D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

that this was a hospital. Once the blood dried, it was no longer scarlet, but another cross was improvised the next morning with red carpets and sheets dyed in mercurochrome.
    Six surgical teams had been on standby since news of the invasion that morning. The Défense Passive organization for Caen had been based at the Bon Sauveur since the beginning of the year. The Lycée Malherbe was designated its subsidiary hospital, while on the other bank of the Orne, the Hospice des Petites Soeurs des Pauvres also acted as a casualty reception centre. The different organizations worked together with great effect. At the request of the surgeons, groups of police set out to seize supplies from pharmacies and clinics around the town. The medical profession in Caen was highly praised in an official report which recorded the ‘magnificent attitude of the town’s doctors who showed a boundless devotion’.
    In the southern fringes of the city, some 15,000 people sought shelter in tunnels, recently rediscovered, which were part of the medieval stone quarries. They had packed suitcases with food and prayer books, not knowing that these damp, airless quarters were to be their squalid refuge for just over a month. With no sanitation or water, almost everyone suffered from lice, fleas and bedbugs.
    A smaller but more intense tragedy had already taken place in Caen that morning. The Gestapo had gone to the Maison d’Arrêt, the city prison, and entered the section where French Resistance prisoners were held by German guards. The French warders on the civil side watched what happened through a hole in the canvas screen which had been erected to blank off the German military section. Altogether, eighty-seven members of the Resistance were taken out into the courtyard and shot that morning in batches of six. Victims of the massacre ranged across the political spectrum of the Resistance, from the ORA to Communists, and from a railway worker to the Marquis de Touchet. Another prisoner, who heard the shooting from a cell, recorded that none of them cried out except one man who, on entering the courtyard, perceived his fate. He began to shout, ‘Oh, no! No! My wife, my children . . . my children!’ He was silenced by the volley.
    That night the German woman warder, who had previously behaved monstrously towards her charges, was ‘pale and evidently terrified’ by what had happened. She even returned to the surviving prisoners some of their possessions, insisting, ‘The German army is honest.’ Three weeks later, when the British had still not taken the city, the Gestapo came back and removed the bodies. 16
    The bitterness of many citizens over the destruction of Caen is not hard to imagine. ‘With a bestial frenzy,’ wrote one, ‘the bombs eviscerated the city without pity.’ Another described the bombing as ‘useless as well as criminal’. There had never been more than 300 Germans in the town, he wrote, and even if the purpose was to disrupt transport communications, the bombers failed to hit a single bridge. Altogether some 800 people died in Caen as a result of the bombing and naval bombardments of the first two days. Many thousands more were wounded.
    A number of other towns astride main routes to the invasion area suffered a similar fate. As well as Saint-Lô, Caen and Falaise, Lisieux to the east received two major bombing raids. ‘The town is in flames and appears to be completely abandoned,’ a report to Paris stated. It also demanded that the Commissaire of Police be punished for having fled his post during the night while the town burned. So many firemen were killed and so much equipment was lost during the first raid that it became impossible to fight the flames when more bombers returned. To the south, both Argentan and Ecouché were described as ‘almost destroyed’. In Argentan ‘all the gendarmes [were] killed or injured’. The bombing caused terrible panic as well as widespread destruction of homes. Altogether, some 100,000 residents of Calvados would become refugees. Caen’s population of 60,000 was reduced to 17,000.
    A curious contradiction lingers within this strategy of interdiction by bombing. If Montgomery really did intend to capture Caen on the first day, then why did he want the RAF to smash it so that its streets became impassable? That could help only the defender.
     
    In London, meanwhile, everyone waited uncertainly for more news after the King’s broadcast to the nation. Churchill later