AS WAS ITS CUSTOM, on the evening of 5 June 1944, the BBC's French-language service broadcast personal messages after the news. This evening, there was an unusually large number - 325 -and it took an hour to get through them. One message - "I will bring the eglantine" -was particularly significant. It was the order to the Resistance throughout northern France to implement Operation Vert, the scheme for rail sabotage. As the broadcast continued, other announcements activated Operation Tortue, the destruction of bridges and highways; Operation Bleu, the disruption of the electricity supply system; and Operation Violet, the cutting of telephone and telegraph links. Before midnight, teams of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) were moving into action. In the area of the Normandy beachheads, FFI intelligence chief Guillaume Mercader, a renowned cyclist who had come close to winning the Tour de France, pedalled at breakneck speed along coastal roads carrying orders from team to team. In Caen, stationmaster Albert Auge and his men set about disabling the locomotives in the city's marshalling yards. Further west, teams commanded by café owner André Farine cut the telephone cables leading out of Cherbourg. Meanwhile, other teams led by grocer Yves Gresslin dynamited the railway lines linking Cherbourg, Saint-Lô and Paris. In Brittany, teams of the Deuxième Régiment des Chasseurs Parachutistes (RCP) - the Free French equivalent of the SAS -parachuted down to join some 3,500 Resistance activists. By morning, they'd carved a swathe of destruction through eastern Brittany, wrecking railway bridges and tracks, demolishing electricity pylons, and establishing roadblocks covered by machine-gun and bazooka teams. They took every step to stop the 150,000 German troops in Brittany from reinforcing the beachhead quickly.
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