Codebreakers Victory (40 page)

Garbo and friends, reporting to their German controllers, had an explanation as to why their predictions about FUSAG hadn't materialized. The tough German resistance in Normandy demanded that troops be transferred there from FUSAG to save the beachheads, thus requiring time for FUSAG to be reinforced.

In addition, the idea of a Pas de Calais invasion was so deeply implanted in the Germans' minds that they couldn't shake it. Not until July 27 did the chief of the Wehrmacht's Intelligence Division, noting the withdrawals from FUSAG, concede that it was "improbable now that it will be used at short notice to attack a strongly fortified coastal sector." General Giinther von Kluge, who had replaced Rundstedt as commander in chief in the West, persuaded a reluctant Hitler to begin shifting troops, including units of the Fifteenth Army, out of the Pas de Calais. Kluge finally concluded on August 7 that a second major landing was "improbable" and ordered all possible formations to be sent to the Normandy battlefront. By then, however, the Allies had more than a million troops on French soil.

Bradley has recorded one other major Ultra contribution to the early going. The decrypt warned that a panzer grenadier division Rommel had shifted eastward from Brittany was about to attack the lightly armored 101st Airborne Division at Carentan—a move that, as Bradley noted, had the potential of splitting the Allied line and thrusting all the way to the beaches. He ordered tanks and an armored infantry battalion to reinforce the paratroops. "The Germans attacked Carentan exactly as Ultra had forecast and were thrown back with heavy losses."

 

 

Hitler Thrusts His Armies into a Noose

 

On July 20 a cabal of German officers carried out a plot to assassinate Hitler. The attempt failed, and many of the officers were shot, hanged or hung on meat hooks to have their nooses slowly garrote them to death. The effect on Hitler was to make him more suspicious than ever of his generals and to impel him to take command of the war more fully into his own hands. The result was a defeat that came close to breaking the back of the Wehrmacht, that should have broken the back of the Wehrmacht.

On July 31, Hitler was at his "Wolf's Lair" secret headquarters in East Prussia, conferring with General Alfred Jodl, his chief of staff. The situation in the west seemed to the professionals to call urgently for withdrawal to a new defensive line north of the Seine. For weeks the Allies and Germans had been mauling each other along the battle line that stretched across Normandy. Many German units were depleted and exhausted. The Americans had overrun the Cotentin Peninsula and were now squeezing through a narrow corridor at Avranches, the seacoast town on the far western side of the peninsula. The orders for the Yanks' VIII Corps were to turn their backs on the main combat and close in on the ports farther west along the coast of Brittany—ports badly needed for bringing in supplies to the Normandy armies. Patton had finally crossed the Channel to take charge of the real Third Army instead of the notional FUSAG. The Third was pushing through the Avranches defile, poised to press south and east. Two of Omar Bradley's corps had seized Saint-L6 and were also threatening to charge eastward to encircle their German opponents. As Churchill recorded, "The whole German defense west of the Vire was in jeopardy and chaos." The only sensible course, Hitler's generals believed, was to fall back and regroup on the north bank of the Seine.

Hitler had other ideas. He was in the mood not for defense but for attack. In his eyes the Allied bottleneck at Avranches presented a golden opportunity. Both of his main commanders in the West were now gone. Rommel had been injured in the crack-up of his staff car trying to elude a strafing Allied plane, and his support of the plot against Hitler subsequently led to his forced suicide. Rundstedt was temporarily under a cloud. When asked what should be done, after the success of the Normandy landings was evident, he had responded, "Make peace, you idiots. What else can you do?"

Hitler gave his new commander, Günther von Kluge, his order to "prepare a counteroffensive aiming to break through to Avranches with the objective of isolating the enemy forces and ensuring their destruction."

Kluge and his subordinates were dismayed by the order. Already extended too far west, they were in danger of having to extricate themselves from a corridor forming between the Allied forces to the north and those now making a U-turn eastward around Avranches. To push still farther west would only make their exposure worse. But orders were orders, and Kluge prepared his attack.

The obvious launching point was the village of Mortain. The plain before it offered the shortest route to Avranches, and the hilly terrain behind it would provide cover for the assembly of his forces. Kluge planned his offensive to begin the night of August 6.

Ultra's part in warning of the attack is in question. Winterbotham claimed that Bradley's armies were informed well in advance, which Bradley vehemently denied, writing in 1983, "Ultra alerted us to the attack only a few hours before it came, and that was too late to make any major defensive preparations." Hinsley supported Bradley, noting that the timing of the intercepts was either very close to or after the launching of the offensive.

There is no question, however, that Patton was warned. From the time of the formation of the Third Army, he had had a British-manned Special Liaison Unit assigned to his headquarters. In addition, an American major, Melvin Heifers, had been in place as the link between the SLU and Patton. However, the general also had a highly protective intelligence officer, Colonel Oscar Koch, who stood between Heifers and Patton. The most Heifers had been able to do thus far was supply summaries of Ultra decrypts to Koch, who then decided what, if anything, would be passed on to the general.

When Heifers saw the decrypts about the Mortain attack, he immediately recognized their importance. This time he was not to be denied. He went to Koch's tent and showed him the Ultra materials as well as a map he had hastily prepared. Koch agreed that Patton should get the news without delay. According to Koch's own memoir, he and Heifers picked up Patton's chief of staff, Brigadier General Hobart "Hap" Gay, en route to Patton's trailer. It was the first time Heifers had been admitted to the general's presence.

The officers spread Helfers's map on the floor and squatted over it as Heifers explained the decrypts. Patton was not one to ignore advantageous information. As he wrote in his diary the next day, "We got a rumor last night from a secret source that Panzer divisions will attack west from . . . Mortain . . . on Avranches. Personally, I think it is a German bluff to cover a withdrawal, but I stopped the 80th, French 2nd Armored, and 35th [Divisions] in the vicinity of St. Hilaire just in case something might happen."

Bradley's Thirtieth Infantry Division was already in place. Its men, with help from Patton's divisions and from intense aerial forays once the weather cleared, checked the German panzers in three days of bloody, desperate fighting.

When it became clear that the Mortain counteroffensive was failing, Bradley told the visiting Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, "This is an opportunity that comes to a commander not more than once in a century. We are about to destroy an entire hostile army. If the other fellow will only press his attack here at Mortain for another 48 hours, he'll give us time to close at Argentan and there completely destroy him."

Kluge and his fellow generals would not have given the Americans those additional forty-eight hours, but Hitler did. He ordered a new offensive: "I command that the attack be presented daringly and recklessly to the sea." By then decrypts of Kluge's orders were flowing to Allied commanders almost as swiftly as they were to his own generals. In the end the attack never really came off. The most that Hitler's order did was slow the withdrawal and allow the Allies to tighten the noose around the battered German armies.

Patton, now starting each day with a report by Heifers, swung around to the south and raced eastward ahead of the retreating Germans. Colonel Koch had become an Ultra convert as well. His assistant reported, "An army never moved as fast and as far as the Third Army in its drive across France and Ultra was invaluable every mile of the way."

The Germans were closed into a narrow corridor on three sides and had to run a gauntlet of fierce artillery fire and air attacks. The only way out was via a gap at the town of Falaise.
With Patton pressing up from the south and Montgomery's Canadians pushing down from the north, it appeared that the gap would be closed and most of Kluge's Fifth and Seventh Panzer Armies trapped inside.

Kluge himself was no longer in charge. When he set off on a tour of the pocket in which his armies were confined, his staff car was strafed by fighter planes just as Rommel's had been earlier, and he was unable to reach his headquarters until midnight. By then Hitler had become convinced that Kluge was planning "to lead the whole of the Western Army into capitulation." He had replaced Kluge with Walther Model. Ordered to return to Germany, Kluge, surmising correctly that he would be met by the Gestapo, took poison instead.

Sadly for the Allies, the Falaise gap was not closed in time to capture the whole of the German armies. With two major Allied forces now heading directly toward each other, it was Montgomery's duty to define the limits of advance to avoid a collision. He set the town of Argentan as the point beyond which neither of the approaching armies was to go. Units of Pat-ton's army reached Argentan while Monty's Canadian troops were still miles away and making painfully slow progress. Patton pleaded with Bradley to be allowed to advance farther; in fact he ordered his field commander there to push on slowly until meeting up with the Canadians. Bradley, knowing that Patton had exposed himself to a flank attack, was adamant that Patton stay at Argentan. Stay he did, while German troops poured through the gap to fight again. There are conflicting accounts of why the Allied armies failed to close the Falaise gap. Bradley blamed it in part on faulty intelligence that told him the main German divisions had already escaped when, in actuality, they were still in the trap. Many place the blame on Montgomery, claiming that because the rapid American advances were grabbing the headlines while his own troops were stalled, he was determined not to allow the Americans to gain still more, credit and so delayed giving the orders that would have allowed Patton to move northward. Whatever the cause, Montgomery's own intelligence officer later admitted, "Monty missed closing the sack."

Even so, Falaise was a German disaster. Ten thousand men were killed and fifty thousand captured, and huge quantities of tanks, artillery and other equipment were lost. The Germans were deprived of the strength to stop Patton from making his slashing drives to the east and south. The Battle of Normandy had, at last, ended in triumph.

 

 

Up from the South: The Riviera Invasion

 

When most of Italy was in Allied hands and Rome captured, the question became, where next? Churchill, ever weighing the political aspects, looked past the war at hand and contemplated the potential war to come. He wanted the Allies to push northeastward, up through Trieste, then into Austria, Czechoslovakia and southern Germany, so as to deny these areas to Russian Communism. Eisenhower, though, had a one-track mind: the first order of business was to whip the Germans, and the best way to do that was to concentrate Allied strength in the west. He stood steadfast, with FDR behind him, to follow the plan agreed on earlier: to carry out Operation Dragoon, the invasion of the south of France. Dragoon's goal was to drive out the Germans there and link up with the Allies breaking free in Normandy. Muttering in discontent, Churchill eventually gave in.

On August 15 another great collation of ships, this one nine hundred strong, converged on the Riviera and began unloading warriors onto the beaches and the playgrounds once reserved for the wealthy. The invasion was an enormous feat of planning and organization that came off with few fumbles. This was no narrow Channel crossing. The ships that arrived together on the fifteenth had come, on varying schedules, from Italian ports such as Naples and Taranto, from Oran on the north coast of Africa, from the islands of Malta, Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily. Plans for the landings were based on an intelligence file that, according to William Breuer in his book
Operation Dragoon,
exceeded that for the Normandy invasion. This "mountainous pile of information" on every detail of the German defenses had been obtained from photoreconnaissance, the French underground and Ultra decrypts. Despite an early morning fog that caused some units to be landed well away from their drop zones, the parachute and glider operations were unusually successful. The beach landings met with little opposition, bringing ashore ninety-four thousand men and eleven thousand vehicles in a single day. The drive inland held to its schedule.

Ultra codebreakers began quickly to decrypt messages with an astonishing import: Hitler was ordering a withdrawal to a defense line well back from the coast. He did want troops left at the fortresses such as Toulon and Marseilles, and these defenders were of course to hold out to the last man. Otherwise, concerned that the breakout in Normandy was threatening to cut off his Nineteenth Army in southern France, he ordered his commanders to move quickly to the north.

Aided by decrypts that covered the Germans' every move, General Lucian Truscott, commanding the invading Seventh Army, foresaw that most of the retreating enemy would follow the Rhone River northward. At Montélimar, eighty miles north, was a gorge that could be turned into a deadly bottleneck. Truscott sent a task force racing ahead to close off the gorge and trap the Germans trying to pass through it. Too cautious action by the task force's commander allowed two German divisions to escape, but other retreating units were encircled. Ultra warned when two German divisions were to combine their forces in a desperate breakout effort. Some German units did fight their way through but with heavy losses.