D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (21 page)

The 29th Division was the first to go through the school. General Gerhardt praised the "superb training facilities," which he said made his division "capable of a successful landing on the shore of Fortress Europe."
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In the winter and spring of 1944, thousands of troops went through exercises every week. As they did so, observers noted what worked and what didn't and made adjustments in the plans as required. For example, the exercises indicated that the use of smoke for cover tended to confuse the assault troops as badly as it did the defenders, that smoke could not be sufficiently controlled, and that it interfered with observed fire from the warships. So smoke was out.

Experiment further convinced the planners that the best use of tanks was not as an armored force but as close-support artillery. Giving up armor's characteristics of shock and mobility, the planners decided that instead of using tanks to lead the drive through the fortifications they would instead fire from hull down in the water, giving support from behind rather than breaking through at the front.

None of these lessons, somewhat surprisingly, came from previous American experience in the Pacific. There was some correspondence between the 1st Engineer Special Brigade in Europe and the 2nd Brigade in the Pacific, and a few officers were brought from the Pacific to the United Kingdom, but for the most part there was no interchange. After North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, the commanders in Europe did not feel a need to ask their counterparts in the Pacific about their experiences.

In April and early May, assault exercises that amounted to dress rehearsals took place all over England. They included marshaling, embarkation and sailing, approach and assault, setting up the beach organization. The rehearsals brought together the units that would go to France as a team: assault forces O (for Omaha), G (Gold), U (Utah), J (Juno), and S (Sword). The Army got to know the Navy, and vice versa.

The air forces were also involved: as Leigh-Mallory's headquarters put it, "It is important that the pilots of all aircraft should see a large concentration of assault forces at sea. . . . Conversely, it is of importance that personnel in assault forces should obtain an idea of the degree of air cover and support which they might expect."
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Thirty-two-year-old Lt. Dean Rockwell was in charge of the training for the LCT crews. He had been a professional wrestler and high-school coach in Detroit before the war. Although he had never been on salt water, he joined the Navy after hearing a recruiting pitch from former heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. The Navy made him an instructor in physical education, but Rockwell did not approve of the Navy's PE program and said so. He voiced his criticisms so often and so loudly that he got a reputation as a "Bolshie." As a punishment he was posted to landing craft, which his senior officers regarded as a suicide squad.

Regular Navy officers thought that landing craft were ugly and unseamanlike; Rockwell loved them, and he became exceptionally clever at handling them and understanding their often strange behavior. He began with LCVPs and LCMs, got promoted to petty officer, and went to England. He was so good at his job that he got a spot promotion to lieutenant (jg), then to full lieutenant, and in March 1944 was put in command of the training program for LCTs.

Lt. Eugene Bernstein, USNR, commanding an LCT(R), remembered the training exercises as "very realistic. We would rendezvous all ships in specific convoys, load troops, tanks, ammo, and supplies of all sorts and head out. At around midnight we would open a set of orders to find that we were to go to Slapton Sands, or wherever, and go through the entire landing procedure. We would turn 180 degrees, make for Slapton Sands, fire our rockets on designated targets [if the LCT(R) was moving ahead at flank speed of ten knots when all 1,060 rockets were fired, the recoil was such that the craft was thrust backward at three knots], unload

attack transports into small boats, and assault the beach. These were full scale operations with aircraft cover, major-ship bombardment, the works. Then we would go home. Soon we would be at it again. We and the British did this practice operation eleven times. So passed the spring of 1944." When it came time for the real thing, Bernstein added, "We weighed anchor and calmly got under way as though it were another practice exercise."
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Maj. R. Younger, who commanded an assault squadron of British tanks in the Royal Engineers, recalled that "most of the early exercises were pretty catastrophic. All sorts of things went wrong, but we were learning. . . . Vehicles broke down. Coming off a landing craft in a tank, when the sea is rough, isn't particularly easy, and sometimes we'd get a vehicle broken down on the ramp of the LCT and it had to be towed off and so on.

"We certainly needed training. Wireless, for example. You can't talk to any of your subordinate tanks without wireless and we'd never used that, and we were very verbose initially in our use of the wireless, but as we got more confident in it we got far quicker—people recognize your voice and you cut everything down, so that in the end conversations are just click click click and you know exactly what the men meant. The trouble with being verbose on the air is that somebody else has got something much more important to say and he can't get on the air because it is blocked by those long-winded statements."
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The joint exercises revealed flaws. In the rehearsal for the VII Corps at Utah, Operation Tiger, held on the night of April 27-28 at Slapton Sands, there were some missed schedules resulting in traffic jams and some naval craft arriving late at embarkation points. Much worse, German E-boats slipped through the British destroyer screen and sank two LSTs and damaged six others. Over 749 men were killed and 300 wounded in the explosions or drowned afterward.

Lessons were learned that saved lives on D-Day. There had been no rescue craft in the Tiger formation. Naval commanders realized that they would be needed. The men had not been taught how to use their life preservers. After Tiger, they were. It turned out that the British were operating on different radio wavelengths than the Americans, which contributed to the disaster. That was fixed.

What could not be so easily fixed was the weather. Visibility

had been poor on April 27-28 and the American fighter airplanes had not shown up.

Operation Tiger was not the only training maneuver to produce casualties. The use of live ammunition led to many wounds and some deaths, as did the night jumps for the paratroopers. Maj. David Thomas was regimental surgeon of the 508th Parachute Infantry. On one training jump, a trooper's chute failed to open. "It took us three days to find him," Thomas recalled, "and when we did I took his gloves and laundered them carefully three or four times to get the sweet odor of death out of them. I'm not superstitious but I figured that those gloves couldn't be unlucky twice." He wore them on D-Day.
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No one had yet told the GIs and Tommies where or when they were going to attack, but the exercises made it clear to the men in such divisions as the 29th and 4th that they would be leading the way, wherever it was. Confidence was high, but there was no doubt that casualties would be taken. Rifle companies were being reinforced to the point that they were overstrength, especially in junior officers and noncoms.

Pvt. Harry Parley joined Company E, 116th, in early 1944. He never forgot the moment of his arrival: "The CO walked in, said his name was Capt. Lawrence Madill, that our company was to be first wave in the invasion, that 30-percent casualties were expected, and that we were them!" Parley commented, "It saddened me to think of what would happen to some of my fellow GIs."
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The U.S. 1st, 4th, and 29th Infantry divisions, the British 50th and 3rd Infantry divisions, and the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division would make the assault, supported on the flanks by the British 6th Airborne and the U.S. 82nd and 101st. The 1st and 82nd had been in combat in the Mediterranean; for the others, D-Day would be the baptism of fire (as also for the many replacements who joined the 1st Division in England). As Geoffrey Perret writes, "Overlord was the supreme task for which the wartime Army had been created. If the division-making machine really worked, it should be possible to take untried divisions such as the 4th, the 29th and 101st Airborne, put them into a battle against experienced German troops and see them emerge victorious."
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The infantry divisions were composed, overwhelmingly, of conscripts. The airborne divisions were all volunteer (except for the gliderborne units) and thus by definition elite. The paratroopers' motivation, in the words of Pvt. Robert Rader of the 506th Regi-

ment, 101st Airborne, was "a desire to be better than the other guy."
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The $50 a month extra jump pay was also an attraction. They thought of themselves as special, and they were right, but they discovered in the campaign in northwest Europe in 1944-45 that the gliderborne troops and outfits like the 1st, 4th, and 29th were almost as good as they were—a tribute to the training of the conscripts.

Still, it was true that the airborne troops underwent even tougher training than the infantry. Back in Georgia in late 1942, for example, the 506th had made a three-day forced march, carrying full equipment, of 136 miles. When the regiment got to England in September 1943, training intensified. There were numerous three-day field exercises, beginning with a jump. The regimental scrap-book described the march back to barracks: "Glancing down the line you were of the opinion that everyone had that combat expression, an unshaven face showing extreme weariness and disgust, caked mud from head to foot, and every jump suit looking as tho it had come out second best in the ordeal of the fences. You finally dragged your weary body those last few torturous kilometers, and throwing yourself across the bunk you said—'Combat can't be that rough!' "
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The objective of all the training, whether infantry or armored or engineers or airborne, was to make the men believe that combat could not possibly be worse than what they were undergoing, so that they would look forward to their release from training and their commitment to battle.

"But of course," Sgt. D. Zane Schlemmer of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment commented, "you never get enough training, I've found. Once you get into combat, you've never had enough training for combat. It is a total impossibility."
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Some units had highly specialized training. Major Howard of D Company of the Ox and Bucks asked the topographical people to search the map of Britain and find him some place where a river and a canal ran closely together and were crossed by bridges on the same road, as on the Orne waterways. They found such a spot outside Exeter. Howard moved his company down there and for six days, by day and by night, attacked those Exeter bridges, practicing every conceivable condition—if only one of his six gliders, each carrying a platoon, made it to the objective, that platoon knew what to do to complete the mission alone.

To make as certain as possible that the gliders did land near

the bridges, the pilots (all sergeants, all members of the Glider Pilot Regiment; there were sixteen of them, two for each of the six gliders scheduled to go in on D-Day plus four reserves) went through Operation Deadstick. Col. George Chatterton, commander of the GPR, made the exercise hellishly difficult. He had the pilots land beside a small L-shaped wood, three gliders going up the L and three on the blind side. In daylight, on a straight-in run, it was relatively easy. But then Chatterton started having them release from their tug planes at 7,000 feet and fly by times and courses, using a stopwatch, making two or three full turns before coming over the wood. That was not too bad, either, because, as Jim Wallwork, pilot of no. 1 glider, explained, "In broad daylight you can always cheat a little."

Next Chatterton put colored glasses in their flying goggles to turn day into night, and warned his pilots, "It is silly of you to cheat on this because you've got to do it right when the time comes." Wallwork would nevertheless whip the goggles off if he thought he was overshooting, "but we began to play it fairly square." By early May they were flying by moonlight, casting off at 6,000 feet, eight miles from the wood. They flew regardless of weather. They twisted and turned around the sky, all by stopwatch. They did forty-three training flights in Deadstick altogether, more than half of them at night. They got ready.
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The U.S. 2nd and 5th Ranger battalions were composed of volunteers. Others referred to them as "suicide squads," but Lt. James Eikner of the 2nd Rangers disagreed: "We were simply spirited young people who took the view that if you are going to be a combat soldier, you may as well be one of the very best; also we were anxious to get on with the war so as to bring things to a close and get home to our loved ones as soon as possible."
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Naturally, such fine troops had a special mission, to capture the battery at Pointe-du-Hoc. As this would require scaling the cliff, the Rangers got into superb physical condition. In March, they went to the Highlands of Scotland, where Lord Lovat's No. 4 Commando put them through grueling speed marches (averaging twenty-five miles a day, culminating in a thirty-seven-mile march) across what was reputedly the toughest obstacle course in the world. They climbed mountains, scaled cliffs, practiced unarmed combat. They learned stealth, how to conduct quick-hitting strikes. In ten days of such training, one private's weight dropped from 205 pounds to 170 pounds.
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Next they practiced amphibious landing operations on the Scottish coast, hitting beaches specially prepared with barbed wire, beach obstacles, and every type of antiassault landing device that Rommel had waiting for them. In April, the rangers went to the Assault Training Center. In early May, it was off to Swanage for special training in cliff scaling with ropes, using grappling hooks trailing ropes propelled to the top of the cliff by rockets, and with extension ladders donated by the London Fire Department and carried in DUKWs.
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