Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
I've always been interested in the history of the Second World War, and I talked to my grandpa about it a fair bit in the last years of his life. Although he'd been (narrowly) evacuated from Dunkirk with the rest of the British Expeditionary Force in 1940, by 1944 he was nowhere near France (he was posted in Iraq, doing vehicle inspections as Armament Quarter Master Serjeant.) That's why the memoir he wrote for his family in 2000 doesn't talk about D-Day except in passing. But it does include a long passage about his worries that "the present generation" might not realize how terrible the consequences might have been if the fascists had won the war. My grandpa and I were indeed from different generations, and there are lots of things he might not see the same way I do. But I agree with him wholeheartedly about that.
One reason I wanted to write a novel set in the Second World War was to add my tiny contribution to the ongoing work of keeping that history alive and real, or at least spurring a reader or two to find out more about it. History can be forgotten–and more immediately, it can be suppressed or twisted to the ends of those in power, or those trying to take power.
My novel scheduled for publication in September, The Tapestry of Time, is about the abuses of history, and how fascists tried to take control of the historical narrative then as they continue to do now.
It takes place mainly in France in the summer of 1944, so I had to do a lot of research about D-Day, Operation Overlord and the liberation of Paris. I sought out information about what the resistance was doing; I knew about the coded messages that Radio Londres had sent to alert the resistance that D-Day had come (captured memorably in The Longest Day). I learned about the sabotage and organizing they were doing to prepare. I learned about the role played by the British Special Operations Executive in the run-up to D-Day, a time when many of their agents had been caught and their networks infiltrated. I learned about the fear that resistance fighters and foreign agents who were in custody in France at that time would be shot by their captors or sent to the concentration camps once the Germans were on the retreat, which did indeed come to pass for many.
And I read as much as I could about what was happening to civilians, and what their fears, hopes and expectations were at the time. After all, they didn't know how long the Allied push across France would take, or which parts would be liberated, how, and when. The Allied bombing of Falaise on June 7, 1944 is a major part of the plot in The Tapestry of Time, and was not something I had heard much about before. (The Allies bombed Falaise and other towns and cities in France to slow down the German reinforcements on their way to the coasts.) I recommend the book D-Day Through French Eyes, by Mary Louise Roberts, which gathers a lot of first-hand material from a civilian perspective.
The storming of the beaches of Normandy was an act of such tremendous bravery, and a place of such unimaginable horror, that I have trouble even conceiving of what it must have been like, no matter how many books I read or footage I see. We are all in the debt of the men who fought and died there. It was, though, only one part of the long, hard and bloody work by soldiers, resistance fighters and civilians that won the war–not only in France but on all fronts, particularly on the Eastern Front, which has tended not to feature largely enough in western popular narratives about the war, partly because of the Cold War that followed.
One of the invented characters in The Tapestry of Time is a British SOE agent, so I have read a lot about the SOE, particularly the female SOE agents. I'll leave you with a little about one of them, taken largely from the book Mission France: The True History of the Women of the SOE by Kate Vigurs.
This story includes violence, torture and references to the horrors of the Holocaust, so please feel free to stop reading here if you don't have the tools to cope with that today.
Denise Bloch was a Jewish woman who fled with her family from Paris when the Germans invaded and started rounding up Jewish people. She joined the resistance, crossed the Pyrenees and made her way to London, where she trained to be a wireless operator. In March 1944, she returned to France and worked with a network that was disabling infrastructure such as power lines, in preparation for D-Day. Her role as a wireless operator was particularly dangerous because it ran the constant risk of alerting the Nazis to one's location.
On June 17, 1944, she was at a dinner with some fellow agents at a villa between Nantes and Tours, as part of the Clergyman network. (The SOE networks tended to be named after occupations, such as Historian, Wheelwright, Ventriloquist or Fireman; when I had to invent one for the novel, I called it the Mechanic network, which is a little private nod to my grandfather.) The leader of the network got an urgent message saying that his mother was ill and he had to come right away; he warned his fellow agents that if he didn't return by the following day, they should disperse. They didn't heed his warning, and the SD (one of the many Nazi security and intelligence agencies) raided the villa and arrested all but one of the agents, including Denise. Vigurs reports, "Once inside the house, an SD officer started to shout at the women: 'Line, Line, ou est Line?' This was the codename for Denise's wireless traffic; they clearly knew about her, and Denise stepped forward to be handcuffed." They took her to Gestapo headquarters where she was interrogated and tortured. From there, she went to Fresnes prison. When the Nazi grip on Paris loosened in August, they started to kill prisoners at Fresnes or transport them. Denise Bloch and 37 other captured SOE agents were on the train that left Paris on August 8, 1944, days before Paris rose up and was liberated. She was taken to several camps, where she was made to do forced labour. She was in such rough shape by January 1945 that she had to be supported as she walked behind the crematorium in the Ravensbrück concentration camp to be shot, along with two of her SOE colleagues.
It's not easy to read any of these stories. But I do think that reading them and telling them to each other is as important now, 80 years on, as it ever was. It was a privilege to do this research about the events of 1944, even though it was definitely the most emotionally taxing research I've had to do for a novel.