Joseph E. Persico (46 page)

Early in May, German radio monitors on the Dutch coast believed they had scored what Walter Schellenberg, their SD chief, rated a bull's-eye. By then, German engineers had succeeded in unscrambling the more complex device developed by the Bell Telephone System for protecting the highest-level Allied phone conversations. Barely a month before the invasion was to take place, monitors at Eindhoven listened in on a five-minute transatlantic talk between Roosevelt and Churchill. The breakthrough, however, proved more impressive in technique than in substance. The two leaders discussed the massive invasion buildup in southern England, but were mute on where and when. The transcript, delivered to Hitler, contained a curious good-bye from Roosevelt which the enemy searched for hidden meaning: “Well, we will do our best—now I will go fishing.”

As the date for Overlord neared, Hitler abandoned earlier guesses that the Allies might strike through the Balkans, Scandinavia, Portugal, or the French Atlantic coast. He issued Directive 51, pinpointing the Pas de Calais: “For it is there that the enemy must and will attack,” even though “diversionary attacks,” as at Normandy, “are to be expected.” He was now telling Ambassador Oshima, whose report was again snatched by Magic, “They would establish a bridgehead at Normandy or Brittany, and that after seeing how things went, they would embark on establishing a real second front in the Straits.” Hitler also predicted with alarming closeness that “the Cotentin [Peninsula] would be the first target of the enemy.” Consequently, two seasoned German armored divisions and two infantry divisions were added to the Normandy defenses. Still, Hitler kept his strongest forces facing Dover, across the Pas de Calais.

Three weeks before D-Day, FDR sent a proposal classified “Top Secret” to Churchill and Stalin. As soon as the invasion was under way, he suggested that he broadcast the following message to the Continent: “What I want to impress upon the people of Germany and their sympathizers is the inevitability of their defeat. . . . Every German life that is lost from now on is an unnecessary loss. From a cold-blooded point of view, it is true that the Allies will suffer losses as well; but the Allies so greatly outnumber the Germans in population and resources that on a relative basis the Germans will be far harder hit. . . . The government of the United States—with nearly twice the population of Germany—send word to the people of Germany that this is the time to abandon the teachings of evil.” Churchill did not like the idea. “I brought your No. 341 before the Cabinet,” he cabled back. “Considerable concern was expressed at the tone of friendship shown to the Germans at this moment when the troops are about to engage. . . . The message might conceivably be taken as a peace feeler.” Stalin was equally negative. “I have received your message regarding the appeal to the German people. . . . Taking into consideration the whole experience of war with the Germans and the character of the Germans, I think that the proposal by you cannot bring positive effect. . . .”

At the same time that FDR was proposing this appeal to the Germans, his private operative John Franklin Carter suggested to him something more devilish, born in the imagination of Putzi Hanfstaengl. “I assume that somewhere here or in England we already have a man who can imitate Hitler's voice and style in speechmaking,” Carter told the President. “On the eve of the invasion, let the fake Hitler broadcast over all of our black radio stations along these lines: Instruct the German troops, German civilians and citizens of occupied countries to put up only a token resistance to the invasion and to cooperate with Anglo-American forces.” Carter went on to suggest that the phony Führer declare “that he has reached an understanding with the leaders of England and America for Anglo-American forces to cooperate with Germany in holding back the Jewish hordes of Asiatic Bolshevists from Europe. Let him state that U.S. bombers will soon establish air-bases in Germany to enable the forces of civilization to reconquer Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad etc.”

Oddly, FDR, always so cautious not to provoke Stalin, did not reject Carter's scheme out of hand, but sent it to the country's propaganda chief, Elmer Davis, head of the Office of War Information, with a note asking, “What do you think of this idea?” Davis displayed a healthy skepticism, advising the President, “For a matter of two or three hours it might cause considerable confusion in Germany.” But, Davis warned, “the success of the invasion is not likely to depend on two or three hours.” Putzi's brainstorm ended up in FDR's wastebasket.

Though the Germans were still in the dark about Overlord, Churchill was haunted by the operation's potentially exorbitant cost in bloodshed. At one point the Prime Minister told Eisenhower, “When I think of the beaches of Normandy choked with the flower of American and British youth, and when in my mind's eye I see the tides running red with their blood, I have my doubts. I have my doubts.” British commanders reported that 90 percent of their junior officers did not expect to survive D-Day. General Omar Bradley discovered that 90 percent of the men of the 29th Infantry Division, destined to hit Omaha Beach, also expected to die. An alarmed Bradley gave the division a pep talk dismissing the likelihood of casualties so high. But driving back to London with his aide, he confessed, “I doubt if I did much good.”

On May 7, with the invasion date less than a month off, Churchill lamented to FDR the number of innocent French lives that would be lost when Allied bombers began blasting rail centers. “I am personally by no means convinced that this is the best way to use our air forces in the preliminary period, and still think that the GAF [German air force] should be the main target.” Early estimates by his war cabinet were that French civilian casualties could reach 20,000 dead and 60,000 injured. Subsequently, the estimate was revised downward to 10,000 dead. Still, Churchill found the price appalling, and he told Roosevelt, “. . . [T]he war cabinet shares my apprehension of the bad effect which will be produced upon the French civilian population by these slaughters, all taking place so long before D-Day. They may easily bring out a great revulsion in French feeling towards their approaching United States and British liberators.” But General Eisenhower wanted rail lines that were capable of moving German troops to the beaches to be interdicted. And FDR, unlike Churchill, was disinclined to overrule the judgments of his military chiefs.

Less than a week before D-Day, the President received precise knowledge of how the Germans were bracing for the attack. On May 28, Oshima again met with Hitler and asked, “I wonder what ideas you have on how the Second Front will be carried out?” According to the ambassador's dispatch to Tokyo, the Führer, sticking by his earlier hunch, answered, “Well, as for me, judging from relatively ominous portents, I think that
Ablenkungsoperazionen
(diversionary action) will take place against Norway, Denmark, the southern part of Western France and the coasts of the French Mediterranean—various places. After that, after they have established bridgeheads on the Norman and Brittany Peninsulas and seen how the prospect appears, they will come forward with the establishment of an all out Second Front in the area of the Straits of Dover.” Both Bodyguard and Fortitude were evidently working. Roosevelt had it from Hitler's mouth, courtesy of the codebreakers at Arlington Hall. The timing of the invasion, however, was beginning to pierce the fog of disinformation. Oshima spoke to the chief of German intelligence in Bern, who told him, “. . . [M]ost indications point toward this action sometime around the last of May.” It was harrowingly close. As for the where of Overlord, the same officer told Oshima, “[I]n my judgment they will strike with might against the Netherlands, Belgium, and west coast of France. . . .” The other predicted sites were too garbled for the Magic codebreakers to decipher.

Every night, members of the French resistance huddled around their clandestine shortwave radios listening to the recital of short, seemingly meaningless “personal” messages broadcast by the BBC from London. They had been alerted that when they heard the line by the French poet Paul Verlaine, “Les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne” (The long sobs of the violins of autumn), the invasion would occur within fifteen days. When a second Verlaine line, “Blessant mon coeur d'une langueur monotone” (Wounding my heart with a dull languor), was broadcast, the invasion was about to begin. Abwehr agents, too, knew the two-part code. They had beaten it out of a captured resistance leader. The first signal was heard on June 1. On June 5, at 9:15
P.M.
, a German monitoring station under a concrete bunker at Tourcoing in northern France picked up the second Verlaine line. Though distributed throughout Wehrmacht commands, this warning did not provoke a heightened state of readiness beyond what already existed.

The hour had arrived. All was risked on this cross-Channel throw of the dice. No contingency plan existed. If Overlord failed, it could not be remounted.

Chapter XXII

Cracks in the Reich

DURING THE war years, not all the President's tightly held secrets were military. For the world's greatest power, immersed sinew and spirit in a global war, the appearance of strength in its leader was symbolically as important as the strength of the nation itself. Franklin Roosevelt, tethered to a wheelchair for the past twenty-three years, his legs shrunken from disuse, had nevertheless for eleven years of his presidency displayed astonishing strength and vitality. But in the year of greatest stress, as the war's outcome hinged on the gamble of Overlord, the man began to slip into visible decline. The first to express concern was his daughter, Anna. She had been with her father the previous fall at Tehran, where she noticed that his weight had dropped alarmingly, his appetite was poor, and his hands trembled constantly as he scattered cigarette ashes over his clothes and papers. Purple half-moons developed under his eyes. His fingernails displayed a blue-gray cast. His breathing was shallow, and the timbre of that sonorous voice had thinned. Occasionally, his mouth hung open, and he left sentences dangling.

In March 1944, Anna left her home in Seattle to stay for a time at the White House. Alarmed at her father's continuing deterioration, she begged his physician, Vice Admiral McIntire, to arrange a thorough physical examination. The admiral, a nose and throat specialist, recognized the likely cause of his patient's waning health and accepted his limitations in that sphere. On March 27 he called the Bethesda Naval Hospital and arranged for Lieutenant Commander Howard Bruenn, Bethesda's best cardiologist, to see the President. Before Bruenn saw his patient, McIntire warned him that no matter what he found he was not to tell Roosevelt anything. He was to report only to the admiral. McIntire described the appointment to curious reporters as the President's “annual check up.” For years, part of the physician's job had been to assure the world that, in spite of his paralysis, Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed splendid health. He saw no reason now to change that portrayal.

After exhaustively examining FDR at Bethesda, Doctor Bruenn came the next day to McIntire's office next to the White House Map Room. The report he submitted was dismal. The President was suffering from hypertension, hypertensive heart disease, and failure of the heart's left ventricle. His blood pressure was a stratospheric 218 over 120. The years of forced inactivity and limited exercise had taken their toll. Roosevelt was an old sixty-two. Bruenn estimated the life left to him at somewhere between months and, at the outside, two years. After the examination FDR had simply shaken his hand and said only, “Thanks, Doc.” He had not asked a single question. The admiral next arranged for the young physician to be transferred to the White House as FDR's physician-in-attendance. Though the doctor examined his patient daily, Roosevelt still never asked why he had been assigned a full-time cardiologist. The only persons fully cognizant of the President's condition were McIntire, Bruenn, and Anna, but not the First Lady.

The mid-forties were not a favorable era for victims of heart disease. The first diagnosis that a patient had suffered a heart attack had not been made until 1910. Cardiology had not become a medical specialty until the early 1920s. And once cardiovascular disease was diagnosed, even a specialist such as Bruenn could do little. The drugs and surgical procedures that could prevent death from heart attacks and forestall strokes were a generation in the future.

FDR's decline remained a sometime thing. He still displayed flashes of the old exuberance. He continued to amaze Admiral Leahy with his near-photographic memory. Leahy was another recruit from FDR's days as assistant Navy secretary. He had then been in command of Secretary Daniels's dispatch boat, the
Dolphin,
which Roosevelt frequently commandeered. A strong favorable impression had stayed with FDR, and, after he became president, he appointed Leahy ambassador to France's Vichy government and then brought him to the White House as chief of staff to the commander in chief. Leahy served as the President's link to the armed forces. Of this duty, he once remarked, “He would ask my opinion. Sometimes my recollection was not functioning as fast as his own, but I always gave him some kind of answer. . . . He would look at me quizzically and say, ‘Bill, that's not what you told me a year ago.' I frequently wondered if he was doing it on purpose.”

FDR sought to husband his depleting resources through his gift for turning instantly from work to play. He continued watching movies and reading the light novels that distracted him, though in this most burdensome year of the war he had less and less free time. When an aide asked if he had read Kathleen Winsor's racy best-seller of the 1944 season,
Forever Amber,
he answered with a twinkling eye, “Only the dirty parts.” Still, much of the old élan was fading, as if he had rounded the track too many times. What was sapping his vitality was simple enough to describe, though difficult to treat. The hardening arteries of this essentially immobile man were delivering insufficient blood to the brain. Still, he continued with the routines of his life, yielding to Dr. Bruenn's probing, poking, and thumping. And the charade went on. The President asked nothing about his condition, and Bruenn offered nothing. The rest of the staff remained in the dark as to what lay behind their chief's shaking hands, the ashen pallor, the grape-colored cast of his sagging lips, the occasional lapses of mental acuity.

FDR only appeared to be burying his head in the sand. He could level with one person as confidentially as if he were talking to himself—the discreet and devoted Daisy Suckley, as her diary was about to reveal. Early in May, Roosevelt was staying at Hobcaw, Bernard Baruch's lavish South Carolina estate. At lunch with Baruch, Dr. Bruenn, and Daisy, FDR picked listlessly at a dish of minced chicken on toast. After the doctor and Baruch left the room, he asked Daisy to stay. She later recorded their conversation: “I had a good talk with the P. about himself. He said he discovered that the doctors had not agreed together about what to tell him, so that he found out that they were not telling him the whole truth and that he was evidently more sick than they said! It is foolish of them to attempt to put anything over on
him.
” The conspiracy of silence went on. Roosevelt, leading the nation into the crucial hour of the war, intended to keep the state of his fitness a part of the web of secrecy along with Overlord itself.

*

On Monday afternoon, June 5, the President seemed outwardly relaxed as he played with his Scottie, Fala, and watched his grandson Johnny Boettiger perform somersaults on the sofa. Still the tension in his study was palpable. Grace Tully noted that the President's hands shook constantly, and his skin had taken on the color of cement.

At eight-twenty, after dinner, his valet, Arthur Prettyman, wheeled FDR into the Diplomatic Reception Room and positioned him behind a clutch of microphones. The President glanced over his script and then began to deliver a fireside chat to the American people, the voice solemn, the pace deliberate, his principal subject being the fall of Rome to the Allies that day. Left unsaid, but consuming his thoughts, was what was about to happen the following morning some eight hundred miles northwest of the Italian capital.

After the broadcast, Eleanor, Anna and her husband, Major John Boettiger, and Daisy Suckley joined FDR for a movie in the makeshift projection room set up in the colonnade leading to the White House East Wing. The fare this evening was not the comedies or musicals the President favored, but newsreels dealing with the war. At five minutes past 11
P.M.
FDR retired to his study, followed by Eleanor and Daisy. As he sipped at a glass of orange juice, he told them he had a secret he wanted to share. Within hours, American GIs would be storming the beaches of Normandy. Eleanor responded that now she would not be able to sleep and almost wished he had not confided in them. Sensing the pall that his words had cast, FDR shifted his mood and began making jokes about what he was going to do to Hitler the moment the Führer surrendered.

As he spoke, the mightiest armada ever assembled was already crossing the English Channel—6,500 vessels, ranging from a half dozen battleships to 4,250 landing craft carrying 57,500 American troops and 75,215 British and Canadians, accompanied by 20,000 vehicles and 1,500 tanks, a flotilla one hundred miles wide and five miles deep. Overhead, 10,000 planes blackened the sky. FDR, usually so quick to nod off, did not sleep that night. He kept picking up his bedside phone, asking, “Hackie,” Louise Hackmeister, the chief White House telephone operator, to put him through to the Pentagon for whatever scrap of information on the progress of the invasion force he could glean.

On the other side of the Atlantic, as troops waded ashore at Omaha, Utah, Sword, Gold, and Juno Beaches, all had not gone without mishap. Paratrooper units missed their drop zones; gliders crashed on landing, spilling troops from fragile wooden hulls; at Omaha Beach, German guns began cutting down American infantrymen the instant the Higgins boats dropped their ramps and until the GIs found scant shelter under the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc. Still, the major objective of the enterprise was stunningly achieved. Surprise had been total. A fleet covering approximately 500 square miles had crossed the Channel undetected. Allied casualties—a substantial 10,300 killed, wounded, and missing on that longest day—were one seventh of the worst estimates.

For all the elaborate machinations of Bodyguard and Fortitude, the greatest deception had been a gift of nature. June 5, Eisenhower's original invasion date, had proved so stormy, the winds so strong, the rains so heavy, the skies so overcast, that his meteorologists persuaded him to postpone the landing, even though part of the fleet had already set sail and would have to be recalled. June 7 was predicted to be equally inhospitable. So certain was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel that the Channel was too rough to permit an invasion that he had left France on June 4 to celebrate his wife's birthday at their hillside home in the fairy-tale town of Herrlingen. There Rommel presented Lucie-Maria with a pair of Parisian shoes, and then went to Berchtesgaden to discuss the Atlantic defenses with Hitler. But on June 5, at Suffolk House in Portsmouth, Ike's senior meteorologist, Captain J. M. Stagg of the Royal Air Force, spotted a narrow window of milder weather the next day. The rain should stop, the seas should calm slightly and remain so, at least throughout the morning before they rose again. The opening was fleeting, hardly ideal. Still Eisenhower wondered aloud to his staff, “. . . [J]ust how long you can hang this operation on the end of a limb and let it hang there.” “OK, let's go,” he said. Overlord began the following morning.

That night, Roosevelt made a fifteen-minute radio broadcast, leading the nation in a prayer for the young Americans committed to the battle. “They will need thy blessings,” he said. “Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong.” And then he made his final contribution to the Bodyguard deception. “The Germans appear to expect landings elsewhere,” he said. “Let them speculate. We are content to wait on events.” Indeed, the enemy was still waiting for the real blow after the presumed feint at Normandy. The Wehrmacht's Foreign Armies West intelligence chief, Baron Von Roenne, reported: “Not a single unit of the 1st United States Army Group [FUSAG], which comprises around 25 large formations . . . has so far been committed.” Much of the German strength remained rooted at the Pas de Calais, waiting for Patton's ghost army. Three days after the invasion, Hitler still rejected the plea of his commander in France, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, to engage the 1st SS Panzer Division in Normandy. Instead, Hitler ordered the division to back up the Fifteenth Army for an expected main assault across the Dover Straits.

Through an OSS source in Bern rated “fairly dependable,” Bill Donovan was able to inform the President that Hitler had called Rommel and Rundstedt on the carpet, demanding that they mend their destructive rivalry. “Rommel had insisted on bringing up the full German reserves,” the informant reported, “while Rundstedt wanted to retain sizeable concentrations of troops in the Black Forest and to the North and East of Paris, where he feared paratroop landings. . . .” After Hitler issued an order to hold the key port of Cherbourg to the last man, Rundstedt tried to explain to the Führer's chief toady, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, that the order meant lives wasted. “What shall we do?” moaned Keitel. “Make peace, you fools,” Rundstedt replied. The next day, Hitler removed the old soldier from his command.

Fortitude continued to enjoy a remarkable shelf life. Not until nearly two months after the Normandy assault, after Field Marshal Guenther von Kluge had replaced Rundstedt, did Hitler accept the hard truth. He had been duped. The tens of thousands of troops who might have thrown the D-Day invaders back into the sea had waited futilely for the “real” strike at the Pas de Calais. On August 3, Hitler allowed Kluge to shift forces from the strait to face the steadily swelling Allied armies in Normandy. On August 7, Kluge conceded that a second major landing was “improbable.” By then, the Allies had well over a million troops in France, including George Patton, now commanding an authentic force, his Third Army.

*

The capacity of Germany to fight on so stubbornly on two fronts—to keep its armies well equipped, supplied, and refurbished—opens one of the great moral quandaries of the war, the behavior of neutral countries in supporting, even prolonging, the ability of the Nazi war machine to fight on. In light of revelations over half a century later, particularly pointed at Switzerland, the question arises: through the intelligence available to President Roosevelt, what did he know of the decidedly unneutral behavior of certain nonbelligerents, and what did he do about it?

Over two years before D-Day, an unhappy Charles Bruggmann, the Swiss minister to Washington and recipient of the confidences of his brother-in-law, Vice President Henry Wallace, came to see Adolf Berle. The
New York Post,
Bruggmann complained, had published an article defaming Switzerland and questioning its neutrality. The
Post
story charged that the Swiss National Bank and the Swiss government were providing U.S. dollars to Germany to purchase the matériel of war. Bruggmann claimed to know the source of this report, FDR's Jewish Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., who had tried to freeze Swiss bank accounts in the United States from the moment America entered the war, believing that Switzerland was already collaborating with the Nazis. “I said that in a country which had a free press, there was not a great deal that could be done,” Berle later wrote of his response to Bruggmann. What FDR's intelligence representative at State was too tactful to say was that the
Post
's story was essentially accurate.