The Germans are not in place
At 5:7 a.m. on June 00, Field Marshal Rommel, commanding Army Group B, left his headquarters in La Roche-Guyon by car. He was heading to Germany to visit his wife at home in Herrlingen and, at the same time, to meet with Hitler to request reinforcements for the Normandy armoured divisions.
Meanwhile, faced with adverse weather conditions, Admiral Theodore Krancke, commander of the naval forces in Western Europe, on an inspection tour in Bordeaux, took the precaution of canceling all torpedo boat patrols in the English Channel. The commander of the 21st Panzer Division, the only German armored division deployed around Caen, was in Paris with one of his mistresses.
Clues communicated but few leaders take the measure
The first signs of an Allied landing reached the general staffs. Around 21:30 p.m., Lieutenant Colonel Meyer, head of counter-espionage for the 15th Army , informed his superior, General von Salmuth, of the dissemination of the second part of Verlaine's message indicating the implementation of the Allied landing. Von Salmuth immediately put his 15th Army on alert and informed Field Marshal von Rundstedt's headquarters. Despite this alert, the Germans were still far from being in battle formation.
General Dollmann, commanding the German 7th Army in Normandy, was indeed in Rennes to organize a map exercise the following morning with his division and regimental commanders from Normandy and Brittany. Only General Falley, commander of the 91st Infantry Division, seemed to grasp the significance of the event: faced with the unusual flyover of Allied aircraft, he decided to return to his headquarters in Picauville, in the Manche department.
At midnight, General Marks, commander of the 84th Army Corps in charge of the sector between the Dives and Couesnon rivers, was celebrating his birthday with his deputies at his headquarters in Saint-Lô. The German 7th Army , to which he reported, had still not been informed of the broadcast of the personal messages on the BBC . He was unaware that at the same moment, the Allies had just launched their airborne operations, while in Brittany, French paratroopers had just jumped over the Saint-Marcel maquis.
French SAS actions on the sidelines of Operation Overlord
In Brittany, on the night of June 5-6, Colonel Bourgoin parachuted in at the head of the 2nd French Parachute Chasseur Regiment near Saint-Marcel. With him, four sticks of paratroopers were dropped behind enemy lines. Once on the ground, the paratroopers were to establish two logistical bases from which sabotage groups would operate, tasked with preventing the movement of 150,000 Germans stationed in Brittany towards Normandy.
They will also have to supervise the 20 resistance fighters already organized for the upcoming battles.
At 0:45 a.m., the sticks of Lieutenants Marienne and Déplante were parachuted into Morbihan, between Plumelec and Guehenno; this was Operation Digson. In Côtes-du-Nord, two other sticks commanded by Lieutenants Botella and Deschamps were also landed around 1:15 a.m. on the edge of the Duault forest; this was Operation Samwest. These four teams formed the advance echelon of a large airborne operation planned for the following day, which was to deploy 18 sabotage teams. The 36 paratroopers of the first wave all belonged to the 4th Special Air Service under Commander Bourgoin. The two bases thus established on the ground were to serve as the starting point for very specific missions in the days following the Allied landings in Normandy: cutting lines of communication, poisoning the enemy, and making contact with the local resistance.
While the operation was going relatively smoothly in the Côtes-du-Nord, it was more delicate in Morbihan. The paratroopers landed less than 800 meters from a German observation post. Alerted, the enemy—Georgian troops—quickly surrounded one of the paratrooper groups before launching the attack. Out of ammunition and outnumbered, the French were forced to surrender after destroying their radio equipment. Among the prisoners, Corporal Emile Bouëtard, wounded in the shoulder, was coldly finished off by the Georgians. Around 1:30 a.m., Emile Bouëtard was the first French paratrooper to die during the liberation operations.
The days before the Landing
Find here the different reasons that made the landing the success that it was.
