The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (5 page)

effect upon the enemy was small,” it concluded, “since detours were easily established.”
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Caen did not see any liberating soldiers for another month.

The effect of the bombing upon the enemy may have been small, but the effect upon the 60,000 inhabit- ants of Caen was great indeed. In a matter of thirty-six hours, the city was shattered. The attacks on June 6 killed 600 people. The attacks on June 7 left 200 more dead. Thousands were wounded. The city lay in ruins, ablaze. Thirty-nine-year-old Bernard Goupil, a mem- ber of one of the défense passive (civil defense) teams in the city, recalled just after the war in a detailed ac- count that he and his family, who had built an air raid shelter in his garden, heard the initial bombing on the coast in the early hours of June 6. He reported to his command post, with his helmet and white armband at the ready, only to spend most of the morning in anxious anticipation of liberating soldiers. When none came, he returned home for lunch. At 1:30, he heard “a pow- erful throbbing”; running into the garden and looking up he cried, “the bombers are coming at us!” Before he could get his family into the shelter, “the terrify- ing, thunderous explosions crashed upon us. Our poor little dining room shuddered, the chandelier fell onto the table, the door of the house was blown in from the force of the blast. The sounds of the neighboring hous-

es, crashing down under the bombs, followed the great hammer blows from these horrible engines of death. All around us was nothing but violence and infernal noise…Clutching one another, we prayed.” Goupil, conscious of his duty, tried to return to his civil defense post in the rue des Carmes, but at 4:30 another wave of bombers struck the town and he ran for shelter in a stout eighteenth-century stone building. In the eve- ning he made it to his post, saw after the wounded, and helped transfer them to the Bon Sauveur hospital. In the eerie, smoke-filled evening, in the ruins of a burn- ing city, Goupil wondered if it was over: “ There were already enough ruins and victims. Hadn’t the allies at- tained their objectives with these savage bombings? Could they not now leave things to the ground forces? We hoped, in short, that the city would now be taken by the Allies a few hours after the landings.” It was not to be. At 2:30 in the morning of June 7 came the heaviest attack yet. “How can I describe with words my experi- ences in this infernal noise, the shrieking of the falling bombs, the incredible shaking of the ground and of the buildings? The explosions kept coming. Through the doors and windows we saw the flashes and felt the bru- tal blows. We felt nearby the falling of roofs and mate- rial of all sorts in a great deafening cascade. The walls against which we had gathered truly moved under the shock of the bombs.” Then at 3:00 in the morning, the

bombers disappeared, the skies emptied, and a sinis- ter quiet settled upon the town. Quiet, except for the sounds of the wounded.
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One of the most powerful accounts of these two awful days was written by the deputy mayor of Caen, Joseph Poirier. “Nothing had prepared us for the swiftness of the attack,” he wrote six months after the liberation of the city. “ We knew well that our deliverance was at hand, that the hour of liberation had sounded, but self- ishly we thought that the landings would happen else- where and that our region would be spared. Providence had decided otherwise.” The first bombing raid at 1:30

P.M. struck the central quarters of the city. “It was of an unprecedented violence…There was general conster- nation about the suddenness of the attack.” Despite later, and wholly ineffectual, attempts by the Allied command to warn the citizens of impending bombing, no warning had been given on June 6. “ The raid had lasted no more than ten minutes but the damage was enormous. The Monoprix stores were shattered and at least ten fires burned in the downtown.” The next at- tack, at 4:30 P.M., struck the prefecture headquarters, and other municipal buildings in the center of town as well as the church of Saint-Jean. Some of the build- ings of Le Bon Sauveur, the twenty-acre Benedictine hospital complex in the northwestern quarter of the

city, were hit by shells; one nun was killed, trapped un- der falling stones. By now a quarter of the city was in flames.

The attack of 2:30 A.M. on June 7 proved even more devastating. The first bombload fell on the central fire station, killing the chief, his deputy, and 17 firefighters. More than twenty bombs hit the town hall, in whose basement Poirier had sheltered. The hospital clinic of La Miséricorde, located on the rue des Carmes in the center of town, took a direct hit. Seventy-two people, mostly nuns and their patients, were killed, their bod- ies buried under the rubble; 171 others were wounded. Emerging into a nightscape illuminated by dozens of fires, Poirier saw dead bodies in feeble air raid trenches, body parts, dead children, the corpse of a close friend on the ground, headless. The electricity, telephone, and water lines were cut, making it difficult to coordinate aid to the wounded. The firefighting equipment was destroyed. “ The population was literally crazed, seized by panic, and trying to flee the city into the country- side. People were running about in nightshirts, bare- foot, without having had the time to put on the least clothing. The city was enveloped in a yellowish smoke and dust from all the shattered buildings. It was an in- fernal scene.” The best he and his civil defense teams could do was try to get the wounded to Le Bon Sauveur,

and gather up the horribly mutilated corpses and pile them up at the Central Commissariat. “ Where, when, how would we bury them?”
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Had the liberating troops arrived in Caen on June 9 or 10, with offers of aid, food, medicine, bulldozers to clear rubble, manpower to restore public services, then perhaps Caen’s liberation would have gone down as merely one of many sad chapters in a war that took so many civilian lives. But Caen’s travails were far from over. By June 10, the Anglo- Canadian troops north of Caen were no closer to taking the city than they had been at midday on June 6. Indeed, with the Germans pouring reinforcements into Normandy, and espe- cially north and west of Caen, the city lay just behind an ever-strengthening German perimeter. With the Americans heavily engaged in the Cotentin peninsula, where they were trying to seize the port of Cherbourg, the British slugged it out with the Germans for every inch of ground around Caen. After the initial assault of June 6–8 had failed, General Montgomery directed another major attack in an attempt to outflank Caen, aiming his tanks at Villers-Bocage, a small town some 12 miles southwest of the city. Historian Max Hastings has called this battle a “wretched episode,” in which the British were thoroughly outfought by the German defenders; but Monty tried again on June 26, sending

three divisions—60,000 men and 600 tanks—crashing into the German line west of Caen, running out toward Tilly-sur- Seulles. This was Operation Epsom. It too failed.
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The implications of these military operations on the western outskirts of Caen were grave indeed for the civilians in the city. German concentrations in and around the city were under assault from the air or from artillery, and the city endured near-constant fire. Thousands of the city’s inhabitants sought shelter in the hospital of Le Bon Sauveur and other points des- ignated as welcome centers (centres d’accueil ) by the city authorities; the thick walls of the old churches like Saint-Etienne offered shelter to thousands of citizens, sprawled amidst the pews on beds of straw. But op- erations to provide basic services, shelter, and medi- cal care were severely compromised by the shelling. Aid workers painted red crosses on the grounds and buildings of Le Bon Sauveur and on the Lycée Mal- herbe, a school across the street whose cafeteria had been turned into a hospital ward. Even so, on June 9–10, two hundred artillery shells, intended for Ger- man positions on the outskirts of town, landed on Le Bon Sauveur and fifty-seven hit the Lycée; more than 50 people were killed. On June 12, a huge artillery shell struck the superb steeple of the church of Saint-Pierre,

a beloved landmark in the center of town. It crashed down in pieces, a Gothic masterpiece wiped out in a flash. On June 13 and 14, the shopping districts, cafés, and hotels of the center of town were all set ablaze, and without water the firefighters had no hope of contain- ing the flames. Le Bon Sauveur, which in normal times handled 1,200 patients with a staff of 120 nuns, was now packed with 2,000 refugees and 1,700 wounded. Work- ing around the clock with few supplies, no electricity, and only what water could be pumped manually from the wells, a handful of doctors tried to treat the worst cases. They achieved great things, conducting some 2,300 operations between June 6 and August 15, relying on a patched-together staff of 31 doctors, 22 interns, 114 nurses, and 46 French Red Cross personnel. Across the street in the Lycée Malherbe, over 500 wounded people and thousands of homeless refugees, installed on makeshift pallets in the hallways and basements, received basic treatment from a skeletal staff of twelve doctors and a handful of Red Cross workers.

As residents fled the city, Caen’s population dwindled to about 17,000 by mid-June. In a search for shelter from the bombing, thousands of people made for the large stone quarries two miles to the south of the city in the suburb of Fleury. Here opened up another aston- ishing chapter in this saga of Caen’s destruction. Dur-

ing June and July, as many as 12,000 people huddled in the extensive networks of vacant caves in the old quar- ries, where the pale yellow limestone, used to build many of Caen’s churches, had been quarried since the eleventh century. The Germans, in mid-July, tried half- heartedly to evacuate the caves, perhaps to prepare them as a defensive redoubt for their own troops. Yet thousands of homeless Caennais took little notice and continued to dwell in the dark, dank network of cav- erns. Small villages sprang up overnight: the ill and el- derly were grouped together in makeshift beds, women set up laundry and cooking facilities, the men took on heavy labor on a rotating timetable: digging potatoes in the fields, hauling water, sawing lumber for the com- munal kitchens, gathering supplies from the nearby villages. Bakers and butchers from Fleury delivered supplies of bread, meat, and occasional vegetables. But the conditions of life in the close, airless caves were dreadful. There was no electric light. The floors of the caves, which had been used lately for the cultiva- tion of mushrooms, were constantly damp and muddy; there were no toilets or running water. Within days, fleas and bedbugs infested everyone; food was always in short supply; and the tension of living underground during constant bombing took a toll on the refugees. One young girl who, with her family, sought shelter in the caves at Fleury recalled the misery of it all: “apart

from the fleas, our heads were alive with lice, scratch- scratch all day. Hygiene was non-existent; there were no toilets in the caves. We had to make do with corners or heaps of stones.”
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Yet there was protection from the incessant shelling, and there was communal solidarity. Five hundred homeless refugees actually remained in the caves for two weeks after the complete liberation of Caen, since the city itself had become a shambles.
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As the people of Caen clung to life in and around their besieged city, the British Second Army continued its efforts to break through the German line blocking its advance into the interior of France. Having tried twice to outflank Caen, Montgomery now thought he might go straight at it. He called on the RAF to lay down an intense bombardment of German defensive positions and artillery to the north of Caen to open the way for an assault by I Corps directly into the city. What followed was “one of the most futile air attacks of the war,” ac- cording to historian Max Hastings.
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Although it was well-known that most of the Germans were deployed north of the city, Bomber Command, in its care not to hit the closely engaged British troops, altered the plan and moved the bombing area farther into Caen itself. With dreadful precision, RAF Mosquitoes and Pathfind- ers flew in first and dropped their smoke-bomb mark- ers on the northern half of the already ruined city—a

city quite free of German units. On July 7, under a clear evening sky, and facing little flak, 456 Lancasters and Halifaxes dumped 2,276 tons of bombs on Caen. “It was afterwards judged,” concludes one laconic ac- count, “that the bombing should have been aimed at the original targets. Few Germans were killed in the area actually bombed.”
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The sight of so many friendly aircraft in the skies over Caen was a great morale booster to the thousands of British soldiers in the field who had been badly beat- en up by the Germans for over a month now. “ What a lovely sight we saw at about 10:00 p.m.,” wrote one soldier in his diary. “Hundreds of Lancasters passing over on way home. Could see them on their bombing run somewhere over Caen in more or less single file. One can now understand the term ‘ They queued up to bomb.’ Could see the flak—a grand sight which inspires confidence.” Of the same raid, Captain W. G. Caines of the 43rd Wessex wrote, with boyish enthusiasm: “On the hillside which we were occupying we had an excel- lent grandstand view of the raid, bombers just flew in, unloaded their deadly cargo and turned and made off across the Channel. This was indeed a pleasant sight for us, the sky was literally black with bombers.” Gun- ner J. Y. White of the Royal Artillery was no less ani- mated in his diary: “July 7: This evening about 1,000

of our brave bombers came over in a continual stream and bombed Caen. The bombs could be seen leaving the planes through field glasses. It was a grand and awe inspiring sight to watch our bombers passing overhead for over an hour in a continuous stream, right through the heavy flak, drop their load, circle around and make for home.”
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One can hardly blame these beleaguered soldiers for the pleasure they took in seeing someone else take a turn at plastering the Germans; they could not know that few Germans were actually being hit. Still, it is quite unimaginable that words such as lovely, grand, and pleasant would have occurred to the citizens of Caen at that moment. From within the buildings of the Lycée Malherbe, Joseph Poirier too saw the bombers overhead, “blocking out the sky.” He was then thrown against a wall by the force of the explosions. He tried to calm the screaming women and children in the Lycée, “but what can you do to calm these poor people who had already experienced the bombings of June 6–7 and who, for a month, had been living the lives of soldiers on the firing line?” As reports came in, Poirier learned that the university and its wonderful library were in flames. The church of Saint-Julien was destroyed. The battered remains of the town hall were crushed. A shel- ter on the rue Vaugueux, near the church of Saint-Ju-