The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  In the afternoon, Barensfeld flew support for a group of Dakotas tugging gliders to Normandy. The P-47s, flying at 250 miles per hour, had to make long lazy S-turns to keep the C-47s in visual contact; otherwise they would overrun the glider formation. “Battle formation, 2-300 yards apart, then a turn, crossover, then we’d line up again. We were so busy we had no sense of time. Of course, we were looking for enemy aircraft, there weren’t any. Mouth dry. Edge of seat. Silence. Very exciting time.”

  The gliders cut loose. Barensfeld descended to below 1,000 feet to shepherd them into Normandy. But for the gliders the ground was rough and the hedgerows too close together. “It was very disconcerting to see one cut loose, make the circle and hit a hedgerow. I thought, ‘My God, this invasion is going to be a failure if they are depending on these gliders for any sort of part.’ ”35

  • •

  The P-38 Lightning was a twin-engine, twin-boom, single-seat fighter designed by the legendary Clarence “Kelly” Johnson of Lockheed (he later designed the U-2 spy plane). The Germans called it Gabelschwanz Teufel (Fork-tailed Devil). Because of its distinctive shape, the Lightning was given the role of close-in support. The thought was that antiaircraft crews on the Allied warships would recognize the shape even if they failed to notice the white bands painted on the wings and booms.

  But although they were closer to the action, the P-38 pilots found their high expectations quickly deflating. First, there were too many ships at sea with too many overanxious gun crews who had too much ammunition—the P-38s got shot at by their own gunships, and they found no German aircraft to shoot at themselves. “We circled and weaved in the air over our ships,” Capt. Peter Moody said. “We were somewhat envious of the fighters who were allowed to break free and fly over the French coast looking for targets of opportunity. At one point I heard a British controller radio to one of his aircraft: ‘Roger, Red Rover, you’re free to romp and play.’ ”36

  From the point of view of Lt. William Satterwhite, flying a P-38 over Omaha Beach, “German resistance appeared to be devastating. Landing craft were being capsized, some were exploding, and the contents, including men and equipment, were being spilled into the surf in great numbers and quantity.”37

  • •

  The Allies put 3,467 heavy bombers, 1,645 medium bombers, and 5,409 fighters into the air on D-Day. Not one plane was shot down by the Luftwaffe. The flak batteries managed to shoot down 113 aircraft.

  Overall, except at Utah, the contributions made by the Allied air forces on D-Day could not be characterized as critical, because they had accomplished the critical mission in April and May 1944. They had isolated the battlefield from much of the French railway system, they had made it difficult to impossible for German trucks and tanks to move by day, they had driven the Luftwaffe out of the skies of France.

  What they had not done was develop a workable doctrine for the use of the heavy bombers in tactical support of ground troops, nor had they developed a working method of communication between the soldiers on the ground with those eager-to-shoot P-38 pilots over their heads. Techniques were developed, later in the war, that worked; in December 1944, in the Battle of the Bulge, the air-ground coordination was outstanding, and critical to the victory. But those techniques were not there on D-Day.

  But what the air forces had accomplished before D-Day more than justified their cost. How completely the Allies controlled the skies over the battlefield was illustrated dramatically by the single Luftwaffe bombing mission against the beaches. It came at dusk on D-Day. LSTs were jammed together offshore at Omaha, Higgins boats were on the coastline, with jeeps, trucks, aid stations, tanks, men, and other equipment pressed together on the beach. A lucrative, can’t-miss target.

  Four twin-engined JU-88s appeared over Omaha Beach. The sky was suddenly ablaze with tracers, as every man on a machine gun or antiaircraft gun in that vast fleet opened up. “The barrage was magnificent, thunderous, and terrifying,” said Lt. Donald Porter, a fighter aircraft controller on an LCI waiting its turn to go into shore. “The low trajectory of the streams of tracers, mostly .50-caliber machine guns, had us ducking. The Germans were coming in at a very low altitude so our firing was just clearing our own ships. I was huddled on the small and crowded deck with only my helmet and two blankets for protection.”

  Porter looked up and saw tracers converging just overhead. At that instant, “the JU-88 burst into flame from wingtip to wingtip. It seemed that the flaming plane would crash right on us and our guns were firing into him even as he burned.” Some 100 yards away from the LCI, the German plane slid over and “plunged into the water with a hissing sound. Our guns were still firing into him as he hit the sea about fifty yards to the starboard.”38

  The staggering amount of hot metal the fleets poured into those JU-88s sent a signal: whatever happened on the ground, the skies above Normandy belonged to the RAF and the U.S. Army Air Force, while the Channel belonged to the Royal Navy, the U.S. Navy, and the Allied warships.

  • •

  P-47 pilots were not the only ones who felt a disappointment at not being able to participate more directly in D-Day. Ground crews all over England stayed busy, refueling planes and repairing flak damage, making a direct contribution but still feeling a bit out of it. Staff officers, in London and throughout England, from the different nationalities and services, often despised by the line officers, had done their work in advance and on D-Day could only be spectators. The amount of sheer grind that the staff officers had put in denied some of them even the role of spectator.

  Harry Crosby was Group Navigation Officer for the 100th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force. He records: “During the week before D-Day I worked twenty-four hours a day. I had to superintend the preparation of maps and flight plans. I had to set up the formations for over a hundred different missions and variations. I had to brief all our navigators as a group and each lead navigator as an individual.

  “I was a minute part in the whole operation but I worked for seventy-five hours without even seeing my bed. I didn’t shave. My orderly brought me a change of uniforms. I don’t remember eating. I remember gallons of coffee, each cup so hot and strong it shocked me into wakefulness.”

  By dusk on June 5, Crosby was a zombie. His CO told him to go to bed. Crosby protested. The CO made it an order. Crosby fell onto his bed without removing his tie or shoes. He slept for twenty-four hours. So as for D-Day, “I missed it all.”39

  • •

  Shortly after Captain Shettle of the paratroops saw the sight that so impressed him, wave after wave of Marauders coming over, he spotted a German antiaircraft battery. “I had my naval radio operator send coordinates to his ship at sea. The naval gunfire came almost immediately, and after correcting their aim, they fired a barrage which silenced the antiaircraft fire.”40

  The incident illustrates the coordination and teamwork that was the hallmark of the Allied effort on June 6. A paratrooper behind enemy lines uses a naval officer who had jumped with him (probably his first jump) to contact warships at sea to silence a battery shooting at Allied aircraft. The men being protected were the men who had made it possible for the paratroopers and Navy to be there in the first place, the men of the Army Air Force.

  * * *

  I. John Eisenhower graduated from West Point on D-Day. A week later, 2nd Lt. Eisenhower was driving around the beachhead with his father. Lieutenant Eisenhower was astonished to see vehicles moving bumper to bumper, in complete violation of West Point textbook doctrine. “You’d never get away with this if you didn’t have air supremacy,” he remarked to his father.

  The supreme commander snorted. “If I didn’t have air supremacy I wouldn’t be here.”

  14

  A LONG, ENDLESS COLUMN OF SHIPS

  The Naval Crossing and Bombardment

  THE MINESWEEPERS went first. There were 255 of them. Their job was to sweep up lanes from the Isle of Wight through the Channel up to the transport anchoring area off the French coast. The mines th
ey were after consisted of contact and antenna mines, some floating, many anchored, plus pressure mines planted on the bottom and exploded by a change in water pressure exerted by the hull of an approaching ship.1 These mines constituted the Germans’ most effective—indeed, virtually only—naval defense.

  The mines could be brutally effective. One of them caused the first Allied casualties in the invasion. At about 1700 on June 5, minesweeper USS Osprey hit a mine that blew a large hole in the forward engine room. Fires broke out and at 1815 the ship had to be abandoned. Osprey sank soon after with a loss of six men.2

  The minesweeper fleet, under the direct command of Admiral Ramsay, went on with its task. It cleared a wide channel from the Isle of Wight to Point “Z,” thirteen miles southeast of the island. Around Point “Z” there was a circle of five miles’ radius, nicknamed “Piccadilly Circus,” through which all the following vessels would pass. From Point “Z” the minesweepers broke up into groups to sweep ten lanes to France, two for each task force (one for the slower transports, the other for the fast warships). They marked the lanes with lighted dan buoys. When that task was completed, their assignment was to move in to sweep the shallow waters off the invasion beaches.

  Destroyers provided cover. The lead destroyer for the lead flotilla of minesweepers came from the first nation Hitler had overrun; it was Polish, named Slazak, commanded by Capt. Romuald Nalecz-Tyminski. Just behind Slazak was HMS Middleton. Next came the Norwegian destroyer Svenner. The minesweepers they were covering were British, Canadian, and American—a fine show of Allied unity. At 2315, June 5, the three destroyers entered channel no. 10, alongside the minesweepers that cleared the lane and marked it with dan buoys. At 0303 June 6 the job was done and the destroyers took up their patrol station opposite Ouistreham (Sword Beach).

  • •

  Behind the minesweepers came the LCT flotilla. Each LCT carried four DD tanks and four jeeps with trailers full of ammunition, plus their crews. For the 29th Division’s sector of Omaha (Easy Green, Dog Red, Dog White, and Dog Green), sixteen LCTs were bringing across the Channel sixty-four DD tanks. The plan was to launch the swimming tanks from five kilometers offshore. The timing had to be precise; the tanks were scheduled to climb onto the beach and commence firing at pillboxes at H-Hour minus five minutes, in order to provide cover for the first wave of infantry, which would land at H-Hour (0630, an hour after first light and an hour after dead low tide).

  The LCTs were in the van because they were the slowest and most difficult to maneuver vessels in the fleet. LCTs were built from three sections bolted together to form the 110-foot craft, with the heavy machinery in the stern and the bow both high and light. They were flat-bottomed with no center board. In a strong wind or tidal current it was all but impossible to hold them on course.

  Lt. Dean Rockwell commanded the LCT flotilla headed for Omaha. On June 5 he set off on his twenty-hour journey to the far shore. At Piccadilly Circus he had his first problem—LCT 713 was missing. There were ships, vessels, and boats of all types circling and trying to form up, some with a big “O” painted on the side (for Omaha), others with a “U” for Utah. Rockwell finally found LCT 713 with its “O” cruising “blithely along among ships with great big ‘U’s on them. I came alongside and told the captain to look around and see where he was. ‘Oh,’ he said, and I guided him back to where he belonged.”

  Rockwell headed for France. The wind was strong, holding position was difficult, even staying afloat was a problem. Those Sherman tanks weighed thirty-two tons each, plus their ammo, food, fuel, and men. “So, combined with our weight, we had very little freeboard. In fact, the seas were running in over our decks.” Everyone was miserable, especially the tankers.3

  At 0400 June 6, the LCTs reached the transport sector of Omaha. At 0415 they went from condition 1 to general quarters. At 0510 they went a kilometer closer to the beach, to their launch position five kilometers offshore. At 0522 the crews secured from general quarters to take up their beaching stations.

  Although the strong westerly winds continued, they were now in the lee of the Cotentin Peninsula and the seas were relatively moderate.

  • •

  Behind the LCTs came the bombardment groups, battleships, cruisers and destroyers. There were six battleships (three American, three British), twenty cruisers (three American, three French, the remainder British and Canadian), sixty-eight destroyers (thirty-one American, one Norwegian, one Polish, the others British and Canadian). The battleships were old; Nevada, with ten 14-inch guns, had been commissioned in 1916 and had been the only battleship to get under way at Pearl Harbor. Texas, mounting ten 14-inch guns, was two years older, while Arkansas (commissioned 1912, with twelve 12-inch guns) had been scheduled for disposal and had been saved only by the coming of the war. HMS Warspite was twenty-nine years old; she carried eight 15-inch guns, as did HMS Ramillies (commissioned 1917); HMS Rodney, with nine 16-inch guns, was the youngest of the battleships (commissioned 1927).

  The “old ladies,” navy men called the battleships. They would be dueling the heavy German batteries. In the Utah Beach sector, the Germans had 110 guns ranging from 75mm up to 170mm. Inland, they had eighteen batteries, the largest consisting of four 210mm guns in casements near St.-Marcouf. The old ladies were expendable and it was expected that one or two of them at least would be lost, but they would make their contribution by drawing the huge shells away from the beach and onto them.

  The main group of destroyers came behind the cruisers and battleships, ahead of the transports, LCIs, LCCs (landing craft control, carried part of the way on LSTs before being lowered by davits to the sea), LCMs, and others. The entire fleet included 229 LSTs, 245 LCIs, 911 LCTs, 481 LCMs, all under their own power, and 1,089 LCVPs riding on LSTs to the transport area, plus various other transports, Coast Guard rescue boats, PT boats, blockships that would be sunk to create artificial harbors off Gold and Utah, and more.

  The most unwieldy craft, even worse than the LCTs, were the Rhino ferries, barges hooked together carrying trucks, jeeps, bulldozers, and other heavy equipment, towed by LSTs across the Channel, with outboard motors to provide their own propulsion for the run-in to the beach.4

  On USS Bayfield, an attack transport that served as headquarters for Maj. Gen. Raymond O. Barton, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, the decks were jammed with troops and sailors. Barton’s deputy commander, Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, moved among the men, speaking softly and soothingly. Countless members of the 4th Division recall the words of reassurance that Roosevelt, the oldest man going ashore that day, said to them. They remember, too, that he began singing and urged them to join in. Lt. John Robert Lewis described the scene: “During the cruise across, we all assembled on the deck of the Bayfield and sang ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’ This was a very sobering time to sing the words, ‘As God died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.’ ”5

  Seaman Joseph Donlan, a radio operator on Bayfield, remembered thinking that at that moment his high-school class was holding graduation exercises. Had he not joined the Navy, he would have been there.6 On LST 530, Seaman Gene Sizemore reported to Capt. Anthony Duke. Just before departing England, Sizemore had told Duke, “I’m only fifteen, Captain, and I don’t want to go on this trip.” (He had lied about his age when he enlisted.) Duke had replied, “Well, Sizemore, you are going anyway.”

  “Well, Captain, I am scared,” Sizemore rejoined, “and I want to get off, NOW.”

  Duke said he felt sorry for him, but the best he could do was order Sizemore to report to the bridge every hour: “That way, I’ll be able to see how you’re doing and you’ll be able to see how I’m doing.” So Sizemore reported, and he was doing fine.

  LST 530 was headed to Gold Beach, the second LST in a column of twelve. One of the first things Duke did was order the barrage balloon cut loose. The cables were snapping in the wind and were a danger to the crew. Other LST skippers did the same.

  Looki
ng around, Duke recalled, “By God, I’ll never forget the feeling of power—power about to be unleashed—that welled up in me as I viewed the long, endless columns of ships headed toward Normandy.”7

  In spite of the wind and rough sea, the crowded movement of the thousands of Allied ships and small craft ran off close to schedule, with some minor bumping but no major collisions. This remarkable feat, according to Admiral Morison, was incredible enough to “suggest divine guidance.”8

  Against this host, the Germans could put into action a handful of gunboats, a few submarines, a small fleet of E-boats, and nothing more. In World War I, Germany had challenged Britain for control of the seas; by 1944 the Germans had only three ships larger than destroyers still afloat—the cruisers Prinz Eugen, Nürnberg, and Emden—and they were in port on D-Day.

  At 2300, Nevada, followed by cruisers Quincy, Tuscaloosa, and HMS Black Prince, Piccadilly Circus to head south-southeast for Utah. At 0230, Nevada reached her position, eleven miles off the coast. “As we neared our position in the Bay of the Seine,” Lt. Ross Olsen recalled, “we felt like we were sneaking up on the enemy and even talked in whispers, thinking that we might be heard by the Germans on the beach, which of course was impossible. But when we cut loose the anchor, it made a tremendous noise as the anchor chain went through the hawsepipe.” Olsen was sure the Germans had to have heard it.9 Quickly the rattle of other chains running through hawsepipes filled the air, off Utah and the other four beaches.

  • •

  The Germans heard nothing, saw nothing. Although there had been a steady stream of ships coming from Piccadilly Circus since well before midnight, lined up so close in their columns as to practically form a bridge from the Isle of Wight to Normandy, and although the first ships reached the transport areas around 0200, German search radar failed to pick up anything. This was partly due to German inefficiency, more to the effectiveness of preinvasion air bombardment, when the bombers had made radar sites on the coast primary targets, destroying some and damaging many more. Further, the Allied aircraft were throwing down “windows,” foil strips that caused hundreds of echoes on the German radars. Admiral Krancke had canceled the usual E-boat parrols because of the foul weather, so the boats were still in port in Le Havre, Ouistreham, and Cherbourg.