Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (37 page)

Private John Price found most of the French sullen, and was struck by the predominance of the elderly – the young or middle-aged appeared to have fled. But he was touched when a kindly old clockmaker asked for a penny, and worked it into a ring for him. Many of the British, after years of privation at home, were disgusted by the abundance of food in the Norman villages. ‘The civilians seemed to have eaten well,’ said Alfred Lee of the Middlesex Regiment. ‘We saw no skinny ones.’
⁷
There were persistent rumours throughout the beachhead of Fifth Column activities by local Frenchmen spying for the Germans, and these multiplied mistrust. ‘We almost had the feeling that these people had not been hostile to the Germans,’ John Hein of the US 1st Division said wonderingly.
⁸
A captured German of 12th SS Panzer wrote cynically in his diary: ‘As we are marched through the town towards
the port, the French insult us, shake their fists and make throat-cutting gestures. This does not really shock us. We are used to this sort of thing from the French. If it was the other way around, they would be threatening the Tommies . . .’
⁹
In the British sector, it was found necessary to mount pipeline patrols to prevent civilians from inserting wooden plugs at intervals along them in order to drain off fuel supplies for themselves. Most Normans treated the fighting armies with impartial disdain or occasional kindness. Helmut Gunther of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers once asked an elderly woman why she gave his men cream, and she answered gravely: ‘Because I have a grandson who is a prisoner in Germany, and I hope that the people there are doing the same for him.’
¹⁰
It was not remarkable that so many French families were shocked and appalled by the cost of liberation to their own homes, which if anything were looted more thoroughly by the Allied than the German armies. ‘We have been reproached,’ wrote a local writer bitterly a few months later, ‘at least by those who regard the battle of Normandy as a military tattoo, for failing to throw ourselves on the necks of our liberators. Those people have lost sight of the Stations of the Cross that we have passed since 6 June.’
¹¹
When it began to rain early in July, the locals told the soldiers that there had not been a summer like it for 50 years. But for this, at least, they did not seek to blame the Allies. They shrugged: ‘
C’est la guerre.
’

A few overworked Norman prostitutes were already plying their trade. One day General Bradley was astonished to notice a village near Isigny with ‘Off Limits’ signs posted outside it, and drove in with General ‘Pete’ Quesada of IXth Tactical Air Command. He found a house marked ‘Prophylactic Station’, containing three sleeping GIs, none of whom recognized their army commander when he awakened them. He inquired how much business they were doing. The medic shrugged. ‘Well, yesterday there was just the two for the MPs and one for me and that was it.’ Characteristically, Bradley moved on without inflicting the trauma of his identity upon them.
¹²

It was well into July before facilities for rear-area entertainments began to be established, and few men were withdrawn from the line for long enough to enjoy them. But in the
mairie
of Balleroy, where the US 1st Division had its civil affairs office issuing
laissez-passers
to civilians and supervising the blackout, a group of local inhabitants one day requested permission to hold a concert. On 2 July, a few score civilians and GIs crowded into the little auditorium for what they billed proudly as ‘the first cultural event in liberated France’. The mayor’s daughter sang a song, a succession of other local talents performed their little acts, and Leslie Bertal, a Hungarian concert pianist of some pre-war celebrity who was now serving as a prisoner-of-war interrogator, played in the oddest setting of his career. He was killed a week later, when a shell exploded in the tree above him as he was questioning a German soldier.

For most of the men fighting in France, beyond a passing curiosity about alien sights and a foreign language, life revolved around the battle and the cocoon of their units. Each squad or platoon carried its little island of east London or westside New York across Europe, the average GI only communicating with the world outside for long enough to imitate a chicken before a bewildered Frenchwoman, in an effort to persuade her to sell him eggs. They had little eye for the beauty of the creeper-clad farmhouses, the white apple and pear blossom, the golden walls of the châteaux. Most Tommies were bemused by their officers’ enthusiasm for the sticky, smelly local cheese – camembert. Sergeant Andy Hertz, an American aviation engineer, was once asked to dinner by a French refugee family, fellow Jews. He said that it was his first inkling of what the Germans were doing to his people. As a souvenir, his hosts gave him one of the yellow Stars of David that they had been compelled to wear. He kept it all his life.

The rear areas were littered with signs – divisional symbols and direction markers, cautionary KEEP TO SWEPT PATH, or roughly daubed FRONT LINE NO VEHICLES FORWARD OF HERE, or simply DUST MEANS DEATH. Except when rain and the vast columns of
tracked vehicles had chewed the roads into muddy ruins, one of the greatest perils was the dust thrown up by speeding convoys, bringing down a deadly rain of German artillery fire. Infantry cursed the proximity of their own tanks or artillery for the same reason, and took pains to avoid occupying positions near a major signals unit, for fear of German radio locators and the fire that they could call down. Every German signaller testified to the carelessness of Allied soldiers on the air, especially the Canadians and some American units whose easy chatter provided priceless intelligence.

Among the fighting soldiers, there was little to do between battles except stroll among the fields or visit a nearby village to buy milk or eggs; they could write home; drown themselves in the universal calvados and cider; play cards; or talk interminably. Padre Lovegrove of the Green Howards tried to get his men to speak about their civilian jobs and homes, to preserve some grip upon the world beyond the battlefield. Among themselves many men, inevitably, talked about women. But deep in their hearts most soldiers on the battlefield would readily trade a night with a woman for a hot bath, a home-cooked meal, and a safe bed in which they could merely sleep. Some found solace in religion. Frank Svboda, a presbyterian chaplain with the US 79th Division, was moved by the manner in which his services were attended by Protestants, Jews, and Catholic soldiers clutching their rosaries. Before battle, he found himself administering communion of crackers and squeezed raisin juice to little clusters of 15 or 20 sombre young men in a hedgerow a few hundred yards behind the front. Good chaplains were greatly prized by their units, but bad ones – of whom there were many in the Allied armies – were detested and avoided for the hypocrisy with which they offered their blessings from the rear echelon. Frank Svboda felt that the best aid he possessed in cementing relations with his men was a little axe he had bought in England, and which they found invaluable for hacking off the stubborn hedgerow roots as they dug foxholes. ‘Chaplain, pass the hatchet!’ became a unit catchphrase.

The Americans lived chiefly off 5-pound cartons of C rations, or the more popular three-meal K ration – 60,000,000 of them were shipped to Normandy in the first three weeks of operations. Everybody detested the powdered lemon juice, but otherwise it was the monotony of the food that men cursed, rather than its quality. One night, John Hein found himself called upon to feed four German prisoners seized by a patrol. The men wolfed their first American rations, one of them declaring courteously: ‘This is first-rate.’ British soldiers were astonished by the sheer quantity of American supplies, and by the ice cream-making machines that soon appeared in rear areas. But their own rations were of substantially higher quality than the food on which the British civilian population at home was being fed. Augmented by occasional cuts from freshly-dead cattle and produce bought or thieved from the Normans, it was tolerable enough. Almost every man smoked. The armies supplied the troops with cigarettes in prodigal profusion, as the readiest means of sustaining morale, the most portable comfort available to a soldier. For the first weeks ashore in France, their greatest craving was bread. There was none to be had until field bakeries were established in the beachhead, and as they chewed day after day on tasteless hard tack biscuits, soft white bread came to seem an unimaginable luxury.

To almost every man of the Allied armies, the predominant memory of the campaign, beyond the horror of the battle, was the astounding efficiency of the supply services. The Americans had always justly prided themselves upon their organization. But for young British soldiers, who had grown up with the legend of the War Office’s chronic bungling, and of the Crimea and the Boer War, Second Army’s administration in Normandy seemed a miracle. ‘We were all very agreeably surprised by the efficiency,’ said Major John Warner of 3rd Recce Regiment. ‘We always knew that we would receive ammunition, letters, petrol, food.’ Curiously enough, whatever the command shortcomings of the British Army in France in the First World War, its administration had been a supreme achievement. So it was now, and this contributed
enormously to men’s faith in their commanders and in final victory. ‘There was so much
matériel
at the back,’ said Alf Lee of the Middlesex Regiment. ‘Whenever you went to the rear and saw fields packed with petrol tins as high as a house, rows of guns in their canvas covers waiting to come up, huge dumps of shells, you couldn’t doubt that we could do it. We would often fire 25,000 rounds from a Vickers gun in a single shoot. Yet we were never short of ammunition.’

Few men on the battlefield read anything more demanding than comics. Private Richardson of the 82nd Airborne self-consciously carried around his US army paperback edition of
Oliver Twist
until his unit was withdrawn from action, but he never looked at it. Padre Lovegrove read Housman’s
A Shropshire Lad
, and some men clung to their bibles. But most merely glanced at their own unit’s weekly duplicated news-sheets – if there was time for headquarters to produce such refinements – or, in the American army, leafed through
Stars and Stripes.
To Lieutenant Floyd Ratliff of the 30th Artillery, this at least ‘made it seem that there was some design, some grand strategy to what we were doing’. Unless a man had access to radio news or headquarters gossip, he lived entirely in the tiny private world of his unit, cut off from both the successes and failures of others, and from the army of which he was a part. The sheer enormity of the forces deployed in Normandy destroyed the sense of personality, the feeling of identity which had been so strong, for instance, in the Eighth Army in the desert. The campaign in north-west Europe was industrialized warfare on a vast scale. For that reason, veterans of earlier campaigns found this one less congenial – dirty and sordid in a fashion unknown in the desert. Many responded by focusing their own loyalties exclusively upon their own squad or company. One of the chronic command difficulties of the campaign was that of overcoming the conviction of many men that another unit or another division’s difficulties were entirely its own affair. The sense of detachment was inevitably strongest among the hundreds of thousands of men serving in the rear areas or on the gunlines:

For the gunners, the greatest strain lay in the shattering noise of their own pieces, and the physical sweat of shifting 95-pound 155 mm projectiles day after day, stripped to the waist and working like automatons through the bombardment before a big attack. Their risk of death or mutilation was small – very small by comparison with that of the infantry. In Ratliff’s battalion in Normandy, one observation officer was lost when his Piper Cub was shot down, and a switchboard operator and his assistant were wounded by an incoming shell exploding in a tree above their foxhole. That was all.