Read The Cost of Courage Online
Authors: Charles Kaiser
CHRISTIANE
likes the handsome Alex “very much — but no more.” She feels too consumed by her duties to pursue a romance with him, or anyone else. But when Alex meets Jacqueline, sparks begin to fly quickly.
It is Jacqueline who becomes Alex’s “precious collaborator, the only person in my service on whom I could count completely” —
and, soon, his lover. Even if Christiane is a bit jealous, Jacqueline’s romance does nothing to diminish the sisters’ extraordinary closeness.
About a month after making contact with Christiane and Jacqueline, Alex begins a secret course on sabotage for a cell of
Résistants
on rue des Entrepreneurs.
On May 19, Alex leads three confederates on a sabotage mission. Their target is a ball-bearing factory, and they are so successful, production there is never resumed. For some reason, the twenty Germans responsible for guarding the factory never engage them during the attack.
By now everyone knows the Allied invasion is imminent, but the Germans still have no clear idea of when or where it will occur. On May 8, Dwight Eisenhower secretly chooses June 5 as the tentative date for the attack at Normandy. The next day, the British bomber command makes its first attack on German coastal batteries near Pas de Calais.
CHRISTIANE AND JACQUELINE
know that their brother has been shipped off to Germany. But they don’t know which camp he is in, or what it really means to be in a concentration camp. They bury themselves in their clandestine duties to distract them from a debilitating terror about what could happen to him in Germany.
Meanwhile, their boss, Rondenay, is leading sabotage missions against many factories outside Paris. To prepare for the Allied invasion, he meets with Resistance members working for the national telephone company, to plan how to blow up underground long-distance telephone lines (code name:
Plan Violet
) and with railroad workers, who are supposed to blow up strategic railroad lines (
Plan Vert
)
.
*
Two months before Rondenay got there, on March 28, Lübeck was subjected to a horrendous attack by the RAF, when 234 British bombers dropped 400 tons of bombs, including 25,000 incendiary devices, which created a firestorm that burned one-third of the city. The intent was to demoralize the civilian population. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: “The damage is really enormous, I have been shown a newsreel of the destruction. It is horrible. One can well imagine how such a bombardment affects the population.”
†
On April 20, 1944, an Allied bombing raid on Paris leaves 651 dead and 461 wounded, provoking a minirebound in the popularity of General Pétain, the collaborationist chief of state. (Jackson,
France,
p. 535)
‡
Alsace became French again at the end of World War I, reverted to Germany after the conquest of France in 1940, and then returned to being part of France in 1945.
§
Which happens to be Christiane’s nineteenth birthday.
Rather than just being liberated by foreigners … France herself would rise up to take an honorable part in her own liberation. That, really, was what resistance was all about.
— Ian Ousby
I opened the window
[
in London on the morning of June
6]
and the noise became deafening … It was possible to see the aircraft flying in massed formation above the sleeping capital. They flew over in a never-ending stream. Holding my breath and looking steadily in the direction of Nazi Germany, I could see, beyond the barbed wire sealing the frontiers, beyond the prisons, the dawn that was bringing to our enslaved friends the first glimmer of their victory.
— Marie-Madeleine Fourcade
A
CROSS THE CHANNEL
, on the southeastern coast of England, the Allies have assembled a gigantic collection of airplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, and more than two million men. “All southern England was one vast military camp,” Eisenhower recalled.
By the eve of the invasion, fifty-two million square feet are filled with supplies, including almost half a million tons of ammunition. Soldiers joke that if the invasion doesn’t happen soon, the southern edge of England will sink into the sea beneath the weight of their preparations.
“The southernmost camps where assault troops were assembled were all surrounded by barbed-wire entanglements to prevent any soldier leaving the camp,” Eisenhower remembered. “The mighty host was tense as a coiled spring, and indeed that is exactly what it was — a great human spring, coiled for the moment when its energy … would vault the English Channel in the greatest amphibious assault ever attempted.”
The Germans have fifty-five divisions assigned to the defense of France, while the Allies have only thirty-five divisions assembled for the invasion. But not all the German soldiers can be used to defend the northern coast of France. Some of them must remain in the south to defend the Mediterranean coast, and the Russians have promised to begin a new offensive on the eastern front when the invasion begins, to discourage the Germans from sending any reinforcements.
In the weeks before the invasion, the Allies do their best to cripple communications in the north of France, to isolate the Normandy beaches from the rest of the country. Between May 24 and June 6, British and American bombers destroy all nine railroad crossings and a dozen highway bridges in the region. The Allies keep them closed by repeatedly bombing the boats and the temporary bridges the Germans try to put in their place. This will severely limit the Germans’ ability to send in reinforcements after the invasion begins.
Meanwhile, the Allies are continually leaking false invasion plans to prevent Hitler from figuring out that Normandy is their real target. They make a special effort to convince the Germans that they will land near Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk, and many of Hitler’s generals are taken in by the ruse.
The British even create a fictitious 4th Army headquarters at Edinburgh Castle, which pours out phony radio messages to convince the Nazis that the Allies are also about to invade Norway, where the Germans have stationed twenty-seven divisions. Again,
the deception works: Those German divisions never leave Norway to defend France.
Realizing that it will be crucial for the French to participate in the liberation of their own country, Churchill makes a special appeal to Eisenhower to find enough transport to allow the 2nd French Armored Division to land in Normandy during the summer of 1944. Eisenhower agrees to his request. This will eventually make it possible for French soldiers commanded by General Jacques-Philippe Leclerc to spearhead the Liberation of Paris.
On the last day of May, 245 minesweepers begin clearing the English coast. Then they start to create paths to the landing sites on the French coast. Two days later, two British submarines leave Scotland to head for the Normandy coast. Their task is to mark the approaches for the landing craft that will arrive there four days later.
On June 3, Dwight Eisenhower gives de Gaulle his first briefing on Operation Overlord, the code name for the Normandy invasion. This is the first official information the Frenchman has received about the gigantic operation that will liberate his country — a good indication of the “warmth” between the two generals.
IN THE WEEKS
before the Normandy invasion, Resistance leaders in Paris are notified how they will be alerted to the great event. The Allies apparently believe this is necessary because so much depends on the extensive sabotage of railroad tracks and other communication channels that the Resistance has been ordered to carry out just as the invasion begins.
At the moment when the French should begin to ready themselves for the invasion, the BBC will broadcast the first lines of “Chanson d’automne,” one of France’s best-loved poems, by Paul Verlaine, one of its most celebrated nineteenth-century poets. On June 1, the chosen French listeners who know the code are riveted
when they hear these seven words traveling across the channel from the BBC:
Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
(The long sobs of autumn violins)
Someone with a literary sensibility, a decent knowledge of French culture, and a fine sense of history has clearly made this selection. The melancholy poem comes from the “paysages tristes” (sad countrysides) section of Verlaine’s first volume of poetry. When the next stanza is broadcast, the Normandy countryside will be drenched with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Allied and German soldiers, and at least fifteen thousand French civilians, most of whom will be victims of Allied bombardments.
After the first lines are broadcast, Christiane, Jacqueline, and scores of their confederates in the Resistance know that the moment they have been waiting for since the bleakest days of 1940 has finally arrived. Within days, Allied troops will return to French soil, to try to expel the Germans.
From Belgium and the Netherlands to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Greece, millions of freedom lovers are praying for the success of the invasion, without knowing yet exactly when or where it will begin.
Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Eisenhower, and Hitler
*
all agree about the importance of this moment. Each believes that this will be
the
crucial event of the war. The fate of the “Thousand-Year Reich” is about to pivot on the skill, the bravery, and the good
fortune of 156,000 mostly British, American, and Canadian soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Additional troops will hail from Belgium, Poland, Norway, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Australia, New Zealand, and, of course, France.
They will use nearly 7,000 ships, 2,395 aircraft, and 867 gliders to land in and around French beaches, which have been given the code names Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. It will be the largest naval armada in the history of the world.
After eleven years of Nazi atrocities metastasizing across Europe, this is the moment of truth in a global contest between democracy and tyranny. The main thing that muddles the idea that this is simply a conflict between good and evil is the role of Stalin. Like Hitler, Stalin is responsible for genocides that have killed millions of innocent people. But now, destiny has made him
the
essential ally of the Western democracies.
No one but Stalin is willing to sacrifice so much to defeat the Nazis: a staggering twenty million men and women. World War II will kill ten million Soviet soldiers and ten million Soviet civilians.
†
That is nearly five times the losses sustained by the Germans — and
fifty times
the losses of the United States.
Ten million civilians is also ten million more than were killed at home in America during the entire war. The United States and Canada are the only major combatants that suffer no losses at home, apart from those killed at Pearl Harbor. In France, on the other hand, 350,000 civilians will perish between 1940 and 1945.
The worst per capita civilian losses of all are in Poland, where 5.7 million will die, including 2.8 million Jews, out of a prewar population of just under 35 million — more than one-seventh of all Polish citizens.
ON JUNE
4, Eisenhower’s meteorological committee predicts low clouds, high winds, and formidable waves, and the American general decides to reject a June 5 invasion date, against the advice of British field marshal Montgomery. “The tension continued to mount as prospects for decent weather became worse and worse,” Eisenhower remembered.
Driving to the next meeting of the meteorological committee, at three thirty on the morning of June 5, “our little camp was shaking and shuddering under a wind of almost hurricane proportions and the accompanying rain seemed to be traveling in horizontal streaks.” Under those circumstances, Ike thought it wasn’t even worth discussing the situation. But when the meeting began a half hour later, the weathermen had a welcome surprise.
They were now confident of thirty-six hours of relatively good weather, beginning on the morning of June 6. At four fifteen
A
.
M
. on June 5, Eisenhower tells his colleagues he has decided to proceed with the massive invasion the following day.
With the fate of the entire war weighing on his shoulders, Eisenhower pauses to write a resignation letter, to be released in the event that Operation Overlord is a failure: “If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.” Then he orders the gigantic operation to go forward. “I hope to God I know what I’m doing,” he tells his staff.
At eleven fifteen on the evening of June 5, Christiane is sitting in her secret apartment with her confederates, listening to the “personal messages” on the BBC, when the magic words crackle out of the radio:
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone.
(Wound my heart with a monotonous languor)
Everyone in the room jumps up to embrace one another. Then Christiane’s boss, Rondenay, dispatches her into the blacked-out streets of Paris, to deliver the joyful tidings to their colleagues. She rides her bicycle without any lights. It is thrilling to be the bearer of such happy tidings.
Some days earlier, a leader of the Maquis, as the Resistance is known in the countryside, has been arrested — after he has learned that the invasion will be heralded by the Verlaine poem. Unbeknownst to the Allies, after being tortured by the Germans, the Maquis member has revealed the existence of the code.
As a result, when the poem’s lines are read on the night of June 5, the commander of Germany’s 15th Army in the Pas de Calais immediately puts his troops on alert.
But the Allies’ vast disinformation campaign has a completely unpredictable — and quite miraculous — effect on the German officers at Army Group B’s headquarters at La Roche–Guyon. There have been so many false reports of so many imminent invasions before, for them the truth is transformed into a mirage. And thus they decide to pay no attention at all to the secret gleaned from the tortured Maquis leader.