Authors: Jeff Shaara
The Steel Wave (72 page)
SIR FREDERICK MORGAN
The officer responsible for the plan that becomes Operation Overlord is for the most part a forgotten footnote to the history of that event. Morgan’s extraordinary efforts produce the blueprint for the Normandy invasion, and though it is changed considerably by the addition of more troops and a wider invasion landscape, it is Morgan’s concept to drive the assault into Normandy, rather than the more obvious point of attack at Calais. Perhaps Morgan’s greatest accomplishment is assembling a team of British and American planners who manage to maintain a cohesive and productive working relationship, something Eisenhower struggles with throughout his entire command.
Morgan serves under Eisenhower at SHAEF for the remainder of the war and goes to Germany at the war’s end to assist in coordinating the fledgling United Nations’ support efforts for the devastated German economy. He retires from the British army in 1951 and is appointed controller of the British Atomic Energy agency. For three years in the mid-1950s, he is Britain’s senior controller of atomic weapons.
He writes his memoirs and dies in 1967, at age seventy-three.
THE AMERICANS
JESSE ADAMS
In late August 1944, while the Eighty-second Airborne’s newest first sergeant awaits his unit’s next assignment, Adams is seriously injured during a training jump. He breaks an ankle and both arms when his parachute tangles with another trooper, who does not survive the fall. Thus, Adams misses the Eighty-second Airborne’s involvement in Operation Market-Garden in Holland in September 1944. He never fully recovers from the injury, and is again offered an opportunity to return to Fort Benning, Georgia. Knowing his combat days are likely past, Adams considers the transfer, though, despite James Gavin’s support, Adams’s proposed commission as second lieutenant is never approved. Adams swallows the slight and returns to Fort Benning in January 1945, but his enthusiasm for training new recruits cannot match the passion he feels for the fight that he is missing in Europe. While on a brief leave in Columbus, Georgia, his injuries are aggravated by a serious jeep accident, and he will never jump again. In June 1945, Adams is discharged from the army and begins the journey home by train to New Mexico. The end of the war affects Adams as it does a great many who served in the most grueling fights, and he has no enthusiasm for the life he expects to find in peacetime. However, on the journey home, he meets Nancy Forbes, a former army nurse, who is returning to her home in Los Angeles. Over the course of the three-day journey, Adams finds a new direction for his passion. They marry in September 1945, after a two-month engagement, and he fathers four boys, two of whom will enlist to fight in the Vietnam War, both serving in the Eighty-second Airborne Division.
The family settles in Santa Barbara, California, and Adams pursues a career in real estate, surprising himself with his talent for deal-making in the fledging boom market of 1950s California. He is enormously successful and enjoys traveling with his family, including his mother, whom he brings into their home upon the death of his father. Though they sail the Pacific and vacation in Hawaii and Asia, he will not return to Europe.
He frequently attends the airborne’s reunions and in 1954 is reunited for the first time with the one man who eventually becomes his closest friend, Wallace Unger. Because the men will rarely talk with others about their shared experiences, their time together is most often a closed-door affair, both men accepting that few can understand their need to release the memories. They also share a common bond, provided by the army and the efforts of Jim Gavin. Both men are awarded the Bronze Star, Adams for his gallantry in Sicily, Unger for his actions in the Cotentin Peninsula.
Adams retires in 1990, a wealthy landowner, and lives with his wife in Montecito, California.
Hell, I’m not a hero. I just liked to jump out of airplanes. It didn’t much matter that along the way I had to kill Germans. They shot at me, and missed. I shot back. And didn’t.
JESSE ADAMS
TOM THORNE
The young soldier who survives the 116th Regiment’s disastrous landing at Omaha Beach returns to the states in August 1944, after a lengthy stay at a hospital in England. The loss of his legs confines him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Thorne will not accept repeated efforts from his family or various veterans’ groups to furnish him with artificial legs. He is awarded a Bronze Star for his actions on Omaha Beach, will not display it, and never attends reunions of the 116th Regiment, the men who embellish their nickname as the Stonewall Brigade. Despite many invitations from local civic groups in and around his hometown of Fredericksburg, Virginia, Thorne will not speak publicly of his experiences during the war. Thorne’s marriage fails after ten difficult years. His daughter, Ella, remains as close to her father as he will allow, and he never parts with the photograph of her as an infant, which he somehow managed to retrieve from his helmet liner on the day of his wounding. But he never accepts his fate and dies in 1958 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age thirty-six.
EDWIN SCOFIELD
Major Scofield jumps into combat yet again during Operation Market-Garden in Holland in September 1944 and, as in Sicily and Normandy, he leads his company with considerable gallantry. But like so many of the paratroopers who witnessed the birth of the Eighty-second Airborne, Scofield cannot survive so many tests of his own luck. On September 20, 1944, he is seriously wounded at Nijmegen, Holland. He spends four months in a British hospital and then returns to the States. An unwilling participant in the army’s downsizing after the war, Scofield suffers lingering effects of his wounds and retires in 1947. He returns to college, graduates with an accounting degree from Penn State University, and lives a peaceful life as a bank examiner until his retirement in 1977. He regularly attends reunions of the Eighty-second Airborne, writes several articles about his experiences, and is always quick to mention his respect for the men in his command, notably his favorite noncom, Jesse Adams. He dies in Austin, Texas, in 2005, at age eighty.
JAMES GAVIN
“Slim Jim” succeeds Matthew Ridgway as commander of the Eighty-second Airborne Division in August 1944, and thus, at only thirty-seven years old and still a brigadier general, he becomes the youngest division commander in the American army since the Civil War. He receives his second star in October 1944, which also makes him the youngest major general in the army. Gavin not only earns the respect of his men but is singled out repeatedly for his actions on the battlefield and is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, and the Silver Star, as well as a Purple Heart for having been wounded in combat. He is also awarded the British Distinguished Service Order, only rarely awarded to soldiers who serve outside the armed forces of the British Commonwealth.
Gavin remains in command of the Eighty-second Airborne until 1948, and throughout the 1950s becomes an outspoken advocate for a strong military, at a time when prevailing sentiment calls for downsizing. Frustrated that his is merely a voice in the wind, he nonetheless energizes various projects and the development of technology that advances a more mobile American army, including the utilization of helicopters, a practice that becomes the norm during the Vietnam War. But Gavin is not a man who flows with the tide, and despite earning his third star in 1958, he retires, believing the army has deteriorated because of infuriating interference from self-serving politicians, armchair strategists, and policy makers, all of whom Gavin despises.
He enters the world of private industry, serves eventually as chairman of Arthur D. Little & Company, a research and consulting firm, which he heads with great success until 1977. In 1961, he takes a brief leave of absence from the company, at the request of President Kennedy, and serves his country once more as ambassador to France, a post that thrusts him back into the world of political wrangling that he can tolerate for little more than a year.
Gavin writes several books that deal both with his personal experiences in the war and with his very opinionated take on the war in Vietnam, as well as various political and foreign-policy issues. Regardless of the controversy and the enemies that he creates by his outspokenness, he is beloved by the paratroopers who served under him.
He dies in 1990, at age eighty-two, and is buried at West Point.
WALLACE UNGER
Corporal Unger serves until the end of the war and makes his final combat jump into Holland during Operation Market-Garden. He is discharged in May 1945, and returns to his family home in Iowa. Like Jesse Adams, Unger finds civilian life unsettling, until he meets a woman who will unsettle him even more. He marries Rachel Todd in December 1946, and the couple has two children. Unger remains on his family farm and retires in 1996 at age seventy. Despite persistent efforts by his former sergeant to relocate Unger and his wife to a milder climate in California, Unger occupies his time by guiding pheasant hunters on his property and is, to this day, a crack shot.
A
nd, from these pages: George Patton, Omar Bradley, Dwight David Eisenhower, Gerd von Rundstedt, Winston Churchill, Bernard Montgomery, Adolf Hitler, and many more:
After the enormous struggles of 1944, these men must still confront the war, which will continue for nearly a year after the Normandy invasion. It is a different story, of heroes and horror and the bloody collapse of a madman’s twisted dream. Another story for another time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JEFF SHAARA is the author of seven bestselling novels, critically acclaimed historical epics that cover the American Revolution, Mexican War, Civil War, and World Wars One and Two. He has also penned a nonfiction guide to America’s Civil War battlefields. Shaara was born into a family of Italian immigrants in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, where he graduated from Florida State University. After many years in Montana and New York City, he now lives in Sarasota, Florida.
Contact the author at
www.jeffshaara.com
.
ALSO BY JEFF SHAARA
Gods and Generals
The Last Full Measure
Gone for Soldiers
Rise to Rebellion
The Glorious Cause
To the Last Man
Jeff Shaara’s Civil War Battlefields
The Rising Tide
The Steel Wave
is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Jeffrey M. Shaara
Maps © 2008 Mapping Specialists, Ltd.,
Madison, WI, U.S.A.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Shaara, Jeff
The steel wave: a novel of World War II/Jeff Shaara.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-50726-6
1. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—France—Normandy—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.H18S74 2008 813'.54—dc22 2008004813
v1.0
