Ike's Spies

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Frutos was only the first of many stay-behinds picked up by both the British and the Americans. Most were found thanks to ULTRA. To the end, the Germans never suspected a thing.

  The American SLUS found themselves gaining prestige in the eyes of their commanders during the battle of the buildup. Earlier, before D-Day, Wainwright said that General Bradley and his staff “were very, very skeptical” of the ULTRA information. They just could not believe any intelligence officer could be that good. But once the battle was joined, “SLU breaks were such that you could find out practically where small units were moving, and, Christ, you just had to believe. Because going through Normandy … you’d get a message that 110th headquarters was at a certain place, and by God it was there. This you had to believe.”

  Wainwright’s biggest problem was providing a cover story for his source. Most of the intelligence officers he dealt with did not know about ULTRA; they were naturally curious as to where Wainwright was getting all his fabulous information. “Nine out of ten times we made it up out of whole cloth. The cover story was picked out of the air.” For example, when asked how he knew that the 106th Panzer Division would be moving into the line that night, Wainwright replied that he was running a spy who overheard a conversation at a local bar between two German officers.

  That spy was fictitious, but the story rang true because in fact the SLUS had “a helluva lot of confidential funds.… They could run agents on their own. Hire agents. I did that. My boss was very keen on that. He used to call these agents midgets. He’d say, ‘Wainwright, how many midgets are you running?’ ”29

  BY JULY 1944 the Allies had won the battle of the buildup. A handful of men in the British Secret Service, spearheaded by Masterman, along with thousands of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen of all ages, aided in no small measure by the SLUS and ULTRA, had imposed just enough delay on the Germans to make the victory by the British and American troops possible. It was a damn close-run thing, as Wellington is reported to have said about Waterloo, but if the margin was slim, it was sufficient.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Battle of Mortain—ULTRA’S Greatest Triumph

  MID-JULY 1944. Cherbourg has been captured, the damage to the port repaired. On July 19 the first supply ships start unloading. The Americans have landed a total of 770,000 troops in Normandy. They have suffered 73,000 casualties, which are more than compensated for by reserve divisions in England (including the 82d and 101st Airborne, which have been withdrawn from the Continent for refitting) waiting their chance to cross over and join the battle.

  The British and Canadians have landed 591,000 troops, suffered 49,000 casualties, and also have reserve forces waiting to cross. The Germans, meanwhile, continue to hold the Fifteenth Army at the Pas de Calais, despite the overwhelming Allied commitment to Normandy, because they still overestimate Ike’s total force. The Wehrmacht has taken 116,863 casualties. In Normandy, the Germans have twenty-six divisions, many of them understrength, facing thirty-four Allied divisions.1

  ALL GERMAN ATTEMPTS to drive the Allies off the Continent had failed miserably, partly because of poor generalship—they committed their reserves piecemeal, feeding them into the battle as soon as they arrived at the front—and partly because of ULTRA. Whenever the Germans did try to assemble forces for a major counterattack, ULTRA passed the word to Allied artillery, airmen, and naval forces, who together unleashed a horrendous bombardment on the assembly center.

  Still, the Wehrmacht on the defensive remained a formidable foe. Winterbotham went to Normandy to see Bradley and check on the operation of the SLU system. Bradley thanked him and all those involved in ULTRA’S performance: “Never did I expect to get such concise information about my opponents,” he said, then added, “The only trouble is that there seems to be too many of them.”2

  So, although he was in control of most of Normandy and was the winner in the battle of the buildup, as July drew to a close Ike was close to despair. Flying bombs were falling on London. Monty’s attempts to take Caen had failed, despite the massive application of air power. Bradley’s progress in the hedgerow country was agonizingly slow. After seven weeks of fighting, the deepest Allied penetrations were some thirty miles inland, on a front of only eighty miles. There was hardly enough room to maneuver or to bring in the reserves waiting in England. The Germans were fighting savagely, taking advantage of every piece of cover and laying mines with extraordinary skill.

  The Wehrmacht was, however, stretched thin, too thin to keep up the fight much longer. ULTRA revealed that Hitler was ordering his generals to stay put, which indicated that they were asking him for permission to retreat.3 Fortunately for the Allies, Hitler decided that Rundstedt was a defeatist and replaced him with General Guenther von Kluge.

  Even better, Rommel was wounded on July 17 when an Allied fighter strafed the staff car in which he was riding. He was then implicated in the July 20 plot against Hitler and eventually committed suicide to avoid the shame of a trial. Von Kluge assumed Rommel’s duties in addition to his other responsibilities, but Hitler did not trust Kluge either and therefore insisted on maintaining a tight personal control over his battle plans and actions. That situation forced the Germans to use the radio extensively, which was ideal for ULTRA.

  Nevertheless, the Germans, in their fixed positions, with their panzers dug in, utilizing every fold of ground, most especially the famous hedgerows of Normandy, could not be dislodged. If the Allies could ever break through, they could use their air and transport superiority to launch a war of maneuver that would crush the Germans in France. The trick was to break through. In a sense the situation of 1940 had been reversed, with the Germans in the role of the immobile French at the Maginot Line and the Allies ready to begin a blitzkrieg of their own, if only they could crack the shell.

  Bradley had a plan to force a breakout. It called for the massive use of air power in a manner that resembled a 1916-type offensive, with the bombers substituting for artillery to blast a hole through the German line. The big difference between Bradley’s plan, code name COBRA, and a World War I offensive was the relative thinness of the German line in 1944, coupled with the presence of American tanks to exploit the hole blasted in the line.

  COBRA began on July 25. The tremendous bombardment left the Germans in a dazed condition. At the same time the Canadians, on the left, began a drive toward Falaise, which gained little ground but did pin down the panzers facing Montgomery. Meanwhile, General “Lightning Joe” Collins, a veteran of Guadalcanal, led his U. S. VII Corps to St. Lô, through the German lines, and broke out into the open countryside of France.

  The Germans, finally, abandoned their idée fixe that the main landings would come at the Pas de Calais. Kluge obtained Hitler’s permission to transfer two divisions from the Fifteenth Army to Normandy. Hitler told Kluge to “keep his eyes riveted to the front and on the enemy without ever looking backward.”4 ULTRA picked up that signal, to Ike’s great delight, because it told him the Germans were doing exactly what he hoped they would do—stand in Normandy and take a beating there. What Eisenhower most feared was that the Germans would retire to the line of the Seine River, or perhaps all the way back to the Franco-German border, there to take up prepared defensive positions.

  But with Hitler in charge, there was no danger of a German retreat. Ike counted on what he called Hitler’s “conqueror’s mentality.” He believed that Hitler, like most aggressive leaders, could not bring himself to give up land he had conquered. Throughout the war, Eisenhower took it for granted that his enemies would stand and fight, no matter how precarious their situation or how bad their position, rather than retreat to shorter, more easily defended lines. It was a leap into the mind of the man directing the battle from the other side of the hill, the kind of intelligence that comes from study and observation over a period of time, as well as from a study of history, rather than as the result of an intercepted radio message or a spy’s report.5

  Collins’ breakthrough opened the way for a flow of rein
forcements from England to France led by Patton. The situation was the culmination of a soldier’s dreams. Eisenhower had armored units loose in the enemy rear and they could go in any direction he wanted them to go. Patton might be sent east, toward Paris, or northeast, toward the German rear at Caen, or south into central France, or west into Brittany.

  As Ike told Marshall on August 2, he now had a golden opportunity not only to defeat the German Army but to destroy it. Patton sent one corps into Brittany to get possession of the ports there; the other three corps of his Third Army sped southward from Avranches, with the ultimate intention of swinging around the exposed German left flank and encircling Kluge’s Seventh Army. The Third Army’s food, fuel, ammunition and other supplies had to come through the narrow bottleneck at Avranches.

  At this moment, Hitler decided to counterattack. He ordered an offensive along the Mortain-Avranches axis on through to the coast. It was a brilliant strategic move that promised, if successful, to isolate Patton and possibly even drive the Allies back into the sea.

  It was a gamble, and Hitler signaled to Kluge, “The decision in the Battle of France depends on the success of the Avranches attack. You have a unique opportunity, which will never return, to drive into an extremely exposed enemy area and thereby to change the situation completely.”6

  To succeed, Hitler needed to convince Kluge that the plan would work. In this he failed. Hitler wanted to delay the counterattack until an imposing force of panzers had been gathered opposite Mortain, so that the blow, when it came, would be a strategic and not just a tactical one. But Kluge attacked five days ahead of schedule, precisely because he thought the best that could be attained would be minor changes in the front line, not a strategic turnaround. Furthermore, Kluge could not afford to pull more of his tanks off Monty’s front; he had already brought down to Normandy most of the armor in the Fifteenth Army, and in any case the combination of Allied air forces guided by ULTRA and the French Resistance made movement of units into Normandy too costly and time-consuming to be worth the effort.

  The other element Hitler counted on for success was surprise. Here he was on much better ground, because the Allies were predisposed to believe that the Germans were fighting with their backs to the wall, thinking only about an orderly retreat to the Franco-German border, incapable of even contemplating, much less launching, a major counterattack. His plan was so bold, Hitler believed, that the Allies would never suspect it until too late. But thanks to ULTRA, Eisenhower and Bradley were able to fight a classic defensive battle, a textbook example of how to meet and throw back an armored attack.

  The story began on August 3, when ULTRA picked up a Hitler-to-Kluge signal that read, “The armoured divisions which have up to now been employed on that front must be released and moved complete to the left wing. The enemy’s armoured forces [Patton’s Third Army] which have pressed forward to the east, southeast and south will be annihilated by an attack which these armoured formations—numbering at least four—will make, and contact will be restored with the west coast of the Contentin at Avranches—or north of that—without regard to the enemy penetrations in Brittany.”7

  Everyone involved in the process of decoding, translating, interpreting, and disseminating ULTRA material realized immediately the import of this message. The SLUS got it to Eisenhower and SHAEF within the hour, while Winterbotham personally rang up Churchill with the intercept.

  Ike’s deputy, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, as Winterbotham relates, “took the rather unprecedented step of ringing me up and, as he put it, ‘in view of the extreme importance of Hitler’s signal,’ asking if I would be quite certain that it was not a bluff. Again he said that the substance was of such importance that Eisenhower didn’t want to take any chances. I phoned Hut 3 [in Bletchley Park] to make quite sure that the original German version was in Hitler’s own distinctive style and language. They told me we had no reason to doubt it on any score, and the signal had without doubt come from Fuehrer headquarters. Tedder was satisfied.”8

  So were Eisenhower and Bradley. They agreed at once to keep Patton driving forward, even sending more units through the narrow opening between Mortain and the coast while holding at Mortain with only one infantry division, the 30th, and two others in reserve.

  The three Americans had all been outstanding athletes (Bradley in baseball, Patton in polo, Ike in football); all were West Pointers; they had been friends for nearly thirty years. Patton was the oldest, Bradley the youngest. Bradley had served under Patton’s command in Sicily; now Patton was under Bradley; it was a measure of their closeness that Ike never heard a word of complaint from either man about the relationship.

  Patton and Bradley seemed to be exact opposites. Patton was a great actor, deliberately portraying the role of the ruthless soldier, swashbuckling, profane, insensitive. His frown was enough to scare a man half to death, his shouts were legendary. Bradley was quiet, self-effacing, never raised his voice, was considerate of his men, and shunned any hint of role-playing. Where Patton loved uniforms, with pearl-handled pistols sticking out on his hips, Bradley wore a simple Eisenhower jacket and plain pants.

  But both men had much in common too, beginning with a belief in Ike and a willingness to trust him, no matter what. In addition, each man had dark, deep-set, penetrating eyes that missed nothing; a grim, determined, square chin; a broad, hard-set mouth; and a face that displayed singleness of purpose. The United States could well be proud of this trio of generals.

  Eisenhower was with Bradley at his headquarters when Bradley made the decision to hold at Mortain. Ike approved his plan, Tedder recalled, “there and then. He told Bradley that if the Germans should temporarily break through from Mortain to Avranches and thus cut off Patton’s thrust, we could give the advance forces two thousand tons of supply per day by air.”9

  How could the American leaders take such a risk, knowing that Hitler intended to attack with four armored divisions in the initial assault? Partly because air power could supply Patton and protect his flanks, more because of ULTRA. They were confident that the oracle of Bletchley Park would give sufficient advance warning of where, when, and in what strength the attack would come for them to prepare for it. What they were really depending on was that Hitler would try to control the battle and thus fill the air with radio signals.

  By August 6, Kluge had three armored divisions ready at their jump-off points. Although well-camouflaged, for reasons that were inexplicable to the Germans, they were taking a terrific air and naval gun bombardment. In contrast to the usual daily personnel losses of about 3 percent for units in combat, the casualty reports for August 6 in the divisions scheduled for the attack reached heights of 40 percent.10

  The Germans had to attack or fall back. Right after midnight, the engines of two hundred assault tanks roared into life and the Battle of Mortain was on. By daylight, the 2d ss Panzer Division had overun Mortain. There was no significant American opposition. The Germans assumed they had achieved complete surprise and gleefully began to drive beyond Mortain toward Avranches.

  As they did so, and as the light strengthened, American artillery shells began to drop all around them, setting vehicles afire, kicking up dust, raising hell generally, forcing the panzers to seek cover, throw up camouflage, and dig in. On the flanks, the 1st SS Panzer Division and the 2d Panzer Division were going through similar experiences. The attack had come to a halt almost before it got started.

  What had happened was that elements of the U. S. 30th Division had stayed on Hill 317, immediately east of Mortain, while other elements had thrown up road blocks that funneled the German tanks in predetermined and selected directions. Bradley had also set up artillery batteries on each flank. With daylight, the men on Hill 317, enjoying unexcelled observation, called the artillery fire right down on the Germans’ heads.11

  Simultaneously, British rocket-firing Hurricane and Typhoon fighter airplanes swooped down on the enemy, firing rocket after rocket into the massed tanks. They were soon joined
by American Lightnings, Thunderbolts, and Mustangs from General Pete Quesada’s 9th Tactical Air Command. Thirty years later, Quesada still recalled that triumphant attack. He told Lewin, “You know, Brad and I never used to talk together about our ULTRA signals. We just took it for granted that each of us knew what was in them. But I can still see that moment when we stood with those signals in our hands, and grinned, and said, ‘We’ve got them.’ ”12

  Hitler promised Kluge extensive air cover. He said that every Luftwaffe plane in France would be thrown into the battle. But not one—not one—appeared in the sky over Mortain that August 7. Where were they? Mostly shot up. Thanks to ULTRA, the Allies were able to engage them the moment they got off the ground from their airfields around Paris. Only a few got out of sight of their airfields; none reached Mortain.13

  On the afternoon of August 7, Kluge sent a gloomy report to Hitler’s headquarters. He had lost fully half his tanks, he said, and was still losing them. The attack had been brought to a standstill. He wanted to disengage what was left of his three panzer divisions at Mortain and use them to blunt the Canadian drive at Falaise.14

  Hitler was furious. He thought that Kluge had launched the attack prematurely, hastily, and carelessly. In Hitler’s view, he should have waited for the arrival of three more armored divisions, on their way to Mortain, and then made a truly massive effort. From Hitler’s point of view in East Prussia, that made sense; from Kluge’s point of view in Normandy, to wait meant that the units already assembled would be destroyed in place by Allied artillery, air, and naval fire.