The Spy with 29 Names (20 page)

Once the parties ended, however, and lovers pulled themselves free of each other’s embrace, the sense of purpose across the country to defeat the Germans and see the war through to the end, was almost palpable.

‘Although we were on the threshold of what might be a terrible and for many a terminal experience, we felt uplifted and carried away by the mood of the moment. There had been so much suffering, so much heartbreak, so many tragedies and sacrifices, so much disruption, and now the time was at hand when we were to rise up and strike the blow which could end it all. The British people, for once totally united, held their breath and waited.’

The men of La Nueve company liked and respected Lieutenant Amado Granell; he had been a soldier for longer than most. Now, very soon, the Spaniards under his command would be heading for France to fight alongside other Allied troops. It was the next step – perhaps the first of many – but the dream of a Spain free from fascism kept them going. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco – they would all fall in the end. And now they had American guns and tanks to get the job done.

Granell liked soldiering: as a young man, in the 1920s, he had joined the Spanish Legión – a force based in Spanish Morocco and modelled on the French Foreign Legion. Its founder, Colonel Millán Astray, was a one-armed, one-eyed maniac and devotee of the Japanese ‘samurai way’. His ‘
legionarios
’ were expected to embrace a heroic demise; not
for nothing were they dubbed the ‘bridegrooms of death’. Tough conditions and harsh punishments for misbehaviour were the norm – unlike other units, the members of the Legión were often bearded, wearing their shirts unbuttoned to the belly and sniffing at the way other soldiers marched – a
legionario
always ran.

Millán Astray’s second-in-command in the 1920s was a young major – Francisco Franco. Millán Astray revered his protégé and thought he was destined to be the saviour of Spain. Franco, a conservative Catholic, did not disagree. Amado Granell had different politics from his commanding officer, however, and once his service in the Legión came to an end, he returned to civilian life in his native Valencia and joined the Republican Left Party, becoming an active member of the socialist UGT trade union.

When the Spanish Civil War started, Granell joined the Republican army to fight the rebels – or the Nationalists as Franco’s coalition of monarchists, fascists and Catholics came to be known. Within a short time Granell had risen up the ranks to become an officer, and commanded a unit equipped with armoured cars and motorcycles – shock troops to be used at various key points of the shifting front lines. He spent much of the Civil War defending Madrid, riding up and down the streets where, only three years later, his compatriot Juan Pujol would meet at cafés with his Abwehr controllers to discuss plans for spying in London.

But after two and a half years of fighting, and half a million deaths, the Republicans lost the Civil War. As Franco’s troops, helped by his German and Italian allies, conquered the remaining areas of Republican territory, in late March 1939 Granell was one of the last left-wingers to get out of the country, securing a place on HMS
Stanbrook
as she sailed out of Alicante towards Algeria. Many of his comrades left stranded on the docks committed suicide where they stood.

The French in Oran were uncomfortable with so many armed Spaniards turning up. They stripped the new arrivals of their weapons, put them in concentration camps, ordered some to join the French Foreign Legion. Granell held on for over three years. A new world war started, France fell to the Nazis, and the French soldiers now watching over him shifted their allegiance to Pétain and the regime collaborating with Hitler.

Granell and the other defeated Spanish Republicans never stopped dreaming that a moment of redemption might come.

And then, in 1942, at long last the Americans landed in Oran. As they were being shot at by French defenders, Granell took his chances and helped the GIs move around the city, giving them directions, telling them where the defenders were staked out. He had been waiting for this moment. Now other kinds of French – the Free French – were in control. He and the others quickly joined up to help, and they became soldiers in the French 2nd Armoured Division, led by General Philippe Leclerc.

Spaniards were scattered throughout the unit – over 2,000 of them. The largest concentration, however, around 150 men, was in the 9th Company, which soon became known as ‘La Nueve’ in Spanish. The commander was Captain Dronne, a Frenchman. Under him, and the effective company commander, was Lieutenant Granell. His years in the Legión and then the Spanish Republican Army counted for much.

Granell handed out Spanish Republican tricolour flags of red, yellow and violet to sew on to his men’s uniforms. They were under French orders, but they knew who they were, and what they were fighting for.

They had been stationed in Rabat for a while, where they had been fitted out with US Sherman tanks, armoured cars and Jeeps. The Spanish gave each vehicle a name, often the name of a battle from the Civil War – words like ‘Brunete’ or ‘Teruel’ would be painted in white on the side. A group of anarchists wanted to call their armoured car Buenaventura Durruti after their charismatic leader, killed during the siege of Madrid in 1936, but the French would not allow it. They called it Les Pingouïns instead. Granell’s car got the name Los Cosacos – ‘the Cossacks’.

In the run-up to D-Day, La Nueve was transferred along with the rest of Leclerc’s division to Britain as part of the troop build-up. Billeted in Pocklington, west of York, the company waited for the moment when the invasion would begin, itching to be a part of the new chapter in the war.

ON THE EVE
of the Normandy landings Germany had over a million men available to fight in France. Even after three years of heavy fighting in the east the Wehrmacht was still a large, powerful and well-equipped military force. Many on the Allied side were anxious about the success of the landings. Just hours before D-Day British Chief of the Imperial General Staff Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke wrote in his diary of his concerns. ‘At the best’, he said, ‘it will fall so very very far short of the expectation of the bulk of the people, namely all those who know nothing of its difficulties. At the worst it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war.’

On the German side, by contrast, many thought they would win once the Allies finally landed. Generalleutnant Fritz Bayerlein, commander of the Panzer Lehr Division, was convinced that what had happened at Dieppe in 1942 was ‘proof that we could repel any invasion’.

Hitler himself was confident of success, betting on the destruction of the Allied forces in France so that he could get on with fighting the Soviets. He had adopted a defensive stance in the west, which went against the grain of German military thinking. A vast ‘Atlantic Wall’ of reinforced coastal positions had been erected from Norway down to the French border with Spain. Dunkirk, Calais, Boulogne,
Le Havre, Cherbourg, Brest, La Rochelle and Bordeaux – all ports – had been designated ‘fortresses’ which would be defended to the last man.

Along the northern French coast – the most likely target for invasion – the German 15th Army, with a total of eighteen divisions, and the best men and materiel that the Wehrmacht could muster, was stationed around the Pas-de-Calais. To its left was the 7th Army, less well equipped, set to defend the Normandy sector.

Despite the optimism of some, there was a degree of nervousness about the coming invasion on the German side, however. Overall command was held by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, based at St Germain just outside Paris. He was unimpressed by the coastal defences, regarding them as ‘just a bit of cheap bluff’. The main assault, he was convinced, would come over the Pas-de-Calais, hence the positioning there of the 15th Army.

Von Rundstedt was not a lone commander in total control of his forces, however. The German command structure in the west was complicated, following Hitler’s liking for arrangements where more than one agency was performing the same task – a competitive set-up, according to Nazi post-Darwinian thinking, brought out the best in people.

Under von Rundstedt, in nominal control of the Panzer forces, was General Leo Freiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg. Meanwhile, in command of Army Group B, the German forces grouped across northern France and the man responsible for the coastal defences, was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Rommel wanted the Panzer divisions to be kept close to the seaboard for a quick response to the invasion. He was, however, only given control over three of the total six Panzer divisions available. Of the remainder, two were of the Waffen-SS: the 12th SS Panzer Division made up of boys of the Hitler Youth and with an average age of about 18; and the 1st SS Panzer Division LAH. Rommel had no say over how these key, crack formations would be deployed.

The three-way split of authority between von Rundstedt, von Schweppenburg and Rommel was further exacerbated by the fact that Hitler himself insisted on having final command over the Panzer divisions, convinced that the Allied landings would be ‘the sole decisive factor in the whole conduct of the war’.

Rommel and Hitler agreed, unlike von Rundstedt, that Normandy might be a target for the invasion. In the weeks leading up to the assault, Rommel reinforced his units there, his intuition, like the Führer’s, telling him that landings of some sort might happen along these beaches.

This confusion at command levels might favour the Allies’ chances come D-Day, but on the ground at least German soldiers were better equipped and in general more experienced than any of the ‘citizen soldiers’ that the Allies could send against them. A key element in this superiority was that of the Germans’ tanks.

By this point in the war the basic German workhorse tank was the Mark IV. It had a 75mm gun, armour up to 80mm thick and a top speed of just under 40 kph. In terms of numbers produced, it was the most important German tank in the conflict, and was equal, if not considerably superior, to the Shermans and Cromwells of the Allies. The Mark IV was already being superseded by an even better tank, however, one that is commonly regarded as the best produced by any country in the war: the Panther. This tank had a 75mm gun like the Mark IV, but also had three machine guns, armour up to 110mm thick and a top speed of 46 kph.

In addition, the Germans had Tiger tanks – heavier and slower than Panthers, but with thick armour and a massive 88mm gun that could easily take out any Allied opponent.

By comparison, Shermans, which were produced in great numbers by the Americans and were set to be used by all Allied forces in Normandy, had a short 75mm gun, armour only 51mm thick at its strongest point, and a top speed of just 38 kph. They were also tall, which made them relatively easy targets. Soldiers used to call them ‘Ronson Lighters’ owing to their unfortunate habit of catching fire once they had been hit.

After the landings had begun, Allied tank crews became all too aware of the superiority of the Germans’ tanks.

‘There was, I think, no British tank commander’, one officer wrote, ‘who would not happily have surrendered his “fringe benefits” for a tank in the same class as the German Panther or Tiger.’ Once a Sherman, Churchill or Cromwell had been hit by one of these steel monsters, the results were commonly fatal.

Even in lighter weaponry, the German soldier enjoyed a clear
advantage. The MG42 machine gun – the ‘Spandau’ – could fire 1,200 rounds per minute, compared to an equivalent 500 rpm from a British Bren or BAR. Meanwhile, the German anti-tank weapon, the
Panzerfaust
, was also superior to the American bazooka or British PIAT.

Only in artillery and air power could the Allies claim superiority.

Battle hardened from the Eastern Front, the best fighting unit within the German military forces now based in the west – the 1st SS Panzer Division LAH – was regrouping in Belgium having finished its tour of duty in the Ukraine. Fighting the Soviets it had been reduced to a mere
Kampfgruppe
– an ill-defined ‘fighting group’ – after heavy losses had reduced it from a full division. Now, however, its numbers had swelled once more to around 20,000 men, and it had been re-equipped, reaching a near-capacity 103 Mark IV tanks and 67 Panthers.

The LAH was part of the 1st SS Panzer Corps, which also included the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitler Youth. The Corps was led by former LAH commander General Sepp Dietrich, a one-time petrol-pump attendant and Hitler’s erstwhile chauffeur and brutal sidekick. His place in the LAH had been taken by General Theodor ‘Teddy’ Wisch.

At the age of twenty-eight, Jochen Peiper had been promoted to Obersturmbannführer – Lieutenant Colonel – in charge of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment. His brutality had continued in the same vein after the victory at Kharkov. In one encounter with Soviet forces his men killed a total of 2,280 Red Army men and took only three prisoners. The complete annihilation of the village of Pekarshchina using the now famous blowtorches was also added to his tally.

Hitler himself awarded Peiper his latest decoration and the following notice was published in German newspapers: ‘In grateful recognition of your heroic actions in the struggle for the future of our people, I award you the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves as the 377th member of the German Wehrmacht so honoured. Adolf Hitler.’

The fighting in the east was taking its toll on Peiper. Fuelling himself with coffee, cigarettes and Pervitin, a German-manufactured amphetamine, had caused his heart to suffer, leading to exhaustion and fainting spells. At the start of 1944 he began a lengthy period of leave, staying with his wife and two young children at their home in Bavaria. Sigi was heavily pregnant with their third child.

Late April saw Peiper back with his regiment, stationed in the Belgian town of Hasselt. The new recruits brought in to fill the LAH’s numbers needed to be trained up to the high, fanatical standards demanded by the Waffen-SS. As well as the hard training and familiarisation with weaponry, two one-hour education sessions were held each week to teach the troops about the American forces they were expecting to face. The USA, Peiper’s men were told, was a decadent country ruled by Jews, made morally corrupt by Jewish artists and Black music.