The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe Read Online Free PDF Page B

intensified, with profound consequences for the local inhabitants. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commanding the Ger- man armies in the west, possessed sixty German di- visions, and he deployed four in Calvados. Added to other occupation authorities and labor services, this meant there were 60,000–70,000 foreigners in the de- partment by June 1944, all of whom had to be fed and
    housed. From the late fall of 1943, the Germans mas- sively increased the pace of defensive preparations along the coast: mines, obstacles, tank traps, barbed wire, and concrete gun emplacements popped up all along the coastline. The Germans laced local fields with mines and flooded lowlands. Open areas were stud- ded with “Rommel’s asparagus,” tall poles designed to shred any troop-carrying Allied aircraft that might attempt a landing. The Germans banned commercial fishing so they could control all sea-based activity, and halted all local building so that supplies could be chan- neled toward the construction of defensive positions on the beaches. Thirty thousand hectares, or 7 percent of the arable land of Calvados, was taken out of cultiva- tion by flooding, mines, or defensive preparations. The Germans made still further demands for local labor details, forcing village mayors to produce able-bodied men between eighteen and fifty years old to work on the fortifications. In February 1944, Vichy passed a law making women between eighteen and forty-five subject to immediate labor for the Germans. Inevitably, eco- nomic life of the region ground to a halt as the fevered work on the Atlantic Wall sucked in local labor and ma- terials; in the fields, labor disappeared, crops were not sown, and horses were requisitioned by the Germans to pull wagons. The countryside, one of the richest and most productive regions of France, was largely aban-

    doned. Cereals and grain supplies that Calvados relied
    on could not be transported into the department be- cause the train lines were now given over exclusively to military use. By the spring of 1944, Calvados, nor- mally an abundant supplier of meat, faced a severe shortage of this staple; even the meager official meat ration of a hundred grams per week per person could not be filled, largely the result of the lack of fodder and the heavy demands made by German troops. The black market became the only way to secure sufficient supplies of butter and meat, and prices soared. This in turn heightened social tensions, as farmers naturally
    hoarded their goods to get a better price and assure their own needs; workers in the towns and cities went increasingly without. The Vichy-controlled prefect re- ported a sharp rise in morbidity due to typhoid, tuber- culosis, diphtheria, and scarlet fever. 13

    The behavior of the Germans toward the civilian popu- lation worsened with the likelihood of an Allied inva- sion. In January 1944, Hitler’s chief of conscript labor, Fritz Sauckel, demanded that France produce yet an- other million laborers to be deployed for the German war effort, but virtually no one complied. In Calvados, of the 1,370 men called up, a mere 104 responded to the order. The desperate Germans resorted to the use of roundups and arrests in cinemas and public places to secure recalcitrant labor conscripts, and shipped off their quarry to camps in Germany. Prisons bulged with civilians arrested on the least pretext. In response to stepped up Resistance attacks on local officials, collab- orators, and German soldiers, the Germans violently cracked down. In March 1944, all radios were ordered to be surrendered so that BBC emissions could not be heard. Through arrests, torture, and infiltration by col- laborators, the Germans managed to crack open many of the local Resistance networks; over 200 resisters were killed in the six months before the D-Day inva- sion. 14
    And as if these travails were not enough, the Anglo- American bombing of France, as part of the preliminary preparations for the invasion,