The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  All across England, from four-man squads of the SAS to the overstrength divisions of the 6th, 82nd, and 101st Airborne, the men going into France by air were ready.

  • •

  By the evening of June 3, the assault waves of the AEF were loaded up. Force O, carrying the 29th Division for the right flank at Omaha, coming out of Falmouth, had the longest distance to sail so it sallied forth first, during the night. To General Eisenhower, “the smell of victory was in the air.”23

  • •

  On the far shore, all was quiet. Rommel spent June 2 hunting for stags. On June 3, he drove to Paris to buy shoes for Lucie’s birthday, which would come on June 6. In Paris, he conferred with Rundstedt, who agreed with him that “there is still no sign that the invasion is imminent.” The tides in the Strait of Dover would not be suitable for an invasion until mid-June. Rommel checked the weather report—it indicated increasing cloudiness, high winds, and rain. He decided to go to Herrlingen for Lucie’s birthday, then on to Berchtesgaden to see Hitler to beg for reinforcements. He wanted two additional panzer divisions and control of all the tanks. He wrote in his diary, “The most urgent problem is to win the Führer over by personal conversation.”24

  Although Rommel had half or less of what he calculated he required, in men, guns, mines, Rommel’s asparagus, beach obstacles, and fixed emplacements, he exuded confidence. He had brought to his task outward enthusiasm and confidence. Morale was apparently high all along the Atlantic Wall, or so the German leaders told themselves. A secret Gestapo morale report claimed that the troops were actually looking forward to the invasion. “People see it as our last chance to turn the tide,” it said. “There is virtually no fear of the invasion discernible.”25

  Rommel had managed to persuade some of his officers and a few of his troops that not only did they have a chance, they would prevail. Most German soldiers on the coast hoped the invasion would come far from them, but if it did hit them many were prepared to stand and fight. “Er soll nur kommen,” was Goebbels’s sneer. (“Let them come.”)

  And why not? Even the Ost battalions had landing obstacles, barbed wire, and mines in front of their trenches and fortified pillboxes. To the rear, mortars and artillery pieces had zeroed in on every feature of the beach. At their sides were casemates holding 88mm cannon prepared to fire crisscross across their front. Behind them stood German sergeants, pistols ready. Those Allied briefers who told their men that the troops they would face on D-Day were inferior and could be expected to run away had got it wrong. Those briefers who reminded their men that the Ost battalions were made up of rough, simple, ignorant men with German noncoms and officers to ensure that they fought had got it right.

  But for the German high command, there was the nagging problem of surrender. They feared that many of their men would take the first opportunity to turn themselves into POWs, and they too had got it right.

  • •

  At Omaha Beach, Maj. Gen. Dietrich Kraiss commanded the 352nd Division, which had moved up from St.-Lô to Calvados in May. Kraiss was a veteran of the Eastern Front, where he had distinguished himself, but his disposition of his forces in Calvados left much to be desired. On the Eastern Front, the German practice was to let the Red Army attack, then counterattack with reserves held back from the front line. That was not Rommel’s idea at all in Normandy, of course, but in accord with German doctrine Rommel left tactical dispositions up to his subordinates. Thus at Omaha—the only place in Kraiss’s sector of the coast (stretching from the mouth of the Vire River to Arromanches) where an amphibious assault could come ashore—he had in place but one artillery battalion and two infantry battalions (from the 716th Infantry Regiment). Kraiss had his reserve, ten infantry battalions and four artillery battalions strong, as much as twelve miles back from the coast.

  There was one advantage to the Germans in this arrangement: Allied intelligence had failed to see the move of part of the 352nd’s strength to the coast. Briefers told the 29th Division that Omaha would be defended only by second-rate troops from the 716th Division.

  • •

  Like Rommel, Colonel General Dollmann, commanding the Seventh Army in Normandy, was convinced that the deteriorating weather precluded an invasion. He ordered a map exercise to be conducted in Rennes on June 6. All divisional commanders plus two regimental commanders per division were ordered to attend. Admiral Krancke canceled E-boat sea patrols because of the foul weather.

  Only the one-legged Gen. Erich Marcks, in command of the LXXXIV Corps on the western sector of the Calvados coast and in the Cotentin, was uneasy. He was especially concerned about the 716th and 352nd divisions in Calvados. Each division had a fifty-kilometer line to defend. “It’s the weakest sector of my whole corps,” he complained. On June 1, he went to Arromanches. Looking out to sea, he told an army captain at his side, “If I know the British, they’ll go to church next Sunday for one last time, and sail Monday [June 5]. Army Group B says they’re not going to come yet, and that when they do come it’ll be at Calais. So I think we’ll be welcoming them on Monday, right here.”26

  10

  DECISION TO GO

  AT THE END of May, as the loading began, Air Vice Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, who had doubted from the first the wisdom of dropping the two American airborne divisions into the Cotentin, came to Eisenhower at his headquarters in Southwick House (Admiral Ramsay’s HQ, taken over by SHAEF for its command post for the invasion), just north of Portsmouth, to protest once again. Intelligence had discovered that the Germans had put their 91st Division into the central Cotentin, exactly where the 82nd Airborne was scheduled to drop. The 82nd had moved its drop zone to the west to avoid the Germans, but Leigh-Mallory felt not far enough.

  He told Eisenhower, “We must not carry out this airborne operation.” He predicted 70 percent losses in glider strength and at least 50 percent in paratroop strength even before the paratroopers hit the ground. He warned of a “futile slaughter” of two fine divisions, futile because the divisions would not be able to make any contribution to the battle. To send them into the Cotentin was “just plain sacrifice.”1

  Eisenhower went to his trailer, about a mile from Southwick House, “and thought it over again. I had no need for experts at this late time.” He later described this as his most worrisome moment in the war, and wrote in his memoirs, “It would be difficult to conceive of a more soul-racking problem.”

  He reviewed the entire operation in his mind, then concentrated on the American airborne. He knew that if he disregarded Leigh-Mallory’s warning and it proved accurate, “then I would carry to my grave the unbearable burden of a conscience justly accusing me of the stupid, blind sacrifice of thousands of the flower of our youth.”2 But he felt that if he canceled the airborne mission, he would have to cancel the landing at Utah Beach. If the paratroopers were not there to seize the causeway exits, the entire 4th Division would be endangered. But cancellation of Utah would so badly disarrange the elaborate plan as to endanger the whole Overlord operation. Further, Leigh-Mallory was only making a prediction, and the experience with airborne actions in Sicily and Italy (where Leigh-Mallory had not been present; Overlord was his first involvement with a paratroop operation), even though the airborne performance in 1943 had been flawed in many ways, by no means justified Leigh-Mallory’s extreme pessimism.

  “So I felt we had to put those two airborne divisions in,” Eisenhower related, “and they had to take Ste.-Mère-Eglise and capture the causeway exits, and protect our flank.” He called Leigh-Mallory to tell him of his decision and followed the call up with a letter. He wrote Leigh-Mallory, “There is nothing for it” but to go, and ordered him to see to it that his own doubts and pessimism not be spread among the troops.3

  • •

  While Rommel was going to see Hitler to beg for more tanks and a tighter command structure, Eisenhower was visited by Churchill, who was coming to the supreme commander to beg a favor. He wanted to go along on the invasion, on HMS Belfast. (“Of course,
no one likes to be shot at,” Eisenhower later remarked, “but I must say that more people wanted in than wanted out on this one.”) As Eisenhower related the story, “I told him he couldn’t do it. I was in command of this operation and I wasn’t going to risk losing him. He was worth too much to the Allied cause.

  “He thought a moment and said, ‘You have the operational command of all forces, but you are not responsible administratively for the makeup of the crews.’

  “And I said, ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  “He said, ‘Well, then I can sign on as a member of the crew of one of His Majesty’s ships, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

  “I said, ‘That’s correct. But, Prime Minister, you will make my burden a lot heavier if you do it.’ ”

  Churchill said he was going to do it anyway. Eisenhower had his chief of staff, General Smith, call King George VI to explain the problem. The king told Smith, “You boys leave Winston to me.” He called Churchill to say, “Well, as long as you feel that it is desirable to go along, I think it is my duty to go along with you.” Churchill gave up.4

  • •

  With De Gaulle, it was Eisenhower asking the favor. On June 3, Churchill brought De Gaulle to Southwick House, where Eisenhower gave him a briefing on Overlord. This was the first De Gaulle knew of the plan, and he subjected Eisenhower to an hour-long lecture on what he was doing wrong; Eisenhower replied that he wished he had benefited from De Gaulle’s generalship earlier but now it was too late. Then Eisenhower showed him a copy of a speech he would be making to the French people on D-Day, urging Frenchmen to “carry out my orders.”

  He asked De Gaulle to make a follow-up broadcast urging his countrymen to accept the SHAEF-printed francs. De Gaulle said non. The French people should obey him, not SHAEF; only the French government, of which he was president, had the right to issue currency. Eisenhower pleaded with him, to no avail. The whole thing was, in Eisenhower’s words, “a rather sorry mess.”5

  • •

  When Churchill and De Gaulle left, Eisenhower wrote a memorandum for his diary, which he entitled “Worries of a Commander.” At the top of the list was De Gaulle, and he wrote three paragraphs on the difficulties of dealing with the French. Next came weather. He was about to go to a weather conference. “My tentative thought,” he wrote, “is that the desirability for getting started on the next favorable tide is so great and the uncertainty of the weather is such that we could never anticipate really perfect weather coincident with proper tidal conditions, that we must go unless there is a real and very serious deterioration in the weather.”6

  Eisenhower, his principal subordinates, and all the officers and men of the AEF had spent months training, planning, preparing for this moment. “The mighty host,” in Eisenhower’s words, “was tense as a coiled spring,” ready for “the moment when its energy should be released and it would vault the English Channel.”7 He was determined to go if at all possible.

  • •

  On the morning of June 3, the LCTs in the Dart River started moving out. Hundreds of British citizens lined the shore, waving good-bye and good luck. Ens. Edwin Gale on LCT 853, a part of Flotilla 17, was twenty years old, a “ninety-day wonder.” His skipper turned to Gale and said, “Edwin, you know we may not do anything as worthwhile as this again in our lives. It is a fine thing to be here.”8

  Lt. Dean Rockwell, the former high-school football coach, commanded a flotilla of sixteen LCTs. Each LCT was carrying four DD tanks, scheduled to hit the beach in front of the first wave of infantry, so he was one of the first to move out into the Channel. His LCTs began departing Weymouth late on June 3. It was soon “pitch black, no lights, no nothing. And to say pandemonium reigned is an understatement, because we not only had LCTs but picket boats and escort craft and all kinds of ships trying to sort themselves out.” Radio silence prevailed, the ships could not use blinker lights, “we could not do anything but curse and swear until the whole thing got sorted out.”9

  Around the landing ships and craft, the warships circled to form up their own convoys. Storekeeper 2/C Homer Carey on LCT 505 remembered the sight of two British cruisers “in the soft twilight, racing past us headed south for the coast of France. Their shapely bows cut the water and passed us as if we were standing still. Beautiful—like two greyhounds. It was a comfort to know that they were on our side.”10

  The 2nd Battalion of the 116th Regiment was on the transport Thomas Jefferson. The men knew the ship well, having made two practice landings from her. Pvt. Harry Parley noted that this time, however, “humor was infrequent and forced. My thoughts were of home and family and, of course, what we were getting into. It saddened me to think of what would happen to some of my fellow GIs, whom I had grown to love.” His heart went out especially to Lieutenant Ferguson, who had initiated a discussion about philosophies of death with Parley. “I did not envy him his position,” Parley said. “He had come to know the men quite intimately as a result of having had to read and censor our outgoing mail. The loss of any of his men would be a twofold tragedy for him.”

  Private Parley carried an eighty-four-pound flamethrower, plus a pistol, shovel, life belt, raincoat, canteen, a block of dynamite, rations, and three cartons of cigarettes. He was worried about keeping up with his assault team on the dash across the beach. He scared the hell out of his buddies by using a trick he had just learned. He could set off a small flame at the mouth of his flamethrower, which would produce the same hissing sound as when the weapon was actually being fired, without triggering the propelling mechanism. Standing on the deck of the Thomas Jefferson, he calmly used the flamethrower to light a cigarette, sending a score or more of men scurrying in every direction.11

  Pvt. George Roach of Company A, 116th, was saying his rosary. He was worried about casualties too, “because we were going to be in the first wave and we figured the chances of our survival were very slim.” More than half the men in his company came from the same town, Bedford, Virginia. Most of the regiment came from southwestern Virginia.12

  Sgt. Joe Pilck of the 16th Regiment, 1st Division, was on the transport Samuel P. Chase. “While we were riding around in the Channel,” he recalled, “we were glad that this was the real thing. Not that we wanted to do it, but we knew it had to be done so we wanted to get it over with.”13

  • •

  The weather, which had been beautiful—clear skies, little wind—for the first three days of June, began to deteriorate. Clouds formed and began to lower, the wind came up, there was a smell of rain in the air. On his LCT, Cpl. Robert Miller was miserable. It started to drizzle, it was cold. He was on the open deck without shelter. The waves kicked up and started rocking his LCT. The steel deck was too slippery to lie down on, so he tried to catch some sleep on the canvas covering atop the trucks, but the wind and rain and rocking increased, so he gave it up.14

  Pvt. Henry Gerald of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles was also on an LCT. At daylight, June 4, as the craft moved out into the Channel, he joined his mates in the crew’s quarters for a briefing from his platoon leader. The LCT would “go up about twenty feet and then drop out from underneath us. Those who looked green yesterday were ghastly this morning.” The deck was awash in vomit. Gerald was congratulating himself on not getting seasick when “a chap across from me began to heave up into his puke bag. He had an upper plate that came out and disappeared into the bag as he was being sick. That wasn’t so bad until he reached into the bag, retrieved the plate, and popped it back into his mouth.” At that sight, Gerald lost his breakfast.15

  In the Channel, the drizzle began to turn into a cold, penetrating rain. Most of the men on the LCIs and LCTs had no shelter. The decks were slippery, the craft rocking in the choppy water. Everyone was wet and miserable. Eisenhower smelled victory in the air, but to the men of the AEF whose transports and landing craft had left harbor, the smell in the air was vomit.

  • •

  During the first days of June, Eisenhower and his principal subordinates had hel
d twice-daily meetings with the SHAEF Meteorologic Committee, at 0930 and 1600. Group Captain J. M. Stagg, twenty-eight years old and described by Eisenhower as a “dour but canny Scot,”16 made the weather predictions, then answered questions. Eisenhower had been privately meeting with Stagg for a month to hear his predictions so he could have some sense of the basis on which Stagg made them and how good he was—knowing that, as he said, “The weather in this country is practically unpredictable.”17

  The final weather conference was scheduled for 0400, June 4, even as more ships sailed out of their harbors and those already at sea began to form up into convoys. Stagg had bad news. A high-pressure system was moving out, a low coming in. The weather on June 5 would be overcast and stormy, with a cloud base of 500 feet to 0 and Force-5 winds. Worse, the situation was deteriorating so rapidly that forecasting more than twenty-four hours in advance was highly undependable.

  Eisenhower asked his subordinates for their views. Montgomery wanted to go. Tedder and Leigh-Mallory wanted a postponement. Ramsay said the navy could do its part but warned that the accuracy of the naval bombardment would be badly reduced by poor visibility and high seas and that the Higgins boats would be hard to control.

  Eisenhower remarked that Overlord was being launched with ground forces that were not overwhelmingly powerful. The operation was feasible only because of Allied air superiority. Without that advantage, the invasion was too risky. He asked if anyone present disagreed. No one did. Eisenhower decided to postpone for at least one day, hoping for better conditions on June 6. At 0600 hours he gave his order to put everything on hold.

  • •

  At just about that moment, Rommel began his long journey east, away from the coast, to see his wife and his führer. As he departed, in a light drizzle, he remarked, “There’s not going to be an invasion. And if there is, then they won’t even get off the beaches!”18