Burn After Reading (36 page)

If the President had not wanted to take Donovan's word, he could have gained all the evidence he needed from an objective and scholarly source, Commander Tracy D. Kittredge, USNR. A distinguished educator in civilian life, Kittredge was serving at U.S. Naval Headquarters in London as liaison officer to de Gaulle and the French forces of resistance. Kittredge had a most difficult and thankless task, for he had to wage his own war within the war. He had to buck Roosevelt's prejudices as well as a rather widespread and stubborn tendency within his own command to take French patriotism with a grain of salt.

As late as April 17, 1944, this attitude was reflected in an entry in Butcher's diary. “The French railwaymen will not be likely to help us,” he wrote. “All of which makes me wonder if we are hoping too much for French resistance.” At the same time, the Germans also distrusted those same French railwaymen, on exactly opposite grounds. They decided to train their own workers to run the railways after the invasion, convinced that those Frenchmen would do them more harm than good. Events proved the Germans right. During a three-week period, those underrated French railwaymen's sabotage destroyed more rolling
stock than the Allied air forces succeeded in putting out of action in four months.

The British had an ambivalent attitude toward this clandestine force. On the highest political echelon, Churchill sought to humor Roosevelt by following his hands-off policy. At the same time, the Foreign Office under Anthony Eden maintained intimate relations with the Free French, humoring de Gaulle in turn.

Liaison was even closer between the French underground and the Special Operations Executive. The S.O.E. supplied many of the weapons and explosives the underground needed. Like O.S.S., it provided liaison personnel and weapons instructors. It also worked out plans for joint operations, mainly in espionage and sabotage. In the course of their French operations (between March 15, 1941, when the first mission was carried out, and the end of the campaign in 1944), the French section of S.O.E. trained and dropped three hundred and sixty-six agents, organized fifty resistance groups and carried out some four thousand supply missions.

In preparation for the invasion, French resistance was organized in two major groups. One, called the
“Grande Armée,”
operated somewhat loosely, under local leadership, executing haphazard, minor missions. Its major
raison d'être
was to form the reservoir from which the French Forces of the Interior, France's underground army, could be organized at the strategic moment. The
“Petite Armée”
was organized for direct action when needed, to carry out specific espionage missions and sabotage pinpointed installations. Members of the “
Petite Armée”
were chosen with extreme care. It was maintained as a more or less dormant force, its Sunday punch preserved for the invasion itself.

Unlike Roosevelt and some of his own colleagues, Eisenhower expected major contributions from the French. However, there was grave discrepancy between this noble expectation and the aid even he was prepared to give the French. On February 1,
1944, after considerable squabbling, the scattered underground groups were united in the French Forces of the Interior. In March, General Joseph-Pierre Koenig, one of de Gaulle's top-ranking and most gallant lieutenants, was named to command the FFI.

But not until April did the Allies agree to a plan for the utilization of the FFI in the invasion, and even then only on a humiliatingly limited scale. In the combat zone, members of the FFI were expected to supply only intelligence. Sabotage was to be conducted by them only in the rear areas. A number of plans were drafted, a “Plan Green” providing for the “complete paralyzing” of the railways; a “Plan Blue” for the sabotage of public utilities; another plan for sabotaging fuel and ammunition dumps; still another for guerrilla harassment of the movement of enemy troops and material.

But, like some sort of reverse charity, sabotage in this case began at home. The Allies sabotaged those plans by withholding the promised arms and material support. Eisenhower sent only four specialists to establish radio contacts when a hundred times that many were needed. Instead of the agreed sixty tons of supplies to be smuggled into France by various clandestine means every day, the FFI received only twenty tons in a whole month.

On D-Day, only half of the FFI had the arms and supplies it needed for the execution of the plans. Even so, it was ordered into action and fought with such devotion and skill that Eisenhower later said the FFI had the effectiveness of fifteen divisions.

After the war, Eisenhower acknowledged the importance of this French contribution in glowing words: “Throughout France,” he wrote, “the Free French had been of inestimable value in the campaign. They were particularly valuable in Brittany, but on every portion of the front we secured help from them in a multitude of ways. Without their great assistance the liberation of France and the defeat of the enemy in western Europe would have consumed a much longer time and meant greater losses to ourselves.”

Those French clandestine forces whose very existence
Roosevelt refused to acknowledge proved in yet another manner that they were not a phantom force. During four years of underground fighting the French resistance lost one hundred and five thousand of its members. Some thirty thousand of them were executed by the Germans; seventy-five thousand died in concentration camps.

“But perhaps the greatest achievement,” Ronald Seth wrote, “was not in the injury which it inflicted on the enemy, but rather in the honor it restored to France.”

A day or two after D-Day, Eisenhower's headquarters issued a communiqué. It revealed the momentous military secret that the G.I.'s had been served ice cream in several delicious flavors all along the Normandy beachhead only some ten hours after the initial landing. This was meant to reassure the folks at home who still had a drugstore-counterview of the great war, but the invasion was more than the supreme efficiency test of a battalion of martial Good Humor men.

When, on D-Day, the first GI waded ashore in Normandy, he was one man against what historian Percy Ernst Schramm, keeper of the German High Command's official War Diary, described as “the maximum in available forces [the Germans] were capable of deploying in the West.” It took some time for the Allies, pouring in from the Channel, to match the defenders man for man. Even a week after D-Day, when we had three hundred and twenty-six thousand men ashore, the Germans still outnumbered us about two to one. In the end it needed millions of Allied soldiers, and nearly eleven months, to defeat this stubborn and ingenious enemy, although he was engaged, as he chose to be, on several fronts.

Yet on June 6, 1944, when history's greatest amphibian operation was prayerfully mounted, there was a man, a single American, whose activities, had he been given proper scope and adequate support, might have assured victory without this fantastic effort.

The man was Allen Welsh Dulles, ex-diplomat and lawyer
in civilian life, now operating out of Switzerland in the invisible bowels of the great war. Long before D-Day, Dulles had been in touch with influential men inside the Third Reich who professed to be willing and appeared to be able to assure victory to the Allies without the prodigious undertaking of the invasion.

To say that Dulles might have won the war singlehanded may sound like a preposterous exaggeration, just as it may appear foolish and arrogant to pose the question : Was that historic trip across the English Channel really necessary?

The bold question appears justified in the light of the
total
picture that presented itself to the Allied leaders on the very eve of D-Day. Even from a strictly military point of view, the invasion was but the second half of a one-two punch, for the Allies were already on the Continent—in Italy. It would have been possible to conduct the crusade for Europe from this vast Italian foothold (where the Germans had twenty-three divisions), then fan out to the south of France and South East Europe (taking on thirty-one more enemy divisions) and fight our way up France and Eastern Europe to the vitals of Germany, without a cross-Channel invasion.

However, that is idle speculation. A far more important factor mitigating against the invasion from England was another situation, whose inherent opportunities, almost completely wasted, have received far too little attention in the histories of World War II.

On June 6, the
Wehrmacht
was no longer the monolithic force it had been. While the combat efficiency of the
Landser
was still extremely high, and the German army was still a formidable war machine, dissidence and despair had appeared like termites in the officers' corps and in various sectors of the home front. There was increasing determination among a growing number of Germans to terminate the war by a
coup,
even if it meant treachery, humiliation, and, indeed, defeat.

It is not simple to fix a time at which the distintegration began, but most probably it started in June, 1943. Early that month, a young lieutenant colonel of the German Army decided
that he had had enough. He was Claus Schenk Count von Staufenberg, thirty-six years old when he decided to join the cabal of anti-Nazi officers in the
Wehrmacht.
He was a scion of Swabian nobility, and his extraordinary talents had attracted attention, earning for him the nickname “young Schlieffen.” He was in North Africa with Rommel when he was severely wounded in an air attack, losing one eye, his right, and two fingers of his left hand. He was temporarily blinded even in his remaining eye. On his bed in the field hospital in historic Carthage, when he feared he had been utterly destroyed for any useful future, he made up his mind to continue the fight, not against his country's foreign enemies, but against the Nazis whom he had come to regard as the greater foe. His wrath was concentrated on Hitler. It became as obsession with him to kill the man he held responsible, not merely for Germany's physical anguish, but even more for her moral degradation.

Von Stauffenberg was a newcomer to an old plot. Hitler had long been resented and detested by a group of high-ranking officers of the Army. They firmly believed that his liquidation would end the nightmare. They hoped at first to capture him and hand him over to a court of German justice to be punished for his deeds; then, when such a decorous approach seemed impossible, they wanted to assassinate him.

Hitler's arrest was first contemplated in 1938, on the eve of the Munich conference, by a group of generals led by Franz Halder, the Army's new chief of staff (replacing General Ludwig Beck, the spiritual leader of the dissidents) and Erwin von Witzleben, commandant of the Berlin military district. Their conspiracy was inspired and fired by Oster, the diligent plotter inside the
Abwehr,
but Chamberlain's surrender in Munich took the wind out of their sails. Then, on September 3, 1939, the day of the outbreak of the war in the West, Colonel-General von Hammerstein-Equord planned to use a visit of Hitler to his headquarters to arrest the Fuehrer and overthrow his regime, but Hitler did not show up.

The first assassination attempt was scheduled for early
November, 1939, stage-managed by Oster with Halder's help, but the latter, who was expected to back the plot and provide the military forces needed for its execution, lacked the courage of Oster's convictions. Aside from that, a nebulous attempt was then made on Hitler's life in a beer cellar in Munich. It brought in its wake such stringent security measures that Oster's assassin had no chance to get close to the Fuehrer.

Another attempt was planned for August 4, 1941. It was thwarted by a sudden tightening of security measures around Hitler, presumably because a hint had leaked to the Gestapo.

Von Witzleben returned to the picture in December. Everything was arranged for a showdown, when an emergency operation Witzleben had to undergo caused the plan to collapse.

Some of these plots had touches of what later became staples, of television melodrama. One envisaged Hitler's assassination during a presentation of some new Army uniforms. A volunteer, modeling the new uniform, was to conceal a bomb on him. He was supposed to blow himself up and take Hitler into death with him by bumping into the Fuehrer with his fused infernal machine at the climax to this military fashion show.

Enticed by Oster, a small group of determined combat officers now assumed responsibility for direct action. Leader of this group was forty-two year old General Henning von Tresckow, chief of staff of Field Marshal von Kluge on the Eastern front. Von Tresckow was a man of superb gallantry and moral strength, his innate decency and patriotism concealed behind a perpetual sardonic smile on his handsome face. His chief aide in the venture at the front was Lt. Fabian von Schlabrendorff, the lawyer whose anti-Nazi hatred knew no bounds and whose courage blinded him to the perils of the undertaking. Back in Berlin, besides the omnipresent Oster, was. General Helmut Stieff, chief of the Organizations Department of the General Staff, whose happy disposition hid an iron will, superb courage, and a deeply felt dissatisfaction with the Nazis.

In March, 1943, von Tresckow received word that Hitler would come to von Kluge's headquarters at Smolensk on an
inspection trip. Tresckow promptly decided to kill the Fuehrer by blowing up his aircraft as it was returning. As soon as word reached Smolensk of this fatal mishap, the commander of a cavalry regiment, Baron von Boeselager by name, would stage a
coup de main
at Kluge's headquarters and take control of this army group. Insurrection was expected to snowball from there on. Stieff was to stage the
sequelae
in the Defense Ministry in Berlin. Oster and his aides were to handle the political phase of the rebellion.