D-Day by Stephen E. Ambrose

Author:Stephen E. Ambrose
Language: pol
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9788389656803
Publisher: Wydawnictwo MAGNUM Ltd.
Published: 2012-07-24T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

The First Five Days of June

On June 1, the second day on which the Allied troops and vehicles in Britain were being loaded on board ship, the Anglo-American planners of the Normandy landings, set for June 5, were shown the decrypt of a telegram from the Japanese Ambassador in Berlin, Count Oshima, to Tokyo.

In his telegram, Oshima reported on a conversation that he had had with Hitler four days earlier, when Hitler told Oshima that the Allies had completed their preparations; that they had assembled eighty divisions, eight of which had combat experience and were “very good troops”; that after diversionary operations in Norway, Denmark, southwestern France, and on the French Mediterranean coast, they would establish a bridgehead in Normandy or Brittany; and that after seeing how things went, they would embark on establishing a real second front in the Dover Strait.

Several things were clear from Hitler’s conversation: while the Germans regarded an invasion either in Normandy or Brittany as definite, they did not know which it would be, nor did they regard it as imminent; several diversionary operations elsewhere were expected to come first. Also, it was believed in Berlin that the Pas-de-Calais would be the true focus of the main assault on Fortress Europe.

June 1 held a moment of concern for the Allied Intelligence services. That morning, the London Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle included the clue “Britannia and he hold the same thing,” the answer to which was Neptune—the code name for the Allied naval assault.* A scrutiny of the paper’s crossword puzzles over the previous month revealed four other D-Day code words. Two of them were the American landing beaches: “One of the US” on May 2 (Utah), and “Red Indian on the Missouri” on May 22 (Omaha).† On May 27 came the code word for the whole operation: “but some bigwig has stolen some of it at times” (Overlord).‡ And on May 30 the artificial harbors: “This bush is a centre of nursery revolutions” (Mulberry).§

The man who had devised these crossword puzzles, Leonard Dawe, was the headmaster of a school in southern England. Questioned by Military Intelligence, it emerged that his choice of these particular clues had been entirely fortuitous, although his brother-in-law did work at the Admiralty. He had, he said, compiled those particular crossword puzzles some months earlier. Fortunately, the clues were not noticed by German Intelligence or matched up with anything they might have gleaned elsewhere. Their own spies in Britain had long ago been captured and shot—or, like Garbo, were working steadily against them.

For the Allied planners, June 1 marked the first day of an intense pattern of consultations. Each morning and evening all the senior commanders met at Southwick House, Portsmouth, to discuss the final details of the imminent invasion. General Montgomery and Admiral Ramsay were already at Portsmouth. Eisenhower continued to make daily shuttles there by car from his headquarters at Bushey, traveling via his Air Headquarters at Stanmore. The main concern at the twice-daily meetings in Portsmouth was the deteriorating condition of the weather.

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