D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [26]
The small number of action groups in Calvados did not mean a lack of assistance to the Allies. A stream of information had been passed back to London. German divisions in the region were identified in laundries by the numbers inscribed on the collars of their tunics. Many of the details which enabled the British to seize the bridge over the Orne at Bénouville in a highly successful glider operation came from members of the Resistance. And two men who worked in the Organisation Todt offices, which supervised the construction of coastal defences, had copied plans and maps. One of them, Monsieur Brunet, was caught and condemned todeath. Minefields, both real andfake, were identified, and attempts were made to estimate the calibre of the guns covering the beaches. This was difficult, since workers were evacuated before the coastal artillery was installed, but the depth of the zone forbidden to fishing craft during firing practice gave a useful indication.
While General Koenig and his staff coordinated Resistance activities from London, SHAEF planned the operations of the special forces groups to be parachuted in to work with the Resistance. SHAEF envisaged that the SOE groups already in place would attack rail targets principally in the interior. The 2,420 Special Air Service troops, on the other hand, would be dropped closer to the coast. In Bradley’s First US Army headquarters, the conventional ‘straight-legs’ of the regular army were sceptical of the SAS, whom they regarded as ‘nothing more than highly trained parasaboteurs’. ‘The purpose,’ ran the report on the subject, ‘is to drop SAS people very close to the area and have them do little bits of killing here and there in addition to such things as putting water in gas tanks, letting air out of tires and generally playing around.’ The US Army would become rather more appreciative of their efforts later on, especially in Brittany.
The unit tasked for Brittany, the 2ème Régiment de Chasseurs Parachutistes of the SAS Brigade, was to be the first French unit in action on the soil of France since 1940. Wearing the maroon beret of the British Parachute Regiment with the Cross of Lorraine as a badge, its advance detachments took off in Halifaxes from Fairford on the night of 5 June. By the end of July, the French SAS had a force of over 30,000 Breton maquisards in action.
Since March 1943, other groups had been training to parachute into France to assist and train the Resistance in key areas. The most important were the three-man ‘Jedburgh’ teams, usually consisting of a British or an American officer, a French officer and a radio operator. Altogether, eighty-three teams briefed by Koenig’s staff would be dropped in uniform, but many of them arrived too late to be useful.
Rommel was well aware of the threat to his lines of communication, not just from the Resistance, but above all from the Allied air forces. ‘We will undergo the same experience with supplies in the invasion battle as we had in North Africa,’ he had told General Bayerlein on 15 May. ‘The supply lines will be destroyed and we will get nothing across the Rhine as we got nothing across the Mediterranean.’
The Allied plan, however, was not to seal off the battlefield at the Rhine. SHAEF aimed to cut off Normandy and Brittany by smashing rail communications and destroying all the bridges along the River Seine to the east and the Loire to the south. But ‘Transportation’, as the operation became known, proved very hard to launch, because of British anxieties and personal rivalries.
Eisenhower’s deputy, Air Chief Marshal Tedder, was the main proponent of the plan. In February, Air Marshal Harris of Bomber Command and General Spaatz of the Eighth Air Force received warning that preparations for Overlord would require their heavy squadrons to be diverted from the strategic bombing offensive against Germany. Harris, who