In Europe (79 page)

Infuriated, the handful of survivors from Oradour-sur-Glane sent their medals and their
Légions d'honneur
back to Paris, and refused to have anything more to do with the French state.

A number of highly successful public relations campaigns were carried out after the Second World War. The Austrians succeeded in transforming themselves from enthusiastic co-culprits into fellow victims. The cautious Dutch suddenly became robust heroes of the resistance, every one of whom had hidden an Anne Frank in their attic. But what the French got away with borders on the unbelievable. Whenever the war was discussed in France, it was always in terms of glory and triumph, as though there had been no defeat, chaos, starvation, despondency or collaboration.

That image is due to General de Gaulle and his 300,000 Free French
Forces, to the heroes of the Resistance and to courageous bands of
Maquisards
. They fought bravely all over Europe, they gave France a new dignity and a new face, and their incredible courage is justly applauded. Yet it remains astounding to see how, after 1944, all of France suddenly emerged victorious from the wings. Vichy, after all, remained the legitimate government of France till the very end: the National Assembly granted Pétain its full mandate on 10 July, 1940. At the casino in Vichy there now hangs a plaque commemorating the 80 representatives who voted against him, but nothing is said about the 569 (with 17 abstaining) who actually
did
vote for Pétain.

In Fascist Italy, the persecution of the Jews was sabotaged everywhere. From the French town of Drancy, on 17 August, 1944, eight days before Paris was liberated, a train was still able to leave for Auschwitz with 700 prisoners. A little more than a week later, de Gaulle was welcomed by at least a million cheering Parisians. What is forgotten is the hundreds of thousands who had enthusiastically welcomed Pétain only four months earlier, when he visited the city on 26 April, 1944 to commemorate the victims of war. Of 1.5 million French public officials, only around 30,000 were ever penalised in any way for their collaboration, including their assistance in the deportation of Jews. Papon, the Jew-hunter of Bordeaux, was able to build a new and glorious career in post-war France; he became the chief of police in Paris under de Gaulle, and ultimately even a cabinet minister. In 1953 almost all of the collaborators were granted amnesty. By 1958, fourteen former Vichy officials were already back in the French parliament.

After a series of complicated manoeuvres, de Gaulle was finally able to make his triumphal entry into Paris on 26 August, 1944. ‘Paris, Paris abused, Paris broken, Paris martyred but Paris liberated by her own people with the help of the armies of France!’ he shouted, with characteristic rhetoric. And everyone cheered, even though not a single French battalion had taken part in the heroic landings on D-Day, even though de Gaulle himself had not worked on the preparations, even though only a single division of the Free French Forces had fought along with the total of 39 in Normandy, and even though only a small portion of the population of Paris – according to reliable estimates, no more than 15,000 men and
women – had taken an active part in the Resistance. None of that mattered. De Gaulle's conceptual France had won, and after 1945 would even oversee one of Germany's occupied zones.

For what France needed was a grand historical account, to get back on its feet again and to redefine itself as a nation. The Resistance, the Maquis and the Free French Forces made great sacrifices. But all over the country the war cemeteries are full of ‘perfidious’ Englishmen and ‘decadent’ Americans, ‘dirty’ Jews and ‘stinking’ Spanish refugees, and countless Poles who were never given credit for a single victory.

Normandy. The 84th Field Company of the British Royal Engineers at Sword Beach on the morning of 6 June, 1944. The two men in the foreground, a worried-looking soldier and a shouting corporal, are already walking on the sand. It may be the last picture ever taken of them, for the chances of survival on Sword Beach were at that point slim indeed. But it is the foreground of this first invasion photograph in particular that tells the story like a medieval painting: the landing craft in the morning mist, the men wading onto the beach – one bent double, another being helped along, a third running.

Ernie Pyle described the situation two days later: ‘Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn't know they were in the water, for they were dead.’ Beneath the waves lay hundreds of trucks and landing craft, often with crew and all, that hadn't made the beach. Of the thirty-two amphibious tanks, twenty-seven had sunk like bricks in the rough seas. The beach was covered in wrecked vehicles, and an entire set of office equipment had even spilled from one tracked vehicle, complete with hanging maps and crushed typewriters. ‘There is nothing left but the remains: the lifeless rubbish, the sun and the flowers, and the complete silence,’ Pyle wrote. ‘Everything was dead – the men, the machines, the animals …’

Now I am walking those same beaches. All that is left to the naked eye are the concrete remains of two floating harbours, plus dozens of half-buried bunkers and turrets from the former Atlantic Wall. But beneath the cold, green water of the coast lies a complete graveyard. These days enthusiasts sometimes winch whole Sherman amphibious tanks from the water, full of crustaceans that have attached themselves through the years. In the museums the tourists crowd past the corroded soup spoons, motor-bikes, telephones, amphibious jeeps, boots, rifles and punctured helmets. At a special theatre at Arromanches they can experience ‘the total D-Day emotion’ in only eighteen minutes. At the Pointe du Hoc – sticking up against the sky like a blade – they are amazed (and who is not?) at the mad courage of over 200 commandos of the American 116th Infantry Regiment who scaled this steep rock with ropes and ladders under heavy machine-gun fire, and conquered it on the second day. Only seventy-five of them lived to tell about it. In the countless souvenir shops the tourists rush to buy buttons, buckles and books of photographs, they search for
bullet holes in the bunkers, point at the famous dummy of a paratrooper that still hangs on the steeple at Sainte-Mère-Église.

I make a little pilgrimage to the Pegasus bridge at Bénouville, along the Orne, the first patch of Western European ground taken by the Allies. In the early hours of 6 June, 1944, three Horsa gliders – enormous wooden aircraft towed from England by heavy Stirlings – landed here under cover of night. On board were ninety men of the 6th Airborne Division, linked together arm and leg to absorb the impact of the landing, singing loudly to calm their nerves. The two German sentry posts were taken entirely by surprise, within ten minutes the strategic bridgehead was in British hands.

The dance café of the Gondrée family, on the corner, was the first house to be liberated in Western Europe, and their daughter Arlette was the first liberated child. Today Arlette runs her parents’ business, and does so with dignity and flair. Hanging in the bar are dozens of photographs: Arlette with General X, with Admiral Y, the crew of the British royal yacht saluting in front the door of Café Gondrée, it is all on record.

Gondrée
pére
was a member of the Resistance, and spoke fluent English. Just before D-Day a British agent had urged him not to leave the house; something was brewing and he might be needed. Arlette has a few more things to tell me about that night. ‘I was four at the time, and I remember the enormous shooting and thundering in the darkness. My father sent us down into the cellar. We heard the Germans pounding on the front door. We didn't react. A little later the back door opened, we heard footsteps above our head, someone tripped over a chair, and then we heard someone cursing. “Damn it, Tommies!” my father whispered. By the next day our house was already full of wounded men.’

The veterans of D-Day still come back here, and Arlette knows them all. ‘This is where they meet up again. This is their home. When you've been through something like that you always stick together. But they don't talk much about the fighting itself. “He fell beside me,” they'll say, but they never go into detail, not even to their families. They keep that to themselves.’

Does she still remember her liberators? ‘Do I! They came down the stairs, and I started crying right away. “It's all right, chum,” that was the first thing they said to my father. Their faces were blackened and they
had camouflage netting on their helmets, my mother ran and hugged them, but it was still terribly frightening. They were monsters, our liberators! They picked me up, too, and then they brought out the chocolate, and everything was all right after that.’

Operation Overlord, as the Normandy invasion was officially called, was a military operation the likes of which had never been seen before. The preparations had taken two years. A total of almost three million men had been assembled in southern England, divided over thirty-nine divisions: twenty American, fourteen British, three Canadian, one Polish and one French. Among them there were also units from New Zealand, Australia, India and other parts of the British Commonwealth, as well as assorted French, Belgian, Norwegian, Polish, Czech and Dutch squads.

The invasion itself was carried out by an army of 150,000 men, with 7,000 ships, 20,000 vehicles and 11,000 planes. On the first day, 4,500 of those men were killed: approximately 2,500 Americans, 1,641 Britons, 359 Canadians, 37 Norwegians and 19 Frenchmen. Not only was the taking of the beaches a huge task, but the invasion also had to be synchronised to keep all those army units from getting in each other's way. The whole thing was planned to the minute: the military engineers were to land at zero hours plus two, supply troops at zero hours plus thirty, and the first journalists were allowed to come ashore at zero hours plus fifty-seven.

The weather remained disastrous, even after the landing. Between June 18–21 there was actually a hurricane in the Channel, the worst storm since 1900, which swallowed up 800 ships and landing craft. Four times as much military material was lost during that storm as on D-Day itself, and the Allies continued to feel the effects all summer. Still, one month after the invasion there were already a million men on the continent.

Two huge artificial harbours were towed across the Channel, one of them went down during the storm on 18 June. The third port on which the Allies had their eye, Cherbourg, was initially blocked with mines and hundreds of wrecked ships; within a few weeks, working day and night, the American 333rd Engineer Special Service Regiment succeeded in restoring the harbour installations to something like working order. Then the flood of troops and war material began rolling onto the continent.

The Belgian and French Resistance had been closely involved in the
preparations for D-Day, ever since May 1942 when a French Resistance fighter was able to purloin a German map of the Atlantic Wall, an invaluable source of information for the Allied planners. At 9 a.m. on 5 June, the BBC began broadcasting lines of poetry by Verlaine, the signal that told the Resistance groups that the invasion would take place the next day, and they could begin taking their own measures. Later, Eisenhower estimated – perhaps a bit too flatteringly – that they had contributed at least fifteen divisions.