The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Late in the afternoon, Seitzler and some members of a beach brigade decided they were hungry. “So we went out and climbed on a burned-out LCI. We broke into the pantry. Boy, that was really something. It hadn’t been damaged. We brought a lot of stuff out and ate it on the beach under the seawall. The Navy really lived fine. We had a boned chicken, boned turkey, boned ham. We had everything you could think of, and we made pigs out of ourselves because we were half starved by that time.”

  When they finished, they decided they needed to top off their picnic on the beach with some coffee. They built a small fire behind the shingle seawall, using wood they had scavenged from one of the blasted-out vacation homes, and made Nescafé.

  For Seitzler, that turned out to be a mistake. When it was full dark, the rule was that every man should stay in his foxhole. Anything that moved would be shot. But the Nescafé had a diuretic effect on Seitzler.

  “So it was quite a problem, I’ll tell you. If I made any noise or anything, I could very well get shot. All I could do was get up, ease up on the edge of my foxhole, roll over a couple of times, use an old tin can to do my business, throw it away, and roll back, very slowly and quietly. I called it ‘suffering for sanitation.’ I have never been able to drink Nescafé since.”19

  • •

  The next morning, Pvt. Robert Healey of the 149th Combat Engineers and a friend decided to go down the bluff to retrieve their packs. Healey had run out of cigarettes, but he had a carton in a waterproof bag in his pack.

  “When we walked down to the beach, it was just an unbelievable sight. There was debris everywhere, and all kinds of equipment washing back and forth in the tide. Anything you could think of seemed to be there. We came across a tennis raquet, a guitar, assault jackets, packs, gas masks, everything. We found half a jar of olives which we ate with great relish. We found my pack but unfortunately the cigarettes were no longer there.

  “On the way back I came across what was probably the most poignant memory I have of this whole episode. Lying on the beach was a young soldier, his arms outstretched. Near one of his hands, as if he had been reading it, was a pocketbook (what today would be called a paperback).

  “It was Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner. This expressed the spirit of our ordeal. Our hearts were young and gay because we thought we were immortal, we believed we were doing a great thing, and we really believed in the crusade which we hoped would liberate the world from the heel of Nazism.”20

  26

  THE WORLD HOLDS ITS BREATH

  D-Day on the Home Fronts

  AT 0700 MOUNTAIN WAR TIME (1300 French time), three teenage cowboys from western Montana strode into the Mecca Café in Helena, the state capital. The previous afternoon, the cowboys had joined the Navy at the Helena recruiting station. They were full of bluff and bluster and themselves.

  “Food! Service! Attention!” they shouted at the waitress. She and the customers realized that the boys would be shipping out in a few hours, almost certainly their first trip out of Montana. The boisterous bad behavior of the “sailors” was forgiven. The waitress gave them “super de luxe” treatment, while around the tables the customers resumed their conversations over the coffee cups.

  Someone switched on the radio. “Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force has just announced that the invasion has begun. Repeat, D-Day has come.”

  A reporter for the Helena Independent-Record was in the café. He wrote, “The news was first met with unbelief, and then rapt silence. Food was forgotten. Not a single voice was raised in request for service; no one wanted anything. They only sat and listened, and wondered.”1

  • •

  Not until the invention of the telegraph did people on the varied home fronts of wars know that a great battle was under way even as it was being fought. For Americans in 1861–65, the first news came from the bulletins in the newspapers, bulletins that said little more than that a great battle was being fought in Pennsylvania or Mississippi. Over the next few days the papers would report on the battle. Then would come the seemingly never-ending lists of the dead. Gettysburg and Vicksburg were fought simultaneously, which meant that in the first days of July 1863 virtually every American knew someone who was in one of the battles. Son, husband, father, mother, brother, sister, grandson, girlfriend, uncle, friend—they all had to hold their breath. Wait, pray, worry, pray some more, and wait some more.

  In World War I, Americans again had such agonizing experiences. By World War II, wire transmission had improved; Americans whose loved ones were in the Pacific or North Africa or Italy heard radio reports of battles as they happened, and within a week or so could see carefully censored moving-picture film from the battle (never showing dead or badly wounded Americans). What they could not know was how their loved one had fared. For that they could only wait and pray that the man from Western Union did not knock at their door.

  On D-Day, a vast majority of the American people was involved. Most of them had made a direct contribution, as farmers providing the food, as workers in defense plants making planes or tanks or shells or rifles or boots or any of the myriad items the troops needed to win the war, or as volunteers doing the work at hundreds of agencies. The bandages they had rolled, the rifles they had made, were being put to use even as they heard the news. They prayed that they had done it right.

  Andrew Jackson Higgins caught the spirit well. He was in Chicago on D-Day; he sent a message to his employees in New Orleans: “This is the day for which we have been waiting. Now, the work of our hands, our hearts and our heads is being put to the test. The war bonds you have bought, the blood you donated are also in there fighting. We may all be inspired by the news that the first landings on the continent were made by the Allies in our boats.”2

  The workers at Higgins Industries and the workers in defense plants around the nation had sacrificed their daily routines to make the invasion possible. They had jobs, which was a blessing to a generation that had just gone through the Depression, and they were well paid (although nobody got rich on an hourly wage). But they sacrificed to do it.

  Polly Crow worked the night shift at the Jefferson Boat Company outside Louisville, Kentucky. She helped make LSTs. She wrote her husband, who was in the Army, about their savings—something young couples in the Depression could only dream about: “We now have $780 in the bank and 5 bonds which sho looks good to me and as soon as I get the buggie in good shape I can really pile it in.”

  To make that money, Mrs. Crow worked a ten-hour night shift. She cared for her two-year-old son during the day; her mother looked after the child at night. She did volunteer work at the Red Cross. She shared her apartment with another woman and her mother.3

  There were tens of thousands of young women like Mrs. Crow. Quickie marriages had become the norm, a million more during the war than would have been expected at prewar rates. Teenagers got married because the boy was going off to war, and in many cases, in the moral atmosphere of the day, if they wanted to have a sexual experience before he left they had to stand in front of a preacher first.

  When the boy husbands left for war to become men, the girl wives became women. They traveled alone—or with their infants—to distant places on hot and stuffy or cold and overcrowded trains, became proficient cooks and housekeepers, managed the finances, learned to fix the car, worked in a defense plant, and wrote letters to their soldier husbands that were consistently upbeat.

  “I write his dad everything our baby does,” one young mother explained, “only in the letters I make it sound cute.”4

  • •

  Women in uniform were a new phenomenon for the Americans of the 1940s. They were in every branch of service, but more strictly segregated by their sex than blacks were by their race. The names of those segregated organizations were condescending: Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), Women’s Auxiliary Ferry Squadron (WAFS), and WAVES, an acronym for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services (in
late 1944 the Navy dropped the acronym and the women were called Women Reserves).

  The women in uniform did everything the men did, except engage in combat. They were clerks, mechanics, administrators, radio operators, photo interpreters, cooks, meteorologists, supply sergeants, test pilots, transport pilots, and much more. Eisenhower felt he could not have won the war without them.5

  They did not have an easy time. Cruel and vicious jokes were told about them—although not by the wounded about the nurses. These pioneering women persevered and triumphed. The contribution of the women of America, whether on the farm or in the factory or in uniform, to D-Day was a sine qua non of the invasion effort.I

  • •

  D-Day for the young women who had husbands they hardly knew stationed in the ETO was an especially trying experience, but then few Americans were without personal worries. Nearly every American knew someone in the Army, Army Air Force, Navy, or Coast Guard stationed in the European theater. Only a handful knew if the soldier or sailor or airman was in action on D-Day or if he was going in later, but they all knew that before the war was won their loved one would be in a combat zone.

  Now it had started. The buildup phase was over. The United States was committed to throwing into the battle all the vast forces she had brought into existence over the past three years. That meant their boy, brother, husband, boyfriend, employee, fellow student, cousin, nephew was either already in combat or soon would be.

  In Helena and New York, throughout the nation, they sat and wondered and listened to the radio and dashed out on the streets for the latest edition of the newspaper with a front-page map of the French coast. The home front heard and read about World War II. What Americans heard and read on D-Day was dismayingly lacking in details.

  • •

  The official Nazi news agency, Transocean, was first to announce the invasion. The Associated Press picked it up and put it on the wire. The New York Times had it on the streets at 0130, but it was a headline only—no story. At 0200 Eastern War Time, the networks interrupted their musical programs with a flash announcement: “German radio says the invasion has begun.” The Germans reported a naval battle off Le Havre and airborne landings north of the Seine (these were the dummy parachutists). Commentators quickly pointed out that there was no confirmation from Allied sources, and warned that it might well be a trick designed to get the Resistance in France to rise up prematurely and thus expose the organization to destruction.

  At 0932 in London (0332 Eastern War Time) SHAEF released a brief communiqué from General Eisenhower, read by his press aide, Col. Ernest Dupuy: “Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.”

  SHAEF also sent by radio to New York a recording of Eisenhower reading his order of the day. It was a marvelous reading, rich in tone, resonant, and it provided a unifying experience, since it had been broadcast over the loudspeakers on the LSTs and transports in the southern England harbors before D-Day, so the American people heard what the invading force had heard.

  By 0415 Eastern War Time NBC had an eyewitness report from London by a reporter who had flown with the 101st Airborne. Through the morning, more eyewitness reports came from reporters who had been at sea and returned to London. They had seen a lot of smoke, ships, and planes, little else. There was nothing from the beaches.

  People listened to each new announcement breathlessly, only to be disappointed. To Eustace Tilley, pseudonymous “Talk of the Town” correspondent for the New Yorker, it was maddening: “The idiot babble of the radio followed us wherever we went.”6 The incoming news was so slow there were long periods, hours and more, when nothing new came over the wire. But the tension was so great that people wanted to hear something, so the broadcasters kept repeating themselves and quoting each other.

  The commentators had a terrible time with French place-names. They needed some geography lessons. Their attempts at military analysis ranged from misleading to silly. They chattered away, with little to say except that it was on. They talked about everything except the one thing that was uppermost in the minds of many in the audience, casualties. That was forbidden by the Office of War Information (OWI).

  Radio’s shortcomings were caused primarily by OWI, but the SHAEF censorship policies contributed. SHAEF refused to give out the information the American people most longed to hear—what divisions, regiments, squadrons, ships were involved. It would not be more specific in its identification of the site of the landings than to say they had taken place on “the French coast.” The reason for this strict censorship was to keep the Fortitude operation alive; the price in the United States was heightened anxiety.

  Radio could not provide information, but it could provide inspiration. After the recording of Eisenhower’s reading of his order of the day, the king of Norway spoke to his people, followed by the premiers of the Netherlands and Belgium, then the king of England. All these were repeated throughout the day.

  Thin as the news was on the radio, it was a comfort. A California woman wrote Paul White, a CBS announcer: “It is 0321 here on the Pacific Coast. I was fortunate enough to hear the first radio news of D-Day break from CBS this morning, as I have spent all my evenings waiting at the radio these past two months. . . . Your London report from Mr. Murrow gave me a feeling that though I’m at least one world’s distance from my husband and alone, I will not feel that way as long as you and your staff keep on the job.”7

  On D-Day, Franklin Roosevelt used the power of radio to link the nation in a prayer. Throughout the day the networks broadcast the text, which was printed in the afternoon editions of the newspapers; at 2200 Eastern War Time the president prayed while Americans across the country joined him:

  “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor . . .

  “Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. . . .

  “These men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. . . . They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.

  “Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom. . . .

  “And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other. . . . Thy will be done, Almighty God. Amen.”8

  • •

  “What does the ‘D’ stand for?” a passerby asked Eustace Tilley.

  “Why, it just stands for ‘Day,’ ” the New Yorker correspondent rightly answered.II Writing about the incident, he went on: “D-Day was a unique experience, a colossal moment in history.”

  His stroll about town took him to Times Square, where a crowd watched the electric news bulletin. “AND ONE GERMAN GUN IS STILL FIRING,” it read. “Nobody seemed to think that the one German gun was trivial; it was solemnly weighed along with the other bits of news from the beachheads.” A reporter for the New York Times noted that “people stood on the sidewalk near the curb or against the plate glass windows of shops and restaurants on all sides of the little triangle looking up, always looking up to catch even a glimpse of the invasion news.”

  Tilley joined a hundred or so citizens outside the Rialto Theatre. Men were “clustered together and were talking about the course of history during the past twenty-five years. . . . Everybody waited his turn and made his points without raising his voice more than was necessary. . . . The sober talk was still going on when we left.”

  He went to one of the network broadcasting studios “and found the corridors full of radio actors, all somewhat upset by the cancellation of the soap-opera programs.”

  Over the radio, he heard once again the Eisenhower recording. “General Eisenhower’s words are tied up with the image of D-Day that will, we think, remain in our mind the longest. Up in the Modern Museum, an old lad
y, seated on an angular plywood chair, was reading the General’s message aloud to several other old ladies who stood clustered around her. ‘I call upon all who love freedom to stand with us,’ she read, in a thin voice, and a shiver ran through the group.”9

  • •

  New York City on June 6, 1944, was a bustling, prosperous place. Everyone had jobs and more cash than there were products to buy. Apartments were hard to impossible to find; people doubled and tripled up. Bars and movie theaters were jammed. The spring season on Broadway was a big success, topped by Oklahoma! by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Paul Robeson in Othello, Milton Berle in Ziegfeld Follies, and Mary Martin in One Touch of Venus (with music by Kurt Weill, book by S. J. Perelman and Ogden Nash, staged by Elia Kazan, with dances by Agnes de Mille)—those were the days.

  Broadway shut down on D-Day. The actors went to the Stage Door Canteen to perform a scene or two from their plays for servicemen. Only one table, “The Angel’s Table,” was available to nonservicemen; it was reserved “for those civilians whose mildly royal donations win them the privilege of admission to the Canteen.” The donations went to the servicemen’s organizations.10

  The New York Daily News threw out its lead articles and printed in their place the Lord’s Prayer. The New York Daily Mirror eliminated all advertising from its columns so as to have room for invasion news.

  Stores shut down. Macy’s closed at noon. Still there was a large crowd around it, because the store set up a loudspeaker that carried radio programs. When one announcer read a dispatch that warned Americans against rejoicing, according to a reporter for the New York Times, “the faces of those who stood listening were grim and subdued.”

  Lord & Taylor never opened at all. President Walter Hoving said he was sending his 3,000 employees home to pray. “The store is closed,” he announced. “The invasion has begun. Our only thought can be of the men who are fighting in it. We have closed our doors because we know our employees and customers who have loved ones in battle will want to give this day to hopes and prayers for their safety.”11