The youth of the city rapidly revealed considerable courage and dedication. Many were already members of the Défense Passive, the volunteer aid service, and many more immediately joined to help. Ambulances could not get through blocked streets, so the badly injured had to be taken on stretchers to the main emergency hospital set up in the convent of the Bon Sauveur. A very large man being carried across the ruined city by stretcher bearers, sweating under their load, could not stop apologizing: ‘If only I was a little less fat,’ he kept saying. Other volunteers began to shift rubble in an attempt to search for people who might be buried alive. One young man from the Défense Passive found a looter at work and threatened to arrest him. The looter laughed in his face because he was unarmed. The infuriated volunteer swung his spade at him and its blade happened to sever the man’s jugular. In the looter’s pockets were found a quantity of jewels, and — it is said — the severed hand of a woman with rings on the fingers.
The refuge of the Bon Sauveur itself had also suffered. A nun who leaped for shelter into one bomb crater was buried by another bomb exploding next to it. An outbuilding of the convent housed an asylum for the insane. Some of the last bombs to be dropped struck it, killing several of the inmates and driving the rest wild with fear, screaming as they held on to the bars. Heintz’s sister was assisting one of the surgeons in the improvised operating theatre, so he decided to go there to help too. On seeing the pails of blood, he suddenly had the idea of soaking sheets in it and spreading them out on the lawn as a signal to the aircraft that this was a hospital. Once the blood dried, it was no longer scarlet, but another cross was improvised the next morning with red carpets and sheets dyed in mercurochrome.
Six surgical teams had been on standby since news of the invasion that morning. The Défense Passive organization for Caen had been based at the Bon Sauveur since the beginning of the year. The Lycée Malherbe was designated its subsidiary hospital, while on the other bank of the Orne, the Hospice des Petites Soeurs des Pauvres also acted as a casualty reception centre. The different organizations worked together with great effect. At the request of the surgeons, groups of police set out to seize supplies from pharmacies and clinics around the town. The medical profession in Caen was highly praised in an official report which recorded the ‘magnificent attitude of the town’s doctors who showed a boundless devotion’.
In the southern fringes of the city, some 15,000 people sought shelter in tunnels, recently rediscovered, which were part of the medieval stone quarries. They had packed suitcases with food and prayer books, not knowing that these damp, airless quarters were to be their squalid refuge for just over a month. With no sanitation or water, almost everyone suffered from lice, fleas and bedbugs.
A smaller but more intense tragedy had already taken place in Caen that morning. The Gestapo had gone to the Maison d’Arrêt, the city prison, and entered the section where French Resistance prisoners were held by German guards. The French warders on the civil side watched what happened through a hole in the canvas screen which had been erected to blank off the German military section. Altogether, eighty-seven members of the Resistance were taken out into the courtyard and shot that morning in batches of six. Victims of the massacre ranged across the political spectrum of the Resistance, from the ORA to Communists, and from a railway worker to the Marquis de Touchet. Another prisoner, who heard the shooting from a cell, recorded that none of them cried out except one man who, on entering the courtyard, perceived his fate. He began to shout, ‘Oh, no! No! My wife, my children… my children!’ He was silenced by the volley.
That night the German woman warder, who had previously behaved monstrously towards her charges, was ‘pale and evidently terrified’ by what had happened. She even returned to the surviving prisoners some of their possessions, insisting, ‘The German army is honest.’ Three weeks later, when the British had still not taken the city, the Gestapo came back and removed the bodies.[16]
The bitterness of many citizens over the destruction of Caen is not hard to imagine. ‘With a bestial frenzy,’ wrote one, ‘the bombs eviscerated the city without pity.’ Another described the bombing as ‘useless as well as criminal’. There had never been more than 300 Germans in the town, he wrote, and even if the purpose was to disrupt transport communications, the bombers failed to hit a single bridge. Altogether some 800 people died in Caen as a result of the bombing and naval bombardments of the first two days. Many thousands more were wounded.
A number of other towns astride main routes to the invasion area suffered a similar fate. As well as Saint-Lô, Caen and Falaise, Lisieux to the east received two major bombing raids. ‘The town is in flames and appears to be completely abandoned,’ a report to Paris stated. It also demanded that the Commissaire of Police be punished for having fled his post during the night while the town burned. So many firemen were killed and so much equipment was lost during the first raid that it became impossible to fight the flames when more bombers returned. To the south, both Argentan and Ecouché were described as ‘almost destroyed’. In Argentan ‘all the gendarmes [were] killed or injured’. The bombing caused terrible panic as well as widespread destruction of homes. Altogether, some 100,000 residents of Calvados would become refugees. Caen’s population of 60,000 was reduced to 17,000.
A curious contradiction lingers within this strategy of interdiction by bombing. If Montgomery really did intend to capture Caen on the first day, then why did he want the RAF to smash it so that its streets became impassable? That could help only the defender.
In London, meanwhile, everyone waited uncertainly for more news after the King’s broadcast to the nation. Churchill later made a statement to a packed House of Commons. ‘This is the first of a series of landings,’ he said, bolstering Plan Fortitude, even if he was technically guilty of misleading the House of Commons. ‘So far the commanders who are engaged report that everything is proceeding according to plan — and what a plan!’
Outside, London’s streets and shops were empty, with taxis cruising about unable to find a customer. ‘In Westminster Abbey,’ wrote a woman journalist, ‘typists in summer dresses and the usual elderly visitors in country-looking clothes came in to pray beside the tomb of the last war’s Unknown Soldier, or to gaze rather vacantly at the tattered colours and the marble heroes of battles which no longer seemed remote.’ Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke was unable to get out of a lunch that day for the Maharajah of Kashmir with Mrs Churchill. ‘It has been very hard to realize all day,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘that whilst London went on calmly with its job, a fierce conflict was being fought at a close distance on the French coast!’
Less than 200 miles to the south, the battle for Hillman was indeed still fierce. The unfortunate Suffolks were unfairly blamed for the delay and so was their brigadier. The main fault lay with the 3rd Division’s lack of foresight to provide sufficient support, such as AVREs, which could have knocked out bunkers with their petards. And nobody can blame the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, which had pushed ahead bravely towards Caen with insufficient armoured support. Even taking into account the unpredictably high tide that day, the responsibility rested at higher levels. Neither General Sir Miles Dempsey, the commander-in-chief of the British Second Army, nor General Montgomery had thought through this vital part of the operation and allotted priorities clearly enough.
16
Dagmar Dreabeck, a young Dutchwoman whose bravery and kindness stirred the admiration of all — she was known as ‘l’Ange de la prison’ — was separated from the French prisoners and sent to Ravensbrück. She died less than a year later, the day the Red Army liberated the camp.