The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Yet Winterbotham failed to note that the British often did not know with certainty if Ultra decrypts were valid or as phony as the Allied Fortitude signals. The intelligence game was a wilderness of mirrors. Almost every SOE agent the British dropped into Belgium and Holland was captured by the Germans and forced to relay false information back to London. Likewise, every German agent dropped or smuggled into Britain during the war was captured, and then offered a choice: become a double agent or hang. Almost all chose to cooperate, and in their roles as part of Bodyguard fed phony intelligence to Berlin, where Hitler upon reading it gradually grew to believe that Calais, not Normandy, would be the target, especially as the Fortitude signals (from phantom Allied units) seemed to verify the intelligence. Or did Hitler falsely appear to favor Calais? Three times in the early spring, the British intercepted messages from Hitler that clearly indicated he favored Normandy as the objective. Which was it? The Allies could not know with certainty until after the landings. Then, and only then, would German panzer and troop deployments tell them what Hitler believed.129

  All spring Rommel pleaded with Berlin for more barbed wire, concrete, and men. Intercepted communications reinforced Churchill’s concern that Rommel would mass his forces on and near the beaches, throwing everything he had against everything the Allies had, in a Great War–style battle. Another Somme or Passchendaele was what Churchill (and Brooke) most feared. Montgomery read the tea leaves differently. He believed Rommel would never simply sit behind his defenses until the opportunity for a “big push” presented itself, but would constantly assault and harass the Allies from the start. Yet if Rommel assembled a powerful enough force in short order, the nature of his counteroffensive would not be “harassment” but “onslaught.” When Ultra verified Rommel’s plan to gather his panzer reserves and throw them upon the beaches, Churchill’s fears seemed confirmed. If Rommel could stall the first three or four waves of invaders long enough for more panzers (and the Fifteenth Army, from Calais) to appear on the scene, he would win the battle. Hitler had sixty divisions in France and the Low Countries; sound strategy called for him to hurl as many as could be spared at the invaders.130

  Chance would play its usual role in the affair, whether induced by miscommunication, misunderstanding, or the weather. Churchill’s strategic musings and regular proclamations on the roles of chance in warfare put him in general agreement with Clausewitz, who wrote, “War is the province of chance,” a force constantly present on the battlefield, where it “increases the uncertainty of every circumstance and deranges the course of events.” Clausewitz believed fighting a war demanded finding a balance between reason and unreason, where success required both intuition and planning, and where luck always lurked. Most of all, fighting a war demanded political and military leaders who understood this. Clausewitz was no Prussian automaton, but a complex man and complex thinker. Liddell Hart, Britain’s premier strategic thinker in the years between the wars, discounted the importance of Clausewitz. Many in the British military establishment—who presumed a Prussian could teach them little—blamed Clausewitz for the murderous turn that warfare took in the trenches of 1915, an ironic assessment that implies that the long-dead Prussian had somehow ordered Britain’s often stupid generals to conduct the Great War as they had. British political leaders traditionally had little interest in the actual practice of war and for the most part had left the planning and fighting to the admirals and generals. Not Churchill. As a trained soldier who possessed, Ismay later wrote, “an encyclopedic” knowledge of the history of warfare, Churchill had arrived at many of the same truths Clausewitz held dear—confuse the enemy; add creative and idiosyncratic elements to the conflict; control the deranging of events on the battlefield. When it came to fighting, Ismay recalled, Churchill “venerated tradition, but ridiculed convention.”131

  Clausewitz also advised simple plans and tactics not prone to easy foul-up. He advised that attacks should be made only on important objectives, with overwhelming force, and that goals should not be overly ambitious. Overlord was anything but simple; its ambitions were great. Whether its forces were overwhelming would be determined on the beaches. And now the day of battle—June 5—was almost at hand.132

  On June 3, a sunny and breezy day, Eisenhower called a meeting of his commanders and meteorologists at Southwick House, the Royal Navy compound where Eisenhower kept his Portsmouth headquarters. His chief meteorologist, Group Captain John Stagg, who the day before had forecast several days of moderate weather, now predicted gale-force winds, high seas, and low cloud cover for June 4 and 5. A series of low-pressure areas in the North Atlantic were lined up and making for England and Normandy. The Allies could take hourly barometric readings as far afield as Iceland and Greenland, and those readings did not bode well for the fifth. The Germans could not gather weather data in the far reaches of the North Atlantic, an intelligence deficit that would soon blindside them. At the 9:30 P.M. meeting that night, the skies still clear, Stagg reaffirmed his prediction. Eisenhower polled his commanders; they were unanimous in agreeing that the invasion should be pushed back a day, pending a review at the 4:30 A.M. meeting on June 4, just eight hours hence. Parts of the great invasion task force were already at sea; ships that had not yet sailed waited in harbors, packed with troops. At the 4:30 A.M. meeting, Eisenhower asked Stagg if he foresaw any change in his forecast. Stagg replied in the negative. Asked when he thought the front would begin to close on the Channel, he replied, in four or five hours. Eisenhower ordered the postponement.

  By ten that morning, the winds had risen and the clouds had closed in. By eleven o’clock, gale warnings had been run up for the Channel. The June 4 storm scrubbed the fifth. That left the sixth, possibly the seventh, but only if the weather cleared. By then the men would have been aboard the transports for almost four days. A cancellation until late in the month would disrupt the entire logistics structure, to say nothing of the morale of the men and the leaders in London, Washington, and especially Moscow, where Stalin might conclude that his allies had never been sincere in their promise of a second front. A two- or three-week delay would give Rommel time to further reinforce his positions. Nothing could be gained by a postponement, but much would be lost. Eisenhower ordered that they reassemble at 9:30 that night to review the situation.133

  Churchill by then was aboard his private train, parked on a siding outside Portsmouth near Eisenhower’s tented field headquarters. Brooke, as usual, took a dim view, writing in his diary, “Winston… is touring the Portsmouth area and making a thorough pest of himself.” The P.M. designated the train his “advance headquarters,” a moniker Eden found to be absurd, given that the train was cramped and there was only one telephone and one bath and “Mr. Churchill seemed to be always in the bath and General Ismay always on the telephone.”134

  The P.M. had entrained on June 2 with the intention of boarding a Royal Navy cruiser at Portsmouth for a front-row seat as the men went ashore in Normandy. He had asked Admiral Ramsay to make the necessary arrangements but had not informed Brooke, knowing full well the CIGS would vehemently oppose such showmanship. Days earlier, Eisenhower had gotten wind of Churchill’s plans and insisted that he cancel them. Churchill refused, citing his position as HMG’s minister of defence, and the power vested in him by that office to go wherever he pleased in order to conduct HMG’s military business. Eisenhower, who thought Churchill’s presence in the fleet would be a distraction, and dangerous, took his case to King George, who, over three days and in three letters, pleaded with Churchill to reconsider. Finally, when the King implied that he, too, would join the battle—he was a former Royal Navy sailor, after all, and veteran of the Battle of Jutland—Churchill relented. He stressed in his memoir that he had deferred to his King, not to Eisenhower.

  That squall behind him, Churchill waited aboard his train for another tempest to blow in: Charles de Gaulle. The War Cabinet had insisted the Frenchman be at least informed of the date of the invasion; to not do so would be an insult to
France. On June 3, Churchill sent his York to Algiers to retrieve the general, several of his aides, and Duff Cooper. After an overnight flight, they arrived at Northolt Airport just past dawn on the fourth, as the Channel weather deteriorated.135

  At Portsmouth, Churchill, Ernest Bevin, Jan Smuts, and Ismay waited on the railroad spur for de Gaulle, who soon could be seen walking up the line in the company of Duff Cooper, Anthony Eden, and Pierre Viénot, de Gaulle’s ambassador to HMG. Churchill, sensing the historic nature of the proceedings, stepped forward arms outstretched to embrace de Gaulle, who, in his khaki uniform and kepi, two stars on his collar, stood stiffly at attention. Of Churchill’s gesture, Eden later wrote, “Unfortunately, de Gaulle did not respond easily to such a mood.” The tableau resembled a short man trying to embrace a telephone pole. Smuts was altogether the wrong man to be on hand, having declared in a radio address that France would never regain its former position of authority in Europe, an insult the French could never forgive (although Smuts had also predicted the British Empire would emerge from the war in extremis). The parley in the railroad car began well enough, with Churchill outlining the particulars of the military plan while de Gaulle, a military man first and foremost, listened intently, posed questions, and seemed to be enjoying himself. Then Churchill strayed to the topic of the civil governance of France, and the need for de Gaulle to ask Roosevelt’s permission to conduct civil affairs. With cold finality, de Gaulle cut Churchill off. “Why do you seem to think,” he thundered, “I have to submit my candidacy for the government of France to Roosevelt?” The French government existed as a matter of fact, de Gaulle stated, with himself at its head, and that was that. Churchill responded in kind, “I want you to know, General, that every time we must choose between Europe and the open sea we will choose the sea…. Between you and Roosevelt, I will always choose Roosevelt.” Bevin objected, telling de Gaulle that not all in the British government felt that way. Eden, too, tried to calm the waters, but to no avail. “The meeting,” he later wrote, “was a failure.”136

  Franklin Roosevelt spent the weekend of June 3 and 4 resting at Edwin (“Pa”) Watson’s Blue Ridge Mountains home. He read his Book of Common Prayer in order to find the proper words for a blessing to be read on the night of the invasion. He intended to make a radio address on the fifth, but of course would make no mention of events in the English Channel. Rather, his purpose was to congratulate Alexander and Mark Clark on the liberation of Rome—“the symbol of Christianity”—which took place on June 4. It was a hollow victory, Sir John Keegan later wrote. Rome had been declared an open city. Clark should have bypassed it in pursuit of the retreating Germans, which the Fifth Army could then have encircled and captured, with General Oliver Leese’s Eighth Army driving in from the right flank to close off the German retreat. That was Alexander’s plan, drafted in accordance with the Clausewitz maxim that he, Eisenhower, and Churchill held dear: capture armies, not real estate. But Clark, suspicious of British tactics and intent on securing the glory he thought due him, instead took his army directly into Rome, and thus lost his chance to encircle the Germans. Kesselring and his armies began a fighting retreat 150 miles to their Gothic Line in the Apennines—the Allies called it the Pisa-Rimini line—where they successfully thwarted Allied advances into the Balkans until the final weeks of the war. Within eight weeks of the capture of Rome, at the insistence of Roosevelt and Marshall, and against Churchill’s earnest disapproval, Jumbo Wilson’s Mediterranean forces were reduced by seven divisions, four French and three American, for deployment in Anvil. Clark got his front-page glory, for one day, until events in Normandy on June 6 erased Rome from the collective consciousness of Britons, Canadians, and Americans.137

  At Eisenhower’s Portsmouth headquarters, the rain smacking the windows during the evening meteorological meeting of June 4 testified to Group Captain Stagg’s forecasting prowess. Across the Channel the gale was in full blow. An attempt to land on June 5 would have proven disastrous. Prospects for the next day appeared hopeless as well. Then Stagg made what Eisenhower called an “astonishing” forecast: late on June 5 fair weather in the form of a weak high lasting perhaps thirty-six hours would form a break between the low-pressure systems. That sounded promising for the sixth, but opened the unsettling possibility that the first landings might take place under suitable conditions while the follow-up landings would have to be scrubbed as the second storm arrived, leaving the initial forces trapped on the beaches. Eisenhower asked Stagg what exactly the weather would be like in twenty-four hours. “To answer that question,” Stagg replied, “would make me a guesser, not a meteorologist.” After pondering Stagg’s assessment, Eisenhower announced the invasion was on, pending a final review at the 4:00 A.M. meeting on June 5, in seven hours. When they reconvened before dawn on the fifth, Stagg held to his forecast; a break in the weather was imminent. Eisenhower put questions to his commanders: Could the navy gunners spot targets? Could the parachute transports find their drop zones? Could the landing craft reach shore? The answer from each of the commanders was in the affirmative. “Okay,” Eisenhower announced, “we’ll go.”138

  Later that morning, after paying a visit to British troops who were boarding their landing ships, Eisenhower played a game of checkers with Butcher; the result was a draw. That night, June 5, Dwight Eisenhower wrote by hand a message to be broadcast if the liberators were repulsed. It began: “Our landings… have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops.”139

  Churchill, scrubbed from the mission by King George, took his train back to London. As the evening of June 5 came on, Churchill cabled Stalin with the news that the invasion was on for the following morning. Stalin was dining with the Yugoslav writer and Tito’s number three man, Milovan Djilas. Handed Churchill’s telegram, Stalin turned to Djilas and said, “Yes there will be a landing, if there is no fog. Until now there was always something else that interfered. I suspect tomorrow it will be something else. Maybe they’ll meet up with some Germans.”140

  Field Marshal von Rundstedt dined with cronies that night at his headquarters at Château St-Germain. Thanks to the misinformation of Fortitude, he now believed that the invasion in the west would come in the Pas de Calais and in tandem with the Russian summer offensive. Since the Eastern Front showed no signs of activity that week, the west should remain quiet as well. Shortly after nine o’clock he was informed that the second line of the Verlaine couplet—“Pierce my heart with a dull languor”—had just gone out over the BBC. German intelligence had known the meaning of the line for weeks. Von Rundstedt didn’t buy it. “Does anyone think the enemy is stupid enough to announce his arrival over the radio?” he exclaimed to a guest. Then, a bit worse for drink, he retired for the evening.141

  Erwin Rommel had told his superiors that the first day would spell the difference between victory and defeat for the Reich. That day, he said, would be Der längste Tag (“the longest day”). The evening of June 5 did not find Rommel in Normandy, because on the morning of the fourth, after studying the latest weather reports, which predicted a continuation of high winds, high seas, and rain, Rommel concluded that the Allied invasion would not come for at least several days. Thus reassured by the gales blowing in the Channel, he took himself off to Bavaria to celebrate his wife’s birthday. Because his meteorologists could not peer as far west into the Atlantic as could Eisenhower’s, Rommel had no idea that a brief break in the foul weather was on its way.

  Brooke that night offered to his diary: “I am very uneasy about the whole operation. At the best it will fall very far short” of expectations, and “at the worst it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war. I wish to God it were safely over.”142

  Churchill dined with Clementine in the Annexe that evening, one of just four dinners alone in each other’s company since January. After dinner he made a final trip downstairs to the map room to assess the latest airborne dispositions. Shortly before she went to bed Clementine joined him, a rare foray for her
into the domain of the planners and chartists. Churchill told her, “Do you realize that by the time you wake up in the morning twenty thousand men may have been killed?” His calculation did not include Germans. He knew that if his estimate of Allied casualties proved accurate, the invasion had been repulsed on the beach. His declaration—part melodrama, part cold calculation wrapped in sentiment—was in character. And consistent; he had proclaimed for two years that a disastrous defeat on the coast of France “was the only way in which we could lose this war.” And now the moment was at hand. He lingered in the map room for a few moments before going to bed at about the time the first of the airborne troops glided and parachuted into the Normandy countryside.143

  It was shortly after midnight, June 6.

  Guided by the near-full moon, Bomber Command spent the first hours of the day dropping more than five thousand tons of bombs on coastal batteries and nearby rail lines, the greatest tonnage of bombs dropped in a single night during the war. To deflect German attention from the goings-on in Normandy, a Montgomery look-alike had days earlier been sent to Gibraltar along with his “staff” with orders to make his presence there known, which would presumably lead the Germans to conclude that with Montgomery (who Berlin knew was to command the invasion) out of the country, no invasion was imminent.* Another deception operation, aerial in nature, took place early on June 6 off the Pas de Calais, where the lead planes in a fleet of British aircraft dropped tinfoil strips just off the English coast, and then turned and took up position in the rear of the little aerial armada. The radar “picture” created by the tinfoil told the Germans that something was out there. Then, the next squadron of planes dropped their tinfoil a mile or so in front of the first, before turning for the rear, while the first squadron by then had come around and dropped more tinfoil another mile or so toward Calais—and so on slowly across the Channel, with the effect that the steadily advancing (and confusing) radar “picture” appeared to confirm for the Germans in Calais an oncoming seaborne invasion fleet. Meanwhile, two squadrons of RAF bombers carrying radar-jamming equipment overflew Normandy in order to blind the remaining German radar operators there. By 2:00 A.M. the Germans no longer could “see” what was coming their way.144