D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (23 page)

The best way to avoid trouble was to keep the troops, of whatever color, hard at work. Eisenhower ordered that "troops must train together, work together and live together in order to attain successful teamwork in [the coming] campaign."
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As the white infantrymen practiced going ashore from their Higgins boats, the black soldiers loaded and unloaded LSTs and other vessels. The training was intense and seemed never to end.

The Germans in France hardly trained at all. Instead, they put more poles in the ground, more obstacles on the beach, working through April and May as construction battalions rather than going through field maneuvers. An exception was the 21st Panzer Division. Colonel Luck, commanding the 125th Regiment, put his tankers through regular night exercises. He emphasized assembly points, various routes to the coast or to the bridges over the Orne River and Canal, fire and movement, speed and dash. On May 30, Rommel inspected the division. He was enthusiastic about a demonstration with live ammunition of the so-called Stalin Organ, a rocket launcher with forty-eight barrels. That evening, Rommel told the officers of the 21st to be extremely vigilant. He closed with these words, "You shouldn't count on the enemy coming in fine weather and by day."

Staying vigilant was not easy. As Luck records, "For
a panzer
division, which in the campaigns so far had been accustomed to a war of movement, the inactivity was wearisome and dangerous. Vigilance was easily relaxed, especially after the enjoyment of Calvados and cider, both typical drinks of the region. There was, in addition, the uncertainty as to whether the landing would take place at all in our sector."
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In other words, even the elite of the Wehrmacht in Normandy had grown soft enjoying the cushy life of occupiers in the land of fat cattle and fine apples. For the ordinary Wehrmacht soldier, whether a teenager from Berlin or a forty-year-old Pole or Russian in an
Ost
battalion, life consisted of boring work during the day, enjoyment at night, waiting and praying that the invasion would come elsewhere—anything but getting ready for the fight of their lives.

The long occupation of France made for special problems. There was an increasing incidence of German soldiers divorcing their German wives in order to marry French women. Further, there was a danger that individuals and even units might surrender

wholesale at the first opportunity. Obviously, this was so with the
Ost
battalions, but it also existed with German-born troops who, according to a December 1943 secret high command report, had "the illusion of a confrontation with an adversary who acts humanely." As Dr. Detlef Vogel of the
Militargeschichtliches For-schungsamt
put it, "As a result, hardly anyone was too much afraid of becoming a POW of the Allies. This was not exactly a favorable condition for endurability and steadfastness, as constantly demanded by the military commanders."

Dr. Goebbels put his propaganda machine to work to convince the German soldiers in the West that they faced a "life-and-death struggle, an all-out conflict." Shortly before the landing, General Jodl tried to bolster spirits by arguing, "We shall see who fights better and who dies more easily, the German soldier faced with the destruction of his homeland or the Americans and British, who don't even know what they are fighting for in Europe."

Rommel could not count on it. As Dr. Vogel writes, on the eve of the invasion "It remained quite doubtful whether the German troops in the West would resist in the same death-defying manner as they were frequently doing against the Red Army, for the often assumed motive of the German soldier defending his homeland certainly did not have the same significance to the soldiers in the West as to their brothers-in-arms on the Eastern Front."
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To counter such defeatism, the commanders lied to their troops. Peter Masters discovered in his interrogations of POWs on D-Day and after that the men had been told, "We will easily push them back into the sea. Stukas will dive bomb them; U-boats will surface behind their fleet and shell and torpedo them; bombers will sink their landing craft; panzers will rout them on the beaches."
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How many, if any, believed such fantasies is open to question. The truth is that the Wehrmacht was full of doubts, which were best expressed by Rommel's insistence that more concrete be poured, more poles stuck in the ground, rather than training for quick movement and lightning strikes. On the other side of the Channel, meanwhile, the men of the AEF were putting in nearly all their time getting ready.

8

MARSHALING AND BRIEFING

Starting in the first week of May, the soldiers and sailors of the AEF began descending on southern England. They came by sea in a never-ending stream of transports and LSTs. The ships came out of the Firth of Clyde and Belfast, down the Irish Sea past the Isle of Man, from Liverpool and Swansea and Bristol. They got into formation, twenty ships, forty ships, 100 ships, to sail out into the Atlantic and then past Lands End, to turn left for their designated ports—Plymouth, Torquay, Weymouth, Bournemouth, Southampton, Portsmouth, Eastbourne, and others.

They came by land, by train, bus, truck, or on foot, men and equipment from Northern Ireland, Scotland, the Midlands and Wales. They formed up by the hundreds in companies and battalions, by the thousands in regiments, to march down narrow English roads, headed south. When they arrived in their marshaling areas, they formed up by divisions, corps, and armies in the hundreds of thousands—altogether almost 2 million men, nearly a half million vehicles. It took 54,000 men to provide necessary services for the force, including more than 4,500 newly trained army cooks. It was the greatest mass movement of armed forces in the history of the British and American armies. It culminated with a concentration of military men and weaponry in southernmost England such

as the world had never seen, or would again.*

The 175th Regiment of the 29th Division marched to its assembly area, called a sausage, near Falmouth. (Sausages got their name from their shape; on the map, the long, narrow, fenced-in areas, usually beside a road, looked exactly like sausages.) There the regiment was sealed in. The men moved into tents; gravel paths had been constructed and orders were issued to stick to those paths so that German reconnaissance planes would not get photographs showing new paths beaten down by walking through the fields. Vehicles were parked close against hedges. Everything was camouflaged under wire netting. The sausages were surrounded by MPs; no one was allowed out. No fires were allowed even though the nights in mid-May in England were still cold, with frost on the ground in the mornings.

Lt. Eugene Bernstein took the LCT(R) he commanded through the Irish Sea to the Isle of Man, where he took on provisions ("mostly steaks, which we ate three times a day"), and proceeded to Falmouth, where he was told he was in the wrong place. After much confusion and many exchanges of messages, he was ordered to Dartmouth on the Dart River. On arrival, he was told to sail up the river and drop anchor across from Greenway House, Agatha Christie's home. It was a "beautiful stone mansion, with hothouses and flowers dominating the view and a winding, gravel river road running alongside." Mrs. Christie had turned it over to the U.S. Navy, which set up a headquarters there.
¹

The airborne troopers went into camps near the airfields of southern England. For the 506th PIR, that meant Uppottery; for the gliderborne troops of the Ox and Bucks, it was Tarrant Rush-ton. The engineers had their own marshaling areas; the 6th ECB was outside Portsmouth.

The sausages were packed with equipment. Sgt. John

* Had the invasion of Japan's home islands gone ahead as planned in the fall of 1945, that would have been a larger operation. On the tenth anniversary of D-Day, at a press conference, President Eisenhower predicted that the world would never again see such a concentration in so small an area because in the atomic age it would be too vulnerable. In Operation Desert Shield in 1990-91, the UN forces gathered to attack Iraq were less than one-quarter the size of the AEF. The numbers of men involved in various battles on the Eastern Front in World War II were higher than those in D-Day, but on the Eastern Front the numbers of aircraft were far below those in the United Kingdom, and of course there was no sea armada.

Robert Slaughter of the 116th Regiment, 29th Division, recalled: "Every field and vacant lot was piled high with materiel for an impending great battle. Tanks and other tracked vehicles; trucks, jeeps and weapons carriers; spotter Piper Cub airplanes; artillery pieces of all sizes; gasoline, water, food, jerry cans, boxes, drums, you name it and it was there, in abundance."
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The vehicles had to be waterproofed. Every moving part was protected by Cosmoline, a greasy substance that would keep out water and protect the metal from the corrosive action of salt water. Pipes emerged from the carburetors of the jeeps, tanks, and trucks for air intake. "The drivers and gunners who toiled under the camouflage nets were not careless," Lt. Ralph Eastridge of the 115th Regiment, 29th Division, observed. "Carelessness here would mean a stalled vehicle at the crucial minute that it drove down the landing ramp and headed for the beach. The gunners painstakingly covered the breeches of their weapons with rubber cloth and sealed the edges with rubber cement. The radio operators sealed the delicate radios with rubber bags."
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Condoms were issued, by the millions. Some were blown up into balloons or filled with water and tossed around, but most were put to more practical, if unintended, use. The infantrymen put them over the muzzles of their M-l rifles; the rubbers would keep out sand and water and would not have to be removed before the weapons were fired. Hundreds of men put their watches in condoms and tied them off; unfortunately, the condoms were not large enough to hold wallets.

Men were given escape aids, in case of capture. "These were very Boy Scoutish things," Major Howard remarked. They included a metal file to be sewn into the uniform blouse, a brass pants button that had been magnetized so that when balanced on a pin-head it became a tiny compass, a silk scarf with the map of France on it, water-purifying tablets, and French francs (printed by the U.S. and U.K. governments, over De Gaulle's loud protest, about $10 worth to a man). "This sort of thing absolutely thrilled the troops to bits," Howard said. "I have never seen such enthusiasm about such simple things."
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Every soldier got a brand-new weapon. The rifles and machine guns had to be test-fired and zeroed in on the firing range. Slaughter remembered "unlimited amounts of ammo were given to each of us for practice firing. Bayonets and combat knives were honed to a keen edge."
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Every man was given a new set of clothing, impregnated with a chemical that would ward off poison gas. They hated those uniforms. Pvt. Edward Jeziorski of the 507th PIR spoke for all the men of D-Day when he declared, "They were the lousiest, the coldest, the clammiest, the stiffest, the stinkiest articles of clothing that were ever dreamed up to be worn by individuals. Surely the guy that was responsible for the idea on this screw-up received a Distinguished Service Medal from the devil himself."
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(The men wore these uniforms through the Normandy campaign, in some cases longer; the chemical prevented the cloth from "breathing," so the men froze in them at night, sweated up a storm by day, and stank always.)

By contrast, the food was wonderful. "Steak and pork chops with all of the trimmings," Slaughter recalled, "topped with lemon meringue pie, were items on a typical menu, and it was all-you-can-eat." Fresh eggs—the first most of the men had enjoyed since arriving in England—plus ice cream, white bread, and other previously unavailable luxuries were devoured with relish, accompanied by the inevitable crack that "they're fattening us up for the kill."
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Theaters were set up inside wall tents, where first-run movies just over from Hollywood were run nonstop, with free popcorn and candy. Most soldiers can remember the names of those movies, if not the plots—favorites included
Mr. Lucky
with Cary Grant and Laraine Day,
Going My Way
with Barry Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby, and
The Song of Bernadette.

Training was over. Until the briefings began, aside from firing weapons and sharpening knives, or watching movies, there was little to do. Cpl. Peter Masters remembered it as a "time without end." After the intense activity of the previous months, the superbly conditioned men quickly grew bored. According to Masters, "Total war begins in the concentration area, because when people are fully charged with ammunition, somebody will get their finger on the trigger by mistake. Occasionally there were casualties. One heard a burst and a shout—'Medics!' "
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At Company A, 116th Regiment, a joker threw a clip of M-l .30-caliber bullets into a burning barrel; the guys in the area laughed and cursed and ran away.
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As the days went by, tension mounted, tempers grew shorter. "It didn't take much of a difference of opinion to bring out the sporting instinct," Private Jeziorski recalled.
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Fistfights were

common. Lt. Richard Winters of the 506th got into a scrap with Lt. Raymond Schmitz and cracked two of Schmitz's vertebrae, which sent him to the hospital.
¹¹
As always in an army camp, especially so in this one, rumors of every imaginable kind raced through the sausages.

Sports was one way to burn off some of the pent-up energy. At first footballs were handed out, but most company commanders put a stop to that when the games got too rough and some bones were broken. Softball was better; there were barrels full of gloves and balls and constant games of catch. A number of men recalled that these were the last games of catch they ever played because of wounds received or arms lost during the ensuing campaign.