Books: For Want of a Shoe

THE LONGEST DAY (350 pp.)—Cornelius Ryan—Simon & Schuster ($4.95).

No Allied soldier from General Eisenhower to Pvt. Schultz knew it. but D-day’s luckiest augury was a pair of women’s grey suede shoes, size 5½. They nestled in the command car of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel as he sped away from his Normandy headquarters on the morning of June 4, 1944, D-minus-two. Rommel, charged with throwing back any invasion attempt, planned to ask Hitler for reinforcements during his visit to Germany, but something more personal sent him on his trip. June 6 was his wife’s birthday, and the Desert Fox planned to surprise her with the grey suede shoes.

The surprise, of course, was on Rommel, who was caught notably out of position; and he was to keep muttering through that fateful invasion day, as he rushed back to Normandy: “How stupid of me, how stupid of me.” It is the number of fortuitous errors and outright bungles on the German side that lends fascination and suspense to Author Cornelius Ryan’s reconstruction of The Longest Day. Author Ryan, onetime senior writer for Collier’s, has dug assiduously into the histories, war diaries and personal recollections of all the D-day fighters he could find on either side, in a full two years of interviewing. As a result, the familiar facts are tautly exciting. There is a lonely Ike, scuffing the cinders and scanning the skies outside his English trailer headquarters on the eve of his greatest decision. There is the breathtaking invasion fleet of some 5,000 ships stretching from the Normandy coast back to the embarkation ports of England. There is the gore and gallantry of the assault troops slashing their way onto Omaha and Utah beaches through the underbrush of mines, barbed wire, antitank and antipersonnel devices, while being Jashed by bullets, mortar and artillery fire from the German Atlantic Wall. As one British marine classically understated it when his outfit was dumped 50 yards offshore and forced to swim through a hail of machine-gun fire: “Perhaps we’re intruding. This seems to be a private beach.”

Code by Verlaine. As Author Ryan spells out in detail, the Germans knew almost to the hour when D-day was coming and fluffed their unparalleled opportunity to mangle the invasion forces. As early as January 1944, wily Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, then chief of German intelligence, had briefed Lieut. Colonel Hellmuth Meyer, intelligence officer and chief of a radio-monitoring unit with the Pas-de-Calais-based Fifteenth Army, on the code message with which the Allies would alert the European underground for the invasion. It consisted of the first two lines of the poem Chanson d’Automne, by the 19th century French poet Paul Verlaine. During a haggard all-night listening session on June 1, one of Meyer’s 30-man radio-interception crew heard and taped the first part of the message: “Les sang-lots longs des violons de I’automne [The long sobs of autumn’s violins].” Meyer immediately telephoned Rommel’s and Von Rundstedfs headquarters and tele-typed the message to General Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s chief of staff at Berchtesgaden. Jodl did nothing, on the assumption that Rundstedt. overall commander in the west, had sounded the alert. Rundstedt did nothing on the assumption that Rommel was alerted. Either Rommel’s mind was on the grey suede shoes, or. as Author Ryan argues, his own estimate of Allied intentions led him to discount the warning and leave the front. On the evening of June 5, Meyer caught the second part of the message: “Blessent mon coeur d’une langueur monotone [Wounding my heart with monotonous languor].” Following this broadcast, Canaris had told Meyer, the invasion would begin within 48 hours. When the excited Meyer burst into the Fifteenth Army chief’s bridge game, General Hans von Salmuth ordered his troops alerted, then picked up his hand, telling his fellow players, “I’m too old a bunny to get too excited about this.”

Kriegsspiel, Anyone? Monotonous languor seems almost the key to an uncanny series of decisions and events that shackled German strength on Dday. Half a dozen or more top German officers besides Rommel were absent from their coastal commands. Some of these, ironically enough, were taking part in a Kriegsspiel, a war game simulating an enemy landing in Normandy. On the very eve of Dday, the Seventh Army, guarding Normandy, was taken off alert because the weather was bad and all previous Allied landings had taken place in fair weather. The 124 planes of the 26th fighter wing stationed near the coast were pulled back on June 5. The only daylight action of the Luftwaffe on D-day was one two-plane air strike. For twelve hours, Jodl refused to release two Panzer divisions that might have been thrown in, and feared to interrupt Hitler’s pill-drugged sleep with news of the invasion until the official Allied communique. Wakened in the forenoon of June 6, Hitler ranted, as always, at his generals, and clung to the illusion that the invasion was another Dieppe-style raid.

Meanwhile. Rommel spent the longest day of all streaking to the front; but by the time (close to midnight) he arrived at his headquarters, nearly all of the 24 hours that he had prophetically claimed would decide the fate of Germany were over. In a mixture of egocentrism and utter despair, he said to his aide: “If I was Commander of the Allied forces right now, I could finish off the war in 14 days.” Author Ryan leaves one question tantalizingly unanswered: How did Mrs. Rommel like the grey suede shoes?