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 Western European naval forces, on an inspection tour in Bordeaux, took care to cancel all torpedo boat patrols in the Channel. The commander of the 21e Panzerdivision, the only German armored division deployed around Caen, is in Paris with one of its mistresses.
Clues communicated but few leaders take the measure
The first signs of an Allied landing, however, reached the general staff. Around 21:30 p.m., Lieutenant Colonel Meyer, head of counterintelligence for the 15the Army informs his superior, General von Salmuth, of the broadcast of the second part of Verlaine's message indicating the implementation of the Allied landing. Von Salmuth immediately puts his 15e army on alert and informs Field Marshal von Rundstedt's headquarters. Despite this alert, the Germans are still far from being in battle formation.
General Dollmann, who commands the 7the German army in Normandy, is in fact in Rennes to organize the next morning a map exercise with its division commanders and its regiment commanders from Normandy and Brittany. There is only General Falley, the head of the 91e infantry division, which seems to take the measure of the event: faced with the abnormal passage of allied planes, it decides to return to its HQ at Picauville in the Channel.
At midnight, General Marks, commander of the 84the army corps in charge of the sector between the Dives and the Couesnon, celebrates its anniversary in the company of its deputies at its headquarters in Saint-Lô. The 7e German army on which he depends has still not been informed of the dissemination of the personal messages on BBC radioHe is unaware that at the same time the Allies have just launched their airborne operations while in Brittany French paratroopers have just jumped over the Saint-Marcel maquis.
French SAS actions on the sidelines of Operation Overlord
In Brittany, on the night of June 5 to 6, Colonel Bourgoin was parachuted at the head of the 2nde French Parachute Chasseur Regiment near Saint-Marcel. With it, four parachute sticks are dropped behind enemy lines. Once on land, the paratroopers must set up two logistics bases from which sabotage groups will radiate to prevent the movement of 150 Germans stationed in Brittany to Normandy.
They will also have to supervise the 20 resistance fighters already organized for the upcoming battles.
At 0:45, the sticks of lieutenants Marienne and Déplante were parachuted into Morbihan, between Plumelec and Guehenno, this was the Digson mission. In Côtes-du-Nord, two other sticks commanded by lieutenants Botella and Deschamps were also landed around 1:15 in the morning on the edge of the Duault forest. This was the Samwest mission. These four teams constituted the precursor echelon of a vast airborne operation planned for the next day, and which was to deploy 18 sabotage teams. The 36 paratroopers of the first wave all belonged to the 4e Commander Bourgoin's Special Air Service. The two bases thus established on land were to serve as a starting point for very specific missions in the days following the Allied landings in Normandy: cutting off 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.
