity hospital (and of the local Resistance), who passed it on to her superiors in the Resistance in Caen, who passed it on to SOE agents in the area, who got it back to England via radio or small airplane. Thus Maj. John Howard of the Ox and Bucks, 6th Airborne Division, who was training his company for a coup de main operation against the bridge on D-Day, knew a great deal about the enemy, including the location of the button that would set off the demolition charge to blow the bridge to prevent capture.23
• •
The 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR) of the 101st Airborne had as one of its D-Day objectives the village of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont. Thanks to the Resistance, Lt. Richard Winters of Company E of the 506th knew, among other things, that the local German commander was seeing the local teacher and that he took his dog for a walk every day at precisely 1700 hours.24
M. Guillaume Mercader of Bayeux owned a bicycle shop. He had been a professional bicycle racer before the war. In an interview he related, “I could, under the occupation, renew my license and under the pretext of training I was able to travel about without difficulty.” Thanks to the compulsory labor policy, he was able to gather from workers specific intelligence on defense construction, on infrastructures, on armaments, on troop locations, on beach obstacles and the like. “My responsible departmental person was M. Meslin, alias Cdt. Morvin, head of the subdivision. Every week at No. 259 Saint-Jean Street in Caen I met with him so I could hand over to him requested information we had obtained.”25
Thanks to the information gathered and passed on from the French Resistance, supplemented and enhanced by Ultra intercepts and aerial reconnaissance, the AEF undoubtedly had better information on the enemy dispositions and strength than any attacking force in history.
• •
Sabotage was another Resistance specialty. In the period 1941–43 it consisted of sporadic, uncoordinated pinpricks against war industries, railroads, canals, and telephone and telegraph systems. It was not of such a scale as to cause the Germans much worry. But beginning in early 1944, after SOE came under SHAEF control, railway sabotage was greatly accelerated and tied into the Transportation Plan. A resister with a stick of dynamite who knew where to place it on a bridge could be much more effective than a B-17 dropping a 500-pound bomb from 15,000 feet on the same target. The man on the spot could also time the explosion so as to take out a locomotive when the bridge went up. In the first three months of 1944 the Resistance destroyed 808 locomotives compared to 387 damaged by air attack. After the Transportation Plan went into effect, the figures were reversed: in April and May the bombers put 1,437 locomotives out of action compared to only 292 credited to the Resistance.26
The British hoped for more direct support from the Resistance. A committee consisting of representatives from SOE and the army considered the possibility of a national uprising. The Resistance could make a strategic contribution to Overlord if it were “backed by a general strike or by a rising on a national scale.” Calmer heads prevailed. A French officer pointed out that the notion of a mass uprising “posited the existence of universal courage, whereas courage inspired only a few men—as it has always inspired the few rather than the many. And the idea of mass uprisings implied battling against modern tanks with the stone-throwing catapults of Caesar’s time.”27
SHAEF was more realistic. It wanted to use Resistance groups to prepare demolitions to blow main trunk lines leading into the lodgment area, beginning on D-Day. Plan Vert, it was called. By May, SOE was able to report to SHAEF that 571 railroad targets were ready for demolition. Plan Vert was supplemented by Plan Tortue, a project for blocking enemy road movements through guerrilla action—which meant in practice firing Sten and Bren guns into German columns, then running off into the woods, hoping the Germans would follow.
As the Germans were regularly picking up Resistance members and torturing them to get information, the Resistance could not be told in advance the date of D-Day. Therefore arrangements had to be made to order the execution of sabotage plans by code messages broadcast over the BBC. Leaders were told to listen to BBC broadcasts on the 1st, 2nd, 15th, and 16th of each month. If the invasion was imminent, they would hear a preparatory code message. They would then remain on alert to listen for a confirmatory message “B,” to be followed within forty-eight hours by a code launching the units into action. Each region had a different code.
In Bayeux, the action code for M. Mercader’s unit was “It is hot in Suez,” followed by “The dice are on the carpet.” He recalled the day he heard them over the BBC: “In Bayeux, in my cellar, the radio was on. At 6:30 P.M., the first message said: ‘It is hot in Suez. It is hot in Suez.’ Twice. Then a definite silence. Then, ‘The dice are on the carpet. The dice are on the carpet.’ Twice again, as well as other messages which didn’t concern us. Stunned by listening to these messages, an instant of emotion invaded me, but quickly enough, I came to myself and after having turned off the radio and climbing the steps from the cellar four at a time, I informed in the first place my wife of what I had heard. I then took my bicycle and went to contact my principal responsible people of an imminent landing. The night was going to be long.”28
SHAEF considered limiting the sabotage activity on D-Day to lower Normandy. A strong argument for doing so was to wait in other regions until the destruction of bridges would be immediately helpful to the AEF. This applied especially to the south of France, where another landing was scheduled for mid-August. Further, if the Resistance went into action all across France, it would expose its members to identification and capture by the Germans, who meanwhile would have time to repair the damage. Those arguments gave way to the view that it was preferable to obtain the maximum amount of chaos behind enemy lines at the moment of landing, and anyway SHAEF figured that it would be impossible to keep the various Resistance groups quiet after the news of D-Day broke.
Anthony Brooks, a twenty-year-old Englishman who had grown up in French-speaking Switzerland and had been studying in France when the war began, was in 1944 an SOE agent in southern France, near Toulouse. He had been receiving airdrops of explosives, which he distributed to his Resistance people, who hid them in cesspools or even on locomotives when the drivers were Resistance. (“We would hide the explosives on an electric locomotive,” he recalled, “and no German soldier is going to open up a thing that says 16,000 volts on it and it has got a key.”) Some went into lavatory water tanks; they would hold up to twenty kilos of explosive. Like most SOE agents, Brooks found that his recruits were impatient, eager for action, so “we had to let them blow up trains every now and again even if it was too soon and we had no orders. Every now and again we derailed the wrong one and we had some bad press you might say and one train we derailed was a Swiss Red Cross train and there were four enormous vans full of eggs and people were trying to scoop the yolks out of the river to make omelets and cursing us all the while.”29
In April 1944, the 2nd SS Panzer Division (the Das Reich) moved into a town near Toulouse named Montauban. It was refitting after hard service on the Eastern Front, receiving brand new tanks, Tigers, the biggest and best Germany could produce. The tanks were gas-guzzlers (Tigers weighed sixty-three tons and got one-half mile to the gallon). They were subject to mechanical problems. They had only steel tracks, which wore out quickly on highway travel. Therefore the Germans always moved the Tigers for any distance on railroad cars. The Tigers were concentrated in Montauban and kept under heavy guard. The railway cars they rode on were hidden in village railway sidings round Montauban, each concealed by a couple of worn-out French trucks dumped on top. These transporter cars were unguarded.
Brooks put his subagents to work. One of them was a beautiful young sixteen-year-old girl named Tetty “who was the daughter of the local boss who ran a garage and she had long ringlets and her mother was always smacking her and telling her not to play with them.” All through May, Tetty and her boyfriend, her fourteen-year-old sister, and others sallied out after dark by bicycle to the cars, where they siphoned off all the axle oil, replacing it with an abrasive powder parachuted in by SOE. Brooks told Tetty and the others to throw away the oil, but “of course the French said it was ludicrous to throw away this beautiful green oil so they salvaged it as it was real high quality motor oil” that fetched a fine price on the black market.
On D-Day, the Das Reich got orders to move out for Normandy. The Germans loaded their Tigers onto the railway cars. Every car seized up before they reached Montauban. The damage was so extensive to the cars’ axles that they could not be repaired. It was a week before the division found alternative cars, in Perigueux, a hundred kilometers away—bad luck for the tanks’ tracks and fuel supply. The Resistance harassed the division from Montauban to Perigueux. As a consequence the Das Reich, expected by Rommel in Normandy by D plus three or four, actually arrived on D plus seventeen. Furthermore, as Brooks notes with a certain satisfaction, “No train went north of Montauban after the night of the Fifth of June until it went out flying the French flag or the Union Jack.”30
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The contributions of the paratroops on the night before D-Day, and of the bombers and the Resistance in the weeks before D-Day, cannot be appraised with precision. But it is clear that while Eisenhower never had to worry about his rear, Rommel always did.
I. In addition, Montgomery hoped that his seaborne British 3rd Division at Sword Beach would be able to overrun Caen in the first hours of the invasion.