D Day, 6 June, 1944, saw put into action one of the most unlikely alliances in the history of warfare: that between the largest military invasion of all time, and French poetry. The episode in question concerned the role played by a poem by Paul Verlaine in that momentous event: an episode immortalised in the famous 1962 film, The Longest Day.
A mixture of confusion, hubris and complacency played its part in the German defeat
The success of Operation Overlord, as the invasion of Normandy was code-named and which culminated 80 years ago today, was to depend considerably on the role of the French Resistance in acts of sabotage prior to the event. The Allies thus broadcast hundreds of coded messages to the underground in the months preceding the attack. Most of the messages sent by BBC Radio Londres were bogus, deliberately designed to mislead and confuse. Only a few were genuine and related to D-Day, but even they sounded meaningless, including such inanities as ‘John has a long moustache’, and ‘Molasses tomorrow will bring forth cognac’.
The Special Operations Executive (SOE) had already employed the verses of many well-known poems for this means during the war. Now it happened to be the turn of this 19th-century romantic’s words: a two-part message taken from the opening lines of Verlaine’s 1866 poem, ‘Chanson d’Automne’, suddenly assumed utmost importance.
The first three verses, ‘Les sanglots longs / des violons / de l’automne” (‘The long sobs of autumn violins’) signified that Operation Overlord would take place within two weeks. The next three, ‘Blessent mon coeur / d’une langueur / monotone’ (‘wound my heart with a monotonous languor’) indicated it would start within 48 hours, and that the Resistance should start sabotage operations accordingly.
The Germans knew all-too-well the Allied game. Some in their higher echelons were also familiar with the particular significance of the Verlaine poem. In January 1944, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, then chief of German intelligence, had informed Lieutenant Colonel Hellmuth Meyer – intelligence officer for the Fifteenth Army and head of the only counter-intelligence team on the invasion front – of the significance of these two lines.
On the night of 1 June, Meyer and his multilingual, thirty-man radio crew intercepted in Morse code the first part of the Allied message. According to Cornelius Ryan in his 1959 book, The Longest Day (which was the basis for the film), immediately upon hearing these words, Meyer informed the Fifteenth Army’s chief of staff, Major General Rudolf Hofmann, who alerted the Fifteenth Army. The Seventh Army, which held the coast of Normandy and was responsible for most of the eventual assault area, was not given the alert. As Martin Gilbert wrote in his 2011 account, D-Day, the Seventh Army had already ‘received too many false warnings in the past’.
Meyer also telephoned Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s headquarters, Field Marshal Rommel’s headquarters at Army Group B stationed in northern France, and the German High Forces High Command (OKW). The message was duly passed to OKW Chief of Operations, Colonel Alfred Jodl. ‘He did not order an alert,’ writes Ryan. ‘He assumed Rundstedt had done so; but Rundstedt thought Rommel’s headquarters had issued the order.’
As Stephen E. Ambrose concluded in his 1994 work, D-Day, of Rommel’s eventual failure to repel the Allies: ‘German confusion was extensive. Without air reconnaissance, with Allied airborne troops dropping, here, there, everywhere, with their telephone lines cut by the Resistance…the Germans were all but blind and leaderless.’
The Germans knew all-too-well the Allied game
Ryan adds as an aside: ‘Rommel must have known about the message; but from his own estimate of Allied intentions it is obvious that he must have discounted it.’ The Allies had long been assumed to be plotting an invasion at the Pas-de-Calais, across the English Channel at its most narrow point. Even when the Normandy invasion did begin, it was dismissed by many as a diversion.
The second crucial line of the Verlaine poem also met with a tepid response. It was received late in the evening on June 5, prompting Meyer once more into action. He finally alerted the Fifteenth Army’s commanding officer General Hans Von Salmuth of the imminent invasion. Returning to the words of Ryan, who interviewed Salmuth later for his book:
‘Meyer burst into the dining room where General Hans Von Salmuth…was playing bridge with his chief of staff and two others. “General!” Meyer said breathlessly. “The message, the second part – it’s here!”
‘Von Salmuth thought for a moment, then gave the order to put the Fifteenth Army on full alert. As Meyer hurried out of the room, Von Salmuth was again looking at his bridge hand. “I’m too old a bunny,” Von Salmuth recalls saying “to get excited by this”.’
A mixture of confusion, hubris and complacency played its part in the German defeat on the beaches of Normandy. For this, some small credit should go to the unnamed aesthete in Allied intelligence, the man who devised the ruse of using a gay, 19th-century decadent poet to baffle the Germans and help secure Allied victory.
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