The King's Speech - Mark Logue [84]
Lascelles had not had to explain what he meant by D-Day. The military terminology for the day chosen for the Allied assault on Europe had long since passed into common parlance. But when – and where – that assault would take place remained a closely guarded secret. The element of surprise was essential if the Allies were to succeed, and they had gone to extraordinary and ingenious lengths to feed disinformation to the Germans.
It had been seventeen months earlier, at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, that Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed on a full-scale invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe using a combination of British and American forces. Churchill, who was keen to avoid a repetition of the costly frontal assaults of the First World War, had proposed invading the Balkans, with the aim of linking up with Soviet forces and then possibly bringing in Turkey on the side of the Allies. The Americans preferred an invasion of Western Europe, however – and their view prevailed. The decision was confirmed at the Quebec conference of August 1943. The operation was named Operation Overlord, and by that winter the choice of landing point had been narrowed down to either the Pas-de-Calais area or Normandy. On Christmas Eve, General Eisenhower was appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SCAEF).
Plans for the operation were outlined by Eisenhower and his commanders at a meeting held on 15 May in a classroom of St Paul’s School – the unusual venue was chosen apparently because General Montgomery, commander of the 21st Army Group, to which all of the invasion ground forces belonged, had been educated there. In the days that followed, more and more forces were concentrated in southern England; the invasion was imminent.
D-Day was initially tentatively set for 5 June, but the weather that weekend was poor: it was cold and wet and there was a gale blowing from the west and high seas, all of which would make it impossible to launch landing craft from larger ships at sea. Low cloud, meanwhile, would prevent Allied aircraft from finding their targets. The operation required a day close to full moon; one was due on that Monday. Delaying for nearly a month and sending the troops back to their embarkation camps would be a huge and difficult operation and so, advised by his chief meteorologist of a brief clear improvement in the weather the next day, Eisenhower took the momentous decision of going for 6 June.
Hours later, Operation Neptune – the name given to the first, assault phase of Operation Overlord – began: shortly after midnight, 24,000 British, American, Canadian and Free French airborne troops landed. Then, starting at 6.30 a.m. British Double Summer Time, the first Allied infantry and armoured divisions embarked along a fifty-mile stretch of the Normandy coast. By the end of the day, more than 165,000 troops had come ashore; over 5,000 ships were involved. It was the largest amphibious invasion of all time.
That evening at six o’clock, Logue arrived, as arranged, at the Palace; he was shown in to see the King fifteen minutes later. The speech was scheduled for nine o’clock and the atmosphere was tense. But there were also some comic moments: just as Logue was taking the King through his voice exercises, they caught sight out of the window of a procession of five people in the garden of Buckingham Palace, among them a policeman. As they watched, the woman put a net over her head, which made Logue think they were trying to coax a swarm of bees into a box. ‘The King got quite excited, and wanted to go out and give them a hand,’ observed Logue. ‘It only wanted me to say yes, and he would have opened the window and gone on to the lawn – but it wouldn’t do to have the King chance being stung by a bee just before a broadcast, so curious as I was I had to pretend that I was not interested.’
After trying the speech through once, they went downstairs to the air-raid shelter. Logue was fascinated by it. ‘What a beautiful place,’ he