D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (81 page)

Stein went walking on the morning of June 6 to celebrate. She passed "some German soldiers they said most pitifully how do you do, I naturally said nothing, later on I was sitting with the wife of the mayor in front of her house a German soldier passed along the road and he politely bowed to us and said how do you do, they have never done this before.

"Well to-day is the landing and we heard Eisenhower tell us he was here they were here and just yesterday a man sold us ten packages of Camel cigarettes, glory be, and we are singing glory hallelujah, and feeling very nicely, and everybody has been telephoning to us congratulatory messages upon my birthday which it isn't but we know what they mean. And I said in return I hoped their hair was curling nicely, and we all hope it is, and to-day is the day."
⁴⁵
*

In Rome, a celebration was already under way when the news came. The celebration just got bigger. Daniel Lang in his "Letter from Rome" reported to the
New Yorker
that the Italians were ecstatic. "They love a winner just a little more than the rest of the world does," and they were "out by the thousands, jamming the square on which Mussolini used to stage his pep rallies. They

* Stein published her memoir of the war in the fall of 1945. She was liberated in the fall of 1944 by two soldiers from the 45th Infantry Division. "Were we excited," she wrote. "How we talked that night, they just brought all America to us every bit of it, they came from Colorado, lovely Colorado, I do not know Colorado but that is the way I felt about it lovely Colorado. . . . They have asked me to go with them to Voiron to broadcast with them to America and I am going and the war is over and this certainly this is the last war to remember."

cheered and applauded as though they were watching the best opera of their lives. They shouted whatever scraps of English they knew. One wild old man yelled 'Weekend! Weekend!' over and over again. Many had huge bouquets of flowers, from which they kept plucking small bunches to toss at soldiers in jeeps and lorries, or at tank drivers. Dozens of people were waving British, French and American flags. Where they had been hidden, only the Italians knew."
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In Amsterdam, Anne Frank heard the news over the wireless in her attic hideaway. " 'This is D-Day,' came the announcement over the English news," she wrote in her diary. Then, in English, she wrote, "This is
the
day." She went on, "The invasion has begun! The English gave the news. . . . We discussed it over breakfast at nine o'clock: Is this just a trial landing like Dieppe two years ago?" But through the day, confirmations that this was really it kept coming on the wireless.

"Great commotion in the 'Secret Annexe'!" Frank wrote. "It still seems too wonderful too much like a fairy tale. Could we be granted victory this year, 1944? We don't know yet, but hope is revived within us; it gives us fresh courage and makes us strong again. . . . Now more than ever we must clench our teeth and not cry out. France, Russia, Italy, and Germany, too, can all cry out and give vent to their misery, but we haven't the right to do that yet!

"The best part of the invasion is that I have the feeling that friends are approaching. We have been oppressed by those terrible Germans for so long, they have had their knives so at our throats, that the thought of friends and delivery fills us with confidence!

"Now it doesn't concern the Jews any more; no, it concerns Holland and all occupied Europe. Perhaps, Margot says, I may yet be able to go back to school in September or October."
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In Moscow, the crowds were joyous. People literally danced in the streets,
Time
reported, and its correspondent claimed that "This was the happiest capital." In the lobby of the Metropole Hotel, an ecstatic Muscovite threw her arms around the correspondent and exclaimed, "We love you, Americans. We love you, we love you. You are our real friends."
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Restaurants were packed in Moscow on the evening of June 6, packed with people celebrating—Russians dancing with British and American diplomats and reporters. Alexander Werth was at one such gathering when "a party of Jap diplomats and journalists

came in and behaved and danced provocatively and ostentatiously and were nearly beaten-up by some Americans."

Pravda
gave the invasion news four columns with a large photograph of Eisenhower, but no comment was made on the significance—the editors had to wait for Stalin to give his line. Not for a week did the dictator speak about the realization of that second front for which he had for so long been pleading. When he did, he was generous and forthright: "This is unquestionably a brilliant success for our Allies. One must admit that the history of wars does not know of an undertaking comparable to it for breadth of conception, grandeur of scale, and mastery of execution." He pointed out that "Invincible Napoleon" had not managed to cross the Channel, nor "Hitler the Hysteric."

"Only the British and Americans troops succeeded in forcing the Channel. History will record this action as an achievement of the highest order." After that statement,
Pravda
was enthusiastic for the achievement.
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In Berlin, people went quietly about their duties. Few talked of the invasion, although the radio was full of announcements. The Nazi propaganda line was "Thank God, the intense strain of the nerve war is over." But the
Times
correspondent in Stockholm reported that "the scale of General Eisenhower's first blow made a deep impression on the general public in Berlin, especially as the German spokesmen emphasize its magnitude and disconcertingly add that it is not yet certain whether this is the main invasion force."

Mainly, though, the Nazi broadcasters went to work to convince people that it was necessary for them to fight against the British and Americans in France in order to save Germany from the horror of a Red Army occupation. In a totalitarian state it was impossible to tell how many, if any other than Hitler and his henchmen, believed such logic.
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27

"FAIRLY STUFFED WITH GADGETS"

The British Opening Moves

Lt. George Honour, Royal Navy Reserves, was the skipper of X2 3, a midget submarine seven meters in length with a crew of four. Along with the skipper of X20, Honour had a unique view of the invasion. At first light, he was anchored a couple of kilometers off Ouistreham (Sword Beach); X20 was off Juno. The submarines were between the invaders and defenders in no-man's water.

X2 3 and X20 were there because of the requirements of the DD tanks. There were only narrow strips where the swimming tanks that would lead the invasion could climb up the beaches; the submarines would serve as their guides so that they could land bang on target.

The British tanks, Churchills and Shermans, were equipped for a variety of tasks. There were flail tanks with drums out front that carried chains that lashed the ground as the drums turned (powered by their own small engines) and set off mines safely in front of the tank. There were tanks carrying fascines for getting over antitank ditches and drainage ditches, others that carried heavy bridging equipment for crossing larger gaps. To accommodate some of the special equipment, the 75mm cannon on the tanks had been replaced by little snub-nosed heavy mortars. Those mortars could hurl twenty-five-pound high-explosive charges over a short distance, less than fifty meters, to blast holes in cement walls and

blockhouses. Other tanks dragged 400-gallon trailers of fuel, which could shoot a high-pressure jet of flame over a range of 100 meters.

Captain Hammerton of the 79th Armored Division had been introduced to "Hobart's Funnies" by their inventor, Maj. Gen. Percy Hobart, at the Oxford training area in East Anglia. "General Hobart gathered everybody around and said, 'I have some news for you. You have heard of the Lord Mares Show,' and everybody's heart stopped beating, 'and you know about the people who come afterwards to clear up the mess. Well, your job is going to be the very opposite. You're going in front to clear up the mess. You are going to be line clearers, flails.' "

Hammerton went on, "They were experimenting with flails, snakes, scorpions, and all the other strange menagerie of things. They had bull's-horn plows which fitted to the front of the Churchills and carved an enormous plow furrow and the idea was they would turn any mines over the side. The snake was a flexible and the serpent a rigid tube. The snake was fired from a harpoon gun, then pumped full of nitroglycerin; the serpent was pushed in front of a tank, stuffed with high explosive. The idea was when detonated they would set off the mines."
¹

The snub-nosed tanks had a multiplicity of extra lugs welded on the body, with heavy tow ropes fixed on beside them; the purpose was to drag obstacles out of the way or to move disabled vehicles. The tanks, called Mk. VIII AVREs, provided a loading platform for extra gear.

Maj. Kenneth Ferguson of the British 3rd Division commanded an assault squadron of Hobart's Funnies at Sword Beach. He recalled loading onto an LCT. His unit contained two flail tanks, a tank carrying a thirty-foot metal bridge folded in half and sticking straight up in the air in front of the tank, and a tank carrying log carpets—two drums (nearly as large as the tank itself) attached to the front, one over the other, that could lay down matting over the sand. The flails would go first, then the bridge to provide a way to get over the seawall, then the carpet layer making a road surface for the fighting tanks. DD tanks would precede them in, set up at the water line, and blast fortified positions.

As Ferguson finished overseeing the loading of his Funnies, one of the seamen called out, "Oh, sir, I say, you've forgotten the piano!"

Ferguson wanted personal mobility once he got ashore, so he loaded a motorcycle and a bicycle on top of his A VRE. Thousands of British troops took bicycles with them; there is no record

of any American doing so (although one 101st commander tried, but his men threw it out over the Channel).

Capt. Cyril James Hendry commanded a troop of Funnies. During the crossing, the skipper of the LCT said to him, "Your bridge is acting as a sail, can you lower it a bit?" Hendry unfolded the bridge so that the far end rested on the tank in front, which helped.
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The British counted heavily on these specialized tanks to help them get ashore and break through the first line of defenses. They were a bit put off by the American refusal to use their inventions (except for the DD tank concept, which the British insisted the Americans butchered by launching from too far out). Some British officers wondered if there was a touch of hurt pride involved. In their view it would be rather a nice thing if the Yanks would utilize British brains to guide American brawn, but the Americans had insisted they would do the job with their own equipment.

At Utah, the Americans had been right. Although they could have used flail tanks, overall the armored units performed well at Utah. Not so cumbersome or slow as the overloaded British specialized tanks, they sped inland and participated in important actions, in the process achieving most D-Day objectives at Utah.

At Omaha, British specialized tanks would have had no function to serve in overcoming the first problem, getting through the shingle. Of all the beaches, only Omaha had a shingle so high and so slippery, impossible for a tank to cross. Once some gaps were blown, the American tankers could have put some of the British gadgets to good use, especially the fascines and bridging equipment. But the Yanks had bulldozers for that work, which was completed in time for a few tanks to make it to the plateau before dark.

It would be too large a generalization to say that the British wanted to fight World War II with gadgets, techniques, and espionage, rather than men, to outthink more than outfight the Germans; and that the Americans wanted to fight it out in a head-to-head encounter with the Wehrmacht. Still, many people, from both countries, felt such generalizations had merit. Connected to that feeling was the British sense that the Americans took needless casualties because of their aggressive head-on mentality, and the American sense that the British were going to take needless casualties because their caution and refusal to press an attack home regardless of loss was going to prolong the war.

Whatever measure of truth there was in those widely held

perceptions, certain it is that on D-Day the British used far more gadgets than the Americans, beginning with X23 and X20.

"We were fairly stuffed with gadgets," Lieutenant Honour recalled of X23. The submarine had a diesel engine and an electric motor, two bunks, a toilet (the escape hatch), a cooker, electronic equipment to send out signals, oxygen bottles (taken from Luftwaffe planes shot down over England, as they were the lightest bottles available in Britain), and more.

"So we had all these wretched gadgets," Honour said, "and the worst was the wretched mast." It was eighteen feet in length and had to be lashed to special stanchions on the shell of the submarine. "It folded miserably," Honour complained.

Code name for this operation was Gambit. Honour was not a chess player; he looked the word up in the dictionary and was a bit set back to read "throwing away the opening pawns."

Gambit required a special kind of man. Everyone on the submarine had to be able to do every job: handle all machinery and electronic gear, navigate, dive, and much more. They also had to be able to handle, without loss of effectiveness, being cooped in an enclosed boat hardly bigger than a canoe for forty hours and more. Some volunteers found in their trials that they couldn't take one hour of it. "Let me out!" one man cried after forty-five minutes.