He pulled at his ale, then asked, “Do you think the Germans had delayed-sound bombs, Lawrence?”
“Not then, anyway,” the son smiled.
“I spent four months in hospital. But my rail yard was maimed worse than I was. An antiaircraft regiment from the Staffordshire Infantry was assigned to the yard, with a number of the big sixty-inch searchlights.”
“They can spot a plane at three and a half miles,” Lawrence said.
“And the AA crew hit two of the bombers. But the Germans were determined this time. They wanted my yard. We’d been bombed on five prior occasions, damaged quite badly. We always had it back in operation within days. After that morning, though, there wasn’t much left of the yard but twisted steel and parts of locomotives and boxcars scattered around the craters.”
We spent another hour in the pub, learning primarily about William Dawes’ three operations, “the scalpels running seconds ahead of the gangrene, like a ghastly foot race toward my crotch.”
Dawes’ switchyard near Sheffield was not the only rail installation destroyed by the Luftwaffe during the same hours Karl Hanneken was mining the sub nets. From London north to Middlesbrough, inland from the North Sea, switchyards, railroad bridges, important crossings, and long lengths of mainline track were destroyed by Heinkels and Junkers. It was night, and “Not even the dog-leg could be bang on,” as Lawrence said, so the Luftwaffe made up for their lack of pinpoint accuracy by using over three hundred planes, the Observer Corps later estimated.
In counter-invasion studies done before S-Day, AACCS had correctly anticipated the Luftwaffe would undertake a massive air strike at rail installations immediately preceding the invasion. The Combined Chiefs believed the bombing’s purpose would be to impede the British in rushing reserves to the invasion front. The Heinkel and Junkers railway raids that night were further proof that the Germans would soon be at hand.
I have read Clara Gaudet’s letter to her daughter Anna, written just before Clara’s execution. Anna showed me the letter, handling it carefully, as if the words might spill off the page. Because my French is halting, she helped me through it.
Written on onionskin and wrinkled badly, as if tamped into a boot or a hat at some point in its journey, the letter was a painful, defiant missive describing the elder Gaudet’s life as a member of the French Resistance in Normandy, and of her proudest moment of the entire war, her radio broadcast from Le Havre, which had been received and decoded at Bletchley just before S-Day.
Mme. Gaudet was a physician, educated at the Sorbonne. When the Germans occupied France, she continued making rounds to her patients’ homes throughout Le Havre, using a bicycle after the Wehrmacht pressed her Renault into service. She had documents allowing almost unrestricted travel in the city, and she always had ready explanations if she was stopped late at night.
Le Havre is a major port and was a center of Wehrmacht and Kriegsmarine activity. The city is due south across the channel from Brighton. An invasion on the southern English coast would be launched from Le Havre and other Norman ports. Clara Gaudet reported weekly on German troop movements in and around the city.
Her radio had once been a pack wireless set used by a German infantry squad for unit signals. A more powerful transmission amplifier and a frequency multiplier had been installed by a resistance man who had not introduced himself. The radio was hidden in the loft of a barn near Montivilliers, a short bicycle ride inland from Le Havre. The antenna was concealed in a wind vane on the barn’s roof. Her broadcasts were at night, when her signals carried farthest. She kept them short because she had been told the Le Havre Gestapo was using a new radio direction finder, with its circular antenna mounted on the cab of an Opel Blitz truck.
She kept her coding pad in the false bottom of a milk can. The pad was a thick block of sheets of alternating green and black paper, green for enciphering and black for deciphering. The paper was made of cellulose nitrate, once used for film in the movie industry. She kept a vial of potassium permanganate with the pad, which, when thrown on the paper, would cause an explosion, consuming the pad without leaving a latent image.
That early morning Clara Gaudet had encoded her message by candlelight in the loft. Then she dug the radio pack from under the hay and opened it like a standing suitcase. The batteries were on the left and the dials and knobs on the right. She pulled the Morse key and the earphones from the compartment below the volume control. The first few times she had used the key her hand had been shaking so violently she kept getting the repeat signal from England. She was steady that morning.
Mme. Gaudet first sent a series of Vs, paused, and immediately heard the return Vs in her headset. Bletchley had her. She pressed the key rapidly in a series of dits and dahs for no more than sixty seconds, knowing well the importance of her message. Three nights before this signal, she clicked, the Wehrmacht’s 8th and 28th divisions, which made up VIII Corps, had abandoned their encampments along the Seine between Le Havre and Rouen. They had moved at night, their armor, trucks, field cars, soldiers, everything. She had heard they headed northeast toward Brussels, but could not be certain.
I’ve seen a copy of her deciphered message, and it was considerably less wordy than my retelling. With RDF equipment on the prowl, Bletchley rarely risked a request for a confirm. This time they did. She repeated the message, then signed off with another series of Vs.
The letter to her daughter closed with heart-breaking vows of love, made even more so because Mme. Gaudet, sitting in her tiny cell, knew her fate. Anna, who was twenty years old when I talked with her, told me of her pride in her mother’s accomplishment that night. The war would have taken a different course had it not been for her mother, she said. No one would argue that.
Ava Singleton’s cottage at the Goldings, just south of St. Leonard’s Forest, midway between London and the channel, was set squarely in a half-acre of vegetable garden. Before the war, grass had grown in front of the cottage, and roses had been wrapped up and over an iron bar at the front gate. But vegetables had replaced the grass and the iron had been given to the Ministry of Works’ salvage drive. She told me she had also wanted to donate the garish cement birdbath at the side of her home, which her long-dead husband had made from a mold, but the ministry would not take it. Her cottage had three rooms and was heated by a log fire in the sitting room. Her bedroom, little bigger than a closet, was off the kitchen.
At about the same moment Bletchley was receiving Gaudet’s signal, Ava Singleton was awakened by the rattle of nearby gunfire. It seemed to be coming from behind her shed, where she kept her wheelbarrow and rakes. And then from somewhere near the Bedfords’ home down the road. She was familiar with the sound of shotguns. Her husband had been a bird hunter, and she occasionally went with him into the field. But this was entirely different—many shots, right after each other, the crackling sound rolling together with urgency. Many weapons, she thought.
Last night she had heard on the BBC that the War Ministry had issued an Invasion Alert No. 2, meaning an invasion was probably to occur within two days. It was their fifth alert in the past month, but she was taking all of them seriously.
And now the Germans were here. She threw back her blankets and lowered her feet to the floor, pushing them into her slippers. She lifted her robe off the hook on the back of the door. She was curiously calm.
Mrs. Singleton had lived all her life within five miles of the Goldings and had made few trips elsewhere. She took for granted that German spies and parachutists and tanks would come to the Goldings once the invasion was under way. She did not know enough about the rest of England to imagine them going anywhere else. She wondered what Germans looked like.