The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  8

  MARSHALING AND BRIEFING

  STARTING IN the first week of May, the soldiers and sailors of the AEF began descending on southern England. They came by sea in a never-ending stream of transports and LSTs. The ships came out of the Firth of Clyde and Belfast, down the Irish Sea past the Isle of Man, from Liverpool and Swansea and Bristol. They got into formation, twenty ships, forty ships, 100 ships, to sail out into the Atlantic and then past Lands End, to turn left for their designated ports—Plymouth, Torquay, Weymouth, Bournemouth, Southampton, Portsmouth, Eastbourne, and others.

  They came by land, by train, bus, truck, or on foot, men and equipment from Northern Ireland, Scotland, the Midlands and Wales. They formed up by the hundreds in companies and battalions, by the thousands in regiments, to march down narrow English roads, headed south. When they arrived in their marshaling areas, they formed up by divisions, corps, and armies in the hundreds of thousands—altogether almost 2 million men, nearly a half million vehicles. It took 54,000 men to provide necessary services for the force, including more than 4,500 newly trained army cooks. It was the greatest mass movement of armed forces in the history of the British and American armies. It culminated with a concentration of military men and weaponry in southernmost England such as the world had never seen, or would again.I

  • •

  The 175th Regiment of the 29th Division marched to its assembly area, called a sausage, near Falmouth. (Sausages got their name from their shape; on the map, the long, narrow, fenced-in areas, usually beside a road, looked exactly like sausages.) There the regiment was sealed in. The men moved into tents; gravel paths had been constructed and orders were issued to stick to those paths so that German reconnaissance planes would not get photographs showing new paths beaten down by walking through the fields. Vehicles were parked close against hedges. Everything was camouflaged under wire netting. The sausages were surrounded by MPs; no one was allowed out. No fires were allowed even though the nights in mid-May in England were still cold, with frost on the ground in the mornings.

  Lt. Eugene Bernstein took the LCT(R) he commanded through the Irish Sea to the Isle of Man, where he took on provisions (“mostly steaks, which we ate three times a day”), and proceeded to Falmouth, where he was told he was in the wrong place. After much confusion and many exchanges of messages, he was ordered to Dartmouth on the Dart River. On arrival, he was told to sail up the river and drop anchor across from Greenway House, Agatha Christie’s home. It was a “beautiful stone mansion, with hothouses and flowers dominating the view and a winding, gravel river road running alongside.” Mrs. Christie had turned it over to the U.S. Navy, which set up a headquarters there.1

  The airborne troopers went into camps near the airfields of southern England. For the 506th PIR, that meant Uppottery; for the gliderborne troops of the Ox and Bucks, it was Tarrant Rushton. The engineers had their own marshaling areas; the 6th ECB was outside Portsmouth.

  The sausages were packed with equipment. Sgt. John Robert Slaughter of the 116th Regiment, 29th Division, recalled: “Every field and vacant lot was piled high with matériel for an impending great battle. Tanks and other tracked vehicles; trucks, jeeps and weapons carriers; spotter Piper Cub airplanes; artillery pieces of all sizes; gasoline, water, food, jerry cans, boxes, drums, you name it and it was there, in abundance.”2

  The vehicles had to be waterproofed. Every moving part was protected by Cosmoline, a greasy substance that would keep out water and protect the metal from the corrosive action of salt water. Pipes emerged from the carburetors of the jeeps, tanks, and trucks for air intake. “The drivers and gunners who toiled under the camouflage nets were not careless,” Lt. Ralph Eastridge of the 115th Regiment, 29th Division, observed. “Carelessness here would mean a stalled vehicle at the crucial minute that it drove down the landing ramp and headed for the beach. The gunners painstakingly covered the breeches of their weapons with rubber cloth and sealed the edges with rubber cement. The radio operators sealed the delicate radios with rubber bags.”3

  Condoms were issued, by the millions. Some were blown up into balloons or filled with water and tossed around, but most were put to more practical, if unintended, use. The infantrymen put them over the muzzles of their M-1 rifles; the rubbers would keep out sand and water and would not have to be removed before the weapons were fired. Hundreds of men put their watches in condoms and tied them off; unfortunately, the condoms were not large enough to hold wallets.

  Men were given escape aids, in case of capture. “These were very Boy Scoutish things,” Major Howard remarked. They included a metal file to be sewn into the uniform blouse, a brass pants button that had been magnetized so that when balanced on a pin-head it became a tiny compass, a silk scarf with the map of France on it, water-purifying tablets, and French francs (printed by the U.S. and U.K. governments, over De Gaulle’s loud protest, about $10 worth to a man). “This sort of thing absolutely thrilled the troops to bits,” Howard said. “I have never seen such enthusiasm about such simple things.”4

  Every soldier got a brand-new weapon. The rifles and machine guns had to be test-fired and zeroed in on the firing range. Slaughter remembered “unlimited amounts of ammo were given to each of us for practice firing. Bayonets and combat knives were honed to a keen edge.”5

  Every man was given a new set of clothing, impregnated with a chemical that would ward off poison gas. They hated those uniforms. Pvt. Edward Jeziorski of the 507th PIR spoke for all the men of D-Day when he declared, “They were the lousiest, the coldest, the clammiest, the stiffest, the stinkiest articles of clothing that were ever dreamed up to be worn by individuals. Surely the guy that was responsible for the idea on this screw-up received a Distinguished Service Medal from the devil himself.”6 (The men wore these uniforms through the Normandy campaign, in some cases longer; the chemical prevented the cloth from “breathing,” so the men froze in them at night, sweated up a storm by day, and stank always.)

  By contrast, the food was wonderful. “Steak and pork chops with all of the trimmings,” Slaughter recalled, “topped with lemon meringue pie, were items on a typical menu, and it was all-you-can-eat.” Fresh eggs—the first most of the men had enjoyed since arriving in England—plus ice cream, white bread, and other previously unavailable luxuries were devoured with relish, accompanied by the inevitable crack that “they’re fattening us up for the kill.”7

  Theaters were set up inside wall tents, where first-run movies just over from Hollywood were run nonstop, with free popcorn and candy. Most soldiers can remember the names of those movies, if not the plots—favorites included Mr. Lucky with Cary Grant and Laraine Day, Going My Way with Barry Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby, and The Song of Bernadette.

  Training was over. Until the briefings began, aside from firing weapons and sharpening knives, or watching movies, there was little to do. Cpl. Peter Masters remembered it as a “time without end.” After the intense activity of the previous months, the superbly conditioned men quickly grew bored. According to Masters, “Total war begins in the concentration area, because when people are fully charged with ammunition, somebody will get their finger on the trigger by mistake. Occasionally there were casualties. One heard a burst and a shout—’Medics!’ ”8 At Company A, 116th Regiment, a joker threw a clip of M-l .30-caliber bullets into a burning barrel; the guys in the area laughed and cursed and ran away.9

  As the days went by, tension mounted, tempers grew shorter. “It didn’t take much of a difference of opinion to bring out the sporting instinct,” Private Jeziorski recalled.10 Fistfights were common. Lt. Richard Winters of the 506th got into a scrap with Lt. Raymond Schmitz and cracked two of Schmitz’s vertebrae, which sent him to the hospital.11 As always in an army camp, especially so in this one, rumors of every imaginable kind raced through the sausages.

  Sports was one way to burn off some of the pent-up energy. At first footballs were handed out, but most company commanders put a stop to that when the games got too rough and some bones
were broken. Softball was better; there were barrels full of gloves and balls and constant games of catch. A number of men recalled that these were the last games of catch they ever played because of wounds received or arms lost during the ensuing campaign.

  The sausages included libraries, composed of paperback books. (The paperback revolution in publishing had begun in 1939 when Pocket Books brought out ten titles at $.25 each; Avon Books came along in 1941, quickly followed by Popular Library and Dell. There were special, reduced-size, free Armed Services Editions; 22 million copies were printed for American servicemen.) One of the most popular was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn but, somewhat surprisingly, the top was The Pocket Book of Verse. (For morale purposes, it contained none of the bitter poems from the English veterans of World War I.12)

  Gambling was the favorite boredom killer. There were virtually nonstop poker and crap games. Large amounts of money changed hands. Pvt. Arthur “Dutch” Schultz of the 505th PIR won $2,500 in a crap game. “I know because I stopped and took the time to count it,” he remembered. “I had broken everyone in the game except for a staff sergeant whom I disliked intensely and who had $50 left. I was bound and determined to take all of his money. My luck changed and I lost my $2,500.”13

  There was no liquor available. A few men managed to sneak out of their sausages and go to local pubs to quench their thirst, but quick arrests by MPs brought that to an end. Maj. David Thomas, the 508th PIR’s surgeon, recalled that the medics were each given a canteen of alcohol to use for sterilization purposes when they got to Normandy. He dryly remarked, “I doubt that a drop of it ever got out of England.”14

  Company commanders marched their men on the roads. This gave them some exercise and helped relieve the boredom or ease the tension; it also gave them some sense of the scope of the enterprise and a sense of confidence that a fighting force of such immensity could not be denied. Marching through the countryside and small villages, they saw unbelievable amounts of equipment, uncountable numbers of aircraft. And they saw the might of the free world gathered to destroy the Nazis; men in the uniforms of New Zealand, Norway, Poland, France, Australia, Canada, Britain, Holland, Belgium, and the United States. As Sergeant Slaughter recalled, “Soldiers from every Allied nation from all around the world seemed to be everywhere.”15

  Some of the resentment felt by the Tommies toward the Yanks came out. Corporal Masters remembered marching with 3 Troop past an American unit, also out marching. A couple of Yanks had stopped to chat with a mother and her three-year-old daughter (all communication with civilians was strictly forbidden but done anyway). Almost surely the little girl was asking the question all children in Britain had long since learned to ask of the GIs, “Got any gum, chum?”

  “But as we marched past,” Masters said, “a disgusted voice at the back of our lot growled at the Americans, ‘At least you could let them grow up!’ ”16

  • •

  Among the millions of men gathered in southern England to participate in the invasion of France, only a handful knew the secrets of Overlord—where the assault would go ashore, and when. Those few had a supersecurity designation, above Top Secret, called Bigot; they were said to be “bigoted.”

  Slowly the circle of those in the know widened. SHAEF and Twenty-first Army Group staff officers briefed army and corps staffs, who in turn briefed division and regimental commanders, right on down to company and platoon officers, who passed the information on to their noncoms and privates. At the lower levels the place names were not revealed until the men were actually sailing for France; otherwise the briefings were extraordinarily detailed and accurate with regard to terrain features, fairly realistic about the numbers and quality of the German defenders, and wildly optimistic about what the naval and air bombardments were going to do to those defenders.

  The briefings were done on sand tables or, in the case of the 12th Regiment, 4th Division, on a huge sponge-rubber replica of the Cotentin Peninsula made to scale both horizontally and vertically, complete in minute detail with roads, bridges, buildings, power lines, hedgerows, fortifications, and obstacles. One member of the 12th recalled, “It was as though the men had been suddenly transported by plane and were looking down on the very beaches they would soon land on and the very ground over which they would have to fight.”17

  Officers were briefed at regimental level. Lt. Ralph Eastridge of the 115th Regiment, 29th Division, wrote an account of the briefing he attended. The briefing officer, the regimental S-2, began with a map of Omaha Beach. He explained that the 16th (1st Division) and 116th (29th Division) would land side by side; the 115th would follow the 116th. He described the beach obstacles and fixed fortifications at Omaha, the terrain, including the distance from the seawall to the foot of the bluff (about 200 meters), the height of the bluff (thirty meters, average), and other details.

  “You can see that the defenses are heaviest at these points where the little valleys lead inland. These breaks or draws in the bluff are our beach exits, and the key to success in the initial assault will be the securing of these exits.

  “The defenses include minefields, barbed wire, antitank ditches, and interlocking bands of automatic fire, concentrated at the exits. Each of these positions is manned by an estimated battalion with another battalion strung along the bluff between. They are part of the 916th Division, a static division, so-called because it is designed to fight in place from fixed positions.

  “This particular static division is made up of about 40 percent Germans, many of them partially disabled. But remember, a one-armed soldier is just as capable of pulling the trigger of a fixed machine gun in a pillbox as a two-armed soldier.

  “The remaining 60 percent of the division is made up of mercenaries, largely Russian, with some Poles, Jugo-Slavs, and other Balkans. . . . They are rough, simple, ignorant men and have little concern for the value of a life. They come from a part of the world where fighting has been the main occupation for generations. Their officers and noncoms are German; they will fight to the death.

  “Behind this static division are mobile divisions, first-line troops. Personnel is largely German. Most have seen combat on the Russian or Italian fronts. Their weakness is a lack of transport. . . .

  “Now for the plan in detail. The 16th and 116th will hit the beach in assault craft at about 0630. . . . The boats will ground out around the first of the underwater obstacles, on a rising tide. The immediate objective will be to secure the high ground above the beaches, denying the Germans direct fire and observation of the beach. Our regiment will land at H plus ninety minutes, move immediately to this village [indicating St.-Laurent-sur-Mer on the map, but unnamed], and go into position on the right. . . .

  “Now this first part is a comparatively easy job. The tough job will be done by the 116th, before we land. If the 116th goes in right we should have a pushover.”

  “Sir,” one officer asked, “what happens if the 116th doesn’t clean up the beach on schedule?”

  “Then we take over their mission.”

  “How many divisions in the first wave?” another officer asked.

  “It’ll be a big show,” the S-2 answered with a smile, “believe me. But we need only concern ourselves with our little sector.”

  “When is D-Day?”

  “Don’t know yet. About the 3rd or 4th [of June] would be a guess.”

  The officers of the 115th liked that “pushover” talk, but did not believe it. Lieutenant Eastridge commented, “The prospects looked grim. The diagrams of the beach defenses indicated that the Germans had been fantastically thorough. The 116th had a rugged job ahead.”18

  Indeed, Pvt. Felix Branham of the 116th heard his briefer tell his platoon that if the men got the excess equipment they would be carrying to the beach—mortar rounds, land mines, ammo boxes, radios and batteries, and more—they would be making a contribution. The 115th coming in behind would not be as heavily laden and their men “would come in and pick up what we had carried ashore, and they would do the job,
even though they had to walk over our dead bodies.”19

  Such bloodthirsty realism was uncommon. Most of the officers were upbeat and reassuring when they briefed their companies and platoons. Forty years and more later, veterans of Omaha still recalled, with some bitterness, what they were told: “The briefer explained that it would be no problem at all because the Air Force was coming over in great numbers, the Navy bombardment would be tremendous, the rocket ships would fire thousands of rockets, it was going to be a walkover, nothing to worry about. Our worries would come two or three days later when the panzer counterattacks began.” (149th Combat Engineers)20

  “We were told that many thousands of tons of bombs would be dropped on our beach by the Ninth Air Force just prior to the invasion. My concern was that we would have trouble getting our trucks across the beach because the bomb craters would be so close and so deep.” (6th ESB)21

  “Our briefing officer gave us a pep talk. More than 1,000 bombers would do their work beforehand. The battleships would blow everything off the map—pillboxes, artillery, mortars, and the barbed-wire entanglements. Everything would be blasted to smithereens—a pushover!” (26th Regiment)22

  “We were briefed to believe that there would be no living things on the beach, no life of any kind. It would be a piece of cake.” (5th ESB)23

  Almost every unit scheduled to invade had a similar experience. To drive home the point, junior officers, noncoms, privates were encouraged to study the sand tables or replicas whenever they wished, and thousands of them spent countless hours looking, discussing, familiarizing themselves with their objectives. They also got photographs, some only a few hours old, that revealed the most recent progress in the building of the Atlantic Wall. With that much accurate intelligence, how could the Germans stand a chance?

  There was tough-guy talk. The briefer for the 91st Troop Carrier Squadron (glider-tugging pilots) gave out a warning: “Pilots will release when the C-47 leading the formation starts a gradual turn to the left to return to the coast. If any C-47 pilot cuts his glider off too soon, he’d better keep on going because if he comes back here, I’ll be waiting for him.”