D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (24 page)

The sausages included libraries, composed of paperback books. (The paperback revolution in publishing had begun in 1939 when Pocket Books brought out ten titles at $.25 each; Avon Books came along in 1941, quickly followed by Popular Library and Dell. There were special, reduced-size, free Armed Services Editions; 22 million copies were printed for American servicemen.) One of the most popular was
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
but, somewhat surprisingly, the top was
The Pocket Book of Verse.
(For morale purposes, it contained none of the bitter poems from the English veterans of World War I.
¹²
)

Gambling was the favorite boredom killer. There were virtually nonstop poker and crap games. Large amounts of money changed hands. Pvt. Arthur "Dutch" Schultz of the 505th PIR won $2,500 in a crap game. "I know because I stopped and took the time to count it," he remembered. "I had broken everyone in the game except for a staff sergeant whom I disliked intensely and who had $50 left. I was bound and determined to take all of his money. My luck changed and I lost my $2,500."
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There was no liquor available. A few men managed to sneak out of their sausages and go to local pubs to quench their thirst, but quick arrests by MPs brought that to an end. Maj. David Thomas, the 508th PIR's surgeon, recalled that the medics were each given a canteen of alcohol to use for sterilization purposes when they got to Normandy. He dryly remarked, "I doubt that a drop of it ever got out of England."
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Company commanders marched their men on the roads. This gave them some exercise and helped relieve the boredom or
^e
ase the tension; it also gave them some sense of the scope of the enterprise and a sense of confidence that a fighting force of such

immensity could not be denied. Marching through the countryside and small villages, they saw unbelievable amounts of equipment, uncountable numbers of aircraft. And they saw the might of the free world gathered to destroy the Nazis; men in the uniforms of New Zealand, Norway, Poland, France, Australia, Canada, Britain, Holland, Belgium, and the United States. As Sergeant Slaughter recalled, "Soldiers from every Allied nation from all around the world seemed to be everywhere."
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Some of the resentment felt by the Tommies toward the Yanks came out. Corporal Masters remembered marching with 3 Troop past an American unit, also out marching. A couple of Yanks had stopped to chat with a mother and her three-year-old daughter (all communication with civilians was strictly forbidden but done anyway). Almost surely the little girl was asking the question all children in Britain had long since learned to ask of the GIs, "Got any gum, chum?"

"But as we marched past," Masters said, "a disgusted voice at the back of our lot growled at the Americans, 'At least you could let them grow up!' "
¹⁶

Among the millions of men gathered in southern England to participate in the invasion of France, only a handful knew the secrets of Overlord—where the assault would go ashore, and when. Those few had a supersecurity designation, above Top Secret, called Bigot; they were said to be "bigoted."

Slowly the circle of those in the know widened. SHAEF and Twenty-first Army Group staff officers briefed army and corps staffs, who in turn briefed division and regimental commanders, right on down to company and platoon officers, who passed the information on to their noncoms and privates. At the lower levels the place names were not revealed until the men were actually sailing for France; otherwise the briefings were extraordinarily detailed and accurate with regard to terrain features, fairly realistic about the numbers and quality of the German defenders, and wildly optimistic about what the naval and air bombardments were going to do to those defenders.

The briefings were done on sand tables or, in the case of the 12th Regiment, 4th Division, on a huge sponge-rubber replica of the Cotentin Peninsula made to scale both horizontally and vertically, complete in minute detail with roads, bridges, buildings, power lines, hedgerows, fortifications, and obstacles. One member

of the 12th recalled, "It was as though the men had been suddenly transported by plane and were looking down on the very beaches they would soon land on and the very ground over which they would have to fight."
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Officers were briefed at regimental level. Lt. Ralph East-ridge of the 115th Regiment, 29th Division, wrote an account of the briefing he attended. The briefing officer, the regimental S-2, began with a map of Omaha Beach. He explained that the 16th (1st Division) and 116th (29th Division) would land side by side; the 115th would follow the 116th. He described the beach obstacles and fixed fortifications at Omaha, the terrain, including the distance from the seawall to the foot of the bluff (about 200 meters), the height of the bluff (thirty meters, average), and other details.

"You can see that the defenses are heaviest at these points where the little valleys lead inland. These breaks or draws in the bluff are our beach exits, and the key to success in the initial assault will be the securing of these exits.

"The defenses include minefields, barbed wire, antitank ditches, and interlocking bands of automatic fire, concentrated at the exits. Each of these positions is manned by an estimated battalion with another battalion strung along the bluff between. They are part of the 916th Division, a static division, so-called because it is designed to fight in place from fixed positions.

"This particular static division is made up of about 40 percent Germans, many of them partially disabled. But remember, a one-armed soldier is just as capable of pulling the trigger of a fixed machine gun in a pillbox as a two-armed soldier.

"The remaining 60 percent of the division is made up of mercenaries, largely Russian, with some Poles, Jugo-Slavs, and other Balkans. . . . They are rough, simple, ignorant men and have little concern for the value of a life. They come from a part of the world where fighting has been the main occupation for generations. Their officers and noncoms are German; they will fight to the death.

"Behind this static division are mobile divisions, first-line troops. Personnel is largely German. Most have seen combat on the Russian or Italian fronts. Their weakness is a lack of transport. . . .

"Now for the plan in detail. The 16th and 116th will hit the beach in assault craft at about 0630. . . . The boats will ground out around the first of the underwater obstacles, on a rising tide. The ^mediate objective will be to secure the high ground above the

beaches, denying the Germans direct fire and observation of the beach. Our regiment will land at H plus ninety minutes, move immediately to this village [indicating St.-Laurent-sur-Mer on the map, but unnamed], and go into position on the right. . . .

"Now this first part is a comparatively easy job. The tough job will be done by the 116th, before we land. If the 116th goes in right we should have a pushover."

"Sir," one officer asked, "what happens if the 116th doesn't clean up the beach on schedule?"

"Then we take over their mission."

"How many divisions in the first wave?" another officer

asked.

"It'll be a big show," the S-2 answered with a smile, "believe me. But we need only concern ourselves with our little sector."

"When is D-Day?"

"Don't know yet. About the 3rd or 4th [of June] would be a

guess."

The officers of the 115th liked that "pushover" talk, but did not believe it. Lieutenant Eastridge commented, "The prospects looked grim. The diagrams of the beach defenses indicated that the Germans had been fantastically thorough. The 116tsh had a rugged job ahead."
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Indeed, Pvt. Felix Branham of the 116th heard his briefer tell his platoon that if the men got the excess equipment they would be carrying to the beach—mortar rounds, land mines, ammo boxes, radios and batteries, and more—they would be making a contribution. The 115th coming in behind would not be as heavily laden and their men "would come in and pick up what we had carried ashore, and they would do the job, even though they had to walk over our dead bodies."
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Such bloodthirsty realism was uncommon. Most of the officers were upbeat and reassuring when they briefed their companies and platoons. Forty years and more later, veterans of Omaha still recalled, with some bitterness, what they were told: "The briefer explained that it would be no problem at all because the Air Force was coming over in great numbers, the Navy bombardment would be tremendous, the rocket ships would fire thousands of rockets, it was going to be a walkover, nothing to worry about. Our worries would come two or three days later when the panzer counterattacks began." (149th Combat Engineers)
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"We were told that many thousands of tons of bombs would

be dropped on our beach by the Ninth Air Force just prior to the invasion. My concern was that we would have trouble getting our trucks across the beach because the bomb craters would be so close and so deep." (6th ESB)
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"Our briefing officer gave us a pep talk. More than 1,000 bombers would do their work beforehand. The battleships would blow everything off the map—pillboxes, artillery, mortars, and the barbed-wire entanglements. Everything would be blasted to smithereens—a pushover!" (26th Regiment)
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"We were briefed to believe that there would be no living things on the beach, no life of any kind. It would be a piece of cake." (5th ESB)
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Almost every unit scheduled to invade had a similar experience. To drive home the point, junior officers, noncoms, privates were encouraged to study the sand tables or replicas whenever they wished, and thousands of them spent countless hours looking, discussing, familiarizing themselves with their objectives. They also got photographs, some only a few hours old, that revealed the most recent progress in the building of the Atlantic Wall. With that much accurate intelligence, how could the Germans stand a chance?

There was tough-guy talk. The briefer for the 91st Troop Carrier Squadron (glider-tugging pilots) gave out a warning: "Pilots will release when the C-47 leading the formation starts a gradual turn to the left to return to the coast. If any C-47 pilot cuts his glider off too soon, he'd better keep on going because if he comes back here, I'll be waiting for him."

One of the glider pilots had a question. In an entirely innocent manner, he asked, "Sir, what do we do after we land our gliders?"

The briefer was taken aback. After a silence, he confessed, "I don't know. I guess we really never thought of that really."
There
was
nervous
laughter
when
the
glider
pilot
sitting
next
to Sgt. Charles Skidmore gave his own answer, "Run like hell!"
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The Army being the Army, inevitably there were some jackasses around. Sgt. Alan Anderson of the 116th Regiment remembered being called into a tent where some colonel from public relations "got up and made an impassioned and patriotic speech about what a privilege it was for us to have this opportunity to be m this great invasion which would change the history of the world, and then at the end of his speech he made the remarkable announcement that he was sorry he couldn't go with us. My buddy, Arkie

Markum, poked me and said, 'Well, he can have my place if he really wants to go!' "

The PR colonel went on to say that the Army was ready to take nearly 100 percent casualties in the first twenty-four hours. Anderson remembered, "We all turned around and looked at each other and said, 'Well, it's tough that you have to go.' "
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Once briefed, the troops were sealed in tight. MPs roamed the grounds and perimeter, no one allowed in without proper identification, no one allowed out without proper orders. Capt. Cyril Hendry, a British tanker, recalled that his father died on June 1 and was buried on June 3, and "I wasn't allowed to go to the funeral, I just wasn't allowed, but my brother in the army who was stationed in Damascus was allowed to fly home for the funeral."
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Bravado comes easy to young men who think of themselves as indestructible, but the briefings and the detailed study of the beach defenses had a sobering effect on even the most lighthearted, unreflective soldiers. For all that they told each other nothing could be worse than the training regimen, they had some sense of what bullets and shrapnel can do to a human body. For the most part they had not been in combat, but they had been reading or seeing war news ever since September 1939. In their hometown newspapers or at the newsreels at the movie theaters they had followed the sweep of the Wehrmacht across Europe, watched it defeat the best the Poles, Norwegians, Belgians, British, French, Yugoslavs, Greeks, and Russians could put against it. The men of the AEF realized that the Wehrmacht was a thoroughly combat-experienced army that had once been unstoppable and might now be impregnable.

As a consequence of these realizations, after the briefings the chaplains did a big business. After losing his $2,500, "Dutch" Shultz went to confession. The priest, a British chaplain, "really chewed me out about some of the sins I confessed to him involving the Sixth Commandment." Shultz went to Mass every chance he had "and I should mention that it was a very inspiring sight to me to see Captain Stef, Major Kellam, Major McGinty, and other battalion officers serving as altar boys."
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Major Thomas of the 508th didn't pay much attention at his briefing: "I had been in the airborne long enough to know that night jumps never went off as planned." Afterward, he got into a poker game. He was losing so he thought "I better go and listen to the chaplain, so as to touch all the bases. About the time I was sitting