Ike's Spies (18 page)

Such coordination became impossible, however, after the imposing of the diplomatic ban, because de Gaulle said he would be damned if he would use the British cipher to communicate with his military leaders in London. If the French could not use their own cipher, they would not talk to Ike or anyone else.

An additional problem was that both Churchill and FDR mistrusted the French so completely that they insisted Eisenhower
not
tell any Frenchman the date or place of the attack. The complex story of how these problems were worked out takes a volume in itself to describe fully; suffice it to say here that Ike spent much of his preinvasion time on relations with the French without ever achieving a satisfactory resolution.
¹⁵
His main accomplishment was to convince de Gaulle that he was honest, intelligent, and a sincere friend of France.

Through the spring of 1944 the
JEDS
went through their training, under
SHAEF
supervision, while the staff at Special Force Headquarters pored over charts, maps, railroad schedules, and timetables to select targets in France for the Maquis to hit on D-Day and in the follow-up period.

The British official history of
SOE
outlines the role
SHAEF
assigned to the Maquis: “A preliminary increase in the tempo of sabotage, with particular attention to fighter aircraft and enemy morale; attacks on local hq, simple road and telephone wrecking, removal of German explosive from mined bridges likely to be useful to the allies, and more and more sabotage as the air battle reached its climax; and then, simultaneously with the seaborne assault, an all-out attack on roads, railways and telephones, and the harassing of occupation troops wherever they could be found by any available means.” All this had to be coordinated with
FORTITUDE
—i.e., the sabotage activities had to be spread out evenly over all possible landing sites, with the emphasis on the Pas de Calais.
¹⁶

The
JEDS
had some ingenious techniques to work with. Julian Huxley, the zoologist, developed a cyclonite plastic explosive that
could be manufactured by the thousands and that looked to be cattle droppings. They were powerful enough to burst a rubber tire. The idea was for the Maquis to spread them in the path of panzer columns trying to make their way to Normandy. The
JEDS
learned how to disrupt German communications systems in such a way that the Germans could not find the breaks—one such technique was to drive a thumbtack into a signals cable. All across France, in the days following June 6, signposts were turned to point in the wrong direction, causing terrible confusion among the Wehrmacht. A cube or two of sugar in the gas tank could immobilize a Tiger Royal tank.

JED
agents in the north of France managed to sabotage more than a hundred factories producing war materials for the Germans. The favorite technique was simplicity itself: A
JED
, or more likely a Frenchman of the Maquis speaking for him, would approach the manager of a factory requesting that he allow the sabotage of certain machines, and threatening Allied bombing of the plant if he did not agree. Most agreed, if only to prevent the destruction of the entire plant. Those who did not were amazed at how quickly and accurately the
JEDS
could call in air strikes on their factories.
¹⁷

THE VAST MAJORITY
of regular army officers are disdainful of irregular forces, for in their view the guerrilla warriors are without order, control, discipline, or clearly defined purpose. But Ike was not an ordinary professional soldier, and from the moment he took up the reins of command for
OVERLORD
he counted on the Maquis for a significant contribution to victory, most of all in the areas of interrupting communications and slowing the flow of German reinforcements to Normandy. In short, the Maquis would be one of his chief weapons in the battle of the buildup, nearly as important as
FORTITUDE
.

In late April, Eisenhower made one of his most basic decisions on the Maquis and
OVERLORD
. Special Forces Headquarters had planned to keep the Resistance in the South of France out of action on D-Day. The idea was to turn the Maquis loose only after the Allied landings at Marseilles (code name
ANVIL
), which was scheduled for mid-August. Headquarters feared that if they rose up in June, the Germans would identify them and probably eliminate most of them before
ANVIL
. In that case, the French Resistance
would not be able to do for
ANVIL
what it was counted on to do for
OVERLORD
.

On April 18, however, Eisenhower decided to overrule Special Forces. He sent a cable to the Supreme Commander, Mediterranean, General Henry Wilson, saying that because
OVERLORD
had the top priority, and because “it is unlikely that Resistance forces in south France could be restrained from rising when
OVERLORD
is launched,” he had decided to have
SHAEF
take operational control of the Resistance in the South of France and make it an integral part of the whole
JED
setup. The objective, Ike ordered on May 21, would be to “delay the movement of enemy forces to the lodgement area,” and to “harass such enemy lines of communications as pass through the South of France.” Special Forces then worked up long, detailed, extensive charts on exactly what bridges, railroad crossings, and other key points the supreme commander wanted destroyed.
¹⁸

The results, all across France, were tremendous and spectacular. The BBC broadcast the famous “personal messages” that set off the Maquis and started a vast army in motion. On the night of June 5–6 alone, the Maquis successfully attacked 950 of the 1,050 railroad targets it had been given.
¹⁹

Sensational as that achievement was, there was even better to follow. All across France that night,
JED
teams landed from the air, made contact with the local Maquis leaders, and went into action. On D-Day plus one, a German ss armored division equipped with the latest and best German tanks started out from Toulouse toward Normandy. Its progress was excruciatingly, infuriatingly slow. All the bridges over the Loire River were down, some destroyed by air, some by the Maquis.

The 2d ss Panzer Division had its own bridging train, and much experience with the broad Russian rivers in how to use it, so the downed bridges held it up for only a few hours. What really slowed it down was the incessant guerrilla activity. The division's gasoline dumps were blown before it even got started. There was only a single open railway line running north, of almost no help to the tankers because one stick of dynamite could derail the whole train. So they marched, and at every appropriate spot along the way, the Maquis sprayed the column with machine-gun and mortar fire. That action caused the panzers to halt in their tracks. Then the
JED
teams could put in a call to the Allied air forces, and Ike's pilots would give the Germans a good pounding. The British official history records that the Maquis “left the Germans so thoroughly mauled that when they did eventually crawl into their lagers close to the fighting line, heaving a sigh of relief that at last they would have real soldiers to deal with and not these damned terrorists, their fighting quality was much below what it had been when they started.”
²⁰

When Rommel persuaded Hitler to send the 2d ss Panzer Division to Normandy, he expected it to arrive on D-Day plus three. It actually arrived, after passing through its ordeal of fire, on D-Day plus seventeen. One more panzer division at Omaha Beach on June 9 or 10 might well have made the difference, so it may be said with truth that in this operation alone the Maquis made an invaluable contribution to the Allied victory. Of course, not all German columns moving toward Normandy were so badly hit, but
SHAEF
estimated that the overall action of the Resistance resulted in an average delay of two days on all German units attempting to move to the battle.
²¹

The French paid heavily for their own liberation. If regular soldiers do not like fighting with guerrillas, they like even less having to fight against them. The Germans, in any event, had fallen into the habit of behaving like absolute beasts in France. Consequently, the revenge they reaped for Maquis actions was terrible. The worst and most famous case was Oradour-sur-Glane, where in retaliation for sniper fire that had killed a popular company commander, the Germans rounded up the entire population in the village square. The women and children were sent into the church; the men were shot down where they stood; the Germans then set fire to the church. Armed ss guards stood around it to make certain nobody got out alive. About seven hundred were killed.
²²

The Maquis not only harassed the German columns headed toward Normandy; the French also provided the
SHAEF
forces with priceless information on German troop movements in general, on the strength of various units, their equipment, their leaders, their-weaknesses. When, in August, the Germans began their retreat from Normandy, the Maquis ambushed the retreating columns, attacked isolated groups, and protected bridges from destruction.

The
OSS
official history declared, “The most significant discovery was the enormous importance of French resistance as a source
of accurate tactical intelligence. The Maquis role in this respect had originally been contemplated as incidental, but it proved to be a major contribution. Just before the break-through at St. Lô, for example, the Maquis gave the Americans excellent coverage of German artillery placements, tank units, troops dispositions and the condition of strategic bridges.”
²³

Was the Maquis worth five divisions to Ike? Ten? Twenty? It was and is impossible to make an exact estimate. Ike used the word “invaluable” on numerous occasions in his postwar praise of the Resistance forces. He also frequently pointed to the most intangible but perhaps most valuable contribution of those forces: “Not least in importance,” Eisenhower declared in his official report, “they had, by their ceaseless harassing activities, surrounded the Germans with a terrible atmosphere of danger and hatred which ate into the confidence of the leaders and the courage of the soldiers.”
²⁴

Nor did Eisenhower wait until after the war to show his appreciation. On June 15, when the campaign was less than ten days old, he greatly increased the rate of supply drops to the Maquis throughout France. “These extra sorties are being given,” he explained, “in order to further assist the resistance movement which at the moment is giving unexpected results.” An especially big drop came on June 25, when 180 bombers of the U. S. Eighth Air Force delivered three hundred tons of supplies to guerrillas in four separate areas in southern France. A Resistance leader signaled London, “The Maquis' thanks to the U. S. Air Force for a damned good show! When is the next?” The next came on Bastille Day and was also a great success.
²⁵

Until June 17, the Resistance received its missions (and thus in practice its orders) from Special Forces, a part of
SHAEF
. De Gaulle found this fact distressing. He insisted that French troops had to be commanded by French generals, and he had already declared that all those who took part in the national uprising against the enemy would be considered part of the French Army and entitled to all the rights and privileges of regular soldiers. Ike, anxious to please de Gaulle as a necessary part of maintaining coordination with the Resistance, had seen the point long before the invasion, but Churchill and Roosevelt would not give him permission to put the Resistance under a French general.

By mid-June, however, they had come to see that their mistrust
of de Gaulle was misplaced, and they allowed Ike to appoint General Pierre Joseph Koenig the head of the French Forces of the Interior, as the Maquis was now called officially. A week later, Ike announced that Koenig had the same status of any Allied commander serving under
SHAEF
.
²⁶
The humiliation and shame of the occupation, 1940–44, was finally over. The French had once again taken their place alongside their British and American friends to drive the Boche from their soil.

When Special Force Headquarters disbanded in 1945, Eisenhower wrote a personal letter of appreciation. He said no final assessment of the operational value of the Resistance had yet been made, but “I consider that the disruption of enemy rail communications, the harassing of German road moves and the continual and increasing strain placed on the German war economy and internal security services throughout occupied Europe by the organized forces of resistance, played a very considerable part in our complete and final victory.”

Ike added his own “great admiration for the brave and often spectacular exploits” of the Resistance and the
JED
teams. Finally, he put the effort into perspective: “In no previous war, and in no other theater during this war, have resistance forces been so closely harnessed to the main military effort.”
²⁷

THE AMERICANS
were also getting better in the spy game. Two young
SLUS
, Stuyvesant Wainwright II and John Oakes, captured the first German stay-behind agent, a Frenchman whose code name was Frutos. They knew Frutos was in Cherbourg because they had monitered his trial-run messages back to Germany, sent before American troops overran the port city. Frutos' assignment was to send the Germans information on troop units coming into France, ships in port, and so on. From one of the practice messages, Wainwright and Oakes knew Frutos had a girl friend. As soon as the Americans entered Cherbourg, they found her. She talked. They picked up Frutos, turned him into a double-agent, and used him exactly as the British used their agents in the Double-Cross System. That is, Frutos was allowed to send on accurate information about matters the Germans already knew, while feeding them false information on key points, designed to support
FORTITUDE
.
²⁸