She trundled into the kitchen and pushed aside the blackout curtain. She could hear planes overhead, as was usual during recent nights. More shots were coming from behind her shed, louder. She could see the shed in the dim light, with its door open so the dog could come and go. Nothing new to be seen.
She walked through the sitting room to the front door and opened it without hesitating. She stepped out onto her narrow stone walkway between the rows of beans and tomatoes. Still nothing to be seen, and now the firing behind the shed had quieted. But the Bedfords still had their hands full. The noise was like the machine guns she had heard on BBC recordings of the fighting in Africa.
She admitted to me that she jumped when the branches started rustling in her apple tree near the birdbath. Most of the tree was hidden by the corner of the cottage, but she could see a few branches shake. Then the tree was still. She padded along a bean row toward it.
I asked her how she remained so steady during all this. She replied, “I was an old woman during the First War, and I was even older during the Second. Nothing excites me.”
Apparently not, because when she turned the corner of her home and found a German paratrooper dangling from her apple tree, still swaying, his parachute stuck in the higher branches, all she did was stare up at him.
She said, “My first thought was that they grew them small in the Reich. This fellow was a midget.”
Then she felt a fine disappointment when she realized that her paratrooper was made of hay stuffed into a small uniform, with a cloth doll’s head, and arms sewn up to the parachute lines. Not even the coal-scuttle helmet, the very symbol of Nazi terror, was real, but was painted on the head. She reached up to feel his cloth boots. They were heavy. Probably rocks for weight, she thought. She was put out that if the Germans were going to drop dolls, they wouldn’t even bother to make them life-sized.
Mrs. Singleton was wondering how she would ever climb into the tree to cut the doll down when the first tank came roaring down the road. It had a white star on it, the emblem of all Allied forces. Probably those knotty Americans, she thought. Her village was full of them. Every time one of their tanks came by, it left a sheen of dust over her vegetables. She squinted in anticipation of the cloud. The Bedfords had a telephone and must have called. Another tank rolled by, then another vehicle, which Mr. Bedford later told her was an armored personnel carrier.
She walked toward the shed and called for her dog, a golden retriever named Jedediah. He emerged slowly, and when she patted him, she could feel he was shaking. The dog followed her around the tool shed toward the grove of pear trees. Jedediah was not born to be a hero, and he walked alongside her, pressed into her leg almost hard enough to topple her. She had walked this path a thousand times, knew it so well she was not even aware it was night.
She found the noise-maker lying on the ground between two pear trees. It was attached to a small parachute, and was nothing more than a string of firecrackers with a pressure-activated detonator. All that was left of the firecrackers was a tumble of paper. Her small orchard still smelled of gunpowder.
“Well, posh,” she said, and began back to her cottage. “You come and sleep inside with me the rest of the night, Jedediah. You look like you need a good watchperson.”
Mrs. Singleton told me she found reason that night to be glad she had no telephone. Down the road, when Mr. Bedford was visited by firecrackers and two dummy paratroopers, he made a frantic call to the local Home Guard regiment, who passed it along to the Americans. Moments later, their tanks ground through his garden over apple trees, snapping them off at the ground. “And completely, I say, completely, tearing out my raspberries,” he told her later. His small greenhouse was crushed underneath the treads, not one pane surviving. One tank fired into his barn, which was razed. “I have my suspicions, Mrs. Singleton, that the Americans had already seen the dummies and were just getting in a practice round.”
Mrs. Singleton returned to bed, Jedediah in tow. Later that morning the radio would report that paratrooper dummies had landed in dozens of places along the south and east coasts, even some as far north as Edinburgh. She had utterly no idea what to make of it. Neither did AACCS.
The British Foreign Office’s Department of Communications was at Bletchley Park, in the town of Bletchley, about fifty miles northwest of London. The first mansion was built on the estate in the 1870s, and expanded many times through the years. Even so, the department added numerous other buildings to house the seven thousand people who worked there during the war. Bletchley was the heart of the British radio interception and code-breaking efforts.
On watch in the Netherlands and Baltic Intercept Section that morning was Commander Joseph Morehouse, a Royal Navy officer serving with the Foreign Office. Morehouse came by his position honestly, as his uncle was Nigel de Grey, who in 1917 had solved the Zimmermann telegram, in which Germany promised to return Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to Mexico if Mexico would declare war on the United States. President Wilson released the intercepted and decoded telegram to the press, and it helped turn American public opinion against Germany. Morehouse’s duty was to gather on tape as many radio signals from Holland and the Baltic as possible. “I was in intercept,” he told me, “rather than in code-breaking because, shall we say, I simply didn’t have my uncle’s knack.”
Morehouse’s section was in one of the new buildings at Bletchley. On the roof were numerous antennas: rotary beams, a trap, several quads, a long-wire directive array, and others. Despite the impressive number of antennas at Bletchley, most of his signals were picked up at intercept stations on the east coast and relayed over telephone wires.
Morehouse’s desk was at the head of an aisle of radio operators. They sat six to a side, with banks of electronics in front of them: crystal converters, VHF receivers, 110-MC amplifiers, grid-dip meters, signal generators, oscillators, and Edison and Motorola recorders. The array seemed strapped against the walls by a mesh of wires. Light was low, and the men’s faces were washed in the green and amber of the dial lights. The room was filled with amplified Morse and scratchy snippets of German conversation. Morehouse spoke German and read Morse, but what he heard, as always, was in code.
At precisely six that morning, Commander Morehouse’s head jerked up from a transcript he was reading. Something indefinable was occurring. A part of the room suddenly seemed to be missing.
“Sir,” one of his operators said, “I’ve lost all signals.”
“Me, too, sir.” The second operator turned a dial. “I’m scanning and not getting anything.”
Except for the low static of empty radio bands, the room was eerily silent. In the six months he had been posted to this room, Morehouse had witnessed this only once before, a month ago. Radio silence often precedes a military operation, but the abruptly empty airwaves last month had been a Wehrmacht feint. He walked down the aisle, bending over one radioman after another, glancing at their dials. Finally, he asked, “What is happening, Barnett?”
Barnett threw two switches and slowly rolled another knob. “I don’t know yet, sir. Perhaps the same as in April. Give me a moment.”
Morehouse’s section was monitoring the Wehrmacht’s Army Group C, which in the previous week had moved into Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the smaller ports at Ijmuiden, Wijk Aan Zee, Den Helder, and the West Frisian Islands along the Netherlands’ north coast. Army Group C was commanded by Erwin Rommel, proven in Africa. AACCS believed Rommel had been given authority to strip from other Wehrmacht and Waffen SS corps any divisions he desired for the invasion. Bletchley’s latest estimated order of battle for Rommel’s Group C included the new XXX Corps, made up of the 7th and 15th panzer divisions and the 15th Light Division, veteran units to be feared. Also in the Army Group C was the XXXIV Corps. Rommel’s troops were crammed into the Dutch ports, waiting for their signal.