D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (7 page)

Mostly, however, Higgins Industries built LCVPs. It was based on the Eureka design, but substituted a square bow that was actually a ramp for the spoonbill bow of the Eureka. At thirty-six feet long and ten and a half feet wide, it was a floating cigar box propelled by a protected propeller powered by a diesel engine. It could carry a platoon of thirty-six men or a jeep and a squad of a dozen men. The ramp was metal but the sides and square stern were plywood. Even in a moderate sea it would bounce and shake while swells broke over the ramp and sides. But it could bring a rifle platoon to the shoreline and discharge the men in a matter of seconds, then extract itself and go back to the mother ship for another load. It fit the need perfectly.

By the end of the war, Higgins Industries had produced over 20,000 LCVPs. They were dubbed "Higgins boats," and they carried infantry ashore in the Mediterranean, in France, at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and at other Pacific islands. More American

fighting men went ashore in Higgins boats than in all other types of landing craft combined.*

The Higgins boats were carried across the Atlantic—and later across the Channel—on the decks of LSTs. They were lowered by davits. (One of Higgins's arguments with the Bureau of Ships had been about length; he insisted that a thirty-six-foot boat was the right length to meet the requirements, while the Navy said it had to be a thirty-foot boat because the davits on the LSTs were designed for a boat of that length. "Change the davits," Higgins thundered, and eventually that commonsense solution was adopted.) Together with the LCTs and other craft, they gave the Allies unprecedented mobility.

The Allies had other advantages to help solve their problems. The Germans, who had been pioneers in creating a paratroop force, had given up on airborne operations after suffering disastrous losses in the 1941 capture of Crete, and in any case they did not have the transport capacity to mount much more than a small raiding party. But the American, British, and Canadian armies had airborne divisions, and they had the planes to carry them behind enemy lines. Those planes were designated C-47s and dubbed Da-kotas. Each could carry a stick of eighteen paratroopers. The Dakota was the military version of the DC-3, a twin-engine plane built by Douglas Aircraft in the 1930s. It was unarmed and unarmored, but it was versatile. It was slow (230 miles per hour top speed) but the most dependable, most rugged, best designed airplane ever built. (A half century and more later, most of the DC-3s built in the thirties were still in service, primarily flying as commercial transports over the mountains of South and Central America.)

The men the Dakotas carried were elite troops. There were two British airborne divisions, the 1st and 6th, and two American, the 82nd and 101st. Every paratrooper was a volunteer. (Glider-borne infantry were
not
volunteers.) Each paratrooper had gone

After the war, Higgins was beset by problems, some of his own making. He was not a good businessman. He could not bring himself to cut back because he hated to put his work force on unemployment. He fought the labor unions and lost. He was ahead of his time as he tried to move into helicopters and pleasure motor and sailing craft, pop-up tent trailers, and other leisure-time items that would eventually take off but not in 1946-47. He was brilliant at design but lousy at marketing, a master of production but a terrible bookkeeper. He went bust. Higgins Industries went under.

But he was the man who won the war for us, and it is a shame that he has been forgotten by the nation and by the city of New Orleans.

through a rigorous training course, as tough as any in the world. The experience had bonded them together. Their unit cohesion was outstanding. The men were superbly conditioned, highly motivated, experts in small arms. The rifle companies in the Allied airborne divisions were as good as any in the world. So were the other elite Allied formations, such as the American Rangers and the British Commandos.

The U.S. Army's infantry divisions were not elite, by definition, but they had some outstanding characteristics. Although they were made up, primarily, of conscripted troops, there was a vast difference between American draftees and their German counterparts (not to mention the
Ost
battalions). The American Selective Service System was just that, selective. One-third of the men called to service were rejected after physical examinations, making the average draftee brighter, healthier, and better educated than the average American. He was twenty-six years old, five feet eight inches tall, weighed 144 pounds, had a thirty-three-and-a-half-inch chest, and a thirty-one-inch waist. After thirteen weeks of basic training, he'd gained seven pounds (and converted many of his original pounds from fat to muscle) and added at least an inch to his chest. Nearly half the draftees were high-school graduates; one in ten had some college. As Geoffrey Perret puts it in his history of the U.S. Army in World War II, "These were the best-educated enlisted men of any army in history."
⁷

At the end of 1943 the U.S. Army was the greenest army in the world. Of the nearly fifty infantry, armored, and airborne divisions selected for participation in the campaign in northwest Europe, only two—the 1st Infantry and the 82nd Airborne—had been in combat.

Nor had the bulk of the British army seen action. Although Britain had been at war with Germany for four years, only a small number of divisions had been in combat, and none of those designated for the assault had more than a handful of veterans.

This posed problems and caused apprehension, but it had a certain advantage. According to Pvt. Carl Weast of the U.S. 5th Ranger Battalion, "A veteran infantryman is a terrified infantryman."
⁸
Sgt. Carwood Lipton of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR) of the 101st Airborne commented, "I took chances on D-Day I would never have taken later in the war."
⁹

In
Wartime,
Paul Fussell writes that men in combat go

through two stages of rationalization followed by one of perception. Considering the possibility of a severe wound or death, the average soldier's first rationalization is: "It
can't
happen to me. I am too clever/agile/well-trained/good-looking/beloved/tightly laced, etc." The second rationalization is: "It
can
happen to me, and I'd better be more careful. I can avoid the danger by watching more prudently the way I take cover/dig in/expose my position by firing my weapon/keep extra alert at all times, etc." Finally, the realization is "It
is going to
happen to me, and only my not being there is going to prevent it."
¹⁰

For a direct frontal assault on a prepared enemy position, men who have not seen what a bullet or a land mine or an exploding mortar round can do to a human body are preferable to men who have seen the carnage. Men in their late teens or early twenties have a feeling of invulnerability, as seen in the remark of Charles East of the 29th Division. Told by his commanding officer on the eve of D-Day that nine out of ten would become casualties in the ensuing campaign, East looked at the man to his left, then at the man to his right, and thought to himself, You poor bastards.''

Men like Sergeant Lipton and Private East—and there were thousands of them in the American army—could overcome the problem of inexperience with their zeal and daredevil attitude.

The ordinary infantry divisions of the British army were another matter. They had been in barracks since the British Expeditionary Force retreated from the Continent in June 1940. The ordinary soldier was not as well educated or as physically fit as his American counterpart. Superficial discipline—dress, saluting, etc.—was much better than among the GIs, but real discipline, taking and executing orders, was slack. The British War Office had been afraid to impose discipline too strictly in a democratic army on the odd notion that it might dampen the fighting spirit of the men in the ranks.

Those British soldiers who were veterans had been badly beaten by the Wehrmacht in 1940; their overseas mates had surrendered to an inferior Japanese army in Singapore in February 1941, to an inferior German army in Tobruk, Libya, in June 1942, and again to an inferior German force on the Greek island of Leros in November 1943. The one British victory in the war, at El Alamein in November 1942, had been won over an undersupplied, outgunned, and outmanned Afrika Korps. In pursuing the defeated Afrika Korps into Tunisia, as in the ensuing campaigns in Sicily

and Italy, the British Eighth Army had not displayed much of a killer instinct.

The Germans who fought against the British often expressed their surprise at the way in which British troops would do only what was expected of them, no more. They found it remarkable that the British would abandon a pursuit to brew up their tea, and even more remarkable that British troops would surrender when their ammunition ran low, when their fuel ran out, or when they were encircled. Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery, commander of the Eighth Army, wrote his superior, Chief of the Imperial General Staff Field Marshal Alan Brooke: "The trouble with our British lads is that they are not killers by nature."
¹²

One reason for the shortcomings of the World War II British army was inferior weaponry. British tanks, trucks, artillery, and small arms were not as good as those of their enemies, or of their American partners. Another reason was the way in which the poison of pacifism had eaten into the souls of British youth after the catastrophes of the Somme, Flanders, and elsewhere in World War I. In addition, senior officers were survivors of the trenches. They had nightmares from the experience. They mistrusted offensive action in general, direct frontal assaults even more. What their generals had ordered them to do, charge across no-man's-land, they would not. They knew it was stupid, futile, suicidal. Their mistake was in thinking that the lessons of World War I applied to all offensive action.

On the eve of the invasion, General Montgomery visited D Company, the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, a gliderborne outfit in the 6th Airborne Division. Its commanding officer was Maj. John Howard. D Company had a special mission. It was composed of volunteers, had excellent junior officers, was well trained and primed to go. It was an outstanding rifle company. Montgomery's parting words to Howard were, "Bring back as many of the chaps as you can."
¹³

Montgomery's approach to the launching of an offensive was markedly different from that of Field Marshal Douglas Haig in World War I, and certainly far more commendable. And yet those were strange words to say to the commander of an elite force undertaking an absolutely critical task. One might have thought something like "John, whatever else, get the job done" would have been more appropriate.

In part, Montgomery's caution was simple realism. Britain

had reached her manpower limits. The British army could not afford heavy losses; there was no way to make them up. But it was precisely this point that infuriated Americans. In their view, the way to minimize casualties was to take risks to win the war as soon as possible, not to exercise caution in an offensive action.

Something else irritated the Americans—the supercilious contempt for all things American that some British officers could not help displaying, and the assumed superiority of British techniques, methods, tactics, and leadership that almost all British officers shared and many of them displayed. Put directly, most British officers regarded the Americans as neophytes in war who were blessed with great equipment in massive quantities and superbly conditioned but inexperienced enlisted men. Such officers felt it was their duty, their destiny, to train and teach the Yanks. Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander wrote to Brooke from Tunisia about the Americans: "They simply do not know their job as soldiers and this is the case from the highest to the lowest, from the general to the private soldier. Perhaps the weakest link of all is the junior leader, who just does not lead, with the result that their men don't really fight."
¹⁴

Another major problem the Allies faced at the end of 1943 was precisely the fact that they were allies. "Give me allies to fight against," said Napoleon, pointing to an obvious truth. The Yanks got on British nerves; the Limeys got on American nerves. This was exacerbated by proximity; as the American army in Britain began to grow in anticipation of the invasion, the friction increased. According to the British, the trouble with the Yanks was that they were "overpaid, oversexed, and over here." The GIs responded that the trouble with the Limeys was they were underpaid (which was true) and under sex ed, which tended to be true as British girls naturally gravitated to the GIs, who had money to throw around and were billeted in villages rather than segregated in isolated barracks.

In Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy the Tommies and the GIs had fought side by side, but there had been too much friction, too little functioning as a team. If they were going to penetrate the Atlantic Wall, they were going to have to learn to work together. One indication that they could do so was the designation of the force. Back in 1917, when members of the American Expeditionary Force were asked what AEF stood for, the Yanks replied, "After England Failed." But in 1943 AEF stood for Allied Expeditionary Force.

As against the untested, cocky, "damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead" American army and the war-weary, too cautious British army, the Germans could put into the battle troops who (as described by Max Hastings) "possessed an historic reputation as formidable soldiers. Under Hitler their army attained its zenith." Hastings asserts: "Throughout the Second World War, wherever British or American troops met the Germans in anything like equal strength, the Germans prevailed."
¹⁵