5 JUNE 2004, Page 59

Misplaced confidence

Michael Vestey

The BBC has been marking the 60th anniversary of D-Day with a plethora of programmes, from documentaries to drama, particularly this weekend. Extracts from the diaries, memoirs and letters of the senior figures in the invasion of Normandy have been broadcast each morning this week in Book of the Week: Countdown to D-Day. We know how crucial the landings were in the course of the war, but what becomes apparent in these items, read by actors, is how devastating failure would have been.

Despite this, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, then Germany's best-known soldier, found the time to write to his wife and son back home to say that he was having a new coat made in Paris as his old one was too tight and thin. His dachsund, he added, was 'touchingly affectionate' and 'loved sweet things' to eat. Rommel, who had commanded the Afrika Korps in North Africa, was now in charge of repelling the Allies in France. He was remarkably optimistic about the outcome, only complaining about the reluctance of Hitler to commit the troops and tanks he needed.

Largely thanks to British misinformation fed to the Germans by a Spanish-born double agent known as Garbo, he concluded that the Allies would invade in the Calais region as it was also the nearest point to England. He concentrated his forces there, writing, 'I'm convinced that the enemy will have a rough time of it when he attacks and ultimately achieve no success.' So confident was he that he decided to return to Germany for his wife's birthday on 6 June, the very morning of the actual landings, and he was away from his headquarters at the vital moment.

Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was, of course, the Allied Land Commander for D-Day under General Eisenhower. He revised and strengthened the original invasion plans and increased the forces to be deployed. In his memoirs he recalled that his headquarters were housed in the High Master's office at St Paul's School, a room he had never entered when a pupil there. As a result of German bombing of that part of London, many local people, he recalled, wrote asking them to go away and blaming their presence for the air raids. Typically, the firm and precise Monty decided that 'there was no evidence' to justify such a deduction. His gift was to gain the confidence and trust of his men, so he set out by train across Britain to address them all in person. He calculated that he had inspected and been inspected by a million soldiers.

Perhaps the most evocative popular song of the second world war was 'The White Cliffs of Dover', sung by Vera Lynn. At first one thinks of it as a quintessentially British song, encapsulating the national character as the country stood alone in 1940 against the Nazi threat. In fact, as Ian Hislop discovered in Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover on Radio Four last week (Saturday), the song was more complex than that, its origins a mixture of politics, propaganda and plagiarism. Standing on the cliffs at Dover, a man from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds told him that the bluebird was North American and unlikely to be seen in Britain.

The reason they're in the song, Hislop explained, was that it was written by Americans and had actually been at number one in the American charts in 1941, way before Vera Lynn saw the sheet music. The music was written by Walter Kent, 'his surname being the closest to England'. The lyrics were the work of Nat Burton, who probably stole them from an Anglophile poet, Alice Duer Miller, who wrote a poem with bluebirds in it actually called 'The White Cliffs'. With America staying out of the war during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's election year, there was none the less considerable sympathy there for Britain's plight. Kent was pro-British and the song was written to show that Americans couldn't detach themselves from the world. Pearl Harbor changed that, but it's intriguing to wonder how much this song might have contributed to American participation. After Lynn, now Dame Vera, of course, sang it on her radio programme in 1942, the House of Commons tried to ban it as MPs thought it was making soldiers abroad homesick and their morale would be lowered. Fortunately, as she pointed out at the time, the reverse was true and the show was allowed to continue, As veterans at the British Legion Club in nearby Deal said, the song had been very important to them. Hislop believed that the song's 'melancholy optimism' is now somehow part of our culture, shorthand, he said, for the bravery, sacrifice and bloody-mindedness of a generation of British people determined not to surrender. I found it fascinating.