D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

long, will now be struck. You can be sure though that we will stand firm.’
     
    During those first days of June, there were numerous contradictory indications of the expected invasion. According to Rommel’s naval adviser, Konteradmiral Ruge, an imminent attack was discounted because of the weather. German meteorologists, who lacked the information available to the Allies from weather stations in the western Atlantic, believed that conditions would not be right before 10 June. Rommel decided to seize the opportunity to return to Germany for his wife’s birthday and to see Hitler at Berchtesgaden to ask him for two more panzer divisions. He clearly showed great confidence in the forecasts, for he had not forgotten his absence from the Afrika Korps due to illness when Montgomery launched the Battle of Alamein, nineteen months earlier. Generaloberst Friedrich Dollman, the commander-in-chief of the Seventh Army, also decided on the basis of the weather forecasts to hold a command post exercise for divisional commanders in Rennes on 6 June.
    Others, however, seemed to sense that something might be happening this time, even after all the false alerts that spring. On 4 June, Obersturmführer Rudolf von Ribbentrop, the son of Hitler’s foreign minister, was returning from a 12th SS Panzer-Division radio exercise when his vehicle was machine-gunned by an Allied fighter. He was visited the next day in hospital by a member of the German embassy in Paris. The diplomat said as he was leaving that, according to the latest report, the invasion was due to start that day.
    ‘Well, another false alarm,’ said Ribbentrop.
    ‘The fifth of June is not quite over yet,’ his visitor replied.
    In Brittany, an increase in Resistance activity aroused suspicions. North-east of Brest, an airdrop of arms to the local network had landed almost on top of the 353rd Infanterie-Division’s headquarters. ‘Couriers and individual soldiers were waylaid’ and its commander, General Mahlmann, only just survived an ambush with automatic weapons. His aide was killed in the attack and his staff car was found afterwards to have twenty-four bullet holes. Then, on 5 June, Oberst Cordes, the commanding officer of the 942nd Grenadier-Regiment, was killed. The no doubt brutal interrogation of a member of the Resistance captured at the beginning of June also obtained results. He is said to have ‘made statements about the beginning of the invasion in a few days’.
    The bad weather on 5 June did not stop an exercise with blank ammunition in the streets of Montebourg on the Cotentin peninsula, but the Kriegsmarine decided that it was not worth sending out naval patrols into the Channel that night. As a result the flotillas of Allied minesweepers were able to advance in line abreast towards the Normandy coast completely unobserved.
    During the early evening, one of the BBC’s ‘personal messages’ in code to the Resistance aroused suspicions. Rundstedt’s headquarters passed on the information at 21.15 hours as a general warning, but only the Fifteenth Army in the Pas-de-Calais implemented ‘Alert Stage II’. At the Château de la Roche-Guyon, General Speidel and Admiral Ruge had guests to dinner. They included the writer Ernst Jünger, an ardent nationalist who had now become a member of the German resistance. The party went on until quite late. Speidel was about to go to bed at 01.00 hours on 6 June when the first reports came in of airborne landings.

4
    Sealing off the Invasion Area
    The French resistance movement, which had grown up from isolated beginnings in the darkest days of the war, was bound to prove fragmented and unregimented. Bringing so many groups of widely differing political views together had proved a difficult and dangerous task. Many brave men, of whom the most famous was Jean Moulin, had died or risked death in their attempts to coordinate the Resistance. In February 1944, some form of unity was achieved under the Conseil National de la Résistance, and Georges Bidault was elected its leader. Bidault, who later became de Gaulle’s minister of foreign affairs, proved acceptable to both Communists and non-Communists.
    In the most general terms, French politics in 1944 split three ways, with people identified by their opponents as Pétainist, Communist or Gaullist. This is not, of course, how they would necessarily have seen themselves. Large parts of the Resistance worked with de Gaulle, without necessarily being Gaullist.