“We have to see this war through,” he told her. “Then we have to prevent the next one.”
“I keep wondering, Lanny—will any war ever prevent the next one? I hate the whole thing, and in the depths of my heart I’m just as sorry for the German boys as for the American.”
“You’ll have to keep that out of your articles,” he said, smiling, “or your editors will drop you.”
IX
Lanny phoned Rick, who came over to the hotel. Nina came into town—impossible to stay quiet on such a day. Now there were two military experts, and two respectful wives to absorb their wisdom. Lanny hadn’t seen Nina for several years; she was thinner and her hair was beginning to show gray; she brooded over her boys, but did not let it interfere with her household duties or her support of her husband’s cause. Lanny was pleased to tell her good news about her youngest son, her baby; he was in a safe place, for the Germans rarely got a chance to bomb Egypt. Nina exclaimed, “I wish the airplane had never been invented!” Lanny thought, but did not say, “Wait until you see the flying bomb!”
The two men listening to the news agreed that its most surprising aspect was the almost complete absence of the Luftwaffe from the scene. Göring had said that it must stop the invasion even if it perished; but up to noon of that crucial day no more than fifty of its planes had showed up. The conclusion was irresistible—Der Dicke simply didn’t have the planes to defy the eleven thousand which the Allies had at work. What Göring had he was saving for the counterattack by which the Reichswehr was promising to drive the invaders back into the sea. Another Dunkerque, which Radio Transocean was incessantly predicting, and which Winston Churchill had been dreading for four long years.
This much was certain by the end of that day: the landing had been achieved. The invaders had taken beach after beach, including the fashionable plages of Trouville and Deauville, which both Lanny and Rick had visited in happier days. The invaders had climbed the bluffs and were spreading out, joining their paratroopers and glider men, over a front of some sixty miles. The people who were praying in all the churches wouldn’t have dared ask for more, and might easily have got far less. The radio reported that in Brooklyn the bearded old men of a Jewish home for the aged had put on their prayer shawls and skullcaps and marched through the streets, blowing the shofar, the ram’s horn.
Another question—what were the Partisans doing, the French? That was news for which the public would have to wait for some time. General Ike had said over the radio, “The hour of your liberation is approaching.” He had told the Partisans to perform those duties which had been assigned to them, and he had told the rest of the population to keep out of the way and do nothing to provoke enemy reprisals. Both Lanny and Rick knew that an elaborate underground organization had been built up; planes had been flown in at night, supplies had been dropped, and a secret army had been equipped. Now, all over France, that army would go into action, blowing up bridges, wrecking rail lines, chopping down trees to block highways, raiding enemy munitions dumps and oil storage depots. These Free French knew the country they lived in, and nothing could be hidden from them; what they couldn’t destroy they would let the Allies know about, and the Air Force would come and do the job.
The result of this uprising would show gradually and in negative ways—there just wouldn’t be any German counterattack. Plenty of resistance, desperate, hard fighting, step by step backward, but no mass advance, no driving the Allies into the sea. The Germans couldn’t get the forces up. They couldn’t run trains and they couldn’t travel the highways except at night because of the incessant bombing. They would learn the bitter lesson, which they had been teaching the rest of the world, that it is impossible to win a modern war without command of the air; also, that it is impossible to win when the Commander-in-Chief is six hundred miles away from the battlefield, and when he does not trust his commanders, and will not let them move troops without permission.
Oskar had told Lanny about this preposterous situation, and Göring had told him about the helplessness of the Luftwaffe; so Lanny could speak as one having authority, even though he did not name the authority. Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson, an authority on air forces, reminded him of the occasion, in the spring of 1914, when Robbie Budd had taken the two boys to visit Salisbury Plain, where the English Army had been making its first feeble efforts at military flying with a few old biplane “crates” held together with piano wire. The pilots were hoping to shoot at the enemy with automatic pistols, and one bold man had the idea that he might carry a machine gun, lift it with his two hands, and fire it before the plane started into a dive. There had been no augur or diviner to tell the boy Rick that within a couple of years he would crash while flying one of those planes, a crash that would cripple him for the rest of his days.
X
All over the world people sat glued to their radios; uncounted millions in their homes or in public places, hotel lobbies, cafés, cigar stores, wherever they could find a radio set. It was a new way of life, a new kind of adult education that had been developing for the past quarter century and met this great occasion well prepared. The men in the studios read the news bulletins, they commented and explained, they introduced experts, they shifted back and forth between New York and London and the actual war scenes. With the help of those in power who had learned to love publicity, they would set up their apparatus on a battleship and let the public at home hear the great guns going off; then it would be a tank rumbling out of an LST, or an airman just returned from a flight over the battlefield.
By the end of the second day it was clear that the invasion had succeeded; the troops were ashore along a sixty-mile front; they were from five to ten miles inland and were holding while reinforcements and supplies continued to pour in behind them. The bombardment went on, for the big guns of the ships had a range of twenty miles or more and were hurling their shells into enemy entrenchments far inland. The weather was making trouble, but not too much, and the airmen maintained cover over the whole scene, keeping the enemy miserable and blocking the roads behind him.
The four friends stayed together, listening and discussing, arguing and exulting; for each it was a personal triumph, something for which they had waited long years. Eleven years and a half, to be exact, for Lanny and Rick had agreed from the day Hitler took power that sooner or later the democratic world would have to put him down. In the early years it would have been easy, but now it necessitated this colossal battle, which was just beginning and might go on for a year, two years—who could guess? Surely not anyone who was talking over the radio.
Laurel’s first article was to deal with the English people in these exciting days: what they thought, how they felt and behaved. Nina and Rick were English people, among the most intelligent, and their minds were laid bare in this crisis. The four would go out and get a meal, and then come back to their vigil. They would telephone to friends, and these were more English people. The chambermaids in the hotel, the bellhops, the porter, the clerk at the desk—all had something to say, something lively and odd to American ears. The people on the streets were bursting with delight, hardly able to keep their feet from skipping, their lips from breaking into song. “Ow, that ole ’Itler! ’E’s gettin’ ’is!” The old women who sold flowers—the young ones were all in the factories these days—would pat the soldiers on the back, Americans as well as British, and cry, “God bless yer, laddie!” Laurel would come in and scribble in her notebook. ’Ere the fleeting hour go by, Quick, thy tablets, memory!
XI
The Cotentin Peninsula thrusts up from France into the Channel, and at its head is the great port of Cherbourg. Now it was becoming plain that this port was the first goal of the American Army. They held the western part of the beachhead and the British had the eastern; the British goal was the railroad town of Caen, and it was a harder assignment, because Germany lay in that direction, and also the great network of railroads through Holland and Belgium and the industrial part of France. The bulk of the Ger
man armies along the Channel were east of the invasion zone, so the British would have their hands full holding on, while the Americans were able to advance. That might be hard on British feelings, but there was no helping it; they had been holding on for nearly five years, all over the world, and it had become their specialty.
The American plan was to cut across the base of the Cotentin, thus isolating Cherbourg, and then taking it. Normandy is the name of the province, and it was from here that William the Conqueror had launched his invasion of England, not quite nine hundred years before. It is a land of granite rocks, and the houses are built of them, and each house makes an excellent fortress—from the point of view of those who hold it. Even when it has been shelled and bombed to ruins, it will be discovered that some of the enemy have stuck it out in the cellars and then come up with machine guns.
The rest of the rocks have been patiently dragged off the fields on sledges and built into fences, or more properly, continuous stoneheaps; the underbrush has grown up through them and covered them, and so the enemy had a series of ready-made fortifications, mile after weary mile. The bocage country, it is called, the French word meaning copse. Some of the fields were pasture; others were apple orchards, and in June they were in full foliage, making a cover which could never be entirely destroyed. No matter how much the hedgerows were bombed, there would always be Jerries left in the trenches, with weapons and ammunition in abundance; it meant that thousands of American boys had to die among the poppies, or be wounded and carried back to hospitals in the English coast towns.
Such was the Army’s job. Tanks and guns had to be unloaded on the beaches and carried up to the roads. Trucks had to follow, bringing fuel and ammunition. Divebombers and artillery had to blast holes in the bocage so that tanks could force their way through, while planes were bombing the next bocage to keep the enemy there from interfering. How many bocages to the mile depended upon the size of the farms; there might be a dozen or there might be two dozen; each had to be taken, and there was no such thing as outflanking them, because the whole country was the same.
Lanny knew this land, having motored through it on his sort of honeymoon with Marie de Bruyne, when he had had only half as many years as he had now. That too had been summertime, and they had thought it marvelously beautiful; they hadn’t happened to think of it from the military point of view. Lanny had just missed World War I, being too young, and while he predicted direfully that another was on the way, he didn’t let it keep him from being happy with music and art and poetry and love. Now he described the country to the others, its farmhouses of granite, its chests of ancient oak, its sturdy horses, its sweet cider, and another kind of cider that was sour, with a powerful kick. There were aspects not so pleasant to contemplate—bedbugs, for example. A pious land, with a shrine at every crossroad, it had been a center of reaction through all French history. Now, alas, its crowded little towns would be blown to rubble.
Thus the map of the great adventure was unrolled and spread before them. The British were expecting to take Caen, and then the great harbor of Le Havre; the Americans would block off Cherbourg, and then turn southward and block off the peninsula of Brittany and take the harbors there. Harbors were what the forces had to have, and quickly, if the expected counterattacks were to be repelled. It was only after Lanny got back to America that he learned from Alston of the devices which had been prepared to meet this situation; they were the most elaborate devices ever used in war: two artificial harbors, each as big as the port of Dover, built in movable sections and towed across the Channel.
A job for the Royal Engineers: at twenty-seven different sites in muddy coves scattered around the shores of the British Isles they had dredged out great basins, and in them had built a total of a hundred and fifty caissons made of concrete, each as big as a house. They weighed up to thousands of tons, but they would float because they were hollow; when they were completed, the water was let into the basins, and they were floated out and towed by tugs. Anti-aircraft guns were mounted on top, little PT-boats darted around them to keep off subs, and they dragged barrage balloons against divebombers. Thus guarded, they moved at three miles an hour until they reached the invasion shore. Each caisson had its appointed spot, marked by a buoy, and it had stopcocks so that water could be let in to sink it in an hour. There was a mile-long line of them, behind which great fleets of ships could lie safely.
The sides of this artificial harbor were made by bringing in old ships, assembled from far and near, and blowing out their bottoms with dynamite. Outside, beyond the line of caissons, was a breakwater made of large watertight steel boxes, the shape of cigar boxes; they were securely anchored and served to break the force of the immense waves which beat upon this coast during storms. Inside the artificial harbors were piers made of floating steel boxes ingeniously contrived to rise and fall with the tides—tremendous tides in this Channel, as high as twenty-two feet. As many as seven Liberty ships could unload against these piers at one time. The artificial harbors were known as Mulberry and Gooseberry, and all their various parts had code names, Phoenixes and Bombardons and Whales; the old ships were Corncobs, and the invasion itself was Overlord. In his youth Lanny had wondered who gave all the names to the Pullman cars, and now he wondered who had the job of thinking up these odd military appellations.
XII
The colossal meatgrinder was now working at full speed, grinding up German bodies, and German tanks and planes and guns and transportation. It would grind British and American and Canadian, also—the difference was that the Allies had more of everything than their foes and could bring in replacements. It was a war of attrition, and the side that had something left at the end would be the victor. No use shedding tears over it, that was what the world was like, and you had no other world to live in. The Allied chiefs had said unconditional surrender, and that meant no talking, only fighting.
Laurel tore herself away from the radio and wrote bits of her article. She would bring each one to Lanny and wait eagerly while he read it. He was glad they were good—for what would he have done otherwise? She would write, and then become dissatisfied, and put in something else, and then change her mind, back and forth. John Burroughs, the naturalist, had once declared, “This writing is an uncomfortable business; it makes your head hot and your feet cold and it stops the digestion of your food.” Lanny, who had been married to a writer for two years and a half now, decided that it was worse than having babies.
At last he persuaded her that the manuscript was good enough, and then she had to submit it to the censor, another ordeal. While awaiting his verdict, she went to see her commanding officer, a much harassed lady, for this was the first time women had ever been taken into the Army, and it was still a man’s world. Laurel wanted to get across that Channel; she would never feel happy until she was sharing the danger and the pain. But they wouldn’t let her across; it was no place for a woman. After arguing and pleading and cabling her editors, all she could get was a promise to send her down to one of the Channel ports—on the English side—and there let her talk to the men going across and those who had come back to the hospitals. Surely there was story material in that.
Laurel’s husband was having trouble with his conscience, too. He was too comfortable in a de luxe hotel. There ought to be something more he could do to help fool Hitler. He wondered, had he accomplished anything in Spain? Days passed, and the great counterattack did not come; and had Lanny had anything to do with that? Were the Germans worrying about the possibility that this Normandy landing might be a feint, and that the Allies were planning a still heavier stroke in front of Calais, or farther east, in Belgium or Holland?
A picturesque situation over in Normandy: the German commander, Rommel, was facing his old enemy from North Africa, Montgomery. Rommel was the violent man, and it would be his temperament to hit the invaders with everything he had or could get hold of. But the overall commander was General von Rundstedt, whom Lanny knew from the old days at Berchtesgaden, and al
so through Emil Meissner, whose friend he was. Rundstedt was a cautious man, who would weigh the consequences and not stake his everything on one throw. Among the factors he was weighing, would there be a letter from the president of Budd-Erling Aircraft, warning his son under no circumstances to go into Holland?
XIII
Lanny cabled Robbie in the usual way and waited for his airplane ticket to show up. Laurel was to leave on Saturday morning; and on the evening of Thursday, the 15th of June, they went to a show, and afterward had a bite to eat. You were always hungry, because meals were so strictly limited; if you had bread you couldn’t have dessert. They came in about midnight, and just as they entered the lobby an air alert sounded. They went down into the shelter, the fashionable guests and hotel staff mixed together, something which would never have happened in Old England.
Here was one more chance to observe the English people, and Laurel learned that their reaction was one of boredom; they had thought they were through with this sort of nuisance, and that it was the Germans’ turn. Everybody was tired and sleepy and nobody talked. They waited, and listened to the rattle of ack-ack, and felt the ground shake with heavy explosions. Usually these ceased quickly, for there were only a few German planes and they passed on or got shot down. But this time the sirens went on sounding, and the shaking of the earth continued, sometimes heavy, more often light. Disgusted rich people sitting on benches leaned back against hard walls and used bad language under their breath. They had to stay all night, and all day too, unless they got sick of it and decided that they would just as soon be dead.
The P.A. leaned over to his wife and whispered, “This must be it—the V-1’s.” He had told her about them at the time he had brought Frances to Newcastle; but so much time had elapsed that she had decided he must be mistaken. Most English people had decided that it was just another of Dr. Goebbels’ bluffs, an effort to keep his people hoping and working. The German people had decided the same. In Spain Lanny had read that their question had become, “Wo ist die Wuwa?” Where is the Wonder Weapon! Even B4, the British Intelligence, was divided on the question; some reports said yes and some no.
One Clear Call I Page 61
