“General,” Clay interrupted forcefully. “Here to here.” He slapped the map twice, Folkestone and Brighton.
Winston Churchill said, “We cannot be absolutely sure yet, General Clay.”
“But we can.” Clay’s sense of timing was exquisite. He waited one long breath. “For I have seen the invasion with my own eyes.”
General Clay’s flight has become one of the fabled adventures of the war, and the story has already gained a high gloss. Soaring over the crescent of battle, impervious to shot and shell, one man, one lonely soldier, risked his life to bring word of the battle. A Paul Revere or Pheidippides. Another braid on the Wilson Clay legend. The tellers of tales and singers of songs will likely forget—have already forgotten—that Captain Norman and I were also in the plane.
The German subterfuge, called Herbstreise (autumn journey) “was sheer goddamn military genius, I guarantee you that,” Clay concluded when the operation’s breadth became clearer.
He asked, “Jack, do you know who said, ‘Deception is the sharpest weapon’?”
I wrinkled my brow. “Thomas Edison?”
“Jesus H. Christ, Jack. You’re going to make me burst an artery one of these days. It was the Chinese philosopher of war Sun Tsu, and he was right.”
OKW reaped immense rewards for its risky deceit. In the Allies’ rationing of battered and scarce military resources, hard decisions had been made, and they were made wrongly, thanks to Herbstreise. The finest Allied soldiers—veteran British troops—had been assigned to defend the east coast, while the green Americans were given the beaches less likely to be hit. The more complete RAF squadrons were assigned to Group 12, guarding the east coast from Digby, Wittering, Duxford, and other stations. The devastated Royal Navy posted a preponderance of its remaining ships to the North Sea. Just before the invasion, the Defense Committee released the British XI Corps, which had been held in reserve north of London, to the east coast.
In the weeks before the invasion, the committee had been painfully aware it might be taking the bait of an elaborate trap. But General Clay and most other committee members firmly believed the Germans would come to the eastern shore. He later said, “We had to act on our best information. And we did, to our sorrow.”
How were we fooled?
Parts of Herbstreise were revealed to the stunned Allies the morning of S-Day. Other fragments of the deception were disclosed only when Wehrmacht commanders began bragging about them—publicly tweaking our noses—later in the war. Intelligence contacts tripped over some of the plan. And in interviews for this narrative, I dug up a few segments of the puzzle myself.
Here too I tried to talk to the first person to know, the first person to discover some portion of the German plan that so grandly duped us.
Peter Vanderhoff was a bulb grower near Schiedam, just west of Rotterdam. Two months before S-Day, an official from the Reicharbeitsdienst (National Labor Service) drove up to Vanderhoff’s small home, rolled down the window of the black sedan, and announced that Vanderhoff and his family were to be off the property within twenty-four hours. The RAD officer drove away without further explanation or any apology.
It was the Dutch experience that their German occupiers meant what they said. Vanderhoff, his wife, and three children moved into his brother’s tiny cottage in Schiedam the next morning, bringing in their cart every stick of furniture and their dog. Two days later Vanderhoff tried to visit his farm, but was turned back at a road block. On his toes, Vanderhoff could see construction in the distance. The Wehrmacht sentry grabbed his shoulders, spun him around, and shoved him away. Every four or five days, the bulb farmer had returned to see if the Wehrmacht would give back his property.
That morning, which Vanderhoff would later learn was S-Day, the roadblock and the sentry were gone, unexpectedly and mysteriously. He walked along the dirt road toward his farm, his black and white Border collie spinning and yipping at his heels, ecstatic to recognize old smells and sights. The dog was worthless, except for its frantic carrying on at Vanderhoff’s feet, which the farmer had learned to enjoy, except for the dust cloud the collie always kicked up with its happy whirling. Vanderhoff walked in a low cloud most of his days.
Vanderhoff approached his home cautiously. He was within a hundred yards when he saw the tanks of a Panzer regiment in his tulip field. Dozens of tanks, aligned in rows. He groaned at what they must have done to his crop.
Yet where were the tank crews and mechanics and support vehicles and the commotion that always accompanied an armored regiment? The Panzers sat there in his field, unattended and ignored. Vanderhoff stepped along his walkway. The Germans had taken his front door and his planter boxes that had hung under the leaded windows. Why would a Panzer unit need planter boxes? The bastards.
He rounded the corners of the cottage. The nearest tank was parked in back of his toolshed. When he opened the shed, the dog rushed in. It was empty. The Germans had taken the lot of it. Bastards. In a rage, the farmer slammed the shed door. He ran toward the nearest tank, intent on spitting on it.
This Panzer was peculiarly disheveled, its armor plating a bit awry—and could it be that the cannon barrel was bent out of true? Vanderhoff slowed and squinted. He was astounded. The barrel had a crook in it. He would have expected the Germans, of all people, to be able to mill a straight tank barrel. It was part of their genetic inheritance.
As he drew near, the tank began losing definition and menace. And by the time he reached it, he knew it was made of wood, coarse planks nailed together haphazardly, then painted gray, with cupolas and tank wheels drawn in black. The barrel was a wood pole. A mock tank. His dog lifted a leg to it. The farmer walked around the vehicle. Fake tread marks had been dug into the ground behind the tank, maybe with the shovels and hoes they had stolen from him.
Vanderhoff turned a circle. The other tanks in his field, dozens of them, were also wood facsimiles. Vanderhoff bit his lower lip, not making sense of it at first. Then he understood, and he prayed the British across the North Sea had discovered the ruse before he did.
The bulb farmer returned to his shed hoping the Germans had overlooked his crowbar. He wondered how long it would take him to disassemble the tanks. His brother would help. There would be a strong market for wood planks in Rotterdam, he suspected.
Johann Lubbers was twelve years old and preferred fishing to schooling. The boy had been born in Amsterdam, but when the war started, he and his mother were sent to a farm near Vlaardingen, on the river below Rotterdam. He fished on the Nieuwe Maas, the right branch of the Merwede, which enters into the North Sea at the Hook of Holland. He did not care what he caught. His mother could cook anything, even eels, and was grateful for anything be brought home. There was usually little else on their table.
A month before, barbed wire barricades had appeared overnight on the riverside road, blocking him from reaching his favorite fishing bank on the lower river. Gruff sentries in field-gray uniforms turned him away at a road barricade. They were soldiers of the Kriegsmarine infantry. While he watched, the sentries waved through a caravan of trucks, most of them Johann recognized as Opel Blitz three-tonners, a standard Wehrmacht transport. He regularly dumped handfuls of dirt into fuel tanks of unguarded Opel Blitzes, a risky little business he had told his mother nothing about. Had the sentries looked closer, they might have seen that Johann’s rod was notched forty-two times above the handle, just like the gunfighters in America that Johann read about in his Karl May westerns. But Johann’s notches were for tires he had slashed on Wehrmacht vehicles. Anderson the barber had once told him during a haircut that if he truly despised the Germans, he should come and talk to him on his thirteenth birthday. Johann could be useful some way, he had promised. The barber had said nothing more, and Johann knew not to ask. But the boy wanted a record of success to tell Anderson the barber when they talked in two months.