D Day, 6 June, 1944, saw put into action one of the most unlikely alliances in the history of warfare: that between the largest military invasion of all time, and French poetry. The episode in question concerned the role played by a poem by Paul Verlaine in that momentous event: an episode immortalised in the famous 1962 film, The Longest Day.

A mixture of confusion, hubris and complacency played its part in the German defeat

The success of Operation Overlord, as the invasion of Normandy was code-named and which culminated 80 years ago today, was to depend considerably on the role of the French Resistance in acts of sabotage prior to the event. The Allies thus broadcast hundreds of coded messages to the underground in the months preceding the attack. Most of the messages sent by BBC Radio Londres were bogus, deliberately designed to mislead and confuse. Only a few were genuine and related to D-Day, but even they sounded meaningless, including such inanities as ‘John has a long moustache’, and ‘Molasses tomorrow will bring forth cognac’.

The Special Operations Executive (SOE) had already employed the verses of many well-known poems for this means during the war. Now it happened to be the turn of this 19th-century romantic’s words: a two-part message taken from the opening lines of........

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