“We stopped the lorries on the road, intent on first inspecting the plane,” he told me. “The power pole was still down, so we gave the wires a wide berth. The Stuka was about fifty yards in from the road. I walked across the field, the green wheat not much above my boot tops, and I tripped over a clump of dirt. Almost fell to my knees. Only it wasn’t a clump of dirt. It was a rat, dead as you please.”
Dartmore and his crew continued toward the German plane. “Then my boot hit another rat, lying still in the furrow, and nothing is more dead than a dead rat. Its little eyes were bugging out, and there was a patch of dried spit at the corner of its mouth, and the flies were working on it. I would have felt sorry for the rat, had it not been so ugly.”
Dartmore and his crew became more careful, watching their steps. “We circled the plane and found a dozen more rats, all dead. The closer we got to the Stuka, the more there were. And some dead birds also.”
The CRO team then found the wood boxes, shattered, their contents spread over the furrows. “And there was meat inside the boxes, or what was left of the boxes. Some of the meat had been strewn about by the impact. There seemed to be oatmeal mixed with it. It appeared the Germans were bombing us with Scottish haggis.”
The meat had poisoned the rats and birds. Laboratory tests later showed the meat to be horse, which along with the oatmeal had been spiked with cyanide.
“Now why would the Germans want to bomb us with poisoned meat and porridge?” Dartmore asked me. “It’s a mystery, and I’ve never figured it out.”
I told Dartmore that the Stuka’s mission had puzzled General Barclay, AACCS commander in chief, and others of the Defense Committee when Barclay presented details. General Clay had shaken his head, without a clue. Then Winston Churchill had rumbled forth: “That dive bomber’s mission is obvious.”
“The prime minister knew of our Stuka?” Dartmore asked me, gratified.
“Certainly.”
That day in the war cabinet rooms, Churchill said, “They were after the ravens.”
All heads nodded with immediate understanding and agreement. Only General Clay and Admiral Stanton, commander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet East, were still stumped.
As I relayed this to Dartmore, he said, “And I’m still stumped.”
I replied, “The Tower ravens.”
Dartmore’s eyes widened. “Of course.” He slapped a palm on the pub’s table. “How could I have not known? That’s just what the jerries would do.”
The six ravens in the Tower of London loiter on the Tower Green, squawking and preening their clipped wings. When one dies, it is replaced by another. The birds are cared for by a raven-master. And they are well cared for, because legend has it that if all the ravens die, the British Empire will fall.
The Stuka’s mission had been to murder the ravens. Hitler, a mystic, may himself have believed in the legend. Or perhaps it was an attempt to cripple British morale. But it was a puzzle for many, until the prime minister, with his fabled lucidity, had quickly solved the riddle.
Not all answers were revealed. Private Philip Hardin was a rifleman with Charley Company, 1st Battalion, 137th Infantry Regiment near Dymchurch on the channel. He told me, “The Wehrmacht’s 17th Division hit us so hard on the beach we just collapsed. I was blown down by a blast, and when I raised my head, I was looking into four German rifles. I may have the humiliating distinction of being the first American captured on S-Day.”
Hardin and ten other stunned and bleeding 1st Battalion survivors were huddled together on the beach, guarded by two Wehrmacht soldiers. German soldiers raced up the beach. Shells crackled through the air overhead.
Hardin recalled, “I had fallen on my rifle stock and knocked out my front teeth, top and bottom. My clearest memory of those two hours on the beach is of the blood in my mouth and the beach master’s whistle. I can’t imagine where he found the wind, blowing and blowing. All the while German troops and traffic roared up the beach from their landing vessels.”
A Wehrmacht lieutenant appeared above the group of POWs. “He was carrying a notebook, and he glanced at it. Then he said in accented English, ‘You prisoners come with me.’ He held a Luger on us, and marched us up the beach.”
The guards lowered their rifles. The German lieutenant followed the POWs closely, keeping them in line.
“He walked us toward the hill rising behind the beach, then up and over the hill. Fighting had pushed inland, and we marched toward the line, past a barn and several houses. Wounded were lying all about, German and American. Machine gun fire was steady. We walked, but I can’t remember how far. My head was still foggy. I started to wobble, but one of the other prisoners put my arm over his shoulder and helped me along.”
Hardin and the other prisoners were ushered into a cottage, half of which had been destroyed by artillery fire. Bewildered and frightened, the prisoners lowered themselves to the floor. Hardin told me, “And then our captor put the pistol into his holster and said, ‘You men are now behind American lines. You’ll want to get further inland as fast as possible.’ One of the other POWs tried to ask him a question, but the German cut him off by saying in English, ‘Get going. You don’t have much time.’ And that was the last I ever saw of the lieutenant.”
The POWs limped north, their hands over their heads. They were soon hailed by American troops, who turned them over to the medics.
“Then a day or two later, it suddenly hit me that the words the German lieutenant said to us in the cottage were completely free of an accent.”
I asked, “You’ve admitted being groggy. Maybe your memory of his accent, or anything else, isn’t accurate.”
“No question about him being a German, at least his uniform was. He was wearing an olive green tunic and a cap called an M1938 officers’ side cap. He wore a decoration, the German Cross in gold, below his right shirt pocket. I know all this because I studied Wehrmacht uniforms after the war, looking for an answer.”
Then Hardin smiled as he handed me a sheet of paper. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me. Here are the names and addresses of three other prisoners who were with me on that beach. You give them a call, and they’ll confirm my story.”
I did, and they told me identical versions of their mysterious liberation.
Whether the officer was an American in a dead Wehrmacht lieutenant’s uniform or a sympathetic German officer with a mastery of English may never be known. Nor, probably, will his fate.
Another small mystery. Never was I more impressed with Wilson Clay’s composure under fire than that day in the cabinet war rooms when the Execution Order, as it came to be called, was produced. The Defense Committee was in the middle of an interminable discussion of convoy problems when Winston Churchill said, “I must interrupt this discussion to ask our American friend General Clay a brief question.”
I, and the other Flying Buttresses, detected a change in the prime minister’s tone, a strange tinniness. We lowered the front legs of our chairs to the floor, expecting a show.
Churchill raised a sheet of paper from the green table and rattled it. He brought it closer to his eyes, then moved it away in a display of distaste. He intoned, “I regret even having to ask this of you, General Clay.”
All eyes turned to Clay.
“I have in my hand an order over President Roosevelt’s signature. I cannot tell you at this time how I came to possess this document.”
Churchill looked over the edge of the paper at Clay. He said, “It directs you, General Clay, in the event of an imminent surrender of Great Britain, to carry out the assassination of the British royal family to prevent their possible collaboration with the Third Reich.”