D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

It was jealousy masquerading as moral outrage. The jealousy was mainly provoked by the food they had received as a result of their conduct.[68] Quite simply, these young women were the easiest and most vulnerable scapegoats, particularly for men who wished to hide their own lack of Resistance credentials.

Moral confusion, if not outright hypocrisy, existed on the Allied side too. At his airfield near Bayeux, Jock Colville found it ironic when Montgomery ordered all brothels to be closed. ‘Military police were posted to ensure that the order was obeyed. Undeterred and unabashed, several of the deprived ladies presented themselves in a field adjoining our orchard. Lines of airmen, including, I regret to say, the worthy Roman Catholic French Canadians, queued for their services, clutching such articles as tins of sardines for payment.’ The French, meanwhile, were shocked by the attitude of American soldiers, who seemed to think that when it came to young French women ‘everything can be bought’. After an evening’s drinking, they would knock on farmhouse doors asking if there was a ‘Mademoiselle’ there for them. More enterprising soldiers had learned some French conversation from the language books produced by the army. Supposedly useful gambits were also provided in the daily lessons published by Stars and Stripes, such as the French for ‘My wife doesn’t understand me.’

Mutual incomprehension and the clash of very different cultures affected Franco-American relations perhaps even more than the joy of liberation. A woman in a town south-east of Mortain described their ecstasy, waving flags and singing the ‘Marseillaise’ when a column of the American 2nd Armored Division arrived. The French were amused by the Creole accent of Cajuns from Louisiana, but in their turn were taken aback when they found that the Americans ‘clearly considered us to be backward. One of them asked me in English if I had ever seen a cinema.’ She replied that the cinema had been invented in France, and also the motorcar. ‘He was left stunned, and not entirely convinced.’

Many American soldiers, who already saw France as almost an enemy country because of the German occupation, found their prejudices strengthened because so many people reported ‘their neighbours as German sympathizers’. Even members of the OSS and the Counter Intelligence Corps had little grasp of French politics and the ‘guerre franco-francaise’, which had simmered away ever since the Revolution and had now boiled up again. There was a widespread view, rooted in American history, that the problems of the Old World stemmed from a corrupt aristocracy and the evils of European colonialism.

Such ideas were encouraged by left-wingers in the Resistance who provided them with intelligence, especially the militant Communist-led FTP. They had good reason to loathe the Vichy regime after the executions of Communist Party members as hostages during the Occupation. They also believed that this was the time for a new revolution. So they tried to persuade American officers, often with some success, that the French aristocracy and bourgeoisie were all collaborators. For their own political purposes, they deliberately made no distinction between those people from all classes of society who had supported Marshal Petain after the debacle of 1940 and those who had actively helped the Germans.

The task of filtering the tens of thousands of Frenchmen and women arrested for collaboration in the summer of 1944 proved overwhelming for the nascent administration of de Gaulle’s provisional government. That autumn, there were over 300,000 dossiers still outstanding. In Normandy, prisoners were brought to the camp at Sully near Bayeux by the securite militaire, the gendarmerie and sometimes by US military police. There were also large numbers of displaced foreigners, Russians, Italians and Spaniards, who were trying to survive by looting from farms.

The range of charges against French citizens was wide and often vague. They included ‘supplying the enemy’, ‘relations with the Germans’, denunciation of members of the Resistance or Allied paratroopers, ‘an anti-national attitude during the Occupation’, ‘pro-German activity’, ‘providing civilian clothes to a German soldier’, ‘pillaging’, even just ‘suspicion from a national point of view’. Almost anybody who had encountered the Germans at any stage could be denounced and arrested.

Tensions between liberators and liberated arose with incidents both large and small. A major source of resentment came with hundreds of road accidents, mainly the killing of livestock but also civilians, due to the constant stream of heavy trucks rushing south to supply the fighting troops. At the other end of the scale, a woman who saw a British soldier give an orange to a German prisoner was furious because French children had never even tasted one. Yet army cooks and others were kind to children, whose eyes opened wide at the slices of white bread cut for them, although they were not quite so keen when they received marmalade sandwiches.

The historian Claude Quetel, then a small boy in Bernieres-sur-Mer, remembers the Canadian troops and his astonishment at seeing a black man for the first time in his life among them. The young Claude could not stop himself from asking why he was black. ‘It’s because I don’t wash enough,’ he joked. Claude took him literally. He wanted to repay the generosity he had received from the soldiers, so he dashed home and stole his mother’s precious cake of soap, then ran back to offer it to the black soldier just before they left for the front. On seeing the outstretched hand with the cake of soap, all the soldiers collapsed in laughter. As the column of trucks moved off, Claude was left there sobbing uncontrollably.

Allied troops, however, became exasperated with the constant pilfering of equipment. The French authorities delicately termed it ‘requisitions irregulieres’. A black market based at first on American and British cigarettes then branched into stolen fuel and tyres. But Allied soldiers were far from innocent when it came to stealing. In Caen, an officer with the civil affairs team wrote that British troops ‘pillaging shops and premises pose quite a problem, but offenders are heavily punished when caught’. In the chaos of war, many soldiers who would never have stolen at home were tempted by what they thought were easy pickings. ‘Our soldiers have done some looting,’ noted Myles Hildyard at 7th Armoured Division headquarters, ‘including two military police of this division who held up two old countesses near here in a chateau.’ Even British officers pocketed objects when billeted in country houses, prompting an increasing number of French to observe that ‘the Germans were much more correct’.

Yet the greatest weight on Norman hearts was the terrible destruction wreaked upon their towns and countryside. An American doctor described the forests stripped of their leaves by artillery fire, livestock carcasses rotting in the fields and towns reduced to a mass of rubble, ‘with occasionally a cynical touch such as an advertisement for Singer sewing machines stuck to a wall which had not been demolished, or a house whose facade has been blown away in front of the dining room, exposing like a theatre set, with the table and the chairs carefully positioned round it’. When French refugees from the fighting returned to their wrecked homes, some were traumatized by the unrecognizable scene, while others were bitterly resigned to the futile waste. Sometimes a tiny detail brought home to Allied troops the suffering of the French. For one British soldier, it was seeing a little house called ‘Mon Repos’ destroyed by shellfire.

Mines and unexploded shells, despite work by Allied and French teams, would continue to maim farmers and children for several years to come. Any work of reconstruction concentrated on improving supply facilities for the Allied armies. In Caen, 15,000 troops were put to work reopening the inland port at the head of the canal, but few could be spared to re-establish essential services for civilians.

Normandy had indeed been martyred, but its sacrifice saved the rest of France. Paradoxically, as a leading French historian has pointed out, the slowness of the Allied advance in the first two months, grinding down the German army, worked in favour of the French, ‘whose liberation was more rapid and less destructive, outside the Normandy battlefields, than one might have feared’.

The battle for Normandy was reaching its climax. On 14 August, Kluge decided that his troops had to break out in a north-easterly direction, ‘otherwise they must expect the loss of all their forces’. Artillery units lined up their guns and fired off all their remaining shells before retreating. On 16 August, Kluge ordered an immediate withdrawal to the line of the River Orne and the crossing began that night. Flak units were brought in to guard the bridges, but Allied air activity appears to have presented little threat over the next two vital days. No troops were allowed to stop or rest in the area. Vehicles were pushed off the road if they broke down and the Feldgendarmerie exerted a strict traffic discipline. Nothing was allowed to slow the withdrawal. Panzer troops aroused anger among the Landser of the infantry by the way they simply drove over corpses, crushing them flat with their tracks.

On 16 August, the Canadians fought their way into the ruined city of Falaise, where William the Conqueror