The submariner had no visible reaction. The RN interrogator ordered the guards to remove Haas and bring in the next German sailor, one of Haas’ crewmen.
Charles Bradley told me, “Of course, we suspected by then the German pathfinder submarine had been part of the deception. Despite his obstinate refusal to say anything, Haas confirmed it to us. He couldn’t help it, I presume. Just a surge of joy.”
“How did he confirm it?” I asked the inspector.
“On his way out of the room, Haas passed Petty Officer Manfred Detmers, one of Haas’ crewmen, who we were bringing in for another go at questioning. Haas grabbed Detmers and gave him a huge hug. Right there in front of us all. It quite startled Detmers.”
“A hug?”
Bradley nodded. “The submarine’s mission had been to misdirect. They succeeded. That hug was all we needed to confirm that Haas had deliberately allowed his sub to be captured by the RN.”
Jean Lechavalier was the owner of Café Anglais on Rue Victor Hugo in Le Havre. He was also a sector chief for the French underground, responsible for six resistance cells in the city. The cells were insulated from each other, and Lechavalier knew many more of his maquis than knew him.
The café had been short-handed since the war started. One evening shortly after S-Day, he was waiting tables. In one corner a German officer and a French woman ordered a Pernod and à pression. The very idea of a French woman consorting with the despised occupiers sickened Lechavalier, and he vowed to make a few inquiries to determine her identity. After the war, he promised himself, she would regret this indiscretion.
But when he bent low over their table to deliver the beer and aperitif, he recognized by the candlelight one of his soldiers, a woman who had never seen his face, Clara Gaudet, the prominent physician.
“That terrible instant will be pressed into my memory forever. Here she was in my café, toasting the progress of the war with a Wehrmacht colonel. And she was one of my own.”
By the time Lechavalier told me the story, he had lived with the revelation for years, yet he stilled purpled when he told it. “Three of my fighters died stealing the radio she used. And, my God, how many English and Americans fell because of her treachery?” He spat, “The infamy, the perfidy, the outrage.”
I asked him why she would be so careless as to be seen with a German officer in a café.
“Her assignment was complete,” Lechavalier reasoned. “She was no longer useful to the Germans, because once the true location of the invasion was known, the Allies could readily deduce she had fed them lies and that she was an Abwehr double agent. She must have hated her countrymen so, to rub our faces in her treachery by publicly celebrating with a Bosch officer.”
“Would she not be in danger from your underground?”
Lechavalier looked at me as he might at a simpleton. “Good God, I would have strung her intestines over my brasserie had I been able to find her without her Wehrmacht colonel. But mission accomplished, she disappeared.”
Mme. Gaudet’s lies were that the Wehrmacht 8th and 28th Divisions were moving from Normandy toward Belgium. She had provided another part of the false puzzle for the Allies.
I interviewed her daughter, Anna, at length. I also spoke with several of her Le Havre friends and even an Abwehr controller. No one knew what turned Clara Gaudet, of the tragedy or avarice or confusion that led her to betray her country to the Germans. She took the secret to the grave after the war. She was placed in her coffin with her neatly guillotined head under her arm.
The British have not released the name of the originator of the second false radio signal received just before S-Day, this one from Merksem about the claimed movements of the Wehrmacht’s 30th Division. They will undoubtedly deal with the double agent when he or she is found.
The citizens of Norwich were more successful than Jean Lechavalier in seeking revenge. Many townfolk are ashamed of it now, though some swear they never will be. Their ancient town lay in ruins from the Luftwaffe fire-bombing. I walked through Norwich after the war. It reminded me of old photographs of San Francisco after the earthquake and fire of 1906. Some buildings had one wall remaining. Others had nothing left above ground but plumbing standing stiffly into the air. A dusty pall hung over the town. Even years after the bombing, my footsteps blew up puffs of ash.
Townspeople had quickly concluded that the devastation of Norwich had been part of the ruse. The Luftwaffe turned their village into an inferno, forcing citizens to flee into eastern county roads, clogging them, further convincing the Allies that the invasion would come from across the North Sea.
Two weeks after S-Day, a Luftwaffe pilot—the only survivor of the only bomber shot down over Norwich—was being transferred from Norwich Castle, which had escaped destruction, to a POW camp in Scotland. The castle had been used as a prison from the reign of Henry III to 1884 and was so used after the fire bombing. The airman was still wearing his tan, summer flying suit over his service tunic, and his breeches were tucked into his tall leather and suede boots. His steps were reduced by shackles, and his hands were bound behind his back. He was easily recognizable for what he was.
As he was marched toward a truck, an elderly man stepped from his tent, pushed his spectacles back on his nose, then yelled, “That’s one of them. Right here, one of them.”
The old man was a resident of a tent city erected since the fires burned themselves out. He continued to shout, and other residents of the canvas shelters emerged to stare at the German.
Someone yelled, “Look at him. Bloody cocksure and proud.”
Another followed with “We’ve got nothing but ashes, and he goes to a camp to eat our food.”
“He killed hundreds of us.”
A crowd gathered. The army guards hurried the German along the street toward the truck.
“My boy is dead, and he’s to blame.”
“He shouldn’t live when our town died.”
“Rotter.”
At first the assembly stepped hesitantly toward the airman, but anger urged them on. They spilled into the street after the prisoner. The homeless throng quickly grew to a hundred. The guards might have outrun them, but the German was hindered by the leg irons. He tripped, stumbling into a guard, who tried to right him. The crowd gained on them.
The cries were of outrage and sorrow. Motion added to the rage. The pack roughly pushed aside the guards and clutched at any part of the German the villagers could reach. He was lifted above their heads, carried on a dozen pairs of hands toward an elm tree, denuded of leaves by the fire’s heat, “but with enough spring left for our purposes,” one Norwich resident who wished to remain anonymous told me.
A rope was produced from somewhere. A boy was hoisted to the first branches. While the crowd cheered, he climbed as high as he could before tying a rope end to the trunk. He dropped the rope to the mob.
Many hands pulled on it, bending the tree top almost to the ground. Another Norwich citizen opined, “You Americans are better at nooses than we are. This wasn’t art, but it did its duty.” The noose was fitted around the terrified German’s neck.
With cries of “Stand back, stand back,” the rope was released. The elm straightened like a bow, dragging the hapless airman after it.
A witness said, “He kicked for five minutes, would have been longer but for the leg irons weighing him down. Then he hung there for a full day before anybody had the courage to cut him down.”
Omar Hacheim had been on the German payroll for ten months and on the British payroll for nine. Hacheim was a man of principle, but he cared not a whit for either side in the war that had engulfed his homeland, so his principle was to collect as much salary as possible from both and thereby guarantee that at least one of his currencies would be worth something after the war.