André Bidet, still dapper and spry at 95, loves Americans. With
poignant memories of living through the German occupation of
France during World War II, he is one of a fast-fading generation
of French men and women who think of the American soldiers who
landed on Omaha and Utah beaches on June 6, 1944, as the most
wondrous of “liberators.”
That alone makes his story a worthy and necessary counterpoint to
the vivid tales of heroic military actions by American and Allied
forces, as told by President Barack Obama, and other heads of
state, at the recent celebration of the 65th anniversary of
D-Day.
During the occupation, millions of French people lived in a kind
of netherworld between collaboration and resistance — yearning
for the day when the Germans would be driven out, yet forced to
lend direct or indirect support to the Nazi war effort if they
hoped to live any sort of a halfway comfortable or normal life.
Living in this situation, Mr. Bidet found a quiet but most
effective way of rebelling against Nazis: He supplied dynamite to
the Resistance.
At the outset of the war, Mr. Bidet, a graduate of the
prestigious Ecole Polytechnique, was pressed into service
designing bomb bays for the French air corps. This was supposed
to be a temporary assignment for the 31-year-old engineer. At any
day, he expected to be re-assigned to his regiment in the French
army as a tank commander. But then the Germany army and Panzer
corps delivered a sudden and unexpected knockout punch —
crushing the French army and its tanks in the opening battle
between the two armies.
Suddenly, Mr. Bidet was orphaned. He found himself, as he puts
it, “a tank commander with no tanks” — and, worse still, an army
officer with no army after the swift and cataclysmic collapse of
the whole army and government.
With a wife and one child (and six more to come — three during
and three after the war), Mr. Bidet moved to Brittany’s Loire
valley, where he found work as director of public works in a
small town that owned a quarry. He wished for nothing more than
“a place where there were no Germans,” thinking he would make a
separate peace for himself and his growing family. This turned
out to be delusion.
In the spring of 1942, Hitler entrusted Albert Speer, his
minister of munitions, with task of building the Atlantic Wall —
a 3,000-mile long string of bunkers, canons and other
fortifications stretching from Norway to Spain — and all along
the French coast. The wall was to serve as a shield against any
attempt at a seaborne invasion along the Atlantic coast — making
it impossible for Allied force to seize a major port, or to
secure a beachhead between ports for any longer than it would
take for the German army to rush several Panzer divisions to the
spot and crush the invasion in its infancy. Speer called on the
Todt construction company — famed for building the German
autobahn in record time — to tackle this immense engineering
exercise.
To build the wall, Todt required millions of tons of stone and
cement, and needed skilled local engineers to supervise the work
of blasting out rock and filling a never-ending stream of trains
going back and forth from the interior to the coast. At the same
time, with the help of Gestapo in instilling fear, they had to
entrust some of their French helpers — people like Mr. Bidet,
compelled to take part in the enterprise as a seasoned executive
and engineer — with supplies of explosives. This, too, proved to
be a mistake.
Even as work on the Atlantic Wall reached peak intensity, Mr.
Bidet became sure that the tide had turned against the Germans.
Secretly, with the news he picked up on a home-made radio, he
kept a map tracking the advances that the Russian army was making
against the Germans inside Russia. With his own eyes, he saw how
the German army had been forced to take younger soldiers out of
France and replace them with aging and infirm troops — a sure
sign of increased vulnerability to an Allied invasion.
Mr. Bidet gambled with his own life. Despite close surveillance
and questioning by the Gestapo, he managed to secrete more than
50 kilos of dynamite and divert it to friends in the Resistance.
This, in turn, was used to blow up bridges and trains and — at
the critical moment — delay the rush of German reinforcements to
the invasion area.
The Allies did not attempt a head-on assault of any port along
the French coast. Instead, they defeated the Atlantic Wall
through the brilliant stratagem of building an artificial,
floating harbor — code-named Mulberry — for the purpose of
unloading hundreds and thousands of jeeps, trucks, pieces of
artillery and other equipment. To create a breakwater along a
wild and unprotected stretch of beach, the Allies sunk old ships
and huge concrete caissons; within the breakwater, they installed
pontoon piers as landing ramps. This is how Albert Speer
described the magnificent feat of Allied engineering (also more
than two years in the making) that trumped his wall:
To construct these defenses, we had, in barely two years of
hurried work, used 13,302,000 cubic meters of concrete,
together with 1,200,000 tons of steel obtained from the
armaments industry. A fortnight after the first (Normandy)
landings, this costly effort was brought to nothing, thanks to
an idea of simple genius. As we now know, the invasion forces
brought their own harbors with them, and built, near
Arromanches and Omaha, on an unprotected coast, the necessary
landing ramps.
Omaha Beach was well defended. The loss of 1,465 American
soldiers storming the beach testifies to that fact. Nevertheless,
thanks the floating harbor established at Arromanches, to the
east of Omaha Beach, the Allied forces were able to sustain their
beachhead and go on the attack. No one was more ecstatic about
that than Mr. Bidet. Within France, news of the landing “spread
like wildfire,” he says. Speaking as an engineer, he calls the
Mulberry floating harbor — “sensational, extraordinaire,
phenomenal.”
After the war, Mr. Bidet applied his engineering talents to the
reconstruction of many of the French villages and towns that were
destroyed by Allied bombing during the war. He became one of the
leading executives in Richier, a French engineering company that
made building cranes, cement mixers and other equipment used in
the massive reconstruction effort made possible by the
U.S.-funded Marshall Plan.
Just a little more than four years shy of his
100th birthday, Mr. Bidet remains physically and mentally
fit. He darts about the harbor city of St. Malo (about a hundred
miles south and west of Omaha beach) in his own car and he ambles
happily up and down hillside parks and monuments without a cane
or other assistance. I met the ebullient Frenchman on a two-week
tour of contested cities and towns close to the D-Day beaches in
which I sought out interviews with as many people as possible who
had personal recollections of this historic event.
Along with a son and daughter-in-law, he gave me a tour of the
impressive German battlements at St. Malo — admitting, ruefully,
that he may have helped to quarry some of the stone used in their
construction.
Late in the summer of 1944, with the German forces in France
either under siege or fleeing, 300 German soldiers were holed up
in heavily fortified Cézambre island in the middle of St. Malo
harbor. It is a mark of how stout the Atlantic Wall was at its
strongest points that these soldiers withstood a fierce Allied
bombardment for three weeks. After running out of food and water,
they finally surrendered. They were totally deaf, but otherwise
unhurt.
A widower now for four years after 65 years of marriage, Mr.
Bidet is very much the paterfamilias — living in St. Malo in the
midst of adoring children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.
He enjoys life to the full and feels proud of his own
contribution to the success of the Allied invasion.
