by Mark Zuehlke
When Cheney asked each man in turn to cast a vote, the majority opted to join 617 Squadron. “Okay, we’re going to get a chance to do something different, interesting, and probably daring,” he said.
Their first challenge proved to be finding the new squadron’s airfield because No. 5 Group’s bases were so closely packed that the perimeter lights of one strip often overlapped another. After initially bouncing down at the wrong base, Cheney thought he had found the correct one but requested that the tower crew flash a green Aldis signal lamp as confirmation before he shut down the engines. “Do you see the light?” the traffic controller asked.
“Yes, I see the light,” Cheney replied and realized immediately that he was damned to eternal ribbing. It started immediately. “Hear that,” one of his crew said. “Skipper’s seen the light.” A second later, “I heard it too. Cheney’s seen the light.”24
Cheney’s crew was immediately set the task of learning the art of pinpoint bombing. Tossing a bomb within fifty yards of a target from an altitude of 17,500 feet was the goal they strove towards, no easy task with a heavy four-engine bomber. Cheney’s Lancaster was the Mk III variant manufactured in Canada. Powered by four 1,390-horsepower Packard “Merlin 224” engines, weighing 68,000 pounds, it could range over 2,250 miles at a cruising speed of 210 miles per hour and a maximum altitude of 24,500 feet. The Lancaster was designed for high-altitude bombing and armed to defend itself without fighter protection. Nose, belly, and mid-upper gun turrets were fitted with twin .303-calibre machine guns, with the tail turret mounting four .303 machine guns. Its payload could be a single 22,000-pound bomb or 14,000 pounds of smaller bombs.
Cheney and his crew carried out mock attacks with six bombs. And finally, after many days of trying, they scored a direct hit and began steadily narrowing their average margin of error below the fifty-yard range to between thirty-five and forty yards. The training officer told the newly promoted flight officer that he was doing well, but had to sustain that average for at least seven days straight before the crew would be put on the operational flight roster.
The importance of pinpoint accuracy became clear one evening in late May when a number of flatbed trucks arrived with what looked like giant cigars hidden under a covering of canvas. When the truck was unloaded at the bomb dump, its cargo proved to be the biggest bombs any of the squadron had ever seen. The new bombs were nicknamed Tallboys. Weighing 12,000 pounds and loaded with 5,600 pounds of Torpex (torpedo explosive), they had specially angled fins that produced a rapid spin and when dropped from an altitude of at least twenty thousand feet reached supersonic speed. Spin and speed combined to enable the bomb to penetrate the earth to two hundred feet before exploding with enough force to create a massive crater up to a hundred feet around. The shock waves created by the explosion radiated outward with earthquake-like violence that collapsed structures well beyond the explosive ring. So powerful was the bomb’s striking force that it could penetrate sixteen feet of concrete. This was the new device Air Vice-Marshal Cochrane had said was in the works. Within a week, Cheney and his crew were routinely dropping dummy Tallboys within thirty yards of the aiming point and were added to the operational flight roster. In late May, they learned their first combat mission would be on the night of the invasion itself. But rather than attacking targets with the ordnance the squadron had nicknamed the Earthquake Bomb, they would be carrying out a vital mission of deception.25
[ 5 ]
The Intelligence Fog
IT WAS WHAT BOTH SIDES frantically sought to gain and to deny the other: intelligence, a commodity arguably more valuable than a great army’s firepower. Without it, an army fought clumsily and blind. Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) was determined to retain the initiative in the intelligence battle. With each passing day in May, although a wider net of ever less senior officers was given detailed information to prepare for the forthcoming invasion, only a small number were let in on the secret of where and when it would occur.
Not knowing where the invasion would fall, the Germans were forced to defend a coastline stretching from Norway to the French-Spanish border. And SHAEF did all it could to prevent Hitler’s Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command) from narrowing the threatened front through two elaborate deceptions, Fortitude North and Fortitude South. Fortitude North was a relatively modest affair intended to convince OKW that a series of raids on Norwegian ports from Scotland was in the works. Ignoring evidence of a massive Allied buildup in England, the German naval command took the bait offered by Fortitude North. On March 5, 1944, an encrypted message from Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine (OKM) reported the arrival of six British divisions in Scotland for operations “of limited scope” in central or southern Norway. Duly intercepted by the Allied Ultra intelligence unit that was reading most of the top-secret German high command codes sent via enigma machines, the message was welcome news for SHAEF, as were subsequent intercepted messages that showed OKM still clung tenaciously to this expectation well into May.1
While the Wehrmacht’s top naval officers prepared to intercept convoys bearing phantom British divisions towards Norwegian fjords, the rest of the German high command was little fooled by Fortitude North. But Fortitude South was a different matter altogether. Launched in late 1943, this elaborate deception plan aimed to convince the Germans that an entirely fictional First United States Army Group (FUSAG) commanded by General George S. Patton was mustering between Kent and Sussex to invade France’s Pas de Calais. Thousands of tanks, artillery pieces, trucks, and other equipment constructed out of plywood, cardboard, and cloth were cleverly placed to create the illusion of an attempt at secrecy and camouflage while ensuring German spies and reconnaissance flights would detect their presence. Several real divisions were also shifted to give a more realistic appearance. In April, II Canadian Corps moved its headquarters and staff a few miles north of Dover to Eastling Wood while 2nd Canadian Infantry Division encamped on Dover’s outskirts. There followed a number of high-level and ostentatiously exaggerated inspections of the town and these units by senior Allied commanders that German intelligence was unlikely to miss. This included a major tour of Dover on May 23 by General Bernard Montgomery in the company of First Canadian Army commander Lieutenant General Harry Crerar and II Corps’ Lieutenant General Guy Simonds.2
Carefully leaked intelligence reports suggested FUSAG would fall upon Pas de Calais in July. It was hoped that OKW would consequently see the Normandy landings as a weak feint designed to soak off divisions from Pas de Calais to bolster the Germans defending the beachhead. In this event, the Germans would likely hold their divisions at Pas de Calais and at least some of the mobile Panzer divisions concentrated inland in place until the Allied Normandy force was consolidated and readily able to repel any counterattacks.
In coded messages intercepted by Ultra between January 9 and March 23, 1944, various references were made to General Patton and FUSAG. But the context was so vague Allied intelligence officers were unable to tell if the Germans were fooled or not. Although Ultra was proving invaluable in other theatres of the war, it was of less utility in northwest Europe. Senior commanders, such as Oberbefehlshaber (Commander-in-Chief) West Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt, seldom communicated with OKW through coded messages as it was entirely possible to report by telephone.3
Despite this handicap, the Allies did know that German high command was both uncertain and divided in opinion regarding the likely invasion site and how to respond. While there was no shortage of senior officers voicing strong opinions, none had sufficient authority to develop a defensive strategy on his own initiative. That authority rested with Adolf Hitler, who in December 1941 had appointed himself not only titular head of the entire Wehrmacht but also of the Heeres (Army). Prompted largely by his innate distrust of senior army officers, this decision put Hitler in the peculiar situation of holding two positions at different levels within the German command chain. So ultimately, Hitler, while figuratively waving
the baton of an Oberkommando des Heeres (Supreme Commander of the Army), was subordinate to and answerable only to himself in the role of Oberster Befehlshaber der Wehrmacht (Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces).4
In fact, the senior German command system, wrote General-leutnant Hans Speidel, who served as Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel’s Chief of Staff at Army Group B, “corresponded neither to the timeless laws of warfare nor to the demands of the hour or of reason.”5 Instead, the supreme navy, air, and army commanders held equal authority, operated independent of each other and reported directly to Hitler, first through the offices of OKW’s Operations Chief, Generaloberst Alfred Jodl, and second through Hitler’s Chief of Staff, Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel. While this system ensured that no major military action proceeded without the blessing of Jodl, Keitel, and Hitler, it greatly hobbled interservice coordination and planning.
But the command structure was even further confused by Hitler’s insistence that the individual operational theatres be similarly structured. In theory, OB West Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt commanded northwest Europe, but neither the commanders of the region’s air arm, Luftlotte 3, nor its naval arm, Marinegruppe West, were answerable to him. They were considered merely “assigned” to OB West and reported directly to OKW. Then there was the Nazi Party’s SS units formed by and firstly answerable to Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. Adding to the confusion, the primary unit responsible for coastal defence construction—Organization Todt—was controlled by Reichsminister for Armament and War Production Albert Speer and carried out its work “on orders from the Führer.”6
As Speidel ruefully noted, this tortured system “led not only to a confused chain of command, but to a command chaos.”7 In December 1943, Army Group ‘B’ Commander, North, Erwin Rommel strode into the midst of this mess on a special “Führer mission” with orders to assess the western front from Denmark to the Alps, including the entire northwest European coastline and that of the Mediterranean. The Afrika Korps hero embarked on this duty with the support of a group of staff officers designated as Army Group B. His instructions were to report directly to Hitler or to OKW and merely keep von Rundstedt informed of his activities.8
Everything Rommel saw on the French coast left him dismayed. While the major ports had been transformed into heavily defended fortresses that would doom any amphibious landing to a Dieppe-style disaster, the open countryside beaches were extremely vulnerable. Many concrete gun emplacements and bunkers had been constructed to cover these beaches all along the coast, but there was no consistency in their strength and the defending troops were so dispersed that reinforcements could not be quickly shifted to danger points. “The battle for the coast will probably be over in a few hours,” Rommel gloomily told Hitler on the last day of December, and noted that a successful defence would hinge on the ability to quickly bring up reinforcements from inland.9
Hitler agreed. For weeks he had harped almost daily at OKW briefings that the coming invasion “will decide the issue, not only of the year, but of the whole war. If we succeed in throwing back the invasion, then such an attempt cannot and will not be repeated within a short time.” A victory like that would enable the Germans to transfer divisions from central Europe to Italy and Russia, where Hitler hoped to fight the advancing Allied armies to a standstill. Hitler believed two static fronts could be held indefinitely. But he warned that if a third front was opened in France, “we can’t win a static war in the long run because the matériel our enemies can bring in will exceed what we can send to that front. With no strategic reserves of any importance, it will be impossible to build up sufficient strength along such a line. Therefore, the invader must be thrown back on his first attempt.”10
Little came of these surprisingly prescient conclusions until mid-March, when Hitler gave Rommel operational command of the anti-invasion forces from the Dutch-Belgian border south to the mouth of the Loire River at St. Nazaire. Two German armies defended this coastline. The northern sector south to the western flank of the mouth of the Seine was guarded by Fifteenth Army, while Seventh Army took over from there south to the Loire River. Although officially subordinate to von Rundstedt, Rommel never hesitated to bypass the chain of command by going directly to Hitler.11
For his part, von Rundstedt carried on as best he could. The sixty-eight-year-old came from a long line of Prussian officers and had been soldiering for fifty years. His was the military background most distrusted by the Nazis, and von Rundstedt’s contempt for Hitler went unconcealed. He and Rommel immediately clashed over strategy, but it was soon clear which of the two men was in charge. “As Commander-in-Chief West,” von Rundstedt later grumped, “my only authority was to change the guard in front of my gate.”12
Rommel set to with a verve that contradicted his growing pessimistic outlook. He was convinced Allied air superiority would make it impossible to move Panzer divisions from strategic points of concentration inland to reinforce the beach defenders. Arguing that the only possibility was “to resist the enemy in field positions, which had to be constructed for defence against the most modern weapons of war,” he had 4 million mines sown on the beaches facing the English Channel by May 20, 1944.13 This was a mere smidgen of the 200 million mines Rommel really thought necessary to be effective. Furthermore, the existing minefields were laid in a thin band along the beachfront, whereas he wanted them to extend between five and six miles inland so the invader was paralyzed long enough for strong counterattacks to be organized.
He also sought to prevent the Allied landing craft getting onto the beaches by installing a maze of obstacles extending twelve hundred yards into the sea. Approached from seaward, the obstacles consisted first of rows of wooden or concrete stakes behind which ramps built of logs or steel rails had been driven into the sand facing outwards and propped up to form a six-foot-high barrier. Then came lines of pyramid-shaped obstacles formed by bolting three concrete, steel, or wooden bars together, amongst which were liberally sprinkled so-called Hedgehogs—sections of heavy angle-iron bolted together to form an X-shape. Most of these obstacles had mines attached.14
The Germans had long accepted that airborne troops would be dropped to secure the flanks of the amphibious landings and disrupt counterattacks. So Rommel had ten-foot stakes driven into the ground at intervals of a hundred feet in the fields situated close to the beaches that presented likely landing sites. Each stake was to be mined and linked to the others in a field by wire, rendering the landing site impossible for gliders to use and perilous for parachutists. The air-landing obstacles were nicknamed “Rommel’s Asparagus.” While successful in getting vast numbers of Hedgehogs and Asparagus obstacles erected by the end of May, few of the latter had been mined or wired.15
Plagued by shortages of Todt troops, the Germans often dragooned the local French populace into constructing many of the defensive systems. Throughout the spring of 1944, men like twenty-year-old Roger Chevalier spent as much time planting Rommel’s Asparagus as crops in the fields. Chevalier worked as a farmhand near Anguerny, which was west of Caen and about six miles in from the Normandy coast. As a young boy, Chevalier had lost his parents after his mother ran away with another man and his father blew his head off with a shotgun. Raised in an orphanage at Falaise, Chevalier had struck out on his own in his teens and eked out a living as a farmhand. Shortly after the occupation, he had married and now had a young daughter.
For the Norman farmers, the German occupation was more hardship than repression, for other than being forced to participate in the increasingly regular work parties and having food they produced routinely requisitioned without payment, they were left to live as they always had. Grudging acquaintances were even struck. In Chevalier’s case, a German soldier once approached his home on the farm and asked if he had any eggs. As Chevalier and his wife kept many chickens, they had an abundance of eggs, and as the German was asking rather than demanding, he gave the man a half-dozen. From then on, the German came once a week for eggs and the two
men would chat in pidgin French interspersed with the odd word of German that Chevalier had picked up.
Chevalier had never considered there would be any benefit in the relationship for him until one day when he had business in Douvresla Délivrande. Although less than three miles from Anguerny, this village lay within the coastal security zone that the Germans had established and into which access by French civilians was carefully controlled out of fears of sabotage. Such anxieties were greatly heightened at Douvres-la Délivrande because of the presence of a nearby Luftwaffe radar station. When Chevalier attempted to pass through the roadblock checkpoint that controlled access from the interior to the coastal area, the German soldier checking his papers found them not in order because his signature on the identity card looked somewhat different from that on his pass. Chevalier was immediately detained for questioning by the Gestapo. While the terrified young man was waiting for the dreaded Nazi police to be called, the German to whom he gave eggs every week happened along. “I know this man,” he told the guards. “He’s no terrorist.” Chevalier was released.
While not a member of the French Resistance, Chevalier was not above doing what he could to hamper the German war effort, however. When he and the other farmers around Anguerny were rounded up and made to dig the holes in which Asparagus poles were planted, Chevalier carefully dug his only as deep as required to enable the pole to remain upright. This way, he figured if a planted field did end up being used by Allied gliders or paratroops, the Asparagus obstacles would topple under whatever weight was placed on them and might not hamper the landings. The tactic worked well and was one adopted by most of the impressed French workers until one day a German soldier pedalled into a field in which they were completing planting of a cluster of Asparagus. When the soldier propped his bike against one of the poles, it keeled over. “Sabotage, sabotage,” the soldier screamed at the Frenchmen. The next day they were forced to replant the Asparagus and this time a German soldier methodically measured each hole’s depth before the log was emplaced.16