Schwerpunkt: From D-Day to the Fall of the Third Reich (4 page)

With my security clearance, Ike sent me to retrieve the batches of Jerry Enigma coded transmits which our guys decoded with Ultra. Ultra was one of several true miracles of the war because with this, we could read whatever the Krauts encrypted with the Enigma code. It was like listening in on a telephone party line. And the greatest part of this miracle was that even though the Krauts changed the code every day, we could still crack it because of some kind of “Turing Machine” which I can’t even pretend to understand. All I know is that a British genius named Alan Turing developed some computing machine that could figure out mountainous mathematical problems sometime in the early 1930s and with that machine, present day Allied war time scientists built on it in Bletchley Park and now the supposedly unbreakable German Enigma code is well and truly broken.

So as the week went on, we continued to scour the Ultra intercepts to see if any other troop movements were being made or if any activity of any kind would lead us to conclude that our DDay secret had been compromised. While Ultra didn’t reveal anything further, there was a doozy of an incident that surfaced from the London newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, of all places.

In the tense days of May and June 1944, the crossword puzzle in the paper had clues which spelled out an alarming set of words. One day’s crossword puzzle had a clue for “Utah” which was the code name for one of the five landing beaches. Another day’s clue spelled out “Neptune” which was our code name for the seaborne part of operation and “Overlord” itself was the word for 11 across in the June 2
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crossword puzzle! “Omaha,” the name of another landing beach, was 3 down a few days earlier. Though investigated by Scotland Yard, the conclusions drawn were that the crossword puzzles in question had been created as long as 6 months ago and the fact that various of our code words found themselves in those puzzles was nothing more than “fantastic coincidence.” Still. It gave all of us night sweats to think that it was possible our secrets were being broadcast to enemy spies by way of a London tabloid.

So we assumed our secret was still safe and we went to elaborate lengths to make sure it stayed that way. We had to keep the real landing site secret and we had to keep the date secret. Operation Fortitude was planned and deployed to trick the Jerries into thinking Calais was the area they needed to most concern themselves with. And in what was really an interesting turn, the planners decided to twist it so that when the Normandy beach landings did take place, the Germans were to think this was just a feint and that the “real” landings were coming sometime in the near future. Since Calais is where classic military strategy dictated that the landings almost had to be made, it wasn’t hard to hoodwink the Krauts into going along with that program. Then, to bring the point home, we bombed it more heavily than the other areas of the coast. We had Hollywood and English film studios make fake staging areas complete with inflatable trucks and tanks. We had fake radio messages transmitted to and from the Calais area and we ran some spies who were highly trusted by Berlin by feeding them false information which was then dutifully forwarded on to the spymasters of the Third Reich. We made dummy parachute drops using straw “men” and threw tin foil and shredded metallic paper chaff out of airplanes around this location to give the Kraut radar something to squawk about. But probably the best part of this operation called for a whole American Army to be set for invading at this location. General George Patton to the rescue.

Patton is just about the most famous American General ever and even the Germans knew him to be a tough nut to crack. Operation Fortitude (South) was conceived to take full advantage of his bigger than balls personality. When June 6
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ended and DDay was officially over, we still had to keep up the subterfuge. We didn’t want the Krauts to move any of their troops, who had been assigned to reinforce the Calais landing beaches, away from Calais where they were currently stationed. The fictional 30th Division, First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG) was fictitiously commanded by the very real General Patton who in reality, commanded nothing at this time. FUSAG was set to fictitiously invade the Pas de Calais area in July of 1944 giving the actual Overlord invading forces a good four to eight week head start on wresting France from German occupation. General Patton was going to lead the “real” invasion across the narrowest point of the English Channel into the French Pas de Calais beach head only no he really wasn’t. It was leaked that this would happen and a whole lot of peremptory bombing runs, plus everything else we staged, lent credence to the Pas de Calais area being the point of our strongest attack. The Krauts couldn’t afford not to keep this prime real estate defended and they kept a strong defense handy throughout this area. We were counting on them thinking we were suckers but we suckered them first because the more Krauts congregating around Calais meant the fewer Krauts defending the real landing beaches.

We knew we were going to have enough problems with the goddamn Jerries who were already in France. We obviously didn’t want any more transferred here. Since we were already doing all we could to make them think our landing in Normandy was just the diversionary landing, we also made them think, through Operation Fortitude (North), that another, even more massive landing would take place in Norway. Fortitude North planted disinformation to lead the Germans to believe that maybe Norway was going to be the site of the “real” invasion. We led them to believe that the landings in Normandy were just a feint to lure German troops and tanks away from the real site (Norway) where we would be landing even more of our troops ashore any day now. It was also critical to make the Krauts think that we had far more men than we really had and that these extra soldiers were being held back for the real invasion. This would force them to keep troops at the ready near the anticipated future landing sites and keep them away from where we did not want them to be, namely Normandy.

We had to make Hitler think he needed to keep extra troops up north to fend off the real thing and to this end, we had a fake army “stationed” in Scotland who transmitted radio messages about shortly heading to Norway. We made full use of whatever Scandinavian spies we had to keep the Krauts frantically guessing about when the real invasion would land on the Norwegian coasts. For his part, Hitler helped us out by keeping over 200,000 soldiers in Norway and then did us another big hairy favor by sending over another division to reinforce those troops. Hope they liked Norway.

While we kept the pressure on Norway with Operation Fortitude (North), we simultaneously concentrated on Calais with Operation Fortitude (South). We knew Hitler’s secret about where he kept numerous infantry and Panzer divisions but he didn’t know our secret that neither Norway nor Calais stood a snowball’s chance in hell of being invaded.

And speaking of secrecy, we just got a request for permission to violate the Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention, as everyone knows, is a bunch of rules that warring countries agree to be bound by so that each country knows the other one will take care of its prisoners in at least a sort of humane way. We gave permission for the United States to break these rules at least one time that I know of. There are “Hunter-killer” Task Groups in the Atlantic Ocean charged with hunting German U-boats and then killing them. One of the ships in one of the Task Groups was called the USS Guadalcanal. This ship was nick named the “Can Do” because of a memo their commander wrote to all men aboard his ship. He said that the ship’s motto will be “Can Do” meaning that they would take any tough job and do it. Boy, was he ever right!

The Can Do, along with all the other ships in that particular Hunter-Killer Group was on patrol on June 5, 1944, the day chosen as DDay. It seems that a certain Captain Gallery’s Task Force hunted as ordered but when his men were just about to put on the finishing touches in order to sink the U Boat they just attacked, word came down that they were NOT to sink the enemy ship, they were to capture it. The Captain therefore uttered a command not heard on the high seas by an American Commander since the War of 1812. He ordered, “Away all Boarders!” His guys boarded the now captured U Boat and found, among a treasure trove of Jerry confidential material, two Enigma Machines complete with companion code books. After initial scares about whether the Krauts had booby trapped the boat as they were all ordered to do before being sunk or captured, the boarding party succeeded in keeping the U Boat intact and actually made it sea worthy enough to be towed across the Ocean.

I later learned the whole story. They were heading for Dakar, the nearest friendly port but that place was full of Kraut spies and all we needed this close to our DDay landings was for some spy to tell Berlin that not one but two Enigma machines were now in enemy hands. The U505 was therefore ordered to be towed to Casablanca but then, fearing the spies there as well, the USS Guadalcanal was told to tow the submarine to Bermuda if it was sea worthy enough to make the trip. It was and so it was towed 2,500 miles across the open sea. I heard that whenever another ship was sighted, one of the Can Do’s destroyers would intercept it and tell it to change course so no one, not even the Friendlies, would know about this captured U Boat’s existence. Eventually the sub ended up in Bermuda with its German crew being held as prisoners of war. By now, it was agreed that this sub had to “vanish” until after the war so that the Germans wouldn’t change their coding procedures. The Germans thought their Enigma code was so unbreakable, they transmitted all of their naval and in fact most of their other land and air orders and reports using it. What they obviously didn’t know was that our guys were reading these communications probably faster than the Germans themselves. This was a hell of a break for the good guys and no way in hell could the Jerries know we were on to them.

So once in Bermuda, the sub was renamed, camouflaged and kept under heavy guard. The prisoners were taken to POW camps but in contravention of the Geneva Convention, they weren’t reported as survivors and they weren’t even allowed to write to their families to tell them they were alive and well. Tough toenails, right? We lost millions of tons of supplies and thousands of men thanks to those U Boat bastards so I didn’t give one daily shit about whether one crew’s whereabouts was kept secret. I guess the Brass didn’t either. War is hell.

I love it when I get mail and I just got a letter from Harold.

May 18, 1944

Dear Frank,

Hello, brother. I finally have some free time to bring you up to date though things are really hush, hush around here. I’m somewhere in England (you probably know more about it than I do! They don’t tell us beans about where we’re going or what we’ll be doing). All I know is I’ve marched and marched for weeks now and I’m sure that if all the miles I covered were put end to end, I’d have marched around this entire country by now. I’ve been target shooting, bayoneting and climbing every target in sight it seems. I’ve shot machine guns and pistols and I’ve “blown up” houses with anti-tank weapons and still no news of what all this work is for. We even practiced getting into and out of boats and one time, the boats we got into drove into a beach off of Wales. What a Chinese fire drill that was! Guys were falling all over the place but we were told to get this maneuver into our skulls since it was going to be gosh darn critical to us in the future. We walked through water in full battle dress and practiced running up the sand and crawling over the sand. This sure beats the Basic Training I started out with back in the States where we trained with WWI steel helmets and old weapons. Whatever all this training is for, it must be pretty big, though. I’ve heard some scuttlebutt that even Ike has shown up at some of the camps to get an eyeful of us Grunts.

I used to get leave every once in a while and me and some pals would head to the local joints for some beers. We’d get razzed all the time by the local English soldiers who said we were, “over paid, overfed, over sexed and over here.” We’d give it right back though, and tell them that they were, “under paid, under fed, under sexed and under Eisenhower.” That got their goat and we’d end up bustin’ up the place some times. It seems I got all this energy and nowhere to use it up!

I hope mom and pop are doing ok. With both of us gone, it’s gotta be rough. I send them almost everything I get so that should be some help. I miss being home with them. I miss listening to the shows I always liked hearing. What I wouldn’t give for a Philco right now! Fat chance of that happening. Oh but here’s some entertainment for you. While I was packing up, getting my gear together and making sure I had everything I’m going to need for however long I’m going to be fighting, I went by the airplane hangars and landing strips. You’ll never guess what I saw. A bunch of women standing on the wings of the airplanes with brooms they dipped into either white or black paint so they could slap the 3 white and 2 black stripes on our planes. I’m sure you know but that is the designation of all Allied equipment so we don’t mistakenly kill our own friends. They sure had a bunch of painting to do and they’re not going to be winning any neatness awards but I’d rather have them painted slaphazardly than not painted at all. I’m guessing our trucks and all our other stuff is being painted by the same technique. Funny to see how they do it.

So, Brother mine. I’ll write again when I get the time. Right now, I’m about ready to keel over since I can’t hardly keep my baby blues open any longer. I love you.

Harold