D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (15 page)

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 Orleans 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-Percee (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. Andre 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 Andre 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 Therese Gondree had a cafe. 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.