D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

supplies by rail, there was an added advantage in forcing movement on to the roads. Tank tracks had only a limited mileage, and as a result of the American Eighth Air Force bombing oil plants and refineries, the Wehrmacht was desperately short of fuel. Their lack of rubber for tyres also provided another very easy target for Resistance groups. Tacks and glass scattered on roads used by supply vehicles proved very effective in hampering road traffic, which was the point of ‘Plan Tortue’, or Plan Tortoise.
    ‘Plan Violet’ was assigned to members of the French telephone and telecommunications organization, the PTT. This concentrated on cutting the underground cables which the Germans used. Although they did not know it, this had the added advantage of forcing the Germans to use radio communications, which could then be decoded through Ultra. ‘Plan Bleu’, meanwhile, focused on sabotaging electric power lines.
    In the Norman départements of Calvados and La Manche, the Resistance was not a major force. The most militarily active of the small networks was the Surcouf group at Pont-Audemer. There were some 200 members in and around Bayeux, as well as some fishermen in the little ports along the coast. Further inland, where the conditions were more favourable, weapons were hidden ready for the moment. In the Orne, which offered the concealment of forests, the Resistance could call on 1,800 men and women, of whom a third possessed weapons.
    The small number of action groups in Calvados did not mean a lack of assistance to the Allies. A stream of information had been passed back to London. German divisions in the region were identified in laundries by the numbers inscribed on the collars of their tunics. Many of the details which enabled the British to seize the bridge over the Orne at Bénouville in a highly successful glider operation came from members of the Resistance. And two men who worked in the Organisation Todt offices, which supervised the construction of coastal defences, had copied plans and maps. One of them, Monsieur Brunet, was caught and condemned todeath. Minefields, both real andfake, were identified, and attempts were made to estimate the calibre of the guns covering the beaches. This was difficult, since workers were evacuated before the coastal artillery was installed, but the depth of the zone forbidden to fishing craft during firing practice gave a useful indication.
     
    While General Koenig and his staff coordinated Resistance activities from London, SHAEF planned the operations of the special forces groups to be parachuted in to work with the Resistance. SHAEF envisaged that the SOE groups already in place would attack rail targets principally in the interior. The 2,420 Special Air Service troops, on the other hand, would be dropped closer to the coast. In Bradley’s First US Army headquarters, the conventional ‘straight-legs’ of the regular army were sceptical of the SAS, whom they regarded as ‘nothing more than highly trained parasaboteurs’. ‘The purpose,’ ran the report on the subject, ‘is to drop SAS people very close to the area and have them do little bits of killing here and there in addition to such things as putting water in gas tanks, letting air out of tires and generally playing around.’ The US Army would become rather more appreciative of their efforts later on, especially in Brittany.
    The unit tasked for Brittany, the 2ème Régiment de Chasseurs Parachutistes of the SAS Brigade, was to be the first French unit in action on the soil of France since 1940. Wearing the maroon beret of the British Parachute Regiment with the Cross of Lorraine as a badge, its advance detachments took off in Halifaxes from Fairford on the night of 5 June. By the end of July, the French SAS had a force of over 30,000 Breton maquisards in action.
    Since March 1943, other groups had been training to parachute into France to assist and train the Resistance in key areas. The most important were the three-man ‘Jedburgh’ teams, usually consisting of a British or an American officer, a French officer and a radio operator. Altogether, eighty-three teams briefed by Koenig’s staff would be dropped in uniform, but many of them arrived too late to be useful.
     
    Rommel was well aware of the threat to his lines of communication, not just from the Resistance, but above all from the Allied air forces. ‘We will undergo the same experience with supplies in the invasion battle as we had in