D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (77 page)

Still, the potential was there. Fortunately for the Allies, Hitler had picked the wrong target. Haphazard bombing of London could cause sleepless nights and induce terror, but it could not have a direct military effect. Had Hitler sent the V-ls against the beaches and artifical harbors of Normandy, by June 12 jammed with men, machines, and ships, the vengeance weapons (Goebbels picked the name, which was on the mark—they could sate Hitler's lust for revenge but they could not effect the war so long as they were directed against London) might have made a difference.

On D-Day, Hitler misused his sole potential strategic weapon, just as he misused his tactical counterattack force. His interference with his commanders on the scene stands in sharp contrast to Churchill and Roosevelt, who made no attempt at all to tell their generals and admirals what to do on D-Day, and to Eisenhower, who also left the decision-making up to his subordinates.

Eisenhower was up at 0700 on June 6. His naval aide, Harry Butcher, came by his trailer to report that the airborne landings had gone in and the seaborne landings were beginning. Butcher found Eisenhower sitting up in bed, smoking a cigarette, reading a Western novel. When Butcher arrived, Eisenhower washed, shaved, and strolled over to the tent holding the SHAEF operations section. He listened to an argument about when to release a communique saying that the Allies had a beachhead (Montgomery insisted on waiting until he was absolutely sure the Allies were going to stay ashore) but did not interfere.

Eisenhower wrote a brief message to Marshall, informing the chief of staff that everything seemed to be going well and adding that the British and American troops he had seen the previous day were enthusiastic, tough, and fit. "The light of battle was in their eyes."
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Eisenhower soon grew impatient with the incessant chatter in the tent and walked over to visit Montgomery. He found the British general wearing a sweater and a grin. Montgomery was too busy to spend much time with the supreme commander, as he was preparing to cross the Channel the next day to set up his advance HQ, but the two leaders did have a brief talk.

Then Eisenhower paid a visit to Southwick House to see Admiral Ramsay. "All was well with the Navy," Butcher recorded in his diary, "and its smiles were as wide as or wider than any."
¹⁷

At noon Eisenhower returned to the tent, where he anxiously watched the maps and listened to the disturbing news coming from Omaha. He called some selected members of the press into his canvas-roofed, pine-walled quarters and answered questions. At one point he got up from his small table and began pacing. He looked out the door, flashed his famous grin, and announced, "The sun is shining."
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For the remainder of the day he paced, his mood alternating as he received news of the situation on the British and Canadian beaches and on Omaha and Utah. After eating, he retired early to get a good night's sleep.

The supreme commander did not give a single command on D-Day. Hitler gave two bad ones.

As dusk descended on Omaha Beach, intermittent shellfire continued to come down. Men dug in for the night wherever they could, some in the sand, some at the seawall, some on the bluff slopes, some behind hedgerows on the plateau. There were alarms

caused by overeager troops, occasional outbursts of firing. There were no rear areas on D-Day.

Still, things had quieted down considerably. Lt. Henry Seitz-ler was a forward observer for the U.S. Ninth Air Force. He was taking "a lot of heckling and ribbing from the guys" because of the failure of the air forces to bomb and strafe the beaches as promised. "Of course, I had nothing to do with it; they just wanted to needle somebody.

"My biggest problem was to try to stay alive. My work didn't really start till D plus three, and here I'd gone in at H plus two hours on D-Day and I had been in the thickest and hottest part of it, and I had no real work to do, no assignment, except as far as I could see to stay alive, because I had no replacement."

Late in the afternoon, Seitzler and some members of a beach brigade decided they were hungry. "So we went out and climbed on a burned-out LCI. We broke into the pantry. Boy, that was really something. It hadn't been damaged. We brought a lot of stuff out and ate it on the beach under the seawall. The Navy really lived fine. We had a boned chicken, boned turkey, boned ham. We had everything you could think of, and we made pigs out of ourselves because we were half starved by that time."

When they finished, they decided they needed to top off their picnic on the beach with some coffee. They built a small fire behind the shingle seawall, using wood they had scavenged from one of the blasted-out vacation homes, and made Nescafe.

For Seitzler, that turned out to be a mistake. When it was full dark, the rule was that every man should stay in his foxhole. Anything that moved would be shot. But the Nescafe had a diuretic effect on Seitzler.

"So it was quite a problem, I'll tell you. If I made any noise or anything, I could very well get shot. All I could do was get up, ease up on the edge of my foxhole, roll over a couple of times, use an old tin can to do my business, throw it away, and roll back, very slowly and quietly. I called it 'suffering for sanitation.' I have never been able to drink Nescafe since."
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The next morning, Pvt. Robert Healey of the 149th Combat Engineers and a friend decided to go down the bluff to retrieve their packs. Healey had run out of cigarettes, but he had a carton in a waterproof bag in his pack.

"When we walked down to the beach, it was just an unbe-

lievable sight. There was debris everywhere, and all kinds of equipment washing back and forth in the tide. Anything you could think of seemed to be there. We came across a tennis raquet, a guitar, assault jackets, packs, gas masks, everything. We found half a jar of olives which we ate with great relish. We found my pack but unfortunately the cigarettes were no longer there.

"On the way back I came across what was probably the most poignant memory I have of this whole episode. Lying on the beach was a young soldier, his arms outstretched. Near one of his hands, as if he had been reading it, was a pocketbook (what today would be called a paperback).

"It was
Our Hearts Were Young and Gay
by Cornelia Otis Skinner. This expressed the spirit of our ordeal. Our hearts were young and gay because we thought we were immortal, we believed we were doing a great thing, and we really believed in the crusade which we hoped would liberate the world from the heel of Nazism."
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26

THE WORLD HOLDS ITS BREATH

D-Day on the Home Fronts

At 0700 Mountain War Time (1300 French time), three teenage cowboys from western Montana strode into the Mecca Cafe in Helena, the state capital. The previous afternoon, the cowboys had joined the Navy at the Helena recruiting station. They were full of bluff and bluster and themselves.

"Food! Service! Attention!" they shouted at the waitress. She and the customers realized that the boys would be shipping out in a few hours, almost certainly their first trip out of Montana. The boisterous bad behavior of the "sailors" was forgiven. The waitress gave them "super de luxe" treatment, while around the tables the customers resumed their conversations over the coffee cups.

Someone switched on the radio. "Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force has just announced that the invasion has begun. Repeat, D-Day has come."

A reporter for the
Helena Independent-Record
was in the cafe. He wrote, "The news was first met with unbelief, and then rapt silence. Food was forgotten. Not a single voice was raised in request for service; no one wanted anything. They only sat and listened, and wondered."
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Not until the invention of the telegraph did people on the varied home fronts of wars know that a great battle was under way even as it was being fought. For Americans in 1861-65, the first

news came from the bulletins in the newspapers, bulletins that said little more than that a great battle was being fought in Pennsylvania or Mississippi. Over the next few days the papers would report on the battle. Then would come the seemingly never-ending lists of the dead. Gettysburg and Vicksburg were fought simultaneously, which meant that in the first days of July 1863 virtually every American knew someone who was in one of the battles. Son, husband, father, mother, brother, sister, grandson, girlfriend, uncle, friend—they all had to hold their breath. Wait, pray, worry, pray some more, and wait some more.

In World War I, Americans again had such agonizing experiences. By World War II, wire transmission had improved; Americans whose loved ones were in the Pacific or North Africa or Italy heard radio reports of battles as they happened, and within a week or so could see carefully censored moving-picture film from the battle
(never
showing dead or badly wounded Americans). What they could not know was how their loved one had fared. For that they could only wait and pray that the man from Western Union did not knock at their door.

On D-Day, a vast majority of the American people was involved. Most of them had made a direct contribution, as farmers providing the food, as workers in defense plants making planes or tanks or shells or rifles or boots or any of the myriad items the troops needed to win the war, or as volunteers doing the work at hundreds of agencies. The bandages they had rolled, the rifles they had made, were being put to use even as they heard the news. They prayed that they had done it right.

Andrew Jackson Higgins caught the spirit well. He was in Chicago on D-Day; he sent a message to his employees in New Orleans: "This is the day for which we have been waiting. Now, the work of our hands, our hearts and our heads is being put to the test. The war bonds you have bought, the blood you donated are also in there fighting. We may all be inspired by the news that the first landings on the continent were made by the Allies in our boats."
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The workers at Higgins Industries and the workers in defense plants around the nation had sacrificed their daily routines to make the invasion possible. They had jobs, which was a blessing to a generation that had just gone through the Depression, and they were well paid (although nobody got rich on an hourly wage). But they sacrificed to do it.

Polly Crow worked the night shift at the Jefferson Boat Company outside Louisville, Kentucky. She helped make LSTs.

She wrote her husband, who was in the Army, about their savings—something young couples in the Depression could only dream about: "We now have $780 in the bank and 5 bonds which sho looks good to me and as soon as I get the buggie in good shape I can really pile it in."

To make that money, Mrs. Crow worked a ten-hour night shift. She cared for her two-year-old son during the day; her mother looked after the child at night. She did volunteer work at the Red Cross. She shared her apartment with another woman and her mother.
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There were tens of thousands of young women like Mrs. Crow. Quickie marriages had become the norm, a million more during the war than would have been expected at prewar rates. Teenagers got married because the boy was going off to war, and in many cases, in the moral atmosphere of the day, if they wanted to have a sexual experience before he left they had to stand in front of a preacher first.

When the boy husbands left for war to become men, the girl wives became women. They traveled alone—or with their infants—to distant places on hot and stuffy or cold and overcrowded trains, became proficient cooks and housekeepers, managed the finances, learned to fix the car, worked in a defense plant, and wrote letters to their soldier husbands that were consistently upbeat.

"I write his dad everything our baby does," one young mother explained, "only in the letters I make it sound cute."
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Women in uniform were a new phenomenon for the Americans of the 1940s. They were in every branch of service, but more strictly segregated by their sex than blacks were by their race. The names of those segregated organizations were condescending: Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), Women's Auxiliary Ferry Squadron (WAFS), and WAVES, an acronym for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services (in late 1944 the Navy dropped the acronym and the women were called Women Reserves).

The women in uniform did everything the men did, except engage in combat. They were clerks, mechanics, administrators, radio operators, photo interpreters, cooks, meteorologists, supply sergeants, test pilots, transport pilots, and much more. Eisenhower felt he could not have won the war without them.
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They did not have an easy time. Cruel and vicious jokes were told about them—although not by the wounded about the nurses.

These pioneering women persevered and triumphed. The contribution of the women of America, whether on the farm or in the factory or in uniform, to D-Day was a
sine qua non
of the invasion effort.*

D-Day for the young women who had husbands they hardly knew stationed in the ETO was an especially trying experience, but then few Americans were without personal worries. Nearly every American knew someone in the Army, Army Air Force, Navy, or Coast Guard stationed in the European theater. Only a handful knew if the soldier or sailor or airman was in action on D-Day or if he was going in later, but they all knew that before the war was won their loved one would be in a combat zone.

Now it had started. The buildup phase was over. The United States was committed to throwing into the battle all the vast forces she had brought into existence over the past three years. That meant their boy, brother, husband, boyfriend, employee, fellow student, cousin, nephew was either already in combat or soon would be.