As dawn broke on June 6, 1944, the mightiest armada in history knifed through the windswept waves of the English Channel toward France. In the thousands of warships—and the serried ranks of bombers and fighters overhead—one could see the full power and grandeur of the Western Alliance.
The invasion forces bearing down on the beaches of Normandy were, for the most part, British, American, and Canadian. But the countries of occupied Europe played a significant role on that historic day as well. The invaders carried with them detailed maps of the German fortifications on the coast to which they were heading—maps based on intelligence supplied by European agents. The ships ferrying and protecting the D-Day troops included Norwegian, Polish, Belgian, and French vessels, while Dutch, Belgian, Czech, Polish, and French pilots and aircrew flew overhead.
As impressive as the June 6 spectacle was, it was only the first wave of what was to come. Over the next three months, nearly 2 million Allied soldiers and airmen—more than 200,000 of them from occupied Europe—would take part in the effort to break out of Normandy and fight their way across France. The French 2nd Armored Division would be the first major force from the exiled allies to land in continental Europe. A Polish armored division would follow soon afterward, as would smaller Belgian, Czech, and Dutch units.
The European troops looked forward to the coming fight on the Continent with a passion unmatched by their American, British, and Canadian counterparts. For them, the chance to help liberate Europe would make up for the humiliation of their countries’ defeats and demonstrate their loyalty to the Allied cause. Above all, they yearned to liberate their nations and exact retribution against their occupiers. It was time to start settling the score.
AS THE ALLIED FLOTILLA approached the beaches of Normandy on that cloudy June morning, the BBC’s European Service broke into its scheduled programs to announce the D-Day landings. It was only fitting that the people of Europe should get their first news of the invasion from the broadcasters at Bush House. From June 1940 on, the BBC had helped them shed their despair and begin to believe in the possibility of liberation. Five years later, that possibility was finally on the verge of reality.
BBC announcers read the message—in French, English, Dutch, Flemish, Norwegian, and Danish—from General Eisenhower, in which he declared that the landings in Normandy were “but the opening phase of the campaign in Western Europe.” The general’s broadcast was followed by recorded messages from de Gaulle, King Haakon, Queen Wilhelmina, Belgian prime minister Hubert Pierlot, and Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg.
The night before, the BBC had performed another of its key wartime roles—as a conduit of information between London and the European resistance movements. Since the summer of 1941, the European Service, in addition to providing news and commentary, had broadcast specific coded messages to resistance members and SOE operatives in the field. The idea had originated with Georges Bégué, the first SOE agent parachuted into France. Worried that frequent use of his wireless set would give him away to the Germans, Bégué suggested to London that some of its instructions to him be sent in the form of short, prearranged phrases or sentences broadcast by the BBC, whose meaning only he and F Section would know.
The BBC messages did not replace Morse code transmissions, but they became an important additional method of communication between London and those in the field. In France, Jean Moulin arranged for the widespread distribution of radio sets to resistance groups around the country, who were then instructed to listen to the BBC for certain private communications. As Georges Bidault, a resistance leader and future French prime minister, later put it, “In the undergrowth of the moors, in friendly streets of shadowy towns, word arrived from across the Channel and spread in miraculous fashion; and so a web was woven, invisible to the enemy.”
The concept of personal messages rapidly spread to every country section in SOE, as well as to MI6. After the BBC broadcast its nightly news programs to the occupied nations, it would send out a series of brief, cryptic personal reports. Most of them sounded nonsensical to those who did not know their meaning: “Dandelions do not like the sardine,” “Father Christmas is dressed in pink,” “Louis has to see the pastor,” “The milk is boiling over,” “Jan, you have to cut your mustache.”
From this stream of apparent gibberish, an agent would pick out the one sentence that meant something to him or her, and no one else would be able to decipher it. The message could indicate a number of different actions or situations: an impending parachute drop; the start of an operation; the dispatch of arms, supplies, or agents; the signal that an agent or courier had arrived safely in London or the field; the warning of someone’s arrest. Proving to be both efficient and foolproof, the personal messages became an integral part of agents’ communications and substantially reduced wireless operators’ airtime—and thus their chance of being detected.
They also fulfilled a function that Bégué hadn’t foreseen: they enabled operatives in various countries to say to people whose help they needed but who doubted their identities as British agents, “You make up a short message—it doesn’t matter what—and I’ll arrange for it to be broadcast a week from now on the BBC.” In the words of Ben Cowburn, an SOE organizer in France, “That was the first manifestation of power: you’d been able to give an order to tell this formidable British broadcasting company what to say….And you were somebody from then on.”
Most Europeans had tremendous trust in and affection for the BBC, which proved to be another great aid for SOE officers. In France, “active resisters were a very small minority but the majority of the French people listened to the BBC,” said Harry Rée, another SOE organizer there. “So on the whole, you could be pretty certain that anyone you didn’t know, if you asked for help in a difficult situation and said you were English, would help. They might be frightened and not help you for very long but they would certainly not give you up.”
On an average night, the personal messages from the BBC’s French service would take no more than five minutes to read. On the eve of D-Day, they lasted more than half an hour. One by one, they tumbled through the air: “The dice are on the table,” “He has a falsetto voice,” “It is hot in Suez,” “Napoleon’s hat is in the ring,” “John loves Mary,” “The arrow will not pass,” “The giraffe has a long neck.” To members of the French resistance, each was a summons to battle.
Throughout the country, thousands of resistance fighters left their homes and businesses, collected arms and explosives from hiding places, and embarked on the prearranged sabotage assignments that the coded messages had ordered. In Normandy and elsewhere, employees of the government-run telephone and telegraph company cut telephone lines, forcing German forces to use radio transmissions as their sole method of communication—transmissions that could be easily intercepted and decrypted by Bletchley Park. In the early days of the invasion, more than seventeen thousand messages were intercepted daily, including detailed information on troop and supply movements. Once they had pinpointed exact locations of enemy units, the Allies called in air strikes.
Overall, the postinvasion sabotage efforts of the resistance were far more successful than anyone had thought possible. From June 6 on, the Germans could no longer rely on control of their own rear areas or lines of communication. On the first night alone, SOE and other sabotage teams carried out 950 of 1,050 planned disruptions of railway traffic throughout the country. All the main routes leading to the Normandy beaches were cut.
In the north, SOE’s Farmer network severed the tangle of railway lines near the industrial town of Lille, rendering them useless until the end of the month. SOE courier Pearl Witherington, who had taken over part of the Stationer network after its organizer was captured by the Gestapo and renamed it Wrestler, was in charge of three thousand saboteurs who cut railway lines throughout the Indre region, in west-central France.
The dozens of resistance groups in the south, meanwhile, brought railway traffic in their areas to a virtual halt, preventing the several German divisions stationed there from moving quickly to reinforce the German defenses in Normandy. Some, like Francis Cammaerts’s Jockey and Tony Brooks’s Pimento networks, consisted of thousands of men. Others were much smaller. A good many groups were communist-run, while some were organized and manned by local resisters with no outside affiliation at all.
Whatever their origin, French saboteurs played havoc with German rail and other traffic, blowing up railway lines, barricading roads, derailing trains, immobilizing locomotives, and destroying fuel dumps and bridges. According to one historian, “the entire French railway system was so shot through with subversion that the Germans practically had to abandon its use.” In addition to troop reinforcements, crucial supplies like ammunition, fuel, and food were greatly delayed in reaching Normandy. As a result of these shortfalls, the Allies were given the time they needed to consolidate their beachheads in the crucial first hours and days of the assault.
The stop-and-go journey of one German armored division from the south of France to the beachheads serves as a prime example of the effectiveness of the saboteurs and the ferocity of the Germans’ reprisals. The 19,000 troops of the fearsome 2nd SS Panzer Division “Das Reich” were regarded, according to Max Hastings, as “among the most formidable fighting soldiers of World War II.” Equipped with the latest heavy tanks, the unit had been sent in early 1944 to Toulouse, in the southwest of France, to rest, train, and refit after months of hard duty on the Soviet front.
During the division’s stay there, its tanks were stored under heavy guard in the nearby town of Montauban, but the railway flatcars that had transported the tanks were left unguarded on railway sidings several miles away. Taking advantage of the opportunity, local saboteurs, among them a pair of teenage sisters, siphoned off all the axle oil from the flatcars and replaced it with ground carborundum, a fine abrasive powder made of stone.
When Das Reich’s commanders received orders on June 7 to proceed immediately to the Normandy front, they sent for the flatcars, all of which broke down on their way to Montauban. As a result, the tanks were forced to travel by road, which took far longer and severely damaged their treads. At least 60 percent of the tanks were unserviceable by the time the division reached Normandy. Along the way, the Das Reich troops were incessantly harried by guerrilla fighters. As Eisenhower later wrote, “They surrounded the Germans with a terrible atmosphere of danger and hatred which ate into the confidence of leaders and the courage of soldiers.”
In normal times, it would have taken the division no more than three days to reach Normandy. In the chaos of June 1944, the journey lasted seventeen days. What’s more, Das Reich reached the battlefield “in a state of extreme disorganization and exhaustion,” having been bombed by Allied planes as it approached the beachhead. The division, which had suffered heavy losses by then, did not actually begin to fight until July 10, far too late for it to have any impact.
But its snail-like sluggishness in making its way to the front was not just the result of sabotage. It also slowed down because its commanders had received orders from Berlin to kill as many maquis as possible as it headed north. Das Reich’s troops, the order said, “must immediately pass to the counter-offensive, to strike with the utmost power and rigor, without hesitation.”
Hitler’s rage at the maquis’s fierce resistance took priority over Germany’s need to summon as many reinforcements as possible, as quickly as possible, to Normandy. The Führer’s “obsession with retaining every foot of his empire once again betrayed him,” Max Hastings noted. “In the first vital days after the Allied landings, the German struggle to hold France against Frenchmen employed forces—above all, the 2nd Panzer Division—that could have made a vital contribution on the battlefield.” On June 16, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt urged Berlin to abandon all of France south of the Loire River and order the sixteen divisions located there to the Normandy front. That, replied Berlin, was “politically impossible.” Instead, Das Reich and the other divisions focused first on liquidating resistance groups. “Not even the most optimistic Allied planner before the invasion,” Hastings wrote, “had anticipated that the German high command would be so foolish as to commit major fighting formations against maquisards.”
The Germans’ brutality, already extreme, escalated further. “They burned, pillaged, and killed,” Philippe de Vomécourt noted in writing about the German terror campaign in eastern France. “They slaughtered the innocent and the guilty (those belonging to the Resistance) alike. They shot a man working on a hedge. They murdered seven woodcutters going home after a morning’s work on the forest.”
Das Reich, for its part, took out its rage on an entire village. On June 10, SS troops from the division marched into Oradour-sur-Glane, set in the woods and fields near Limoges, about 150 miles north of Toulouse. On that beautiful Saturday afternoon, Oradour, which had been an oasis of peace throughout the war, was bustling with people out for a leisurely lunch or doing their weekly shopping. Their normal Saturday routine was suddenly interrupted when the town crier beat his drum to summon all the village’s inhabitants to its small central square.
Once all were assembled, the women and children were separated from the men and herded into a church, which was set ablaze. As the flames shot high, SS troops opened fire on the screaming villagers trapped inside, while soldiers formed a cordon outside the church to make sure no one got out alive. The men of Oradour, meanwhile, were shoved into nearby garages and barns, where they were mowed down by machine-gun fire. More than 600 people died that day, including 190 children and babies.
The wholesale killings in Oradour were followed a month later by another spasm of German savagery, this time aimed at more than three thousand resistance fighters who had established themselves on a mountainous plateau called Vercors, near the city of Grenoble in the French Alps. On July 3, the maquis at Vercors had declared the plateau a free republic, with its own laws, currency, and flag—“a foolish but very understandable act, given their passionate need to erase the shame of 1940,” noted Francis Cammaerts, who by then had been appointed head of all Allied sabotage missions in southeastern France. The Vercors maquis, convinced that the Allies would send them supplies and arms and would soon reinforce them with regular troops, planned to make a stand against the Germans on the plateau. But they had neither the training nor the artillery or other heavy weapons needed to act as a conventional fighting force. Their job was to harass the enemy and stay on the move, not to pin him down. In a pitched battle with the Germans, there was no way they could win.
Cammaerts, foreseeing imminent disaster, frantically urged London to dispatch men and heavy weapons to Vercors, predicting a bloodbath if they were not sent. Both SOE and de Gaulle’s Algiers headquarters dropped several hundred containers of rifles and other light weapons, none of which could hold off a concerted German attack.
On July 20, dozens of gliders appeared in the sky over Vercors. The maquis were overjoyed, thinking the Allies had finally come to save them. Then they saw that the gliders were German. Thousands of crack SS troops had been sent to crush the rebellion, and crush it they did. Over the next three days, more than 650 resistance fighters were killed. The Germans also raped, tortured, and murdered more than 250 inhabitants of a nearby village.
Like Oradour and Lidice in Czechoslovakia, Vercors would take its place in history as an unforgettable symbol of Nazi barbarity.
IF ONLY THE MEN of Vercors had waited until August to launch their republic, they and their dreams of freedom might have survived. On August 15, ten Allied divisions, made up of U.S. and French forces, landed on the beaches of southern France in a campaign called Operation Dragoon. Within seven days, the troops had stormed up the Rhône Valley and reached Grenoble, 180 miles to the north. As the military historian Rick Atkinson observed, the enemy in southern France “never had a chance.” One reason was the aid given by local resistance forces.
Thanks to intelligence provided by underground groups, the invaders knew beforehand “the underwater obstacles, we knew everything about that beach and where every German was, and we clobbered them!” said Colonel William Quinn, the chief intelligence officer of the U.S. Seventh Army. The French, Quinn added, “told us everything we wanted to know.”
CBS’s Eric Sevareid, who accompanied the Dragoon forces, said that “the Allies had never before had such precise information about the German defenses and the location, numbers, and condition of their troops. When we landed, all our officers carried maps indicating not only the location of every farmhouse but the name of the farmer living there, over an area of hundreds of square miles. Within two days, all our invading forces, including airborne men in the back country, were linked in one solid front.”
Having received coded alerts from the BBC about the landings, resistance fighters in several coastal towns and cities rose up against their occupiers as the Allies invaded. In Saint-Raphaël, “the shopkeepers were upon the Germans’ backs” as the first troops hit the beaches, Sevareid noted. By the time troops reached nearby Saint-Tropez, they found that local Frenchmen had already captured or killed more than a hundred Germans and that the German garrison there had been surrounded. When Allied forces arrived in Marseille, much of that city, too, was in the hands of its inhabitants. According to Field Marshal Henry Maitland Wilson, the supreme Allied commander in the Mediterranean, “the resistance reduced the fighting efficiency of the Wehrmacht in southern France to 40 percent at the moment of the landings.”
As German troops retreated up the Rhône Valley, members of Francis Cammaerts’s Jockey network were “yapping at their heels like angry terriers closing in on a fox” and helping clear the way for the French and American infantry following closely behind. When an American tank unit reached the town of Gap, about seventy miles from Grenoble, it expected to have to fight its way in. But it found the Germans already gone, and, instead of a battle, it took part in a victory parade.
“What the resistance achieved in the Alps of France is quite straightforward,” Cammaerts declared after the war. “The troops that landed on August 15 got through to Grenoble in seven days…because there was no fighting. The Alps had already been taken over by the resistance. That to my mind is an enormous achievement, which saved tens of thousands of lives.”
French resistance fighters guarding captured German soldiers.
As it happened, Cammaerts almost didn’t live to see that day. Two days before Operation Dragoon began, he and two other SOE officers were arrested at a German roadblock. They were taken to the nearest Gestapo headquarters and interrogated. Although his interrogators had no idea that they had caught the notorious “Roger,” they decided that Cammaerts and his colleagues were indeed spies and ordered them shot.
When Christine Granville, Cammaerts’s SOE courier, found out about the arrests, she headed immediately to the jail where the three men were being held. Granville, a twenty-six-year-old native of Poland whose real name was Krystyna Skarbeka, was well-known in SOE circles for her beauty, charm, and extraordinary audacity. Confronting the official in charge, she told him that the U.S. troops’ arrival was imminent and that he would be tracked down and killed if Cammaerts and the others were shot. He agreed to release them but demanded a ransom of 2 million French francs in return. Two days later, after a courier from Algiers had brought her the money, she handed it over, and the three SOE officers were freed, just two hours before their scheduled execution.
PRIOR TO D-DAY, the Allied military commanders had been highly skeptical about the effectiveness of the French underground once the landings occurred. Some generals thought that the resistance fighters would be more of a hindrance than a help, while others expected that any support they provided would last only a few days at best. “It is probable,” according to one report from Eisenhower’s headquarters, “that action…will be taken for only a few days, after which stores and enthusiasm will begin to run low.”
In fact, as Eisenhower himself acknowledged in his memoirs, the resistance was “of inestimable value in the [French] campaign. Without their great assistance, the liberation of France would have consumed a much longer time and meant greater losses to ourselves.” In a letter to SOE head Colin Gubbins in May 1945, Eisenhower elaborated on the importance of the wartime accomplishments of resistance movements throughout occupied Europe. “In no previous war, and in no other theater during this war, have resistance forces been so closely harnessed to the main military effort,” he wrote. “I consider that the disruption of enemy rail communications, the harassing of German road movements, and the continual strain placed on the German war economy and internal security services throughout occupied Europe by the organized forces of resistance played a very considerable part in our complete and final victory.”
OSS director William Donovan also gave high marks to the French underground’s contributions. In a letter to President Harry S. Truman, Donovan, whose intelligence and sabotage agents played an active role in the fighting in France, wrote that the battle for that country “showed as never before the extent of the assistance that an oppressed people, given supplies and leadership, can render its allies in the course of its liberation.”
Yet despite these encomiums, considerable controversy remains about the value of the work of the resistance in France and elsewhere in Europe. “One may ask if an enterprise in which around 75,000 French men and women, some of whom were résistants while others were mere innocents caught up in savage German reprisals, perished in German concentration camps, and another 20,000 died in France, often after horrible torture, was worth the fairly trifling return in intelligence and ‘action,’ ” the American military historian Douglas Porch has written. Porch maintained that “in the end, the Allies achieved victory by outproducing German factories and defeating German armies in the field. Sadly, one is driven toward the conclusion that the contribution of the Resistance to that victory…was minimal…[the effort] weighed little in the war’s strategic balance.”
Porch is hardly the only historian to contend that the impact of the resistance in France and elsewhere was greatly exaggerated. The skeptics’ reaction was in part a response to the tidal wave of books published since the war celebrating the exploits of SOE, its officers, and the resistance as a whole and in some cases minimizing the enormous errors made by SOE.
Even more, however, such questioning was meant as a corrective to General de Gaulle’s contention that French resistance had been widespread and had been largely responsible for the country’s liberation. Though that claim was clearly false, de Gaulle persisted in making it after the war—a “necessary myth” that he hoped would heal the divisions in the nation and erase the shameful stain of its capitulation and official collaboration with Germany. In the view of one French historian, “de Gaulle had to convince the French that they had resisted. It was necessary that they disguise the truth from themselves.”
Yet even though it’s obviously true that the Allied armies were primarily responsible for liberating France, it’s also true that the resistance movement, admittedly made up of only a small minority of French men and women, played an important contributing role when it was needed most: during and after the Allied invasion. As Julian Jackson has rightly noted, “If there had been no Resistance, France would still have been liberated, [but] if there were no Resistance, the Liberation would have cost the Allies significantly higher casualties.” In Jackson’s view, there was indeed “a Resistance myth which needed to be punctured, but that does not mean that the Resistance was a myth.”
For those like Airey Neave, who actually had dealings with the resistance movements of occupied Europe during the war, the idea of historians examining their efforts as if they were figures on a balance sheet was distinctly offensive. “In recent years, attempts by professional historians in Britain to describe the actions and errors of men and women who fought the Nazis underground have assumed an unpleasant air of disdain,” Neave wrote two decades after the conflict. “Academic writers have attempted to belittle their contribution to the war. That they would not have written in this vein had they taken part themselves is self-evident. No one who saw secret agents actually leave for occupied territory could afford such arrogance.”
Others, such as Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, the deputy commander of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), have argued that the debate about the military contribution of the French resistance was beside the point. “While its military successes were undoubtedly worthwhile,” Tedder wrote, “I believe that we ought to judge the Resistance in France on quite a different basis….Its greatest victory was that it kept the flame of the French spirit burning throughout the dark years of the Occupation.” In joining the resistance, French men and women were able to shed their sense of isolation and shame and gain a feeling of community and self-respect. In working to reclaim their country, they reclaimed themselves as well.
Eric Sevareid, one of the most astute and eloquent writers about the French wartime experience, made this point in his excellent autobiography Not So Wild a Dream. “A man whose army and country have suffered defeat is not a complete man afterwards; no matter how healthy his body, he is always a little sick,” he wrote. “The conditions of defeat do not count. No matter if he fought bravely himself, no matter if his army never had a chance, no matter if he was betrayed by treasonable leaders—he remains a cripple….It does not suffice that others restore his country. He must act again himself if he would recover.
“And this is, at bottom, why Frenchmen acted. This is why they never waited until invading troops insured their lives, but rose up in every village and city before we arrived, sometimes days before, and did things that were reckless, sometimes useless, but always magnificent and of imperishable memory. An Allied soldier would shake his head with incredulity to see a French farmer assault a German machine gun with a single grenade and a pistol. He would say, ‘These Frogs are crazy,’ not understanding why the farmer had to do this, even if he died in its doing.”