19. The Desperate Need for Spies to Gather On-the-Ground Intelligence
Evelyne Clopet and her fellow spies were airdropped from a B-24 Liberator into Nazi-occupied France a month after D-Day, June 6th, 1944. An Allied beachhead had been successfully established in Normandy, but in the weeks since, things had not gone well. Enemy resistance was fierce, helped in no small part by unfavorable bocage – dense hedges that proliferated throughout Normandy and that were a nightmare to fight through. As a result, the Allies found their hoped-for rapid breakout from the beaches reduced to a bloody crawl. Aerial reconnaissance of enemy positions helped, but much about enemy deployments remained hidden. Allied commanders desperately needed to find out exactly where the Germans were and what they were up to. For that, only human intelligence gathered on the ground by trained observers, such as Clopet and other Operation Sussex spies, would do.
The intelligence services of the Allies did not always get along with each other, and frictions and rivalries delayed the launch of Operation Sussex for weeks. Initial teams of “Pathfinders” were parachuted into France in February, 1944, to establish local networks, and scout out suitable drop zones for more spies and supplies. Their task turned out to be tougher than anticipated, and it took until April before the first Sussex teams were established on the ground and able to report back with their observations. The operation’s start might have been clunky, but by D-Day, things had smoothed out somewhat, and various teams of Sussex spies furnished Allied intelligence with a veritable flood of useful intelligence. As seen below, Operation Sussex proved vital for the success of the D-Day landing and the subsequent Allied breakout from Normandy.
