Beyond the cities, particularly between Caen and Cherbourg, lay the hedgerow country: the little fields bordered by great mounds of earth, each topped with thick bushes and saplings, that had been used as natural fortifications by invaders and defenders alike since the days of the Romans. Dotting the countryside were the timbered farm buildings with their thatched or red-tiled roofs, and here and there stood the towns and villages like miniature citadels, nearly all with square-cut Norman churches surrounded by centuries-old gray stone houses. To most of the world their names were unknown—Vierville, Colleville, La Madeleine, Ste.-Mère-Église, Chef-du-Pont, Ste. Marie-du-Mont, Arromanches, Luc. Here, in the sparsely populated countryside, the occupation had a different meaning than in the big cities. Caught up in a kind of pastoral backwash of the war, the Norman peasant had done what he could to adjust to the situation. Thousands of men and women had been shipped out of the towns and villages as slave laborers, and those who remained were forced to work part of their time in labor battalions for the coastal garrisons. But the fiercely independent peasants did no more than was absolutely necessary. They lived from day to day, hating the Germans with Norman tenaciousness, and stoically watching and waiting for the day of liberation.
In his mother’s house on a hill overlooking the sleepy village of Vierville, a thirty-one-year-old lawyer, Michel Hardelay, stood at the living room windows, his binoculars focused on a German soldier riding a large farm horse down the road to the sea front. On either side of his saddle hung several tin cans. It was a preposterous sight: the massive rump of the horse, the bounding cans and the soldier’s bucketlike helmet topping it all.
As Hardelay watched, the German rode through the village, past the church with its tall, slender spire and on down to the concrete wall that sealed the main road off from the beach. Then he dismounted and took down all but one can. Suddenly three or four soldiers appeared mysteriously from around the cliffs and bluffs. They took the cans and disappeared again. Carrying the remaining can, the German climbed the wall and crossed to a large russet-colored summer villa surrounded by trees which stood astride the promenade at the end of the beach. There he got down on his knees and passed the can to a pair of waiting hands that appeared at ground level from under the building.
Every morning it was the same. The German was never late; he always brought the morning coffee down to the Vierville exit at this time. The day had begun for the gun crews in the cliffside pillboxes and camouflaged bunkers at this end of the beach—a peaceful-looking, gently curving strip of sand that would be known to the world by the next day as Omaha Beach.
Michel Hardelay knew it was exactly 6:15 A.M.
He had watched the ritual many times before. It always struck Hardelay as a little comic, partly because of the soldier’s appearance, partly because he found it amusing that the much vaunted technical know-how of the Germans fell apart when it came to a simple job like supplying men in the field with morning coffee. But Hardelay’s was a bitter amusement. Like all Normans he had hated the Germans for a long time and he hated them particularly now.
For some months Hardelay had watched German troops and conscripted labor battalions digging, burrowing and tunneling all along the bluffs which backed up the beach and in the cliffs at either end where the sand stopped. He had seen them trellis the sands with obstacles and plant thousands of lethal, ugly mines. And they had not stopped there. With methodical thoroughness, they had demolished the line of pretty pink, white and red summer cotttages and villas below the bluffs along the sea front. Now only seven out of ninety buildings remained. They had been destroyed not only to give the gunners clear arcs of fire, but because the Germans wanted the wood to panel their bunkers. Of the seven houses still standing, the largest—an all-year-round house built of stone—belonged to Hardelay. A few days before he had been officially told by the local commandant that his house would be destroyed. The Germans had decided they needed the bricks and the stone.
Hardelay wondered if maybe somebody, somewhere wouldn’t countermand the decision. In some matters, the Germans were often unpredictable. He’d know for certain within twenty-four hours; he had been told the house would come down tomorrow—Tuesday, June 6.
At six-thirty, Hardelay switched on his radio to catch the BBC news. It was forbidden, but like hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen he flouted the order. It was just one more way to resist. Still he kept the sound down to a whisper. As usual, at the end of the news “Colonel Britain”—Douglas Ritchie, who was always identified as the voice of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force—read an important message.
“Today, Monday, June fifth,” he said, “the Supreme Commander directs me to say this: There now exists in these broadcasts a direct channel of communications between the Supreme Commander and yourselves in the occupied countries…. In due course instructions of great importance will be given, but it will not be possible always to give them at a previously announced time; therefore, you must get into the habit, either personally or by arrangement with your friends, of listening at all hours. This is not as difficult as it sounds …” Hardelay guessed that the “instructions” would have something to do with the invasion. Everyone knew it was coming. He thought the Allies would attack at the narrowest part of the English Channel—around Dunkirk or Calais, where there were ports. But certainly not here.
The Dubois and Davot families living in Vierville didn’t hear the broadcast; they slept late this morning. They had held a big celebration the previous night that had gone on until the early hours. Similar family gatherings had taken place all over Normandy, for Sunday, June 4, had been set aside by the ecclesiastical authorities as First Communion Day. It was always a great occasion, an annual reason for families and relatives to get together.
Togged out in their best clothes, the Dubois and Davot children had made their first Communion in the little Vierville church before their proud parents and relatives. Some of these relatives, each armed with a special pass from the German authorities which had taken months to get, had come all the way from Paris. The trip had been exasperating and dangerous—exasperating because the overcrowded trains no longer ran on time, dangerous because all locomotives were targets for Allied fighter-bombers.
But it had been worth it; a trip to Normandy always was. The region was still rich in all those things that Parisians rarely saw now—fresh butter, cheese, eggs, meat and, of course, Calvados, the heady cider-and-apple-pulp cognac of the Normans. Besides, in these difficult times Normandy was a good place to be. It was quiet and peaceful, too far away from England to be invaded.
The reunion of the two families had been a great success. And it wasn’t over yet. This evening everyone would sit down to another great meal with the best wines and cognacs that their hosts had been able to save. That would wind up the celebrations; the relatives would catch the train for Paris at dawn on Tuesday.
Their three-day Normandy vacation was due to last much longer; they would remain trapped in Vierville for the next four months.
Farther down the beach, near the Colleville exit, forty-year-old Fernand Broeckx was doing what he did every morning at six-thirty: He sat in his dripping barn, spectacles askew, head tucked down by the udders of a cow, directing a thin stream of milk into a pail. His farm, lying alongside a narrow dirt road, topped a slight rise barely a half mile from the sea. He hadn’t been down that road or onto the beach in a long time—not since the Germans had closed it off.
He had been farming in Normandy for five years. In World War I, Broeckx, a Belgian, had seen his home destroyed. He had never forgotten it. In 1939, when World War II began, he promptly gave up his job in an office and moved his wife and daughter to Normandy, where they would be safe.
Ten miles away in the cathedral town of Bayeux his pretty nineteen-year-old daughter Anne Marie prepared to set out for the school where she taught kindergarten. She was looking forward to the end of the day, for then summer vacations began. She would spend her holidays on the farm. She wou
ld cycle home tomorrow.
Tomorrow also, a tall, lean American from Rhode Island whom she had never met would land on the beach almost in line with her father’s farm. She would marry him.
All along the Normandy coast people went about their usual daily chores. The farmers worked in the fields, tended their apple orchards, herded their white-and-liver-colored cows. In the little villages and towns the shops opened. For everyone it was just another routine day of occupation.
In the little hamlet of La Madeleine, back of the dunes and the wide expanse of sand that would soon be known as Utah Beach, Paul Gazengel opened up his tiny store and cafe as usual, although there was almost no business.
There had been a time when Gazengel had made a fair living—not much, but sufficient for the needs of himself, his wife, Marthe, and their twelve-year-old daughter, Jeannine. But now the entire coastal area was sealed off. The families living just behind the seashore—roughly from the mouth of the Vire (which emptied into the sea nearby) and all along this side of the Cherbourg peninsula—had been moved out. Only those who owned farms had been permitted to remain. The cafe keeper’s livelihood now depended on seven families that remained in La Madeleine and a few German troops in the vicinity whom he was forced to serve.
Gazengel would have liked to move away. As he sat in his cafe waiting for the first customer, he did not know that within twenty-four hours he would be making a trip. He and all the other men in the village would be rounded up and sent to England for questioning.
One of Gazengel’s friends, the baker Pierre Caldron, had more serious problems on his mind this morning. In Dr. Jeanne’s clinic at Carentan ten miles from the coast, he sat by the bedside of his five-year-old son Pierre, who had just had his tonsils removed. At midday Dr. Jeanne reexamined his son. “You’ve nothing to worry about,” he told the anxious father. “He’s all right. You’ll be able to take him home tomorrow.” But Caldron had been thinking. “No,” he said. “I think his mother will be happier if I take little Pierre home today.” Half an hour later, with the little boy in his arms, Caldron set out for his home in the village of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, back of Utah Beach—where the paratroopers would link up with the men of the 4th Division on D Day.
The day was quiet and uneventful for the Germans, too. Nothing was happening and nothing was expected to happen; the weather was much too bad. It was so bad, in fact, that in Paris, at the Luftwaffe’s headquarters in the Luxembourg Palace, Colonel Professor Walter Stöbe, the chief meteorologist, told staff officers at the routine daily conference that they could relax. He doubted that Allied planes would even be operational this day. Antiaircraft crews were promptly ordered to stand down.
Next, Stöbe telephoned 20 Boulevard Victor Hugo in St.-Germain-en Laye, a suburb of Paris just twelve miles away. His call went to an immense, three-floored blockhouse, one hundred yards long, sixty feet deep and embedded in the side of a slope beneath a girl’s high school—OB West, Von Rundstedt’s headquarters. Stöbe spoke to his liaison officer, weatherman Major Hermann Mueller, who dutifully recorded the forecast and then sent it along to the chief of staff, Major General Blumentritt. Weather reports were taken very seriously at OB West and Blumentritt was particularly anxious to see this one. He was putting the finishing touches to the itinerary of an inspection trip the Commander in Chief West planned to make. The report confirmed his belief that the trip could take place as scheduled. Von Rundstedt, accompanied by his son, a young lieutenant, planned to inspect the coastal defenses in Normandy on Tuesday.
Not many in St.-Germain-en-Laye were aware of the blockhouse’s existence and even fewer knew that the most powerful field marshal in the German west lived in a small unpretentious villa back of the high school at 28 Rue Alexandre Dumas. It was surrounded by a high wall, the iron gates permanently closed. Entrance to the villa was by way of a specially constructed corridor that had been cut through the walls of the school, or by way of an unobtrusive door in the wall bordering the Rue Alexandre Dumas.
Von Rundstedt slept late as usual (the aged field marshal rarely got up now before ten-thirty) and it was almost noon before he sat down at his desk in the villa’s first-floor study. It was there that he conferred with his chief of staff and approved OB West’s “Estimate of Allied Intentions” so that it could be forwarded to Hitler’s headquarters, OKW, later in the day. The estimate was another typical wrong guess. It read:
The systematic and distinct increase of air attacks indicates that the enemy has reached a high degree of readiness. The probable invasion front still remains the sector from the Scheldt [in Holland] to Normandy … and it is not impossible that the north front of Brittany might be included … [but] it is still not clear where the enemy will invade within this total area. Concentrated air attacks on the coast defenses between Dunkirk and Dieppe may mean that the main Allied invasion effort will be made there … [but] imminence of invasion is not recognizable….
With this vague estimate out of the way—an estimate that placed the possible invasion area someplace along almost eight hundred miles of coast—Von Rundstedt and his son set out for the field marshal’s favorite restaurant, the Coq Hardi at Bougival nearby. It was a little after one; D Day was twelve hours away.
All along the chain of German command the continuing bad weather ated like a tranquilizer. The various headquarters were quite confident that there would be no attack in the immediate future. Their reasoning was based on carefully assessed weather evaluations that had been made of the Allied landings in North Africa, Italy and Sicily. In each case conditions had varied, but meteorologists like Stöbe and his chief in Berlin, Dr. Karl Sonntag, had noted that the Allies had never attempted a landing unless the prospects of favorable weather were almost certain, particularly for covering air operations. To the methodical German mind there was no deviation from this rule; the weather had to be just right or the Allies wouldn’t attack. And the weather wasn’t just right.
At Army Group B headquarters in La Roche-Guyon the work went on as though Rommel were still there, but the chief of staff, Major General Speidel, thought it was quiet enough to plan a little dinner party. He had invited several guests: Dr. Horst, his brother-in-law; Ernst Junger, the philosopher and author; and an old friend, Major Wilhelm von Schramm, one of the official “war reporters.” The intellectual Speidel was looking forward to the dinner. He hoped they’d discuss his favorite subject, French literature. There was something else to be discussed: a twenty-page manuscript that Junger had drafted and secretly passed on to Rommel and Speidel. Both of them fervently believed in the document; it outlined a plan for bringing about peace—after Hitler had either been tried by a German court or been assassinated. “We can really have a night discussing things,” Speidel had told Schramm.
In St.-Lô, at the headquarters of the 84th Corps, Major Friedrich Hayn, the intelligence officer, was making arrangements for another kind of party. He had ordered several bottles of excellent Chablis, for at midnight the staff planned to surprise the corps commander, General Erich Marcks. His birthday was June 6.
They were holding the surprise birthday party at midnight because Marcks had to leave for the city of Rennes in Brittany at daybreak. He and all the other senior commanders in Normandy were to take part in a big map exercise that was to begin early on Tuesday morning. Marcks was slightly amused at the role he was supposed to play: He would represent the “Allies.” The war games had been arranged by General Eugen Meindl, and perhaps because he was a paratrooper the big feature of the exercise was to be an “invasion” beginning with a paratroop “assault” followed by “landing” from the sea. Everyone thought the Kriegsspiel would be interesting—the theoretical invasion was supposed to take place in Normandy.
The Kriegsspiel worried the Seventh Army’s chief of staff, Major General Max Pemsel. All afternoon at the headquarters in Le Mans he’d been thinking about it. It was bad enough that his senior commanders in Normandy and the Cherbourg peninsula would be away from their commands all at the sa
me time. But it might be extremely dangerous if they were away overnight. Rennes was a long way off for most of them and Pemsel was afraid that some might be planning to leave the front before dawn. It was the dawn that always worried Pemsel; if an invasion ever came in Normandy, he believed, the attack would be launched at first light. He decided to warn all those due to participate in the games. The order he sent out by teletype read: “Commanding generals and others scheduled to attend the Kriegsspiel are reminded not to leave for Rennes before dawn on June 6.” But it was too late. Some had already gone.
And so it was that, one by one, senior officers from Rommel down had left the front on the very eve of the battle. All of them had reasons, but it was almost as though a capricious fate had manipulated their departure. Rommel was in Germany. So was Army Group B’s operations officer, Von Tempelhof. Admiral Theodor Krancke, the naval commander in the west, after informing Rundstedt that patrol boats were unable to leave harbor because of rough seas, set out for Bordeaux. Lieutenant General Heinz Hellmich, commanding the 243rd Division, which was holding one side of the Cherbourg peninsula, departed for Rennes. So did Lieutenant General Karl von Schlieben of the 709th Division. Major General Wilhelm Falley of the tough 91st Air Landing Division, which had just moved into Normandy, prepared to go. Colonel Wilhelm Meyer-Detring, Rundstedt’s intelligence officer, was on leave and the chief of staff of one division couldn’t be reached at all—he was off hunting with his French mistress.*
At this point, with the officers in charge of beachhead defenses dispersed all over Europe, the German High Command decided to transfer the Luftwaffe’s last remaining fighter squadrons in France far out of range of the Normandy beaches. The fliers were aghast.