The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

To precisely that end, Marshall had transformed the U.S. Army from a cadre of 170,000 men in 1940 to an army three years later that numbered 7.2 million (2.3 million in the Army Air Force). It was the best equipped, most mobile, with the most firepower, of any army on earth. This achievement was one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of the Republic.

  To use that army only in Italy was unacceptable. Failure to mount an assault to create a second front would be a double cross to Stalin and might lead to precisely the political consequence—a separate Nazi-Soviet armistice—Hitler was counting on. Or, perhaps worse, a Red Army liberation (and thus postwar occupation) of Western Europe. At a minimum, no cross-Channel attack in 1944 would put off victory against the Nazis until at least late 1945, possibly until 1946. Meanwhile, the political pressure to say to the British “To hell with it, if you won’t fight in France, we will take our army to the Pacific” would become all but irresistible.

  So there had to be an assault. And for all the difficulties, for all the German advantages—land lines of communication, fighting on the defensive, fixed fortifications—the Allies had the decisive edge. Thanks to their control of the sea and air, and to the mass production of a bewildering variety of landing craft, the Allies had unprecedented mobility. They would choose the time and place the battle would be fought.

  As soon as the battle began, however, the advantage would shift to the Germans. Once in France, the Allied paratroops and seaborne troops would be relatively immobile. Until the beachhead had been expanded to allow self-propelled artillery and trucks to come ashore, movement would be by legs rather than half-tracks or tires. The Germans, meanwhile, could move to the sound of the guns by road and rail—and by spring 1944 they would have fifty infantry and eleven armored divisions in France. The Allies could hardly hope to put much more than five divisions into the attack on the first day, enough to give them local superiority to be sure, but all reinforcements, plus every bullet, every bandage, every K ration, would have to cross the English Channel to get into the battle.

  So the Allies really had two problems—getting ashore, and winning the battle of the buildup. Once they had established a secure beachhead and won room to deploy inland, the weapons being produced in massive quantity in the United States could be brought into France, sealing the German fate. It would then be only a question of when and at what cost unconditional surrender was achieved. But if the Wehrmacht could bring ten divisions of infantry and armor into the battle by the end of the first week to launch a coordinated counterattack, its local manpower and firepower advantages could be decisive. Long-term, the Allied problem appeared to be even greater, for there would be sixty-plus German divisions in France in the spring of 1944 while the Allies would need seven weeks after D-Day to complete the commitment of the forty-odd divisions they would gather in Britain.

  To win the battle of the buildup, the Allies could count on their vast air fleets to hamper German movement—but interdiction would be effective only in daylight and good weather. Far more effective would be to immobilize the panzer divisions through trickery—fooling the Germans not only in advance of the attack, but making them believe that the real thing was a feint. That requirement would be the key factor in selecting the invasion site.

  Whatever site was selected, the assault would be a direct frontal attack against prepared positions. How to do that successfully at an acceptable cost was a problem that had stumped generals on all sides between 1914 and 1918 and had not been solved by the end of 1943. The Wehrmacht had outflanked and outmaneuvered its opponents in Poland in 1939, in France in 1940, and in Russia in 1941. Direct frontal attacks by the Red Army against the Wehrmacht in 1943, and by the British and Americans in Italy that same year, had been costly and relatively ineffective. And the frontal attack on D-Day would be from sea to land.

  In World War I, all frontal attacks had been preceded by tremendous artillery bombardments, sometimes a week or more long. Thanks to their enormous fleet, the Allies had the firepower to duplicate such artillery preparation. But the Allied planners decided that surprise was more important than a lengthy bombardment, so they limited the pre-assault bombardment to a half hour or so, in order to ensure surprise.

  (Later, critics charged that the heavy losses suffered at the beach called Omaha would have been less had there been a preinvasion air and sea bombardment of several days, as was done later in the Pacific at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. What the criticism missed was the central point. As Samuel Eliot Morison wrote in his official history of the U.S. Navy, “The Allies were invading a continent where the enemy had immense capabilities for reinforcement and counterattack, not a small island cut off by sea power from sources of supply. . . . Even a complete pulverizing of the Atlantic Wall at Omaha would have availed us nothing, if the German command had been given 24 hours’ notice to move up reserves for counterattack. We had to accept the risk of heavy casualties on the beaches to prevent far heavier ones on the plateau and among the hedgerows.”2)

  • •

  In World War I, when the artillery barrage lifted the infantry would climb out of the trenches and attempt to cross no-man’s-land. In an amphibious assault, the attacking infantry would not have jump-off trenches close to the enemy line; rather they would have to struggle up out of the water and across wet sand, which would hamper their equipment and agility.

  And how would they get from transport ships suitable for bringing them across the Channel to the shore? At the beginning of World War II, no one knew. In the late 1930s, the U.S. Marines, anticipating that a war against Japan in the Pacific would involve island attacks, had pressed the Navy to build landing craft, but the Navy was interested in aircraft carriers and battleships, not small boats, so little was done. The Wehrmacht had planned to cross the Channel to attack England in 1940 using towed barges to transport its infantry assault units. Those barges had been built for Europe’s canal and river systems; on the open Channel, with anything other than an absolute calm, they would have been worse than useless.

  The British got started on a solution in 1941, with the landing ship, tank (LST) and the landing craft, tank (LCT). The LST was a big ship, as big as a light cruiser, 327 feet long, displacing 4,000 tons, but it was flat bottomed and thus hard to control in any kind of sea. It was capable of grounding and discharging tanks or trucks on shallow-gradient beaches; when it beached, two bow doors opened to the sides and a ramp was lowered to allow the vehicles to drive ashore. It could carry dozens of tanks and trucks in its cavernous hold, along with small landing craft on its deck.

  The LCT (in U.S. Navy parlance, a “ship” was over 200 feet in length, a “craft” less than that) was a flat-bottomed craft 110 feet long, capable of carrying from four to eight tanks (eventually there were four types of LCTs) across relatively wide bodies of water, such as the Channel, even in relatively rough seas, and discharging its cargo over a ramp. When America came into the war, it took on the task of all LST and most LCT production, in the process considerably improving the designs.

  The LSTs and the LCTs became the workhorses of the Allies. They were the basic vehicle-carrying landing craft, used successfully in the Mediterranean in 1942 and 1943. But they had significant shortcomings. They were slow, cumbersome, easy targets (those who sailed LSTs insisted the initials stood for Long Slow Target). They were not suitable for landing platoons of fighting men, the skirmishers who would have to lead the way in the first wave. For that job, what was needed was a small boat of shallow draft with a protected propeller that could beach by the bow, extract itself quickly, and have a small turning circle to enable it to turn out to open water without danger of broaching in a heavy surf. It would also require a ramp so that the riflemen could move onto the beach in a rush (rather than jumping over the sides).

  Various designers in America, both in and out of the Navy, took up the problem. They came up with a variety of answers, some of which worked. The best were the LCIs (landing craft, infantry, a seagoing troop-landing craft of 160-foot length capa
ble of carrying a reinforced company of infantry—nearly 200 men—and discharging the men down ramps on each side of the bow), the LCMs (landing craft, medium), and the LCVPs (landing craft, vehicle and personnel).3

  There were many other types, including the oddest of all, a floating two-and-a-half-ton truck. It was designed by a civilian employee at the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Palmer C. Putnam. He took a deuce-and-a-half truck—the U.S. Army’s basic (and much loved) truck—and turned it into an amphibian by providing buoyancy through a body made up largely of sealed, empty tanks and by giving it a pair of small propellers to provide forward motion in water. Once it hit the sand, it would operate as a truck. The vehicle was capable of making five and a half knots in a moderate sea, fifty miles per hour on land. It could carry artillery pieces, fighting men, or general cargo.

  Most everyone laughed at this hybrid at first, but it soon showed its stuff and was adopted. The Army called it a DUKW: D for 1942, the year of design; U for amphibian; K for all-wheel drive; W for dual rear axles. The users called it a Duck.4

  Production was as great a problem as design. The difficulties involved in building a landing-craft fleet big enough to carry three to five divisions ashore in one day were enormous. Neither the Navy nor the shipyards had any experience in such matters. There were competing priorities. In 1942 escort vessels and merchant shipping were more immediate necessities, and they got the available steel and marine engines.

  As a result, there were severe shortages, so severe that the chief limiting factor in planning the invasion was lack of sufficient landing ships and craft. Indeed, that was the single most important factor in shaping the whole strategy of the war, in the Pacific, in the Mediterranean, in the Atlantic. Churchill complained with some bitterness that “the destinies of two great empires . . . seemed to be tied up in some goddamned things called LSTs.”5

  That these shortages were overcome was a miracle of production and a triumph of the American economic system. The Navy did not want to mess around with small boats, and their big contractors, the large shipyards, felt the same. Perforce, the job fell to small businessmen, entrepreneurs, high-risk takers with little boatyards, designing boats on speculation, producing them on the basis of a handshake contract.

  There were many such men, but the greatest designer and builder of landing craft was Andrew Jackson Higgins of New Orleans.

  • •

  The first time I met General Eisenhower, in 1964 in his office in Gettysburg, where he had called me to discuss the possibility of my becoming one of the editors of his official papers, he said at the end of the conversation, “I notice you are teaching in New Orleans. Did you ever know Andrew Higgins?”

  “No, sir,” I replied. “He died before I moved to the city.”

  “That’s too bad,” Eisenhower said. “He is the man who won the war for us.”

  My face must have shown the astonishment I felt at hearing such a strong statement from such a source. Eisenhower went on to explain, “If Higgins had not designed and built those LCVPs, we never could have landed over an open beach. The whole strategy of the war would have been different.”

  Andrew Higgins was a self-taught genius in small-boat design. In the 1930s he had been building boats for the oil industry, which was exploring in the swamps of south Louisiana and needed a shallow-draft vessel that could run up on a bank and extract itself. His “Eureka” boat, made of wood, filled the need perfectly. He was so confident there would be a war and a need for thousands of small boats, and so certain that steel would be in short supply, that he bought the entire 1939 crop of mahogany from the Philippines and stored it for future use.

  When the Marines forced the Navy to begin experimenting with landing craft, Higgins entered the competition. The Navy Bureau of Ships wanted to do the design itself and wanted no part of this hot-tempered, loud-mouthed Irishman who drank a bottle of whiskey a day, who built his boats out of wood instead of metal, whose firm (Higgins Industries) was a fly-by-night outfit on the Gulf Coast rather than an established firm on the East Coast, and who insisted that the “Navy doesn’t know one damn thing about small boats.”

  The struggle between the bureaucracy and the lonely inventor lasted for a couple of years, but one way or another Higgins managed to force the Navy to let him compete for contracts—and the Marines loved what he produced, the LCVP. It was so far superior to anything the Navy designers, or the private competitors, could build that excellence won out over blind, stupid, stuck-in-the-mud bureaucracy.

  Once he got the initial contract, Higgins showed that he was as much a genius at mass production as he was at design. He had assembly lines scattered throughout New Orleans (some under canvas). He employed, at the peak, 30,000 workers. It was an integrated work force of blacks, women, and men, the first ever in New Orleans. Higgins inspired his workers the way a general tries to inspire his troops. A huge sign hung over one of his assembly lines: “The Man Who Relaxes Is Helping the Axis.” He put pictures of Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito sitting on toilets in his factories’ bathrooms. “Come on in, brother,” the caption read. “Take it easy. Every minute you loaf here helps us plenty.” He paid top wages regardless of sex or race.6

  Higgins improved the design of the LCTs and produced hundreds of them; he helped design the patrol boats (PT boats) and built dozens of them; he had an important subcontractor role in the Manhattan Project; he made other contributions to the war effort as well.

  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.I

  • •

  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 Dakotas. 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. (Gliderborne infantry were not volunteers.) Each paratrooper had gone 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.