War and Remembrance (165 page)

As we drove eastward small gun duels sputtered and villages burned in the persisting quiet. Interrogating officers wherever I could, I learned the reason for the strange calm. A vast combined naval and air bombardment at dawn had poured a deluge of shot and shell on our defenses. The wounded I spoke to had horror-stricken faces. One older noncom with a smashed arm told me that he had lived through Verdun and experienced nothing like it. Everywhere I encountered fatalism, apathy, lost communications, broken-up regiments, and confusion over orders. The gigantic sea armada, the air fleets roaring overhead, and the fearful bombardments had already spread a sense of a lost war.

That a possibly fatal crisis was at hand I could no longer doubt. Speeding back to Paris I told Jodl over the telephone that this was the main assault, and that we must concentrate against it, moving at night to evade the air interdiction, and effecting transport repair on a crash basis. Jodl’s response was, “Well, get back here, but I advise you to be very careful about what you say.” It was unnecessary advice. I never got a hearing. At the next few briefing conferences I was not called on. Hitler pointedly avoided my eye. The Normandy situation deteriorated rapidly, and my information was soon out of date.

Two impressions remain with me of this lovely June, when our German world was crumbling while Hitler socialized over tea and cakes in Berchtesgaden. On June 19 a great storm blew up on the Normandy coast and raged for four days. It set back the invaders far more than our forces had. It broke up the artificial harbors, and threw almost a thousand vessels up on the beach. Reconnaissance photographs showed such a gigantic disaster that I felt my last flicker of hope. Hitler was in seventh heaven, reeling off giddy disquisitions on the fate of the Spanish Armada. When the weather cleared, the enemy resumed his attacks by land, sea, and air, as though a summer shower had passed by. His resources, pouring out of the unreachable
U.S. cornucopia, were frightening. We heard no more about the Spanish Armada.

Stamped on my memory too is a briefing conference about the time Cherbourg was falling. Hitler was standing at the map, wearing his thick glasses, and with a compass and ruler he was gleefully showing us what a small part of France the invaders held, compared to the area we still occupied. This he was telling to senior generals who knew, and who had been warning him for weeks, that with the defensive crust at the coast smashed, and a major port gone, the rest of France was open country for enemy operations, with no tenable German position short of the West Wall at the border and the Rhine. What a sorry moment; scales fell from my eyes, and I knew once for all that the triumphant Führer had degenerated to a pathological monster, trembling for his life behind a mask of bravado.

(from
World Holocaust)

…Had Hitler accepted the suggestions of Rommel and Rundstedt late in June to end the war, we would have had to kneel down to a draconic peace. We might have ended up partitioned as we are now, we might not have; but certainly our people would have been spared a year of savage air bombings, including the gruesome horror of Dresden, and Eisenhower’s ruinous march to the Elbe; and from the east, the horror of universal Bolshevik pillage and rape, which the world smiled at and overlooked, while millions of our civilians had to flee westward from their homes, never to return.

In 1918, while we stood on foreign soil, Ludendorff and Hindenburg had similarly counseled surrender, before others could inflict on German territory the ruin of war. But in 1918 there had been a political state and a military arm; and by the abdication of the Kaiser, the politicians could effect this timely surrender. Now there was no political state, no military arm; all was merged in Hitler. Politically, how could he surrender, and stretch out his neck to the hangman? He could only fight on.

Very well, what of his strategy in fighting on: was it good, or bad? It was rigid, complacent, and dull-witted. He lost Normandy. Only five divisions in the landing force! Had the panzers been freed and concentrated, then in spite of all — intelligence failure, enemy air superiority, naval bombardment — Rommel’s able chief of staff, Speidel, could have unleashed them against the floundering G.I.’s and Tommies. The result would have been a historic bloodbath. At Omaha Beach, the Americans were almost thrown back into the sea by one attack infantry division, the 352nd, which happened
to be operating there. What would a planned concentrated counterattack in those first hours not have achieved?

Had we smashed those five divisions, that might well have been the turning point. The Anglo-Americans were not Russians; politically and militarily they could not take such bloodletting. If all those fantastic preparations, all that outpouring of technology and treasure, could not prevent the slaughter of their landing force on that crucial first day, I believe Eisenhower, Roosevelt, and Churchill would have quailed and announced a face-saving “withdrawal.” The political results would have been spectacular: the fall of Churchill, Roosevelt’s defeat in the election, charges of bad faith by Stalin; even some kind of endurable separate peace in the east, who can say? But Adolf Hitler wanted to control the panzers from Berchtesgaden.

As doom closed in, Hitler clung to, and interminably mouthed, three self-comforting fantasies:

1. The breakup of the Alliance against us;
   
2. The turning of the tide by miraculous new weapons;
   
3. A sudden outpouring from the factory caverns of new jet fighters that would sweep the enemy from the skies.
   

For seven fatal weeks he insisted on immobilizing the Fifteenth Army at the Pas de Calais awaiting the “main invasion,” because the launching platforms for his precious V-1 and V-2 rockets were there. But the rockets, when they finally flew, were minor terror weapons, causing random death and damage in London without military effect. The fighter planes came trickling out of the caverns only in 1945, much too late. As for the only new weapon that mattered, the atom bomb, Hitler had frittered away our scientific lead in atom-splitting by failing to support the project, and he had driven out the Jewish scientists who produced it for our enemies.

The breakup of the enemy coalition had indeed been our one escape hatch; but Franklin Roosevelt’s supreme political stroke at Tehran had slammed it shut and sealed it. And so there burst on us from the east on June 22, three years to the day after we invaded the Soviet Union, the worst catastrophe yet, the Battle of White Russia, Stalin’s assigned role in the Tehran plan.

To this grim tale I now turn.

TRANSLATOR
’
S NOTE
:
In this much-abridged compilation of Roon’s views, I have tried to highlight how the Germans saw the Normandy landing, omitting much operational detail familiar from popular history and movies. Stalin’s telegram to Churchill remains as good a summary as any of the grandeur of Overlord:
“The history of war knows no other like undertaking, from
the point of view of its scale, its vast conception, and its masterly execution.”

The blaming of Hitler can be overdone. Even if the panzers had been released to Rommel, our forces would probably have known it. Our intelligence–from air reconnaissance, the French Resistance, and code penetration — was superb. We might have battered up the panzers from the air before they ever went into action. This is not to say that the landing was not a close thing. It was an extreme risk calculated to a cat’s whisker, and it succeeded.

As for Hitler “degenerating” into a pathological monster, he never was anything else, though he had a good run in his first flush of brigandage. Why his demagogic bunkum ever spurred the Germans to their wars and their crimes remains a vastly puzzling question.

The scales did not fall from Roon’s eyes. They had to be shot off.
—
V.H.

* * *

JEDBURGH TEAM
”
MAURICE
“

U.S.A.: Leslie Slote, OSS

French: Dr. Jean R. Latour, FFI

British: Leading Aircraftsman Ira N. Thompson, RAF

W
hen Pamela saw Slote’s name in the top-secret schedule of the Jedburgh air drops, she at once decided to go and see him. She was getting desperate for some word of Victor Henry. Since sending her letter of refusal, the thought of which was making her more and more miserable as time passed, she had heard nothing. Utter silence. She found an official reason to go to Milton Hall, the stately home some sixty miles north of London where the Jedburghs trained, and she went whizzing out there next day in a jeep. At Milton Hall she quickly attended to her official business. Leslie Slote, she was told, was off on a field exercise. She left a note for him with her telephone number, and was walking disconsolately back to her jeep, when she heard from behind her, “Pamela?”

Not a hail; an uncertain call. She turned. Heavy drooping blond mustache, close-cropped hair, no insignia on the untidy brown uniform; a very different Leslie Slote, if the same man. “Hello! It is Leslie, isn’t it?”

The mustache spread in Slote’s old frigid grin. He came and shook her hand. “I guess I’m a bit changed. What the devil are you doing at Milton Hall, Pam? Got time for a drink?”

“I’d rather not, thanks. I have to drive forty miles. My jeep’s just down in the lot.”

“Is it Lady Burne-Wilke yet?”

“Well, no, he’s still recuperating from an air crash in India. I’m going to Stoneford now, that’s his house in Coombe Hill.” She glanced curiously up at him. “So you’re a Jedburgh?”

His face stiffened. “What do you know about that?”

“Sweetie, I’m in the Air Ministry section that’s arranging to drop you in.”

He laughed, a coarse hearty guffaw. “How much time have you got? Let’s sit down and talk somewhere. Christ, it’s wonderful to see an old face. Yes, I’m a Jed.”

Here was an opening of sorts for Pamela.

“Victor Henry mentioned that you were in some branch of the OSS.”

“Ah, yes. Seeing much of the admiral these days?”

“I’ve had an occasional letter. Nothing lately.”

“But Pamela, he’s here.”

“Here? In England?”

“Of course. Didn’t you know that? He’s been here quite a while.”

“Really! Would we be out of the wind down at that lily pond? I see a stone bench. We can chat for a few minutes.”

Slote well remembered Pamela’s great urge to go to Moscow when Henry was there. Her nonchalance seemed overdone; he guessed that the news was a hell of a jolt. They strolled to the bench and sat down by the pond, where frogs croaked as the sun sank behind the trees.

Pamela was indeed silenced by pure shock, and Slote did all the talking. He foamed words. For months he had had nobody to talk to. He told Pam, who sat listening with grave brilliant eyes, that he had joined the OSS because his knowledge of the German massacre of the Jews — which more and more each month was coming to public light, proving he hadn’t been a monomaniac after all — and the callous inertness of the State Department had been driving him crazy. The drastic move had transformed his life. He had discovered to his surprise that most men were as full of fear as himself. He had done no worse in parachuting than anybody else, and better than some. As a boy he had loathed violence; bullies had discerned this, he said, picked on him, and fixed him in a timorousness which had fed on itself and became an obsession. Other men concealed their fears even from themselves, for a hearty swagger was the American male way; but he had always been too self-analytical to pretend that he was anything but a coward.