In 1939, Germany was on the rise, Czechoslovakia was occupied, and Britain made a seemingly minor change to the BBC. The British Empire Service became the British Overseas Service. This small change reflected a change in mission. The service would now broadcast into overseas territories and, soon, into Axis-occupied territory.
Its most famous broadcast in that mission may have been the coded messages into Nazi-occupied France. And in June 1944, a series of lines from a famous French poem told French saboteurs to start preparations for D-Day.
While Germany was listening, they misinterpreted this poem and sent the wrong units to the wrong places, helping the invasion.
Preparing for D-Day
While the French government fell quickly to the Nazi hordes and their speed-addicted Blitzkrieg in 1940, Free French Forces and French partisans kept up the fight for the remainder of the war. As the Allies prepared to open a new front against Nazi Germany, they knew that sabotage by French partisans could save soldiers’ lives. And they leaned into that.
The British and U.S. sent top-tier spies and other agents into France to prepare Maquis and other resistance forces for the D-Day invasion. Supplies, training, and radios flowed into the country. And a super secret pad of codes went to certain organizations. That pad contained messages and their meanings that partisans might hear broadcasted.
The BBC read a series of seemingly random phrases most nights. And resistance members knew to listen and compare what they heard to their secret pads. Nazis knew about these messages and listened in, but they had to guess what each code meant.
Transmitting the signals
On June 1, the BBC broadcasted the first three lines of “Chanson d’automne” by Paul Verlaine:
Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
It roughly translates as “The long sobs / Violins / Of autumn.” Germany thought this was an order for all resistance forces to prepare for an invasion within 48 hours.
Luckily, this threw the Germans off, since the actual invasion wouldn’t come for another five days. In reality, the poems had special significance for one resistance cell, and it was an order to stand by to cut railways. For the rest, it was a sign that the invasion would come within two weeks.
Four days later, on June 5, the BBC broadcasted the next three lines of the poem, telling the cell to begin cutting rails apart.
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone
Roughly, “My heart drowns / With a langour / In the unchanging sound.” Once again, German SS intercept units overestimated the importance of the poem, thinking it was aimed at all railways across the Reich. And when they alerted other units that were overwhelmed by the frequent false alarms of the preceding months and weeks, those units took almost no action aimed at the actual sabotage and beach landings.
D-Day and the poem
Just a few hours later, D-Day began in earnest with paratroopers inserting east and south of the beaches. Landing craft barreled into Fortress Europe. Tens of thousands of Allied soldiers took their place in history. And the German defenders arrayed against them struggled, in part, due to the railway sabotage initiated by the French poem.
Here is an English translation of the poem in its entirety:
The long sobs
Of violins
Of autumn
Wound my heart
With a monotonous
Languor.
All breathless
And pale, when
The hour sounds,
I remember
The old days
And I cry;
And I go
In the ill wind
That carries me
Here, there,
Like the
Dead leaf.
A monument at the Normandy beaches contains the first six lines of the French poem.
More from We Are the Mighty
- ‘The Red Ball Express’ kept the Allies supplied and armed after the D-Day breakout
- The bold plan to capture 2 mined bridges on D-Day
- This is why the French are better at war than you think
- That time American and Russian tanks faced off in a divided Berlin
This article originally appeared on We Are the Mighty.
