The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (4 page)

by June 1944. This meant that throughout the war, lo- cal inhabitants lived literally side by side with the oc- cupiers. Germans took over hotels, public buildings, and schools for barracks and headquarters and requi- sitioned furnishings, beds, and all manner of domestic equipment; their soldiers were billeted upon the popu- lation, taking up living rooms, barnyards, and stables and displacing local families. German requisitions of food for their troops and forage for their animals hurt the economy, as did military maneuvers through the heavily agricultural countryside.
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To the depredations of the foreign troops were added the indignities of France’s own policy of collabora- tion. The Vichy-based government of Marshal Henri- Philippe Pétain pursued an obsequious policy toward the Germans through which, in exchange for integrat- ing France into Hitler’s New Order as a vassal state, the French authorities gained a measure of independence in running internal affairs. But the burden of this pol- icy fell upon the French people. The attitude of Calva- dosiens, who like many of their countrymen had once admired Pétain as a war hero and a man of steadfast patriotism, sharply deteriorated after the June 1942 an- nouncement of “la relève.” This program, initiated by Vichy, sought to secure the release of one French pris- oner of war from German camps in exchange for every

three French civilian workers that could be delivered to German hands. It was blackmail and was met with stu- pefaction and shame in France. Worse, Calvadosiens quickly learned that the Germans had reneged on their end of the deal: in exchange for six hundred volunteers from the Calvados, the Germans returned only eleven POWs to the department. The relève was only one form of conscription: in addition to labor in Germany, the occupation authorities sought French labor for work on the Atlantic Wall. The Todt Organization, under the direction of Albert Speer, started work in the middle of 1942 on a defensive wall running from Brittany to Hol- land, with particular strength in the Pas-de- Calais, the region considered most likely to be assaulted by the Allies. From October to December 1942, the German headquarters demanded 2,450 workers from Calvados alone to be set to work on building these defensive ram- parts. Workers had to be withdrawn from construction and agricultural sectors. They worked directly under German overseers in deplorable conditions alongside Russian and Polish POWs, living in harsh work camps with little medical care. Combined with workers sent into Germany, Calvados had lost 4,500 workers by the end of December 1942, and an additional 1,679 workers were called up by the Germans in April 1943. The lo- cal skilled workforce was being systematically stripped bare.
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In the context of growing German labor demands and an improvement in the fortunes of the Allied war effort in Africa and Italy, the year 1943 was decisive for the growth of the local Resistance: 40 percent of those who would join a Calvados underground network did so in that year. The Resistance was never large in Calvados. No more than 2,000 people were formally associated with Resistance networks by the start of 1944, precisely because the German military presence was so heavy there, and reprisals against civilians were severe and frequent. Yet Resistance networks played an impor- tant role in aiding downed Allied pilots and sheltering young men who were in hiding from forced labor con- scription. Resistance networks also acted as a means of promoting periodic civilian acts of defiance, from tear- ing down of German posters to the scrawling of the “ V ” sign in public places.
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As the prospect of an Allied invasion of France neared, the German occupation of Calvados intensified, with profound consequences for the local inhabitants. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commanding the Ger- man armies in the west, possessed sixty German di- visions, and he deployed four in Calvados. Added to other occupation authorities and labor services, this meant there were 60,000–70,000 foreigners in the de- partment by June 1944, all of whom had to be fed and

housed. From the late fall of 1943, the Germans mas- sively increased the pace of defensive preparations along the coast: mines, obstacles, tank traps, barbed wire, and concrete gun emplacements popped up all along the coastline. The Germans laced local fields with mines and flooded lowlands. Open areas were stud- ded with “Rommel’s asparagus,” tall poles designed to shred any troop-carrying Allied aircraft that might attempt a landing. The Germans banned commercial fishing so they could control all sea-based activity, and halted all local building so that supplies could be chan- neled toward the construction of defensive positions on the beaches. Thirty thousand hectares, or 7 percent of the arable land of Calvados, was taken out of cultiva- tion by flooding, mines, or defensive preparations. The Germans made still further demands for local labor details, forcing village mayors to produce able-bodied men between eighteen and fifty years old to work on the fortifications. In February 1944, Vichy passed a law making women between eighteen and forty-five subject to immediate labor for the Germans. Inevitably, eco- nomic life of the region ground to a halt as the fevered work on the Atlantic Wall sucked in local labor and ma- terials; in the fields, labor disappeared, crops were not sown, and horses were requisitioned by the Germans to pull wagons. The countryside, one of the richest and most productive regions of France, was largely aban-

doned. Cereals and grain supplies that Calvados relied

on could not be transported into the department be- cause the train lines were now given over exclusively to military use. By the spring of 1944, Calvados, nor- mally an abundant supplier of meat, faced a severe shortage of this staple; even the meager official meat ration of a hundred grams per week per person could not be filled, largely the result of the lack of fodder and the heavy demands made by German troops. The black market became the only way to secure sufficient supplies of butter and meat, and prices soared. This in turn heightened social tensions, as farmers naturally

hoarded their goods to get a better price and assure their own needs; workers in the towns and cities went increasingly without. The Vichy-controlled prefect re- ported a sharp rise in morbidity due to typhoid, tuber- culosis, diphtheria, and scarlet fever.
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The behavior of the Germans toward the civilian popu- lation worsened with the likelihood of an Allied inva- sion. In January 1944, Hitler’s chief of conscript labor, Fritz Sauckel, demanded that France produce yet an- other million laborers to be deployed for the German war effort, but virtually no one complied. In Calvados, of the 1,370 men called up, a mere 104 responded to the order. The desperate Germans resorted to the use of roundups and arrests in cinemas and public places to secure recalcitrant labor conscripts, and shipped off their quarry to camps in Germany. Prisons bulged with civilians arrested on the least pretext. In response to stepped up Resistance attacks on local officials, collab- orators, and German soldiers, the Germans violently cracked down. In March 1944, all radios were ordered to be surrendered so that BBC emissions could not be heard. Through arrests, torture, and infiltration by col- laborators, the Germans managed to crack open many of the local Resistance networks; over 200 resisters were killed in the six months before the D-Day inva- sion.
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And as if these travails were not enough, the Anglo- American bombing of France, as part of the preliminary preparations for the invasion, intensified throughout the spring of 1944, making life a constant misery for millions of people in towns from the Pas-de- Calais to Normandy. Rouen, a city on the Seine and a rail junc- tion that Allied planners knew the Germans would use to reinforce Normandy, was devastated by repeated at- tacks: on April 19, 1944, there were 900 people killed in Rouen by British bombing, and in the first week of June a series of attacks by American bombers killed an additional 200 people there. In Calvados, the prefect’s reports reveal the constant and enervating presence of Allied aircraft in the skies: air attacks struck the de- partment on March 2, 13, 26, 27; April 9, 11, 20, 23, 25,

27 (twice), and 29; May 9, 15, 19, 21, 22, 23, and 27; and June 1. The ostensible targets were railway junctions, barracks, airfields, and crossroads. But these prepara- tory attacks killed many French people. The attack of April 27 on the coastal village of Ouistreham killed 17 people and wounded 40. Between March 1 and June 5, 130 people were killed in Calvados by these bomb- ings.
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It is perhaps no wonder that the Normans, who yearned for liberation, had the appearance of a broken, tired people when the Allied soldiers splashed ashore on June 6, 1944.

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W

HEN LIBERATION DID arrive, it came not all at once but in a series of devastating, prolonged, murderous blows, delivered by

air, sea, and ground bombardment and by the lethal weapons of the Allied soldiers. On D-Day, 1,300 civil- ians were killed in Calvados alone; on June 7, another 1,200 died. Added to the deaths in other Norman de- partments, it appears that 3,000 civilians were killed on June 6–7. Thus, roughly the same number of French civilians died in the first twenty-four hours of the inva- sion of Normandy as did Allied soldiers. And the kill- ing had only just begun: between June 6 and August 25, Normandy would be chewed into a bloody, unrec- ognizable mess. In the five northern departments that saw the most fighting— Calvados, Manche, Orne, Eure, and Seine-Maritime—19,890 French civilians paid for liberation with their lives.
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Calvados got its first taste of liberation a few min- utes before midnight on June 5, when 946 aircraft of the Royal Air Force (RAF) struck targets along the coast of the landing beaches. The RAF dropped five thousand tons of bombs on German defensive posi- tions in ten towns, seven of which were in Calvados: Maisy, Saint-Pierre-du-Mont (the location of the mas-

sive guns perched on the promontory of la Pointe du Hoc), Longues-sur-Mer, le Mont Fleury, Ouistreham, Merville, and Houlgate. This was the largest tonnage of bombs yet dropped in a single night in the entire war.
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Fortunately, these sparsely populated towns had been largely evacuated in the weeks before the landings by order of the Germans and of local authorities. The Ger- mans wished to defend against any Resistance activity by the local population, while many civilians, after the bombings of the early spring, had fled of their own ini- tiative. Even so, these initial bombardments killed at least forty civilians. At dawn on the 6th, 1,083 B-17s and B-24s of the United States Eighth and Ninth Air Forc- es took their turn, hammering the general vicinity of what was to be Omaha beach. Many of the bombs were dropped too far inland, leaving the coastal batteries on Omaha untouched, while Port-en-Bessin, the coastal village on the far eastern flank of Omaha, was struck hard, as were most of the surrounding hamlets. Na- val gunnery joined in, aiming at German batteries but inevitably hitting the surrounding villages. Vierville, Bernières, Courseulles, Saint-Aubin, Lion-sur-Mer, Ouistreham: These are towns that ring down the ages as the site of great heroics by invading Allied soldiers who wrested them from the Germans on June 6 and af- ter. Yet they also ran with the blood of at least 100 non- combatants.
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Throughout the two days of June 6 and

June 7, many Norman communities received devastat- ing bombardments from both air and sea. The purpose of these assaults was obviously to kill Germans and to impede the movement of any reinforcements from the Pas-de- Calais, where large concentrations of Germans had been placed in anticipation of Allied landings there. Yet air power was at best a crude tool: Allied air- craft did not possess the accuracy required to destroy a bridge, a railyard, a crossroads, a telegraph station, or an artillery position without also destroying a great deal of the surrounding area. The results were predict- ably awful: dozens upon dozens of hamlets were heav- ily bombed, and their lovely lyrical French names are now as synonymous with death in the minds of Nor- mans as places like Coventry, Dresden, and Hiroshima are dolorous place-names for the British, Germans, and Japanese: Argentan, Aunay-sur- Odon, Avranches, Colombelles, Condé-sur-Noireau, Coutances, Dives- sur-Mer, Évrecy, Falaise, Lisieux, Mézidon, Mondeville, Montebourg, Ouistreham, Saint-Lô, Thury-Harcourt, Tilly-sur- Seulles, Valognes, Villers-Bocage, Villers-le- Sec, Vire…

More than any single location in Normandy, however, the city of Caen offers testimony to the brutality of Normandy’s liberation.
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Caen was the chief target of the British and Canadian landings on D-Day, but for a

number of reasons that still stir controversy, General Bernard Montgomery’s men failed to take the city.
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Partly it was because the German 21st Panzer Division put up a stubborn defense just north of Caen, partly it was because the British tanks got bottled up on the beaches, partly it was because the plan was simply too ambitious an objective for units that had crossed the channel and undertaken an unprecedented amphibi- ous landing the same day. Yet it was not for lack of try- ing. From June 6 to June 8, Anglo- Canadian forces tried to bash their way into Caen, and the skies filled with bombers to help them. At 1:30 P.M. and 4:30 P.M. on June 6, and 2:30 A.M. on June 7, Caen was pummeled from the air by RAF and U.S. Eighth Air Force bombers in an effort to destroy the city’s bridges across the Orne and slow German reinforcements from moving through the city. Yet for all the bombing, at least one bridge over the Orne was still intact, while concentrations of Ger- man troops were not hit. The 21st Panzers were already established north of the city and were soon joined by the 12th Panzer Division. On June 9, the Panzer Lehr Division arrived in the field and now there was a strong defensive shield to the north and west of Caen. There had been little military value in the air attack on Caen. The rubble in the streets impeded passage of military vehicles, yet even the jaunty official history by the U.S. Air Force admitted the bombing was insignificant: “the