LITMIR.BIZ

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the Royal Irish Fusiliers in 1938 and were posted together to Guernsey in the English Channel in 1940. One evening, having been denied service in a local pub, they became drunk and disorderly and received sentences of imprisonment, which they were still serving when the Germans occupied Guernsey. They were handed over to the Wehrmacht by the Guernsey Police, becoming prisoners of war. Initially taken to Camp Friesack in Brandenburg, Germany, they were subsequently put to work as farm labourers, thereafter taking up an offer of becoming members of the Waffen-SS as German soldiers. Their unit was the 502nd SS Jägar Battalion, a commando-type Special Forces unit mostly composed of foreign recruits, whose commanding officer was an Austrian, Lieutenant Colonel Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s favourite commando. He had previously been handpicked by Hitler to lead a successful glider-borne rescue of Hitler’s ally Benito Mussolini from the inaccessible and highly defended Italian mountaintop hotel where he was being incarcerated, having been overthrown.

      Skorzeny and his unit were to be involved in other such operations, their last major mission successfully causing mayhem and confusion during the Ardennes Offensive (Battle of the Bulge, December 1944) in Operation Greif, when German commandos’ proficient in English dressed in American uniforms and infiltrated behind Allied lines in disguised tanks. They were later to cause concern when it was thought they had plans to assassinate General Eisenhower in Paris during Christmas week 1944. Such a threat was taken seriously, causing Eisenhower to be temporarily confined to his Versailles headquarters. Had the attempt been made, it may well have resulted in casualties to those around him, one notable among them being Irishwoman Kay Summersby, who served as Eisenhower’s chauffeur and later as personal secretary.

      Kathleen MacCarthy-Morrogh (her maiden name) spent a privileged and happy childhood in Inish Beg House, Baltimore, County Cork, with a governess, post-hunt parties, sailing, horse riding and socialising. Her father had been a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Munster Fusiliers but was thoroughly ‘black Irish’, as she used to say of him. A noted beauty, she moved to London in her late teens and became, among other things, a fashion model for Worth, the equivalent of being a supermodel today. There she married Gordon Thomas Summersby, from whom she was divorced but kept his surname. Subsequent to the outbreak of war, Kay joined the Mechanised Transport Corps and during the Blitz drove ambulances through the rubble-strewn streets in blackout conditions to horrific scenes of carnage, death and destruction, often ferrying bodies to morgues.

      In May 1942, she was assigned as chauffeur to US General Eisenhower. A good driver, attractive, friendly, sociable and accomplished – in addition to possessing ‘Irish’ charm – a close wartime rapport was to develop between them, notwithstanding the enormous chasm in rank and an eighteen-year age difference. On one occasion, journeying by sea to Tunisia to be with him during Operation Torch, the troopship she was on, the Strathallen, was torpedoed and she had to abandon ship into the lifeboats. She was engaged to Major Richard ‘Dick’ Arnold, but he was killed while mine-clearing in Tunisia in June 1943. Kay was to become Eisenhower’s secretary and, breaking protocol, military etiquette and regulations, a closeness developed, their mutual attraction evident. Wherever Eisenhower went, Kay was almost always, but discretely, present.

      That a strong relationship existed between them was never in doubt; that an actual affair ever occurred was never clear-cut. The propriety or not of this relationship was never raised in circles, but certain assumptions were made and believed. Kay accompanied General Eisenhower on 5 June 1944, as US paratroopers boarded their aircraft prior to jumping out before H-Hour on D-Day. She was also present and photographed in a US Army Group (later airbrushed out) at the formal surrender of the Germans. It was strongly speculated that Eisenhower sought counsel on the advisability of divorcing his wife Mamie to marry Kay, but was supposedly told in no uncertain terms that to do so would severely hamper any hopes of a future political career. Faced then with the choice of Kay or a career in politics, Eisenhower chose the latter. He was to be twice elected US President in the 1950s. Kay was given American citizenship and made an officer in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) of the US Army, an unusual honour for a foreign national. Kay left the army in 1947, having received a number of medals during her military career. She was to marry for a second time in 1952, to Reginald Heber Morgan, a stockbroker, but this marriage also ended in divorce six years later. It appeared that she was not to settle emotionally. Kay Summersby died of cancer at her home in Southampton, Long Island in January 1975 at the age of sixty-five. Her ashes were brought back to west Cork by her brother Seamus (himself a British Commando during the war) and scattered over the family grave.

      As for her theoretical would-be assassin, Otto Skorzeny, he was to cause much intrigue. Arriving to Ireland in 1959, he purchased Martinstown House and farm in County Kildare near the Curragh. His journey there began at the war’s end, ten days after Hitler committed suicide in May 1945, when Skorzeny surrendered to the Americans. He was to stand trial for war crimes in Dachau in 1947, but the case collapsed and he was acquitted. Still to face charges from other countries, he was detained but escaped. He went to Madrid and established an import/export agency, where he was suspected of being a front organisation assisting the escape of wanted Nazis from Europe to South America. He was to make many trips to Argentina, meeting President Juan Perón and becoming a bodyguard to Perón’s wife Eva. Skorzeny supposedly stopped an attempt on her life and was rumoured to have had an affair with her.

      Six foot four inches in height and weighing eighteen stone (114 kg), he had a distinctive scar running along his left cheek, a reminder of a duelling encounter from his student days. Arriving in Ireland for a visit in June 1957, he was to return two years later and take up residence on the Curragh. There were reported allegations that he had opened up an escape route for ex-Nazis in Spain and that his County Kildare farm was a holding facility, sheltering them, but this claim was unsubstantiated by fact. He was not to be granted permanency of residence in Ireland and returned to Madrid, dying there of cancer in 1975. As to his two Third Reich ‘Irish’ subordinates, having participated in clandestine raids, operations and actions, Brady, even during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, surrendered himself to the British. Brought to London, he was court-martialled and received a fifteen-year prison term, reduced when mitigation was brought to bear, he having been put into German hands by the Guernsey police. Back in Ireland in the 1950s, Stringer immigrated to Britain. Brady assumed his former real identity and both were slow, if ever, to mention their wartime experiences.

      They were not the only foreigners to wear German uniforms during the war. Among the Normandy beach defenders on D-Day were Poles, Romanians, Turks and renegade Russians: Tartars and Armenians, Cossacks, Georgians and of course Germans. Together they stoically waited and watched seaward for the invasion they knew must come, and when it did they knew what they must do. From inside the pillboxes, gun emplacements and the fortified strong points behind the minefields, the barbed wire and the obstacles, they would carefully take aim and give vent to their patient determination to kill.

      2

      DEVISING D-DAY

      Fear is cold. It causes the body temperature to drop and the heart pounds faster. Fear widens your field of vision and each intake of breath is involuntarily shallower and quicker. As the early morning light of 6 June 1944 outlined the shape of the Normandy shoreline, those in the lead landing craft felt such fear. Dawn on D-Day revealed a grey, overcast sky, a rough green coloured sea flecked with white and a vast armada. In every direction there were ships as far as the eye could see; destroyers, sloops, frigates, cargo carriers, troop carriers, warships, merchant vessels, corvettes, minesweepers and specialist craft. This was the largest amphibious assault in history. Reassuringly, overhead flew a vast array of Allied aircraft at varying heights. Spitfires, Hurricanes and P-51 Mustang fighter aircraft wove neat circular patterns in the sky while Wellington, Lancaster and ‘Flying Fortress’ bombers and their fighter escorts flew directly landward.

      Among the tightly packed, wet, cold, nervous troops heading for shore in the landing craft were many who were nauseous with seasickness, or fear, or both. The sheer scale of the Allied assault was unprecedented. Huge naval guns pounded the coast as the lead landing craft swept towards the beaches. Overhead, the bombers targeted German defensive positions, their aerial bombardments dropping tonnes of high explosives onto preselected targets. The long-awaited attack along the coastline of northern France onto Nazi-occupied Europe had begun. Shocking in its

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