The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys
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Some commanders gathered their men together for one last talk before they boarded their transport vessels. The commander of the 115th Regiment, Col. Eugene Slappey, looked at all the shaved heads in his outfit, took off his helmet, scratched his own bald head, and declared, “You men have a good idea there. Lots cleaner. But I never realized that I had been getting ready for an invasion for a long time.”
After the laughter he grew serious, talking to his men like a father to his sons: “There isn’t much us old fellows can do now. The success of this invasion is up to you men. We have done a lot of planning: I wish you could know the amount of preparation that has gone into this thing. It’s the greatest military effort that the world has seen. And all of you know the stakes, the course of history depends on our success. It’s a great satisfaction to know that no unit was ever better prepared to go into combat; that’s why we got the job.”
Slappey concluded, “I’ll see you in France.” As Lieutenant Eastridge walked away, he was struck by the thought, It will be a sad day for this regiment if we ever lose that old man.4
General Bradley gathered nearly a thousand officers in a vast aircraft hangar, the general officers on the platform, the colonels on the front-row benches, the lieutenants at the rear. Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., son of the late president, was assistant division commander of the 4th Division. Because of his age, fifty-six, and his physical condition (he had a bad heart), Roosevelt had been forced to obtain a stack of dispensations and special orders, then plea for permission to go ashore on Utah with one of the first waves. He had finally got what he wanted. He sat on the platform, grinning.
Bradley opened, “Gentlemen, this is going to be the greatest show on earth. You are honored by having grandstand seats.”
Roosevelt frowned, shook his head, and in a deep bass whisper said, “Hell, goddamn! We’re not in the grandstand! We’re down on the gridiron!”
The acoustics of the hangar were such that everyone heard him. There was an eruption of laughter and an easing of tension. Bradley grinned and continued his pep talk.5
• •
The Coast Guard and Navy crews were waiting for the men. Charles Jarreau remembered that on LCI 94 there were four officers and twenty-six men. The officers were “ninety-day wonders,” graduates of officer training school, in their early twenties, but the skipper was an old man of thirty-two. He had ten years in the merchant marine and “the rules were his, not the Navy’s; he did not like the Navy’s.” Two days before LCI 94 picked up its soldiers, he told Jarreau, “There’s nobody going to leave this ship, so you go out and get the liquor you want and we are going to have a party.” It started at 0700 “and boy, at the end of the day, everybody was just crapped out, but it sure relieved the tension. After a night’s sleep we sobered up and started taking troops on board.”6
Familiarity with the loading process helped immensely to ease tension. The men of the AEF had been through the drill many times. By early June 1944, the continuous stream of mounting, marshaling, embarkation, and landing had become monotonous and routine. Many of those involved commented later that they could have done it in their sleep; others said that until the definitive announcement came over the ship’s loudspeaker they half believed this was just another exercise. Those were exactly the attitudes their commanders wanted them to have.
The troops indulged themselves in the age-old tendency of fighting men going into battle to carry too much stuff with them. The Assault Training Center exercises had led planners to recommend that the men in the assault waves should not carry more than forty-four pounds of equipment, but most were taking on more than double that extra weight, some even more. Partly this was the fault of the regimental commanders, who wanted the first waves to carry in land mines, satchel charges, extra ammunition, spare radios, mortars, and the like. Partly this was the men’s own fault, as there was always something extra to carry—a French phrase book or a Bible, an unauthorized knife or pistol, most of all cigarettes.
The cigarettes were handed out at the quays, along with rations. Pvt. Robert Patterson of the 474th Antiaircraft Battalion told the quartermaster to never mind the cigarettes because “I don’t smoke.”
“You might as well take them,” the quartermaster replied, “because by the time you get where you’re going, you will.” Forty years later Patterson commented, “He was right. On that ship I learned to smoke and did so for a lot of years thereafter.”7
One soldier in the 4th Division was addicted to Camels. He went into a panic over the thought of running out, so he bought, borrowed, or traded for every pack he could. He went on board carrying ten cartons. Most men carried two cartons and depended on the Army to get more up to them when needed.
Vehicles were also grossly overloaded with ammunition, jerry cans, picks and shovels, canteens, field rations, weapons, and more. Nevertheless, the loading proceeded smoothly and according to the elaborate schedule. It seemed impossible that each of the thousands of ships and landing craft could find its own specific place, or that the passengers could locate the right vessels, but they did. Tanks, artillery, trucks, and jeeps backed into their LCTs—last on, first off. They used specially constructed “hards,” cement aprons extending into the harbor at the right slope to accommodate the LCTs.
Men moved onto their LSTs and LCIs or other transports “in an astonishingly short time,” according to Lieutenant Eastridge. Almost at once both decks of LST 459 were loaded, with vehicles and guns chained to the deck. The ship was overcrowded, with only one bunk for every three men, so they would rotate sleeping hours, eight to a man. There was insufficient space at the docks and hards for all the transports and LSTs, so many of the infantry companies were ferried out to vessels anchored in the bays on Higgins boats.
LST 459 moved away from the quay, sailed slowly to the center of the river in Plymouth harbor, and tied up to another LST. “We were side by side with so many crafts,” Eastridge said, “that a man could have jumped from one deck to another for a half mile or more. Toward the sea, we could see destroyers and larger ships at anchor. The harbor was just jammed with boats.”8
Altogether there were 2,727 ships, ranging from battleships to transports and landing craft that would cross on their own bottoms. They came from twelve nations—the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, France, Belgium, Norway, Poland, Greece, and Holland. They were divided into the Western Naval Task Force (931 ships, headed for Omaha and Utah) and the Eastern Naval Task Force (1,796 ships, headed for Gold, Juno, and Sword). On the decks of the LSTs were the Higgins boats and other craft too small to cross the Channel on their own. There were 2,606 of them. Thus the total armada amounted to 5,333 ships and craft of all types, more vessels—as Admiral Morison pointed out—“than there were in all the world when Elizabeth I was Queen of England.”9
The first to move out were the minesweepers. Their job was to sweep up along the English coast in case the Luftwaffe and E-boats had dropped mines in the area, then proceed to clear five channels for the separate assault forces (O, U, G, J, and S), marking them with lighted dan buoys spaced at one-mile intervals along the 400-meter-wide channels, and finally clear the area in which the transports would anchor off the beaches. There were 245 vessels involved in this mammoth sweeping job; they began their work on the night of May 31-June 1.
On June 3, the gunfire support and bombardment ships of the Western Naval Task Force set sail from Belfast headed south through the Irish Sea. They included the battleships Nevada, veteran of the Pearl Harbor attack, Texas, the oldest in the U.S. fleet, and Arkansas, along with seven cruisers and twenty-one destroyers. They would lead the way. After they had rounded Lands End and passed the Isle of Wight, the LSTs, LCTs, LCMs, and the transports would follow. They were to get under way in the predawn hours of June 4, rendezvous, and form up in convoys.
• •
As the troops filed onto their transports and landing craft, they were handed an order of the day from General Ei
senhower. It began, “Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force:
“You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. . . .
“Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.
“But this is the year 1944! . . . The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
“I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!
“Good luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.”10
Sergeant Slaughter had his buddies sign his copy. He wrapped it in plastic, put it in his wallet, and carried it through Normandy all the way to the Elbe River in eastern Germany. “I still have that document framed hanging over my writing desk,” Slaughter said. “It is my most treasured souvenir of the war.”11
Thousands of those who received Eisenhower’s order of the day saved it. I cannot count the number of times I’ve gone into the den of a veteran of D-Day to do an interview and seen it framed and hanging in a prominent place. I have one on my office wall.
Pvt. Felix Branham of the 116th Infantry got everyone on his ship to sign a 500-franc note he had won in a poker game. “One guy asked, ‘Why?’ and I said, ‘Fellows, some of us are never getting out of this alive. We may never see each other again. We may be crippled, or whatever. So sign this.’ I have that hanging on my wall in a frame. I wouldn’t take anything for it.”12
• •
Officers considerably junior to Eisenhower were tempted to try their hand at inspiration. After his LST 530 took on its cargo of Churchill tanks, jeeps, trucks, six Higgins boats, and 600 British soldiers destined for Gold Beach, Lt. Tony Duke of the U.S. Navy thought he would give a speech over the ship’s loudspeaker. Thoughts of Shakespeare and Henry V ran through his mind. But a British army colonel came up to the bridge, “put his hand on my shoulder, I’ll never forget it, and said, ‘Careful, young fellow. Most of my men have seen the worst of desert warfare and a good many of them were in France and evacuated through Dunkirk. So I’d advise you to go easy, go quick, and don’t get dramatic or emotional.’ My own emotions were thumping, straining inside of me, but I took his lead and made a very simple announcement. I realized later that I would have made a real ass out of myself if I’d let go with exactly how I did feel.”13
• •
The first thing most crews did was to feed the soldiers. “The Navy chow was wonderful,” Eastridge recalled. “Our men were talking about transferring to the Navy for the next war.”14
On board the transport Samuel Chase, Capt. Oscar Rich, an artillery observer for the 5th Field Artillery Battalion of the 1st Division (whose tiny L-5 aircraft had been disassembled, with the wings folded back and the propeller put inside the plane, which was swung on board by winch), went below to study the foam-rubber map of the Calvados coastline. “It was the most detailed thing that I had ever seen in my life. The trees were there, the trails, the roads, the houses, the beach obstacles—everything was there and I spent hours examining it. . . . I could see my first airstrip, in an apple orchard just off the draw going up from Easy Red, Omaha Beach. Everything was to scale—it was actually like being in an airplane, about 500 feet above the beach and looking at the beach and seeing the whole thing in true perspective. It was uncanny how they had built this thing.” Finally he broke away from the map and joined a poker game. The players included Robert Capa, the famous Life magazine photographer, and correspondent Don Whitehead.15
Once on board, for most of the troops there was little to do except gamble, read, or spread rumors. Pvt. Clair Galdonik found a softball and two gloves. He started playing catch with a buddy but made a bad throw and the ball went over the side.16 On his LCT, Walter Sidlowski of the 5th ESB discovered that the skipper had put the toilet off limits for Army personnel, so as to not put a strain on the facilities. Sidlowski and some buddies put their engineering skills to work and constructed hanging toilet seats, which gave some comic relief when all the seats were occupied just as an admiral’s barge passed by.17
Men listened to the radio. They groaned when Axis Sally told them to come on over, “we are waiting for you.” They cheered when the fall of Rome was announced. They read books: Lt. Frank Beetle of the 16th Regiment, 1st Division, recalled reading (“believe it or not”) about Plato in a paperback edition of Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy.18
Some of the companies of the 2nd Ranger Battalion went on board the New Amsterdam, a small passenger boat, for the journey across the Channel. It was a British ship with a British crew—and British food, meaning kidney stew, which caused much complaint. The rangers being rangers, there was no sitting around waiting. They continued their training and conditioning by stringing ropes up to the mast to practice rope climbing. They did push-ups, sit-ups, and even close-order drill.19
There were some screw ups. Capt. Robert Walker of the 116th Regiment had done practice exercises on LCVPs, LCTs, Ducks, and LCMs. The only type of landing craft he had never been on was an LCI. For the invasion, naturally, he was assigned to LCI 91 and designated as billeting officer. The ship’s capacity was 180 men but he had 200 badly overloaded men on his roster. In addition, LCI 91 was already carrying large rolls of telephone wire, bangalore torpedoes, satchel charges, grapnels, extra flamethrowers, “and much, much more.” Nevertheless, Walker managed to crowd everyone in, then talked to the skipper, a Coast Guard lieutenant from Boston. The skipper said he had entered the Coast Guard anticipating spending the war guarding the Atlantic Coast near Boston, but now was about to embark on his third invasion.20
Lt. Charles Ryan of the 18th Regiment, 1st Division, had been on an LCI in an exercise, so he knew what to expect when his craft moved out into the open Channel. He described the LCI as “a metal box designed by a sadist to move soldiers across water while creating in them such a sense of physical discomfort, seasickness, and physical degradation and anger as to induce them to land in such an angry condition as to bring destruction, devastation, and death upon any person or thing in sight or hearing. It combined the movements of roller coaster, bucking bronco, and a camel.”21
• •
Around the airfields, glider troops and paratroopers checked out their equipment for about the 1,000th time, tried to think of some place to carry an extra pack of cigarettes or an extra grenade, visited the models of the Cotentin or the Orne and Dives rivers one last time—and then once more. They were tightly sealed in, ready at a moment’s notice to march out to the airfield and get into the British-built Horsa gliders or American-built C-47s to get the invasion under way.
At another airfield, Fairford in Glouchester, a less-well-known unit prepared for the flight over the Channel. It was a Special Air Service (SAS) operation. SAS was a British army unit formed to operate behind Axis lines. It consisted of three regiments, one to work in France, plus two French battalions and a Belgian company. Capt. Michael R. D. Foot was a brigade intelligence officer in SAS. Since August 1942, he had been studying the German occupiers of France and their defenses. He had gone on a commando raid. Now he was preparing to send off some special teams to take advantage of what he knew about the Germans in Normandy (because Foot was bigoted, he was not allowed to go behind enemy lines).
Foot had experienced a difficult time in getting his teams for the operation code named Titanic (Foot had picked Titanic from a list, “trusting that would sound large to a German”). He had approached his regimental commander, who was preparing his squads for behind-the-lines bridge destruction and other acts of sabotage, to ask for four small parties of SAS troops.
“To do what?” the CO asked gruffly.
“To provide a bit of deception to assist in the landing.”
“No.”
“Not to me. Put it in writing if you like and I will reply in writing why I won’t do it. But why should we waste paper? I will tell you why I won’t do it.”
He softened a bit and explained, “In the early days of the regiment we were all briefed to raid an Italian airfield. Intelligence canceled it at the last minute. We went on leave in Cairo, came back nursing our hangovers and were told, ‘Right, chaps, it’s on tonight, off you go.’ Very few of us came back. And I swore then I was going to have no further dealings with any intelligence authority. Get out!”
Foot went to see Colonel Francks, commander of one of the other regiments in SAS, “with whom I had made my very first parachute jump, his first jump too. We were reasonable friends and he rather grudgingly agreed to Titanic, but only if it was cut down from four parties to two.”
Foot agreed. He went down to Fairford, which was jammed with SAS teams preparing to go into France to fight, and there he gave his two teams—each consisting of an officer, an NCO, and two privates—the special equipment he had helped dream up and their mission.
The equipment consisted of about 500 dummy parachutists, a record player, and a mass of Very pistols and ammunition. Foot explained to the two teams that the idea was to drop the dummies, which would self-destruct on landing with a small explosion and a flash, then jump themselves carrying the equipment. On landing, they were to turn on the gramophone. The record would play snatches of soldiers’ conversation, interspersed with small-arms fire. Then they should move around the area, shooting off Very pistols. One party would go in about midway between Rouen and Le Havre, the other near Isigny.
The French SAS battalion had its own special missions, including one for an advance party to seize a landing place in Brittany in order to bring the whole battalion into Brittany. The leader was a big game hunter named Bourgoin who had lost an arm but taught himself how to parachute with a single arm. The Frenchmen in the party were scheduled to be the first Allied soldiers to land in France.22