by David Irving
Winnie the Pooh! I’ve got it in my assault library—that and my New Testament. Soon the roses will be out, pink roses would look exquisite on your blue-and-white striped dress. If you were here, I’d undo your dress button by button, then kiss first the nape of your neck, and then the little hollow in your throat, and then the gentle dip between your breasts. And that’s where I’d put the roses, a perfect decoration for such a pretty place. . . . Tomorrow’s June the first, and we’re going one step closer. We’re moving forward to the embarkation area. Today we were given the passwords for the first few days. We’ve topped up our fuel tanks and taken on rations and ammunition.
JUNE 1. At the embarkation area they wait, and speculate on what city “Poland” will be. They stroll, drink beer, strum the piano in the mess and sing songs like “We Must Never Say Good-bye” and “Moonlight Becomes You” and “As Time Goes By.” He hears alarming news: that panzer division has now sniffed forward to “Poland” itself and been practicing counterattacks.
June 2. Rommel is again shooting with the Marquis de Choisy. Bannerman is writing: “This morning we heard that we move off tomorrow at the crack of dawn to embark. So the game’s beginning.”
June 3. Rommel is in Paris, buying shoes for Lucie. Bannerman’s diary says: “Up early, after waking at 4:30. Dressed by hurricane lamp, had just enough time for Communion at five before we drove off at six.” The day is spent winching the heavy guns and gear aboard the landing craft. “D day is Monday, so we’ve only got tomorrow, Sunday, left.”
June 4. In the morning, as Rommel leaves France for his home in Herrlingen, Bannerman writes:
I have written a letter to you, but I don’t know if anybody’s coming to collect them. We’re riding at anchor, and there’s a strong wind and the sea’s quite rough. . . . We’ve got these monster trailers on board, and the deck is packed with tractors, jeeps, personnel carriers, guns and tanks, and the men have been sleeping on buckboards or in their vehicles, with three blankets apiece. I turned in shortly after nine, in the wheelhouse, and slept quite well on a stretcher. I believe D day’s going to be tomorrow, so I haven’t much time left. . . . Pray for courage, though I know I’m no hero. . . .
On Sergeant Matthews’s personnel carrier, in which I’m supposed to go on land, the entire section has chalked the names of their girls and a cupid’s heart. So in order not be left out, I’ve added your name to the gallery too. You’re in between Lance Corporal Baker’s Doris and Sergeant Matthews’s Vera. The harbor’s overflowing with ships, barrage balloons are up and the men are eating their meals in little groups. I wonder what dress you’re wearing? It’s one P.M., I suppose you’re just taking Andrew down for Sunday lunch. Your sunburned arms are preparing his food, and he’s clamoring for it from his high chair. If I was with you now, I’d interrupt you just long enough for a kiss, and see the laughter in your eyes as you turn around and offer me your soft lips, before you turn back like a good mother to the job at hand. How I love to see Andrew’s half-shy surprise when he sees us embrace. . . . We’ve been in the harbor all day. The invasion’s been postponed because of bad weather, the harbor’s full of ships.
Bannerman goes ashore in England to stretch his legs. Rommel is doing the same, in Germany, with Lucie. Bannerman writes:
June 5: There’s still a strong wind blowing, but soon after breakfast we weighed anchor and sailed. The chalk cliffs lit up in the sun like white curtains along the shallow green coastline. The white fleet of tank landing and support craft with their large silver barrage balloons and the motorboats throwing up white plumes of spray make a lovely picture of blue and white and silver. Part of Britain’s armada: it looks more like a regatta.
The signal’s been given: “Open sealed orders at 0700 hours.” Another order from a motor boat: “Sailing time 1230 hours.” So tomorrow must be D day. We sailed at 12:45 P.M. I mustered all the men and told them this is it. It wasn’t easy to speak, as I had to grip the railing with one hand, the papers in the other, and prevent the wind from tearing the megaphone out of my hands as well. I had to shout to make myself heard above the wind, the sea and the engines. I told them, with a great feeling for the drama of the moment, that tomorrow is D day and that our first assault waves hit the beaches at 7:25 A.M. Our objective is the city of Caen. Normandy and Brittany are to receive our invasion forces.
That night, Bannerman does not sleep well.
June 6: I think we all can’t help feeling from time to time we must be dreaming. My friend James spoke for us all when he said, “I keep feeling that my wife’s going to give me a wallop on the backside and tell me I’ve overslept and I’m half an hour late for breakfast.” It’s now three A.M., and I’ve been up on the bridge. The moon’s shining and it’s quite bright but a bit overcast. I can see the columns and rows of little ships and dark balloons, silhouetted fore and aft of us against the gray sea. . . . And so we sail on toward Caen. And you, my angel, are sleeping, I hope, fast asleep in the nursery. Your thoughts have been such a help to me. I’ve drawn a lot of strength from them. I can imagine you listening to the nine o’clock news each day, and thinking lovingly of me. I hope that Andrew is fast asleep with his golden head on his little pillow, and that Richard is lying snug in his tiny cot.
The hours pass, as the invasion fleet slowly approaches Normandy. Bannerman can see antiaircraft fire to the right of him—that must be the Cherbourg defenses. “I expect that you’ve heard the news by now, my darling. My eyes grow quite moist, as I realize that you may at this very moment be listening to the news . . .” His diary comes to an abrupt halt soon after.
BANNERMAN’S LANDING CRAFT had been part of an immense invasion fleet—6,483 ships, including six battleships, twenty-three cruisers and 104 destroyers. All day long it had sailed from England toward the Normandy coastline, as conspicuous a movement as there has ever been, especially in this, the age of the reconnaissance plane, radio, radar and secret agents. Yet nobody on the German side had detected the fleet’s approach.
If just one Nazi patrol boat had been stationed in the English Channel, it could have given Hitler ten hours’ warning—but the German navy had declared the seas too rough for their own patrol boats to put to sea. The German defenders received no warning until the first enemy shots were fired at them. Paratroops landed right in their midst and caught them unawares. Thus the British radio commentators could claim, “The Germans were caught with their pants down.”
The furious German High Command on June 9 ordered Rommel’s headquarters to investigate in full whether this insinuation was true—that the German forces had been surprised. Backward and forward went the teleprinter messages concerning what General Speidel’s staff came to dismiss with guilty levity as the “underwear inquiry.” Rommel evidently guessed where the dirty linen was and squelched all further action, to protect his own and Rundstedt’s officers. On July 4 Tempelhoff, Rommel’s operations officer, advised the Seventh Army: “The commission of inquiry into the events of June 5–6 is a dead duck.”
If ever a situation warranted such an inquiry, it was this one. On the eve of the invasion, the entire German command structure in France was in disarray. Rommel, who had always stressed the need to thwart the enemy invasion in its first few hours, was on leave in Germany. At Rommel’s château, La Roche-Guyon, Speidel was standing in for him, and Staubwasser, the intelligence officer, for Tempelhoff, who, like Rommel, had gone to Germany. Speidel was serenity itself, but for all his staff experience in Russia he had “never actually commanded anything larger than an old-fashioned infantry company,” as the jealous General Geyr later acidly observed. He was not a man of action.
There were other gaps as well. General Salmuth of the Fifteenth Army had only just returned from two days’ hunting in the Ardennes, where he had been completely out of touch. General Dollmann had left the Seventh Army’s headquarters for Rennes, in Brittany, to which he had called all his commanders for a planning conference the next day. Worse, the Twenty-first Panzer Division’s General Feuchtinger had abse
nted himself to Paris to amuse himself, taking his very capable operations officer with him—and Rommel had no other panzer division within immediate striking distance of Caen and the Normandy beaches. Only General Marcks, the commander in Normandy, was at his post. That evening he had hobbled with his corps staff into his command bunker at Saint-Lô for the first time, as if he sensed that his time had come.
How could the German commanders possibly have been oblivious to the fate about to befall them? The answer to this reveals a deeper puzzle yet: German intelligence had given General Speidel strong evidence that the invasion would take place on June 6, but he had declined to alert the Seventh Army.
The historian searches Speidel’s records in vain for the truth behind this inexplicable lapse. Hans Speidel himself frankly admitted to me, “There were quite deliberate omissions from Army Group B’s war diary, resulting from instructions either by Rommel, by Tempelhoff or by myself.” Tantalizingly, the telephone log kept by Rundstedt’s intelligence staff during these days is missing until the dawn of D day itself. But fortunately the records of the High Command, the Seventh and Fifteenth armies, the navy and the SS survive in sufficient volume to enable us to reconstruct the story—a story that seemed almost incredible to me when I first heard it in January 1969 from Colonel Oskar Reile, the chief of German counterespionage in France at the time of the invasion.
I found Reile to be a man of medium height, slight physique, and dark-haired. He could easily have been mistaken for a Frenchman, for he spoke fluent French with an educated accent. His German, too, was elegant: his phrases unhurried, his conversation beautifully ordered, his thoughts flowing obediently in the sequence that he needed them. I listened intently as he told his astonishing tale.
The facts were these: the enemy were known to have assigned to certain cells of the French underground important sabotage operations to coincide with D day. Particular bridges were to be blown, roads mined and railroads sabotaged. How to tip off these cells as to the date, without telling the Nazis? Each cell had been told to listen for its own secret code phrase to be broadcast by the BBC in two halves. The first half would signify that there were no more than two weeks to go before D day. And if the second half was thereafter broadcast, D day would follow within forty-eight hours. It was a precise, and new, system. But since late 1943 Colonel Reile’s agents had infiltrated a significant fraction of these French underground cells, and by February 1944 he knew precisely which code phrases to instruct his numerous radio monitors, quartered in the Hôtel Lutetia in Paris, to listen for.
The monotonous vigil had continued through March, April and May. Then, on June 1, his monitors rushed into his office at the Lutetia. The BBC had just transmitted 125 of the half phrases—so D day would occur in the next two weeks! Very significantly, those cells which the enemy suspected of having been infiltrated—and Reile knew which they were—did not get the dramatic messages: so this must be the real thing. Equally significantly, those cells that did get the messages were located in Brittany and Normandy, and in the Lille-Amiens area (across the German supply route).
Tremendously excited, Reile informed Rundstedt in Paris and the Gestapo in Berlin. The Gestapo informed the High Command and—the records show—clearly spelled it out to them: an invasion would occur before the fifteenth, and reception of the second half phrase would be the final clue as to the actual day. It was the scoop of the Second World War.
Hitler was informed on June 2, and the High Command passed the extraordinary information on to the General Staff’s experts in Foreign Armies West—the agency responsible for briefing the lower army echelons on intelligence matters. This agency did nothing.
The chief of this agency was Colonel Alexis von Roenne. A General Staff colonel, a baron born in the Baltic states, Roenne was distant, suave and fluent in French and Russian. It can surely be said that he was among those responsible for Rommel’s defeat in France. Together with the chief of his English section, Major Roger Michael, an ambiguous figure—his mother was British; he was seen after the war wearing a U.S. Army uniform, then he vanished behind the Iron Curtain—Roenne consistently fed to Army Group B data on the enemy’s strength and intentions that was so thoroughly false that it is impossible to believe it was by accident.
It had to be part of the anti-Hitler plan. Colonel Paul Brendel, Roenne’s operations officer from April 1944 until the end, later remembered Roenne as “an intellectual but aloof person, impossible to make friends with. That countless German soldiers would pay for his actions with their lives, left him stone cold.” Roenne undoubtedly felt, along with the other conspirators, that by expediting the inevitable defeat the plotters were saving German lives, in far greater number. Roenne was executed later as a traitor to Hitler.
Rundstedt’s staff was told about the half phrases directly by Colonel Reile. Why it also did nothing is controversial. It seems that Rundstedt’s intelligence officer, Colonel Wilhelm Meyer-Detring, had originally instructed lower echelons late in 1943 to ignore BBC “alerts.” When word came from Reile, Meyer-Detring was on leave, and his deputy ignored the announcement. In any case, Rundstedt’s staff probably felt that since Rommel had, five months before, taken direct command of the coastal armies, it was up to him to alert those armies.
Rommel’s intelligence officer, Colonel Staubwasser, maintains he was not even told about the new two-part phrase system. At any rate, he wet-blanketed the first storm beacon lit by Reile—regarding it as merely more of the same old stuff—and drafted these words on June 3: “The increased transmission of alarm phrases by enemy radio since June 1 for the French underground cells is not, on previous experience, to be interpreted as an indication that the beginning of the invasion is imminent.” Speidel countersigned this report. Early the next day, June 4, Rommel left for home, taking the parcel of shoes for Lucie. The formal pretext for his journey was an interview—as yet unarranged—with Hitler.
This brings us to the events that occurred at the château on the fifth, the day before the invasion. That morning, Speidel telephoned his colleagues in the Paris section of the anti-Hitler resistance and invited them to come to the château for drinks in the evening. One of them, a senior war reporter attached to Rundstedt’s staff, remembers that Speidel prefaced the unexpected invitation with the words “The Old Man’s gone away.” (At 5:45 P.M. Speidel was heard telephoning one of the main anti-Hitler plotters in Berlin, General Wagner, and saying that Rommel would probably be away for some time since he was not going to see Hitler until the eighth or ninth.) It seemed to Speidel that the coast was clear—in both senses. The enemy invasion was probably going to come at the Strait of Dover—that was what Colonel von Roenne, whose Foreign Armies West was giving Rommel so much misinformation, had ordered all his staff to predict. But the tides there would not be favorable for many days. So it was with an easy mind that Speidel settled down for a rewarding evening.
Soon Speidel’s guests arrived. They dined, ambled about the gardens, then split into two groups in his room in the château’s Norman turret. In one group, a count and a consul general listened to the anecdotes of a colonel. In the other, Speidel talked with Ernst Jünger and other conspirators and discussed the peace manifesto drafted by Jünger, to be proclaimed after the overthrow of Hitler. The bulky document lay on the table.
Outside, the moon had risen. The cognac flowed in warming, golden rivulets through the conversation. Some time after ten o’clock, the subdued voices in Speidel’s group were interrupted by the shrill ringing of the telephone. It was Colonel Staubwasser, calling from Tempelhoff’s desk. The Fifteenth Army intelligence officer had just telephoned from Tourcoing, said Staubwasser, to report that at 9:15 P.M. one of their radio monitors had picked up the second code phrase being broadcast by the BBC to the French underground. There was no doubt about it. As the Fifteenth Army intelligence officer had just pointed out to Staubwasser, this meant that D day might be the next morning, June the sixth. “General Salmuth,” Staubwasser told Speidel, “has already a
lerted the whole Fifteenth Army!” This confronted Speidel with a decision: should Dollmann’s Seventh Army, in Normandy, also be alerted?
General Speidel put down the phone. Retaining his nonchalance, he went to Staubwasser and advised him to telephone Rundstedt’s headquarters for advice. Then he returned to his guests. Staubwasser made the call, and after a while one of Rundstedt’s aides telephoned Staubwasser back from Paris with the desired ruling. According to Staubwasser, it was that the Seventh Army was not to be alerted. So it was not. There is no record of any of these conversations in the war diary of Army Group B.
Toward midnight, Speidel’s guests began to leave. Their drive back to Paris would be much longer than usual, now that the Seine bridges had been bombed. Speidel chatted with the late-goers for a while. At one A.M. he went to bed. It was now June the sixth. Who can say how much of this story Rommel was ever told? His reputation had seemed bedeviled by slipshod intelligence and careless staff work ever since Operation Crusader in Libya in November 1941.
IT IS ONLY now that the events at Rundstedt’s headquarters in Paris that night can be patched together.
Reile had also again intercepted the BBC messages and he telephoned Rundstedt’s staff. Then he personally took a written summary of their importance to Major Reinhard Brink, Rundstedt’s counterespionage liaison officer. Brink took the document in to Rundstedt’s operation officer, Colonel Bodo Zimmermann. The colonel was a generation older than Rundstedt’s other staff officers, arrogant and old-fashioned, with a wooden antipathy toward all intelligence sources. He refused to take the warning seriously. However, Rundstedt’s staff did issue this immediate signal to all stations: “Several phrases known to us since the autumn of 1943 to give brief notice of the start of the invasion, were broadcast for the first time today by the British radio. While we cannot expect that the invasion itself will be announced in advance by radio, it is to be anticipated that the sabotage acts prepared against our transport and communications networks in connection with the invasion, and perhaps armed uprisings as well, are to be set off by these messages.” Among the commanders to whom they sent this message was Speidel at Army Group B.