The Long Wait

To Germans the 21 miles of water between Calais and the chalk cliffs of Dover had never before seemed so wide. Now that all the usual channels of war information had been cut off, they got only what the Allies wanted them to have.

From across the moat they heard by the wireless that the Allies had just carried out their biggest maneuvers yet with para chute and glider-borne soldiers, British and U.S. Soon the same men would drop down out of the night somewhere on the Continent.

They heard that the amazing British were also preoccupied with a crisis in the Labor Party, that for some reason un fathomable to Germans the strange civilian residents of the isles did not yet seem to be caught with the pre-invasion tension which gripped the rest of the world. Some of them were even talking about the price of lettuce and the tulips in Birdcage Walk. As at so many other critical periods in World War II, the British did not seem to comprehend the mighty portents of the hour. Or did they? It was too puzzling for Teutonic minds to solve.

The Knowing People. The Germans knew what was ahead. A man would have to be deaf, dumb & blind not to know. Except for a few blissful days of bad weather, the air bombardment went on without letup. Deliberate, impersonal BBC announcers even gave statistics: two tons of Allied demolition bombs were smashing at Europe every minute of the day & night.

Taut-voiced Germans at other micro phones never let their audiences forget this horror. One minute there would be a brief escape in music. Then a strident voice would break in: "Achtung, achtung! Now we shall give you the air-situation report." That meant that the bombers were back again. Sometimes it was nothing to worry about--at least for one's own safety. The voice would say "Enemy bomber formations are approaching southwestern Germany . . ." and the music would begin again.

The Dreadful Silence. But it would be broken again & again. Bombers were over the Muenster--TAKE COVER . . . bombers were crossing the Reich frontier . . . enemy planes approaching at low altitude--beware of machine-gun attacks. In areas where the bombers were striking, radio stations would go off the air and there would be silence--dreadful silence.

One night on the Berlin radio Germans heard the faultless, schoolmaster prose of Dr. Goebbels: "The enemy's preparations for invasion are practically completed. . . . [Behind the Westwall] are a hidden host of unknown preparations."

But "little Paul Joseph Goebbels could fool the people no longer. Though they showed no sign of crackup to the outside world, though they knew their army and even, perhaps, the vestiges of their surface navy, would put up a good stout fight, it was not so simple as all that.

Germany listened to the radio, eyed its slaves in the occupied countries, eyed the Channel, eyed the sky--and waited for the day.

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