Ten Days to D-Day
D-Day was the most decisive invasion of World War II and its success changed the course of the 20th century. The greatest combined sea, land and air operation in history was planned with meticulous care and involved the great Allied leaders, Eisenhower, Roosevelt and Churchill. But the invasion was much more than a matter of contending armies. It would affect the deepest hopes and fears of the people of occupied Europe.
In Ten Days to D-Day: Countdown to the liberation of Europe, David Stafford creates the tension leading to the day itself. He focuses on the activities of ordinary people, from those involved in the preparations to others who remained completely oblivious of what was going on. Secrecy was paramount, and Stafford conveys what it was like not knowing whether D-Day would succeed.
In this edited extract from the beginning of the book, he sets the scene and introduces the personalities he will follow throughout this momentous period.
– – –
Sunday, 28 May 1944
Sonia d'Artois: The jump
Sonia d'Artois jumped, and the slipstream caught her, pulling her sideways. Then the parachute snapped open and she was floating free in the moonlight. The roar of the aircraft's engines faded rapidly into the distance. The flannel skirt and heavy sweater she was wearing under her special overalls had kept her warm in the unheated plane, and her old hobnail ski boots would protect her during the landing.
Suddenly the shapes of trees appeared out of the gloom, the land rushed forward to meet her and she flexed her knees just as she'd been trained. 'Don't look down,' they had warned her, 'or you'll get tangled in the cords.' But she couldn't help herself. She was still wrestling to free herself when she hit the ground hard and landed painfully in a ditch, wrenching her shoulder. Then she heard voices in French as the reception committee rushed out from behind the trees to help her. 'My God,' she heard one say, 'one of them's a woman.' But all Sonia felt was happiness and relief. She was back in France at last, behind enemy lines, and in time for D-Day.
Peter Moen: What victory means
Peter Moen stood on his narrow prison bed and furtively removed a small tack from the blackout curtain of the cell's only window. Then he took a sheet of the rough, greyish-brown toilet paper handed out grudgingly by his guards each day. One by one, with painstaking care, he pricked out the letters on to the paper until he had a word, then a sentence, then a page. It was slow and laborious work, but writing the diary kept him sane. Only in this way could he make sense of his suspended life.
Prisoner No. 5842 was now beginning his 115th day of incarceration. Early in the morning, when the guards were busy, he would peer through the window at the street outside and see the sun striking the local church, watch the cars swinging around the roundabout and glimpse the blue dot of a city tram jogging up the hill in the distance. The violent contrast with his own confinement inside was hard to bear. His head still hurt where he had been hit squarely across the face the day before for not responding quickly enough to a guard's command to stop playing cards. 'If that is an example of the Herrenvolk [master race],' he spelled out, 'I prefer to be a slave.'
When he had finished, he rolled the paper up tightly and pushed it through the cross-patterned grille of the ventilation shaft on the floor behind the cell's solitary table. There it would be safe. He had to be quick, though. Once, a guard had confiscated a page of the diary before he'd had time to conceal it. Fortunately, there had been no follow-up.
A hundred days before, Moen had written: 'It is only those who are under the Gestapo's whip, with the death sentence as an ever-threatening danger, who completely understand what victory means.'
Glenn Dickin: Next of kin
Glenn Dickin gazed out through the barbed-wire fence surrounding his holding camp in England, and thought of his family on the Canadian prairie thousands of miles away. He was cooped up inside a tent in a camp dotted with a myriad similar canvas roofs housing thousands of troops, one of the hundreds of makeshift bases that blanketed the British countryside. Fringed by a suburban scene of red-bricked semi-detached houses and rows of small shops, it lay only a few miles from the English Channel.
His regiment had been here for almost two months, and from here he had taken part in all the major landing exercises. The last one had been a full dress rehearsal that had lasted six days. The sea had been rough, and he'd been forced to use his vomit bag. He'd returned exhausted but exhilarated. Since then, he'd endured a constant round of briefings, distribution of new clothing and equipment, small-arms exercises and the assignment of waterproofed vehicles to spaces on the individual ships that would carry them across. Otherwise, life consisted of waiting for the big day they all knew was coming.
The camp had been sealed off from the outside world for three days. No one was allowed in or out. Beyond the barbed wire, normal civilian life continued. He could see housewives shopping, children going to and from school and the occasional public bus.
Dickin, a blue-eyed, fair-skinned lieutenant in the Regina Rifles, was 22 years old. Like most young men far from home, he kept up a façade of insouciance and constantly told his mother not to worry. Before the camp was sealed – and all correspondence to the outside world halted – he had written to her that every day he watched fleets of heavy bombers pass overhead from their bases in England to pound the enemy. 'It is a beautiful sight to see,' he enthused. 'They are certainly making a nice job of softening up for the invasion troops.' And he finished off by promising that he'd do his best to be home by next spring to help with the house cleaning.
But the next day he carefully asked his sister to let his girlfriend in Canada know if anything happened to him. She was not next of kin, and therefore not on the official list of those entitled to be told of the missing, the wounded or the dead.
Veronica Owen: Deep underground
Just a few miles to the west of the tented camp, blue-eyed, 19-year-old Veronica Owen sat in a garden in her sunglasses, enjoying the glorious Sunday weather. It was still only nine o'clock, but, up early at dawn, she had already taken high communion at the weathered old Saxon church just down the road. Like Glenn Dickin, she was mesmerised by the fleets of bombers passing overhead in the blue spring sky. 'Steel birds' she called them.
She, too, was writing home to her family. 'My Darling Mummy and Daddy' began her account of the weekend. Although she would have relished a game of cricket even more, the day before she'd played tennis with a girlfriend on a private grass court lent to them by a kindly neighbour. Despite being out of practice she had enjoyed it. The neighbour's wife had brought them welcome glasses of lemonade made out of ice and – a rare luxury – fresh lemons. In the evening, another girlfriend had bicycled over for an hour's chat.
By now, on the fourth page of her letter, the heat was curling the pages and her sweaty hands were beginning to smudge the ink, so she signed off with a 'God Bless'. Later that afternoon she read more of Lawrence of Arabia's letters, which she'd begun a few weeks before. Then she attended evensong and had a late supper.
It was a rare and very welcome day off work for her. Normally she spent most of the day and night deep underground. Veronica Owen was a Wren, a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service, one of more than 70,000 women on land and sea working as dispatch riders, radio mechanics, teleprinter operators, radar detection finders, map plotters, cinema operators and typists. Her special task was to code and decode ships' messages. Every third night she was on watch from seven o'clock (1900 hours in the naval parlance she'd had to learn) to eight-thirty (0830) the next morning. Then she was free until 1300 hours the next day. Recently the work had become particularly heavy, and the issue of shifts like hers, lasting thirteen and a half hours, had even led to questions in Parliament.
Veronica also kept a small pocket diary. Here she recorded the stresses of her work and the moments of relief that came all too rarely.
Walter Schwender: Cancelled leave
Lemonade also proved welcome to a thirsty young German soldier stationed in France, on its northern Atlantic coast. Walter Schwender, too, was enjoying the glorious Whitsun weather. Today he'd managed to get hold of a typewriter and, like the Wren, was writing home. Letters and small gifts brought his family closer. He'd sent them a package of cucumber seeds, and sometimes he sent back his ration of cigarettes. But he would have to gorge on the abundant strawberries himself. 'Dear All' he began, and then stopped to have some wine. But the weather was too hot, so he poured himself a lemonade instead.
On duty he worked in an army repair shop, mending anything that needed fixing, from bicycles to typewriters, which is how he'd managed to get his hands on a machine today. Sometimes he just answered the telephone. The day before, he and his comrades had been given cigarettes again. But because these days he didn't trust the post very much, he might have to smoke them himself instead of sending them to his father. Frustrating news had come of yet another delay in the mail from Germany.
He, too, found it too hot to write for long. After a page he signed off, explaining he wanted to go to the beach to swim. Like all soldiers at the front, he knew the mail he sent home was censored. But he did manage to convey one piece of significant news – all leave for the troops had been cancelled. 'Oh well,' Walter added optimistically, 'I hope that all this will be over soon.'
Albert Grunberg: Secretly listening
That same day, in a sweltering and occupied Paris, a middle-aged man, caged in a tiny room on the sixth floor of an apartment building on the rue des Écoles, worried frantically about his children. For Albert Grunberg, the Allied 'steel birds' were certainly welcome allies against the Germans. But they might also destroy his family. The man was a Jew, and he had been in hiding in this room, measuring just nine feet by seven, for a year and a half. The Germans had arrived to deport him in 1942 and a friendly concierge in a neighbouring building had smuggled him away.
Since then he'd kept in touch with events by secretly listening to the BBC on a hidden radio. His wife, who was not Jewish and so relatively secure, brought him food. Their two sons, now grown up, were living and working on the edge of the French Alps, in Chambéry. But only this morning he had heard that Allied planes had bombed that city's strategically important railway marshalling yards.
Grunberg, too, was keeping a diary. As it did Peter Moen, it gave him comfort, providing more than just a record of daily events. To pour out his feelings, to relieve the pain of the bad times and to record the good moments, restored his balance. He'd found a hiding place for the diary on top of the toilet cistern in the corridor outside his room.
That afternoon his wife came to see him, trudging up the six flights of stairs. She found the heat stifling, despite her husband's best efforts to dampen the floor with cold water, and didn't stay long. Later that evening, he scribbled in his diary, they were still frantically trying to get news. Would the liberators free him but, in doing so, kill their children?
Bill Tucker: Football and cards
The insides of the Allies' 'steel birds' were all too familiar to the bony-faced American paratrooper lying on his cot cooped up in a tent with eight other men at an American holding camp in the lush green fox-hunting countryside of England's Midlands. Unlike the Canadian rifleman Glenn Dickin, Bill Tucker was already a battle-hardened veteran. The year before, aged 20, he'd made his first combat drop over Salerno in Italy. He'd volunteered after seeing newsreel movies of German and Russian paratroopers back home in Boston, and reckoned it was something he didn't need a college education for.
His canvas city lay within the perimeter of the old stone wall of a country house just 20 miles from Sherwood Forest. Outside lay a picture-postcard little town where the church bells rang in the evening and social life revolved around the friendly pubs. Molly, a blonde from Nottingham, was good fun for movies and dances and the occasional picnic. She was a test pilot for Stirling bombers, checking the instruments when they came out of the factory; but unfortunately, she had a husband, a Royal Air Force fighter pilot serving in Malta. Still, Tucker enjoyed her friendship.
Bill Tucker, too, had just learned that, from now on, his camp would be sealed off. No more sneaking off to the fish and chip shop. Training and waiting were now the order of the day. No more practice drops either. He was glad, given the tedious journey by truck to the nearest airfield and the frequent cancellations because of fog. An occasional game of football and endless rounds of cards relieved the tedium.
Anything was better than crawling in his underwear through a pit of dead animals, as he'd done during basic training in Georgia, or shivering with the malaria he'd caught because he couldn't keep down the pills that were given him to fight it off, or squatting for hours over a stinking latrine wracked with dysentery, as he'd had to do at some fly-ridden base in the north African desert. The new boys fished out the flies from their food with a spoon before they ate it. The old sweats just squashed them into the gravy till they stopped struggling and swallowed them down with the food. At least, that was the joke.
André Heintz: Air-raid warnings
Waiting was also the name of the game for André Heintz, a lithe young French schoolteacher, as he bicycled home that evening to Caen, the ancient capital of Normandy and favoured city of Duke William, the 11th-century conqueror of England. Dominated by the huge citadel begun by the Duke in 1060, Caen lay just ten miles from the Channel, linked to its port of Ouistreham by the River Orne and a canal.
André had spent the day with his father helping plant beans on their small allotment on the outskirts of the city. It was one of the few small ways they could supplement their meagre weekly ration of food, and they bartered the vegetables for butter at a local dairy farm. His father had even given up smoking to save money.
André lived with his parents and sister in a large detached house in the centre of the city. Just a hundred yards away lay the heavily guarded military headquarters of the German 716th Division. To reach their house, they had to pass through a barrier and show their identity documents. Every evening, after curfew, German troops rolled out a barbed-wire cordon. The previous night he'd heard heavy bombing along the Channel coast and there had been several air-raid warnings in the city itself.
Unknown to his parents or sister, André was actively working with the local Maquis, or Resistance. Mostly he helped forge identity cards for anyone in trouble, such as men evading obligatory labour in Germany, or members of the Maquis needing a new identity, or Jews on the run – although by now not many of them were left.
More risky was his role in collecting intelligence about German military installations. He bicycled around the city twice a week noting any changes in the composition of the German garrison or the arrival of new military equipment, and then passed on the information to his contact. This was an older man who lived on the coast and had clandestine ways of getting the material to London.
Earlier that month another man had come from Paris and asked him to step up efforts to find more agents for such intelligence work, and to recruit as many young people as possible for an active Maquis group that would spring into action on D-Day. Since then he'd explored the countryside south of Caen, looking for possible hiding places. He'd also kept his eyes peeled for open fields with not too many trees, suitable for parachute drops.
Sydney Hudson: Collecting daisies
Eighty miles to the south, near the city of Le Mans, ancestral home of the Plantagenet dynasty of medieval English kings, and already world-famous for its championship motor races, a fit-looking man in his mid-30s sat on the veranda of an isolated château. Sydney Hudson was a British secret agent and was going over in his mind preparations for the coming night.
The owner of the château was co-operative enough, and at nights the agent felt secure sleeping in his tent hidden in the wood at the back of the property. But Hudson had had a frustrating few weeks. The château was close enough to the Channel coast for the Gestapo to be dangerously active, and there had been a lot of arrests. The locals, mostly farmers, didn't seem too keen to get involved.
With two other agents he'd been dropped 'blind' – no reception committee to greet them – during the Easter weekend a couple of months before. Still, they'd made some headway. The wireless operator, an Englishman fluent in French like himself, had made contact with London, and they'd arranged a couple of successful drops of containers full of Sten guns and explosives. They'd begun to build up a small number of trusted contacts.
What he really needed now was someone to act as a courier to keep him in regular touch with them and who could travel about the countryside relatively unnoticed. He'd worked with a woman once before and seen how much easier it was for her than him to move around without being challenged. With D-Day coming, this could prove vital. A few days before he'd sent a message to London, and they'd agreed to his request. The reply came in a punning coded radio message he'd heard one evening in his tent: 'La marguerite cueille les marguerites' ('Margaret collects daisies').
The drop was due tonight. Hudson wouldn't go himself. It was too risky, and anyway he had some recruiting to do. But he'd turn up the next morning when he knew the drop had succeeded and see what London had sent. Or rather whom. He was curious to meet her.
'Arabel': Valuable source
Inside 35 Crespigny Road, a small Victorian house in the north-west London suburb of Hendon, a man sat hunched over a radio transmitter tapping out a secret coded message. It was a German-made portable machine of 100 watts. The report was destined for Madrid, where it would be picked up by the Abwehr – German military intelligence. Here one of its most highly trained and efficient officers would pore over its contents. Over the past two years he had come to count on 'Arabel', the code-name of his agent in London, to send first-rate intelligence about forthcoming Allied military operations.
Now that the tide of war had turned strongly against the Germans, Berlin was increasingly anxious to collect intelligence about them. The Abwehr had created a special Invasion Intelligence Department and was energetically attempting to infiltrate its agents into Britain via neutral countries such as Portugal, Spain and Sweden. Once there, they would report on troop movements, the identification of military units and the strength and location of American, British and other Allied forces. In short, any clues that would help identify where and when the Allied invasion would come.
Arabel had already been in place for two years. He'd done well during Operation Torch, the Anglo-American landings in north Africa in November 1942 – although, in the end, Berlin had not been able to make much use of the material. His control, an ambitious officer, did his best to supply Arabel with the very latest high-grade ciphers and secret inks, sending him plenty of money to cover his expenses as well as to pay the dozen or so sub-agents he'd succeeded in recruiting. After digesting and assessing Arabel's reports, the Abwehr man forwarded them by radio to headquarters in Berlin.
Unfortunately, they hadn't always been valued or acted on by the German high command. But recently he'd been gratified to hear that they considered Arabel a particularly valuable source. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt himself, commander-in-chief west, had evaluated a piece of intelligence sent by Arabel as 'especially important'. The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, who had recently taken over the service following Hitler's dismissal of its long-time chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, had sent him a personal message of appreciation for the work of his network in Britain.
Things were looking up. He was now coming under heavy pressure to get his agents to provide intelligence about the coming invasion. As a former military attaché in Paris, he'd had plenty of experience in fitting bits and pieces of information together to build up a picture of an opponent's armed forces. What was the order of battle of the Allied troops? How many divisions, how many men? Where were they stationed? When would the attack come? Where?
He was counting mostly on Arabel to find out and tell him. Recent reports from the agent were revealing an interesting build-up of troops in south-east England – suggestively close to the Dover Strait, the narrowest part of the Channel, and opposite Calais. Was this where the attack would come? In Madrid and Berlin, Arabel's controllers tried to fit the pieces of the jigsaw together.
Harbingers of death and liberation
No one but a handful of people knew the answer to the question asked by the Abwehr, and certainly not the British secret agents, the French resister, the German soldier, the British Wren, the American paratrooper or the Canadian infantryman, all of whom had their various roles to play in the epic events about to unfold. Nor the fugitive Jew or the prisoner in his Gestapo cell, whose freedom, and probably lives, depended on the success of the liberating forces poised for action.
The D-Day secret was among the most momentous ever kept. Yet the build-up to it was one of the most public events of the Second World War. By the end of May 1944, over two million troops were stationed in Britain, 5,000 ships had been gathered in ports and harbours around the coast and thousands of bombers – the patriotic young Wren's graceful 'steel birds' and the possible harbingers of death to the sons of the Parisian Jew – were hitting targets round the clock in France.
Only the day before, 1,000 British-based Fortress and Liberator heavy bombers had pounded targets inside Germany itself. Hundreds more medium bombers and fighters – including the deadly new rocket-firing Typhoons – had attacked railway bridges, airfields and aircraft, as well as ship-reporting stations vital to the Germans' invasion warning chain in northern France. Parachute flares and the flashes of exploding bombs over Boulogne and other towns fringing the Channel could be clearly seen from the English coast. From bases in Italy, American heavy bombers had severely mauled German-controlled oilfields and refineries at Ploesti, in Romania, and targeted railways and airfields along the Mediterranean coast of southern France. Newspaper reports talked of entire marshalling yards being pulverised to rubble.
Transport chaos was causing severe power shortages. Electricity for domestic households was cut off from 7.30am to 8.30pm. In Paris, several Métro stations were closed and three lines completely shut down. Regularly, air-raid alerts over the French capital brought transport to a complete stop. The 'air invasion' of Europe, pronounced The Times of London, was already well under way. With liberation so clearly imminent, declared sources in the French Resistance, the fighters in the Maquis were impatient to play their part. But they wanted to fight as liberators, not be regarded as merely the passively liberated.
Hitler's forces on the run
Across Europe, the Germans were in full retreat. In the east, Stalin's Red Army had capitalised on its great victories at Stalingrad and Kursk the year before and was now advancing steadily west towards the German heartland. It had just recaptured the Crimea and driven the Wehrmacht out of the Ukraine.
In Italy, Allied armies had finally broken a bitter and bloody stalemate. Although their landings in Sicily in July 1943 had precipitated the overthrow of Hitler's loyal ally, Mussolini, subsequent fighting on the Italian mainland had gone badly wrong. Naples had been in Allied hands for months, but Rome remained occupied by the Germans. General Alexander's armies, bogged down on Hitler's strongly defended Gustav Line, had advanced only 70 miles in eight months. An attempted 'leapfrog' landing at Anzio, just south of Rome, had stalled. Since February, Allied forces had been held up at the great fortress monastery of Monte Cassino, blocking the main road north to the Italian capital.
Just two weeks before, however, the logjam had finally broken. Led by Free French and Polish troops, Allied forces finally took Monte Cassino on 18 May and a week later began their advance on Rome. Simultaneously, American forces finally broke out of the Anzio bridgehead 30 miles south of the Italian capital. Since then, advance units of the Allies had reached to within 12 miles of Rome.
News from the Italian front now dominated the headlines. Every day brought news of a fresh German retreat in Italy as Hitler's exhausted troops fell back towards their staggered defences in the Alban Hills. Throughout the Balkans, in the mountains of Greece, Yugoslavia and Albania, armies of guerrillas were harassing the enemy and keeping thousands of German troops tied down. At last, after four long years, Hitler's forces were on the run.
The shrinking Japanese empire
Elsewhere the news was equally encouraging. In Asia, the Japanese empire was rapidly shrinking. Here the tide of war had changed as early as mid-1942 with the great battle of Midway. The Americans, under the fire-eating General Douglas MacArthur, were continuing their hard-fought island-hopping towards the Philippines, Formosa and Japan itself. Recently the advance had quickened. The Solomon Islands had already fallen, and in April landings had begun in New Guinea. Just the day before, on 27 May, American troops had landed on the small island outpost of Biak, a key Japanese base off the northern New Guinea coast whose airfields offered yet another springboard for MacArthur's juggernaut.
On the Indian subcontinent, the Japanese still held control of Burma. But at the towns of Kohima and Imphal, just inside the Indo-Burmese border, determined resistance by British-led forces under General William Slim was thwarting a Japanese effort to invade India itself, a desperate bid by Tokyo to throw the Allies off balance.
Intensive security and control
In Europe, everyone knew a massive Allied invasion of the continent from Britain was coming. The British Isles were now virtually sealed off from the outside world. Everyone going into or out of the country was subject to intensive scrutiny and control. Security measures to protect D-Day, Churchill had ordered, should be 'high, wide and handsome'. Civilian travel between the British mainland and Ireland had been stopped altogether in February, to plug leaks of information through the German embassy in Dublin.
All mail coming into and leaving the British Isles was censored, and just over a month before, despite vigorous protests, the ban had been extended to all diplomatic communications by foreign governments, with the exception of the United States and the Soviet Union.
Since April, most of the south coast of England had been sealed off to all visitors, as had a strip of the shore on either side of the Firth of Forth in Scotland. Lucky hotels outside the zone loudly advertised the fact, such as the Spread Eagle Hotel in Midhurst, Sussex – 'the Gateway to the South Downs' – which proudly proclaimed in The Times that it was 'Not Within Banned Area'.
Bank holiday sunshine
Yet life went on elsewhere almost as if the war was already won. This was, after all, a bank holiday weekend. Massive queues formed at Paddington railway station in a stampede to leave London for resorts in the West Country, with hundreds of passengers waiting for up to six hours.
The day before, people had started to queue at 7.45 in the morning for the afternoon train to south Wales. When it finally arrived, the crowd rushed the barrier and police had trouble controlling them. Babies were handed over heads to women porters, who nursed them until their mothers got through. Several children got lost. That morning the newspapers announced yet further restrictions on rail travel. The number of concessionary fares taken by the wives of service personnel would be limited to two or three, depending on the service. They were to come into effect in three days time, on 1 June.
No wonder tempers got frayed. The heat was getting to everyone. Whit Sunday was the hottest day of the year so far, with 14 hours of sunshine across the Dover Strait, the thermometer reading a record-busting 94°F in the sun and 79°F in the shade. It was not just the Wren Veronica Owen playing tennis, or Walter Schwender, the German soldier writing home, who needed a refreshing drink.
The weekend also saw a crowd of 30,000 happy spectators at Lord's cricket ground in London witness an Australian victory over the 'Rest of the World' – in reality, a scratch team of mostly English players who, because of their age or for other reasons, were not in the armed forces, including the legendary batsmen Wally Hammond and Len Hutton. In Nottingham, thousands of people watched a baseball match at the Notts County football ground between two teams from America's 82nd Airborne Division, with the Red Devils beating the Panthers 18–0.
'A welcome divertissement'
Crowds flocked to cinemas in London's West End to see new releases such as Tampico, starring tough guy Edward G Robinson as a torpedoed tanker captain who suspects his girlfriend of being the enemy agent who guided the U-boat to its prey. Also playing was The Bridge of San Luis Rey, based on Thornton Wilder's best-selling novel exploring the role of fate in the deaths of five people who perish during the collapse of a Peruvian rope bridge. 'For present-day audiences up to their ears in war news,' remarked Variety Review, 'this picture will be a welcome divertissement.'
On the London stage, John Gielgud was playing the lead in Hamlet, while the Playhouse Theatre bade a final farewell to the hugely popular Our Town, also by Thornton Wilder, a play about small-town American life featuring several American soldiers in the cast. If only its run could be extended, wrote the actress Dame Sybil Thorndike to The Times, it would prove invaluable in promoting understanding between Britain and the United States.
There was even a birthday to celebrate. Dr Edvard Benes – prime minister of Czechoslovakia at the time of the Munich Agreement, which in 1938 handed over much of his country to Hitler, and who was now the leader of the Czechoslovaks in exile – was one of the dozens of prominent European refugees living in London. The small Czech village of Lidice had become an international symbol of Nazi brutality in 1942 when its entire male population was murdered, its women and children deported to Germany and its houses razed to the ground in retaliation for the assassination by Czech resisters of Reinhard Heydrich, the deputy head of the SS and brutal ruler of the Czech 'protectorate'.
Today Benes turned 60. 'I am glad to think that, at such [a momentous crisis in human affairs],' wrote Churchill, 'the Czechoslovak people, united and resolute under your leadership, despite their long, terrible suffering, are ready to play their part with us in close collaboration with our allies in the West and in the East in encompassing a final overthrow of the German tyranny ...'
Winston Churchill: Father and son
For Churchill, too, it was a holiday weekend. As usual, he and his wife Clementine left London for Chequers, in Buckinghamshire, the country retreat of British prime ministers about 50 miles north of the capital. A couple of days in the weathered half-timbered mansion gave him a short breather from the relentless pressures of London, as well as a chance to deal briefly with pressing family matters. Preying on his mind this weekend was the fate of his only son, Randolph.
Possessing his father's insatiable thirst for action and adventure, the 33-year-old journalist and member of Parliament had fought with the commandos in north Africa, taken part with the SAS in a daring behind-the-lines raid on Benghazi, and landed at Salerno. Then he'd parachuted into Bosnia to work alongside the partisan leader, Marshal Tito, in his mountain retreat near the village of Drvar. 'His office is all lined with parachute silk and looks more like the nid d'amour [love nest] of a luxurious courtesan than the office of a guerrilla leader,' reported Randolph to his father, giving him an intriguing insight into the man whose forces were both fighting the Germans and waging a bitter civil war with their royalist Chetnik opponents for control of Yugoslavia.
But daily guerrilla life was tough, and Randolph shared in the hardships as an equal. 'He never fussed about the cold, hunger, thirst, sore feet or German bullets,' wrote one observer, 'and only raised hell when the Partisan barber wanted to give him a shave without hot water.'
Churchill worried constantly about his son. 'Give my love to Randolph should he come into your sphere,' he had telegraphed Tito just three days before. That very day his son narrowly survived a brush with death. German paratroops, backed up by Stuka bombers, attacked Tito's headquarters hoping to capture the Partisan leader and Randolph as well. After stiff fighting, the Partisans and Randolph had evaded capture and disappeared into the mountains. Churchill had been informed, through British decrypts of German radio messages, about the attack almost as soon as it happened.
Today was Randolph's birthday and Churchill sat down and composed a letter to him. 'We are naturally following with some anxiety the news of the attack on Tito's headquarters,' he wrote. 'But today the report is that the airborne Huns have been liquidated.'
After wishing his son good luck and telling him that he was in all their thoughts, the prime minister continued: 'We have a lovely day at where we live from time to time, and all is fair with the first glory of summer. The war is very fierce and terrible, but in these sunlit lawns and buttercup meadows, it is hard to conjure up its horrors.' He then passed on news about Randolph's three-year-old son, Winston junior, who had developed measles. 'I am ashamed to say I told him it was the fault of the Germans,' he joked, 'but I shall labour to remove this impression quite soon.'
Winston Churchill: 'Terrible things'
Even as he wrote, Churchill was appalled by reports from France about the physical damage and human casualties being caused by the Allied bombing campaign designed to soften up the Germans before D-Day. For days, he'd been having a furious argument about the raids with Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, deputy commander of the invasion forces. Were they really necessary? Churchill asked. How many innocent civilians were being killed? Were they not likely to create a serious backlash against the Allies when they finally landed in France? He dictated a terse note to his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, who shared his worries: 'We will talk about this tomorrow. Terrible things are being done.'
While weekends at Chequers got Churchill out of London, they were never just family affairs. Instead they provided an opportunity to entertain official guests from abroad, foreign politicians, Allied commanders temporarily on leave and other friends, cronies, and colleagues whom he wanted to have beside him. Among his guests this weekend was General Ira Eaker, commander of the Allied air forces in the Mediterranean, who agreed to carry the prime minister's letter to Randolph as far as Cairo.
Winston Churchill: A passionate affair
So was Averell Harriman, a handsome American railroad tycoon turned diplomat. A close and trusted family friend, he was already involved in a passionate affair with the prime minister's daughter-in-law, Randolph's wife Pamela. Long a power behind the scenes in Washington, Harriman was now President Roosevelt's ambassador in Moscow and was en route to the US capital to brief him on recent conversations with the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
What Harriman told Roosevelt now prompted Churchill to drop a line himself to Stalin. Ever since Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, the Soviet leader had been pressing impatiently for an Anglo-American second front in France, and he had been briefed on its contours. But Churchill was anxious to reassure him. He told Stalin that all efforts in Britain were centred on Operation Overlord, the umbrella name for the West's planned invasion of the Continent from Britain, the first objective of which was to establish a lodgement area in France. Everything humanly possible would be done or risked to guarantee the success of the D-Day assault.
To his other major ally, Roosevelt, he also sent a message. Talk of a summit between the two of them in Bermuda had been in the air for some time, but Roosevelt had finally called it off for health reasons. Undaunted, Churchill urged him to come to London after D-Day. So far the President had not visited Britain at all during the war. In the jocular tone Churchill often adopted when faced with Roosevelt's resistance, he added: 'Doctor Churchill informs you that a sea voyage in one of your great new battleships will do you no end of good.'
But the appeal did Churchill no good, either. It was a presidential election year in the United States, and in a nation where anti-British sentiment still ran deep in certain quarters, Roosevelt decided that his political health required he stay clear of London for the time being.
Winston Churchill: Special messages
Of the risks to Overlord, Churchill was all too aware. From bitter personal experience he knew what could go wrong with amphibious landings on hostile shores. His early career had almost been wrecked by his part in the planning of the ill-fated First World War fiasco at the Dardanelles, when Allied forces had been slaughtered as they tried to land in Turkey.
The raid on Dieppe in the summer of 1942 had sharply reminded him of the risks. Thousands of men, mostly Canadian, had been killed or captured in a bungled attempt to seize the French Channel port, a massacre that had shocked all those involved. To minimise the dangers now, and to anticipate every possible surprise, Churchill anxiously devoured every scrap of intelligence that crossed his desk.
His main source was Ultra, or 'Boniface' as he preferred to call it, a name conjured up early in the war to suggest a spy somewhere high up inside the German government. In reality, it was the intelligence harvested by the code-breakers at Bletchley Park – the top-secret decrypting centre not far from Chequers – gleaned from the intercepts of high-level German radio messages that the enemy mistakenly, and disastrously for them, assumed were secure.
Each day Churchill received a bundle of such reports, locked in a beige-coloured box to which only he and his intelligence chief had the key. This was Sir Stewart Menzies, otherwise known in Whitehall simply as 'C', after the initial of the first chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Sir Mansfield Cumming. Today, even out at Chequers on a Sunday, C sent him 20 such 'Special Messages' – a euphemism that served to disguise the highly sensitive source. If the Germans ever got a whiff of how seriously their codes and ciphers had been penetrated, they would immediately change them and the Allies would be struck blind. As it was, Churchill sometimes felt that he was peering straight through a window at German military moves.
Winston Churchill: Bombing raids and supply drops
Today he scanned the intercepts for any sign that the Germans had learned authentic details of the impending invasion. Or, alternatively, that they had swallowed elements of the careful deception plan designed to throw them off the scent. He was reassured by what he read.
Two reports in particular were encouraging. One, sent to the German High Command by Field Marshal von Rundstedt, revealed that the pattern of Allied air attacks on targets in northern France was successfully masking the actual place where the invasion would take place. The bombing raids, reported von Rundstedt, were 'without recognisable point of main effort'; in other words, they were giving no definable clue as to where the landings might be.
A second intercept, dated 27 May, just the day before, went even further. This concerned a German message stating that Allied bombing targeted at bridges across the Seine highlighted probable enemy intentions against an area that was not within the invasion zone. Churchill ticked off the reports and returned them to his intelligence chief in their locked box the next morning.
As he read them, he also knew something else. Supply drops to the French Resistance in May had also been deliberately designed to throw the Germans off the scent. Just a few days before, Lord Selborne, the minister in charge of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the top-secret agency Churchill had created in July 1940 to wage war behind enemy lines, had given him the figures. The supply ratio between the actual invasion area and its non-targeted neighbouring region had been deliberately set at 1:3, even though this meant sending aircraft over the most heavily defended areas of France. If the Germans were monitoring the flights, they might well draw the wrong conclusions about the intended invasion area.
So far, Churchill concluded, the D-Day secret seemed safe and the deception plan was working. But he couldn't be certain.
Adolf Hitler: Where Charlemagne slept
While Churchill basked in the sunshine at Chequers, Adolf Hitler was enjoying the clear mountain air of the Bavarian Alps at his own private retreat at the Berghof on the Obersalzberg, an area to which he'd regularly retreated since the 1920s, either for rest and relaxation or to compose his thoughts while planning major moves or preparing his speeches for the annual Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg.
It was at the Berghof, a few days before his attack on Poland that precipitated the Second World War, that he told the leaders of his Wehrmacht about his war aims. 'Our strength is our speed and brutality,' he had warned. 'Genghis Khan drove many women and children to death, deliberately and joyously. History sees him as a great founder of a state. What weak Western civilisation says about me doesn't matter. I have given the order – and I will have anyone shot who expresses even one word of criticism – that the aim of the war is not to reach definite limits but rather the physical destruction of the enemy. So I have assembled my Death's Head formations ...'
Enlarged from a previously modest country cottage, the Berghof boasted a huge picture window in the living room that could be raised and lowered, and enjoyed magnificent views over Berchtesgaden, Salzburg and the Untersberg mountain. Here, legend had it, the Emperor Charlemagne still slept but would one day awaken to restore the past glories of the German empire. 'You see the Untersberg over there,' Hitler would say to his guests. 'It is no accident that I have my residence opposite it.'
He'd moved here temporarily that winter while his 'Wolf's Lair', the massive concrete command post hidden in the forests near Rastenburg in East Prussia, was being strengthened against air attack. Fleets of heavy Allied bombers were now regularly pounding Berlin and targets further east. The old Royal Palace in the heart of Berlin had just taken a direct hit that destroyed the famous Knight's Hall and Throne Room, as well as the chapel where Frederick the Great was baptised. But here, in the Bavarian Alps, Hitler was far removed from such dismal realities, as well as the relentless news from the Eastern Front about the advance of the Red Army.
Adolf Hitler: Rarefied air
In the rarefied air of the Berghof, life seemed reassuringly normal. Hitler rose late, dealt promptly with official matters and then retreated for an intimate afternoon lunch with guests and friends. They ate in the larchwood-panelled dining room with its bright-red morocco-covered chairs, plain white china, and silver bearing his personal monogram.
Usually there were 20 or so people around the table. Invariably, to Hitler's left sat his long-time mistress, Eva Braun. Members of his personal SS bodyguard, wearing white waistcoats and black trousers, acted as waiters. Afterwards everyone strolled through the pine woods to the Tea House – one of Hitler's favourite spots, with its magnificent panoramic views over the valley – for coffee and cakes. Then, around the night fire in the richly tapestried salon, he would listen to recordings of Wagner's operas and talk until the early hours about subjects ranging from his early days of struggle in Munich to his plan to reshape the world.
He slept in an ice-cold bedroom. His diet was vegetarian, and he drank no alcohol. Each day Dr Theodor Morell, his personal physician, would prescribe pills for the increasing number of ailments that troubled him. The Führer looked older than his 54 years. His face was heavily lined, his right eye often drooped, and he now walked with a stoop.
Adolf Hitler: 'Ruthless upholding of the national interest'
Despite, or perhaps because of this, he remained determined and defiant about his ultimate goals. Just two days before, he had met at the adjacent Platterhof Hotel with a group of senior military officers and generals. In a chilling speech that demonstrated that he had lost none of his fanaticism, he'd told them in no uncertain terms that their destiny was tied up with the fate of National Socialism and that this alone provided the basic principles that could now save Germany – leadership and intolerance, a refusal to compromise with the forces that threatened the nation's survival.
He'd spoken frankly about the Final Solution, the elimination of the Jews. Could he have done it more humanely? 'Gentlemen,' he answered his own question, 'we are in a life or death struggle . . . don't expect anything else from me except the ruthless upholding of the national interest.' He reminded them that, even as they met, the elimination of the Jews of Hungary was proceeding full steam ahead, a measure made possible, he emphasised, only because German forces had entered Hungary that spring.
Adolf Hitler: 'A garden of ruins'
As for invasion in the West, he veered erratically between welcoming it as an opportunity to smash the Allies and wondering if it would even happen that summer. Either way, he was confident of victory. If the Allies did invade, they would meet disaster and never dare try again. But if they did not, and their apparent preparations were no more than a gigantic bluff, he had secret weapons such as the flying bomb and new jet aircraft that would finish them off.
London, he prophesied, would be transformed into 'a garden of ruins'. That is, if the Allies hadn't already fallen out between themselves, as history suggested that allies always did before five years. Then the great East–West clash would break out and Germany would be saved. Time, he was confident, was on Germany's side.
Yet occasionally reality broke through and Hitler was forced to think about the urgent issue being faced in the west by von Rundstedt and, above all, by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commander of Army Group B, which contained the 15th and 7th Armies and stretched from the Netherlands in the north to the River Loire near France's Atlantic coast. If the Allied invasion were to happen, when and where was it most likely to come?
Adolf Hitler: Rich imagination
Hitler, like most of the German high command, had long assumed it would be somewhere along the narrowest stretch of the English Channel north of the Seine. Indeed, that hypothesis was built into the order, Directive 51, that he had issued to the high command in November 1943, which had underpinned the entire German defence effort since. Yet, a few months later, in April 1944, he had suddenly started talking of Normandy and Brittany, in north-western France, as possible targets that should also be kept in mind, and had asked for this part of the front to be reinforced.
There was no obvious reason for his change of mind. Perhaps he deduced that, with their overwhelming naval strength, the Allies would not necessarily need to capture a major port in the early stages of an invasion – one among many factors that had encouraged the Germans to focus on the more easterly coastline containing ports such as Calais, Le Havre and Boulogne. Reports from agents who had penetrated the French Resistance and scored some major successes may also have played a part. No one ever quite knew what arcane sources fuelled Hitler's rich imagination.
He also held firm to an idea that had long obsessed him – that the Allies might additionally strike at Norway; not as the main invasion area, but perhaps in some significant diversionary landing or raid. Norway's countless fiords provided important shelter for German U-boats and the country as a whole was useful for guarding Germany's northern flank. For this reason, he insisted that a substantial army of occupation be kept stationed there. The slightest signs of resistance or espionage were to be fiercely suppressed.
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel: 'What hatred there is …'
In the end, however, what would matter most on D-Day itself was not Hitler's reaction, but that of his commander on the spot, Rommel.
The château of La Roche-Guyon lies on a bend high up over the Seine, about 40 miles north-west of Paris and close to the gardens at Giverny made famous by Claude Monet's Impressionist paintings of water lilies. Once a Norman stronghold – the ruins of the castle still dominated the hill – it had long been the ancestral home of the dukes of La Rochefoucauld. An 18th-century holder of the title had written a famous book of maxims, and his portrait hung prominently in the château's hall of arms.
Shortly after Hitler chose him in January 1944 as the man to defeat the invasion, Rommel had made the château his headquarters, but he permitted the duke and his family to stay in their private quarters and was on excellent terms with them. Tunnels were cut deep into the cliffs to provide accommodation for his officers and men. His personal rooms opened on to a rose garden, and his study was adorned with tapestries and an Renaissance inlaid desk. As well as acquiring a couple of dachshunds to keep him company, he had adopted a large sporting dog named Ajax to accompany him on hare-shooting expeditions into the countryside.
After a hard day's work and supper, he would usually take an evening stroll around the park with his chief of staff Lieutenant General Hans Speidel and his naval adviser Vice Admiral Friedrich von Ruge. His favourite spot was beneath two large cedar trees, from where he'd gaze out over the peaceful valley of the Seine and the western sky. Rommel liked France – its food, its wine, its people, its landscape. Yet it was an occupied land, and not even he could ignore the fact. 'What hatred there is against us,' he noted in his diary.
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel: The Atlantic Wall
The 51-year-old field marshal was Hitler's former commander in north Africa, where he had earned the title 'The Desert Fox'. An austere and hard-driven man, he had spent the previous five months frantically preparing the defences of the vast area of western Europe under his command. 'The war will be won or lost on the beaches,' he declared one day while gazing out over a deserted shore. 'We'll have only one chance to stop the enemy and that's while he's in the water.'
As a result, the western coastline of France was now adorned both above and below the high-tide marks with a bewildering galaxy of anti-invasion obstacles. These included 'Belgian Gates', great 12-foot-high iron and steel frames with legs bracing them against the tides, set in the water about 300–400 yards from the high-tide mark; 'Czech Hedgehogs', four- or five-foot-high wooden or steel triangles primed with mines and shells, which were covered at high tide, so that any vessel hitting them would be holed; four-foot-high concrete cones; tetrahedrons draped with barbed wire; and sharpened wooden stakes festooned with mines.
Behind the beaches were anti-tank walls, great barbed-wire entanglements and four million mines. And all along the coast, at regular intervals, were blockhouses, gun emplacements, elaborate trench systems, hidden machine-gun posts, fortified houses and huge, reinforced-concrete casemates for heavy artillery. Together these fortifications enjoyed the grandiose title of the 'Atlantic Wall'.
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel: Into the tunnels
In overseeing the enormous task of constructing these defences, and in battling with his superiors for reinforcements, Rommel had exhausted himself.
But today even he took advantage of the sunshine to relax a little. He had himself driven in his Horch, his powerful staff car, to the nearby forest of Choisy, and then paid a visit to the marquis of Choisy, a frail old man and pro-German sympathiser whose son was fighting in the German army against the Bolsheviks on the Eastern Front.
That evening, back at La Roche-Guyon, he stayed up late chatting with the Rochefoucaulds about the war. They, too, had gambled on a German victory and could only hope that their guest would repel any invasion. But the signs were not hopeful. Recently, for the first time, they'd been forced down into the tunnels beneath the château as fleets of Allied aircraft on bombing missions flew overhead towards Paris.
General Dwight D Eisenhower: Media savvy
Across the Channel, Rommel's opposite number was carefully guarding the D-Day secret. General Dwight D Eisenhower had been appointed supreme commander of all the Allied invasion forces on the same day that Hitler had appointed Rommel – 15 January.
Roosevelt himself had asked Eisenhower to take on the job at a meeting in Tunis, when the president was on his way home after the first big wartime conference in Tehran with Churchill and Stalin. Because Roosevelt liked to talk about liberation rather than invasion, Eisenhower drafted his bulletins for public consumption accordingly. The media-savvy general knew that the battle for public opinion was vital in modern warfare. He spent most of this morning pre-recording the message he would release on the morning of D-Day.
Helping him was the media tycoon William S Paley, chairman of America's most powerful radio network, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), whose cast of stars included news reporters William L Shirer, Eric Sevareid, Howard K Smith and the legendary Edward R Murrow, whose gravelly voiced reports of the London Blitz in the dark days of the winter of 1940-1 had contributed so much to swaying neutral American opinion behind Britain.
Eisenhower had first met Paley at the Dorchester Hotel in London, thanks to an introduction by his naval aide, Harry Butcher, himself a former CBS lobbyist. The two men had instantly hit it off, and Eisenhower had given Paley a car, a driver and a generous supply of rationed petrol to enable him to travel freely around Britain. By 28 May 1944, Paley, now in a colonel's uniform, was chief of psychological broadcasting at Eisenhower's headquarters. He was also occupying a luxurious suite at Claridge's – the hotel was known colloquially as 'Little America' because of its popularity with American officers – sporting Cartier gold ID tags and enjoying affairs with Pamela Churchill, Randolph's wife, and Edwina Mountbatten, wife of Britain's supreme commander in South-east Asia.
'Radio broadcasting is an arm of warfare just as are guns and bullets, ' proclaimed Paley. This morning he nursed Eisenhower through his all-important D-Day broadcast. When they'd finished, the recording was carefully locked away in a vault.
General Dwight D Eisenhower: Man of iron
After he'd finished his work for the day, the supreme commander relaxed in the garden of his temporary home in England. Telegraph Cottage was a modest, two-bedroomed house in Kingston, just outside London. Eisenhower had chosen it to be physically removed from the capital and the distractions of unwanted visitors.
When he worked, he worked long and intensely. Like Rommel, he slept little, invariably rising early every day, well before his staff. He, too, had earned his spurs in the desert, as commander of Allied forces in north Africa. The two men were just a year apart in age, had strong and solid marriages, wrote regularly to their wives and had one son each. Rommel's was in the Luftwaffe as an anti-aircraft gunner; Eisenhower's was a cadet at the US military academy West Point.
The garden was ablaze with rhododendrons, poppies and pink and white roses. Like Churchill, Eisenhower liked to dabble as an artist. Taking up a pencil, he tried sketching the large pine tree that stood in the garden, but was dissatisfied with the result and scribbled 'Baloney' on it. His desire to sketch, noted Harry Butcher, was further evidence of his boredom and impatience with the long period of waiting. The headlines in the Sunday papers didn't help – promises about the imminent liberation of Rome only highlighted the lack of action closer to home.
The longer the wait, Eisenhower knew, the greater the chance of the secret leaking out. With 2.5 million men poised for action, it could hardly be otherwise. To ensure that everyone got the message, he stamped down hard on any leaks.
One of the most spectacular involved Major General Henry Miller, chief supply officer of the US 9th Air Force. During a cocktail party at Claridge's, Miller had talked freely about his supply problems, but had added that these would be over after D-Day, which would come, he revealed, before 15 June. The instant Eisenhower was told, he had Miller reduced to the rank of colonel and sent him back to the States. Miller's desperate plea to his old West Point classmate against the punishment proved useless: Eisenhower's broad smile masked a man of iron.
André Heintz: Patience and waiting
Shortly before nine o'clock that night, the young French school teacher in Caen, a city now shut down under its nightly curfew, had one final task to complete.
André Heintz had no affection for the Germans. His grandparents had left their native Alsace in disgust after Germany had annexed the province following the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1, and his father had been driven from his home in Burgundy, eastern France, by German troops during the First World War. For his family to face occupation by the national enemy yet again was a humiliation too far for André, and he was determined to do anything he could to hasten its end.
Excusing himself to his parents, he disappeared into the cellar of the family home. From a shelf of tinned groceries, he took down what the label announced was a tin of spinach. He removed the lid. Inside was hidden a small radio crystal set. Earlier he'd brought down a pair of earphones from a box concealed in the attic. He rigged up the set to the electrical circuit in the house, and the reception was good. At nine o'clock, he heard the distinctive voice of the BBC. The good news it brought about the war itself, especially the imminent fall of Rome, was heart-warming.
But André was actually listening for something else. At the beginning of May, a woman had come to his school while he was teaching a class. He'd hurried downstairs to meet her. She'd whispered six short messages into his ear and made him repeat them until he'd memorised them. They were the action messages that would be broadcast by the BBC after the news to announce the timing of D-Day. As soon as he received them, it would be his own special mission to alert the members of his group.
This is what he was now listening for. Tonight, as on every night since the woman's visit, he heard many other messages destined for various agents behind enemy lines. But none had he memorised. For him, too, life had become a matter of patience and waiting.
Sonia d'Artois: Second youngest
Later that night, Sonia d'Artois landed heavily in the French ditch that wrenched her shoulder so badly. The false identity card she carried bore the name 'Suzanne Bonvie' and stated that she was a resident of Cannes. She was 20 years old, the second youngest female secret agent ever dispatched to France from Britain.
Bruised and shaken, she joined up in the darkness with her two fellow agents, both men, who had jumped with her. Together they scoured the field for the containers dropped ahead of them. After a while, they gave up, and local Resistance fighters took them to a nearby farm. Here she was more than glad to toss back a welcome glass of calvados, the local apple brandy, and then, exhausted, fall heavily asleep in a comfortable bed.
– – –
Meanwhile, Peter Moen lay uneasily asleep in his prison bunk. Glenn Dickin and Bill Tucker were bedded down in their canvas tents along with their comrades-in-arms. Veronica Owen was also asleep in the crowded room she shared with half-a-dozen others in a requisitioned villa outside Portsmouth. Albert Grunberg sweltered in his stuffy attic. Sydney Hudson caught a few hours' rest before bicycling out to the farmhouse to meet Sonia. Walter Schwender slept soundly after his day at the beach.
And that night the Abwehr station in Madrid transmitted four messages to Berlin, numbered 862 to 865 and containing intelligence from agent Arabel about troop movements in Britain. Across the Dover Strait, thunderstorms and light showers helped clear the air.
David Stafford, a former diplomat and academic, is currently project director at the Centre for Second World War Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of several books on Churchill, World War II and intelligence history, including Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of secrets, Secret Agent: The true story of the Special Operations Executive, Spies beneath Berlin and Churchill and the Secret Service.
