The Gestapo guards had panicked. Within minutes of the news of the landings, two machine guns had been set up in the prison courtyard. In groups of ten the male prisoners were led out, placed against the wall and executed. They had been picked up on a variety of charges, some true, some false. There were Guy de Saint Pol and René Loslier, farmers; Pierre Audige, a dentist; Maurice Primault, a shop assistant; Colonel Antoine de Touchet, a retired officer; Antole Lelièvre, the town hall secretary; Georges Thomine, a fisherman; Pierre Menochet, a policeman; Maurice Dutacq, Achille Boutrois, Joseph Picquenot and his son, French railway workers; Albert Anne; Désiré Lemière; Roger Veillat; Robert Boulard—ninety-two in all, of whom only forty were members of the French underground. On this day, the day that began the great liberation, these men, without explanation, without a hearing, without a trial, were slaughtered. Among them was Madame Lechevalier’s husband, Louis.
The firing went on for an hour. In her cell Madame Lechevalier wondered what was happening.
*Anne Marie is one war bride who does not live in the U.S. She and Leo Heroux now live where they first met on June 8—at the Broeckx farm near Colleville back of Omaha Beach. They have three children and Heroux runs an auto-driving school.
5
IN ENGLAND IT was 9:30 A.M. All night General Eisenhower had paced the floor of his trailer, waiting for the reports to come in. He had tried to relax in his usual manner by reading Westerns, but with little success. Then the first messages began to arrive. They were fragmentary, but the news was good. His air and naval commanders were more than satisfied with the progress of the attack and troops were ashore on all five beaches. Overlord was going well. Although the foothold was slight, there would be no need now for him to release the communiqué he had quietly scribbled just twenty-four hours before. In case the attempt to land troops was defeated, he had written: “Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at the time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and Navy did all the that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If there is any blame or fault attached to the attempt, it is mine alone.”
Certain that his troops were ashore on the invasion beaches, Eisenhower had authorized the release of a far different communiqué. At 9:33 A.M. his press aide, Colonel Ernest Dupuy, broadcast the news to the world. “Under the command of General Eisenhower,” he said, “Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.”
This was the moment the free world had been waiting for—and now that it had come people responded with a curious mixture of relief, exhilaration and anxiety. “At last,” said the London Times in a D-Day editorial, “the tension has broken.”
Most Britons heard the news at work. In some war plants the bulletin was read out over loudspeakers and men and women stood back from their lathes and sang “God Save the King.” Village churches threw open their doors. Total strangers talked to one another on commuter trains. On city streets civilians walked up to American soldiers and shook hands. Small crowds gathered on corners to gaze upward at the heaviest air traffic Britons had ever seen.
Wren Lieutenant Naomi Coles Honour, wife of the skipper of the midget sub X23, heard the news and immediately knew where her husband was. Sometime later she got a call from one of the operations officers at naval headquarters: “George is all right, but you’ll never guess what he’s been up to.” Naomi could hear all that later; the important thing now was that he was safe.
The mother of eighteen-year-old Able Seaman Ronald Northwood of the flagship Scylla got so excited she ran across the street to tell her neighbor Mrs. Spurgeon that “my Ron must be there.” Mrs. Spurdgeon wasn’t to be outdone. She had “a relative on the Warspite” and she was certain he was there, too. (With minor variations the same conversation was taking place all over England.)
Grace Gale, wife of Private John Gale, who had landed in the first wave on Sword Beach, was bathing the youngest of their three children when she heard the bulletin. She tried to hold back her tears, but couldn’t—she was certain that her husband was in France. “Dear God,” she whispered, “bring him back.” Then she told her daughter Evelyn to turn off the radio. “We’re not going to let your dad down by worrying,” she said.
In the cathedral-like atmosphere of the Westminster Bank at Bridgeport in Dorset, Audrey Duckworth was hard at work and didn’t hear about the assault until much later in the day. It was just as well. Her American husband, Captain Edmund Duckworth of the 1st Division, had been killed as he stepped onto Omaha Beach. They had been married just five days.
En route to Eisenhower’s headquarters at Portsmouth, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan heard the BBC warn listeners to stand by for a special announcement. Morgan told his driver to stop the car for a moment. He turned up the volume on his radio—and then the author of the original invasion plan heard the news of the attack.
For most of the United States the report came in the middle of the night; on the East Coast it was 3:33 A.M., on the West Coast 12:33 A.M. Most people were asleep, but among the first to hear of D Day were the thousands working on the swing shifts, the men and women who had toiled to produce most of the guns, tanks, ships and planes that were being used in the assault. Everywhere in the great pulsing war plants work stopped for a moment of solemn meditation. In a Brooklyn shipyard, under the harsh glare of arc lamps, hundreds of men and women knelt down on the decks of partially finished Liberty ships and began to say the Lord’s Prayer.
Across the nation, in sleeping towns and villages, lights flashed on. Quiet streets suddenly filled with sound as radios were turned up. People woke their neighbors to tell them the news, and so many phoned friends and relatives that telephone switchboards were jammed. In Coffey ville, Kansas, men and women in their night attire knelt on porches and prayed. On a train between Washington and New York a clergyman was asked to hold an impromptu service. In Marietta, Georgia, people thronged into churches at 4:00 A.M. The Liberty Bell was rung in Philadelphia, and throughout historic Virginia, the home of the 29th Division, chuch bells toiled in the night just as they had during the Revolution. In little Bedford, Virginia (population 3,800), the news had a special significance. Nearly everyone had a son, brother, sweetheart or husband in the 29th. In Bedford they did not know it yet, but all of their men had landed on Omaha Beach. Out of forty-six Bedford men in the 116th Regiment, only twenty-three would come home again.
Wave Ensign Lois Hoffman, wife of the skipper of the Corry, was on duty at the Norfolk, Virginia, naval base when she heard about D Day. From time to time she had kept track of her husband’s destroyer through friends in the operations room. The news had no personal significance for her. She still believed her husband was escorting a munitions convoy in the North Atlantic.
In San Francisco, Mrs. Lucille M. Schultz, a nurse at the Veterans Hospital at Fort Miley, was on night duty when the first announcement was made. She wanted to stay by the radio in the hope that the 82nd Airborne would be mentioned; she suspected the division was in the assault. But she was also afraid the radio might excite her cardiac patient, a World War I veteran. He wanted to listen to the reports. “I wish I was there,” he said. “You’ve had your war,” said Nurse Schultz as she turned off the radio. Sitting in the darkness, weeping silently, she said the Rosary over and over for her twenty-one-year-old paratrooper son, Arthur, better known to the 505th Regiment as Private Dutch Schultz.
At her home on Long Island, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt had slept fitfully. About 3:00 A.M. she awoke and could not get back to sleep. Automatically she turned on the radio—just in time to catch the official D-Day announcement. She knew that it was characteristic of her husband to be somewhere in the thick of the fighting. She did not know that she was probably the only woman in the nation to have a husband on Utah Beach and a son—twenty-five-year-old Captain Quentin Roosevelt of the 1st Divisi
on—on Omaha Beach. Sitting up in bed, she closed her eyes and said an old and familiar family prayer: “O Lord support us this day … until the shadows lengthen and the evening falls.”
In Stalag 17B near Krems, Austria, the news was received with a rejoicing that could hardly be contained. U.S. Air Force enlisted men had picked up the electrifying announcement on tiny handmade crystal sets, some of them built to fit in toothbrush holders, others camouflaged to look like lead pencils. Staff Sergeant James Lang, who had been shot down over Germany more than a year before, was almost afraid to believe the report. The camp’s “news monitoring committee” tried to warn the four thousand POWs against overoptimism. “Don’t get your hopes up,” they cautioned. “Give us time to verify or deny.” But in barracks after barracks men were already at work drawing secret maps of the Normandy coast on which they intended to plot the victorious advance of the Allied armies.
At this time the prisoners of war knew more about the invasion than the German people. So far the man in the street had heard nothing officially. It was ironic, because Radio Berlin, beating the Eisenhower communiqué by three hours, had been the first to announce the Allied landings. From six-thirty on, the Germans had showered a somewhat doubting world with a steady stream of newscasts. These short-wave broadcasts could not be heard by the German public. Still, thousands had learned of the landings from other sources. Although listening to foreign broadcasts was forbidden and punishable by a stiff prison term, some Germans had tuned in Swiss, Swedish or Spanish stations. The news had spread swiftly. Many of those who did hear it were skeptical. But there were some, particularly women with husbands in Normandy, who got the report and were deeply concerned. One of these was Frau Werner Pluskat.
She had planned to go to a movie in the afternoon with Frau Sauer, another officer’s wife. But when she heard that the Allies were rumored to have landed in Normandy, she became almost hysterical. Immediately she called Frau Sauer, who had also heard something about the attack, and canceled the movie date. “I must know what has happened to Werner,” she said. “I may never see him again.”
Frau Sauer was very abrupt and very Prussian. “You shouldn’t act like this!” snapped Frau Sauer. “You should believe in the Führer and act like a good officer’s wife.”
Frau Pluskat shot back, “I’ll never talk to you again!” Then she slammed down the phone.
In Berchtesgaden it almost seemed as though the men around Hitler had waited for the official Allied communiqué before daring to break the news to him. It was about 10:00 A.M. (9:00 A.M. German time) when Hitler’s naval aide, Admiral Karl Jesko von Puttkamer, called Jodl’s office for the latest report. He was told that there were “definite indications that an important landing has taken place.” Gathering all the information he could, Puttkamer and his staff quickly prepared a map. Then Major General Rudolf Schmundt, the Führer’s adjutant, awakened Hitler. He was in a dressing gown when he came out of his bedroom. He listened calmly to the report of his aides and then sent for OKW’s chief, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and Jodl. By the time they arrived Hitler was dressed and waiting—and excited.
The conference that followed was, as Puttkamer recalls, “extremely agitated.” Information was scanty, but on the basis of what was known Hitler was convinced that this was not the main invasion, and he kept repeating that over and over again. The conference lasted only a few minutes and ended abruptly, as Jodl was later to remember, when Hitler suddenly thundered at him and Keitel, “Well, is it or isn’t it the invasion?” and then turned on his heel and left the room.
The subject of the release of the OKW panzer divisions, which Von Rundstedt so urgently needed, did not even come up.
At ten-fifteeen the phone rang in Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s home at Herrlingen. The caller was his chief of staff, Major General Hans Speidel. The purpose: the first complete briefing on the invasion.* Rommel listened, shocked and shaken.
It was not a “Dieppe-type raid.” With all the canny instinct that had served him so well for most of his life, Rommel knew that it was the day he had been waiting for—the one he had said would be “the longest day.” He waited patiently until Speidel had finished the report and then he said quietly, with no tinge of emotion in his voice, “How stupid of me. How stupid of me.”
He turned from the phone and Frau Rommel saw that “the call had charged him … there was a terrible tension.” During the next forty-five minutes, Rommel twice called his aide, Captain Hellmuth Lang, at his home near Strasbourg. Each time he gave Lang a different hour for their return to La Roche-Guyon. That in itself worried Lang; it was unlike the field marshal to be so undecisive. “He sounded terribly depressed on the phone,” Lange recalls, “and that was not like him either.” The departure time was finally set. “We will leave at one o’clock sharp from Freudenstadt,” Rommel told his aide. As Lang hung up the phone he reasoned that Rommel was delaying their departure in order to see Hitler. He did not know that at Berchtesgaden no one but Hitler’s adjutant, Major General Schmundt, was even aware that Rommel was in Germany.
*General Speidel has told me that he called Rommel “around 6:00 A.M. on a private wire.” He says the same thing in his own book Invasion 1944. But General Speidel had his times confused. For example, his book states that the field marshal left La Roche-Guyon on June 5—not on June 4, as Captain Hellmuth Lang and Colonel Hans George von Tempelhof have stated and as the Army Group B War Diary records. On D Day the diary lists only one call to Rommel: the 10:15 A.M. call. The entry reads: “Speidel informs Field Marshal Rommel by phone on the situation. Commander in Chief Army Group B is going to return to his headquarters today.”
*For his performance on Utah, Roosevelt was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. On July 12, General Eisenhower confirmed his appointment as the 90th Division’s commanding general. Roosevelt never learned of the appointment. He died that same evening of a heart attack.
6
ON UTAH BEACH the roar of trucks, tanks, half-tracks and jeeps almost drowned out the sporadic whine of German 88s. It was the noise of victory; the 4th Division was moving inland faster than anyone had anticipated.
On Exit 2, the only open causeway running in from the beach, two men stood directing the flood of traffic. Both were generals. On one side of the road stood Major General Raymond O. Barton, commander of the 4th Division, on the other the boyishly exuberant Brigadier General Teddy Roosevelt. As Major Gerden Johnson of the 12th Infantry Regiment came up he saw Roosevelt “stomping up and down the dusty road, leaning on his cane and smoking his pipe almost as unperturbed as though he were in the middle of Times Square.” Roosevelt spotted Johnson and yelled, “Hi, Johnny! Keep right on the road, you’re doing fine! It’s a great day for hunting, isn’t it?” It was a triumphant moment for Roosevelt. His decision to bring the 4th in two thousand yards from the planned touchdown point could have been disastrous. Now he watched the long lines of vehicles and men moving inland and felt an immense personal satisfaction.*
But Barton and Roosevelt, despite their air of unconcern, shared a secret fear: Unless the traffic could be kept constantly moving, the 4th could be stopped dead in its tracks by a determined German counterattack. Again and again the two generals unsnarled traffic jams. Stalled trucks were ruthlessly pushed off the road. Here and there blazing vehicles, victims of enemy shells, threatened to halt the advance. Tanks bulldozed them into the inundated area where troops were sloshing inland. About 11:00 A.M. Barton got the good news; Exit 3, just one mile away, was open. To ease the pressure Barton immediately sent his tanks rumbling off in the direction of the newly opened exit. The 4th was rolling, rushing toward the link-up with the hard-pressed paratroopers.
When it came, the link-up was unspectacular—lone men meeting one another in unexpected places, often with humorous and emotional results. Corporal Louis Merlano of the 101st may well have been the first airborne soldier to encounter troops of the 4th Division. With two other paratroopers, Merlano, who had landed among the beac
h obstacles just above the original Utah Beach, had fought his way almost two miles down the coast. He was tired, dirty and battered when he met the 4th Division soldiers. He stared at them for a moment and then asked irritably, “Where the hell have you guys been?”
Sergeant Thomas Bruff of the 101st watched a 4th Division scout come off the causeway near Pouppeville, “carrying his rifle like a squirrel gun.” The scout looked at the weary Bruff. “Where’s the war?” he inquired. Bruff, who had landed eight miles from his drop zone and had fought all night with a small group under the command of General Maxwell Taylor, growled at the soldier. “Anywhere from here on back. Keep going, buddy, you’ll find it.”
Near Audouville-la-Hubert, Captain Thomas Mulvey of the 101st was hurrying toward the coast along a dirt road when “a soldier with a rifle popped into view from the edge of the bushes, about seventy-five yards ahead.” Both men dived for cover. Cautiously they emerged, rifles ready, and in wary silence stared at each other. The other man demanded that Mulvey drop his rifle and advance with arms raised. Mulvey suggested that the stranger do the same. “This,” says Mulvey, “went on for several go-rounds, with neither of us giving an inch.” Finally Mulvey, who could now see that the other man was a U.S. soldier, stood up. The two met in the middle of the road, shook hands and slapped each other on the back.
In Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, Pierre Caldron, the baker, saw paratroopers high in the steeple of the church waving a big orange identification panel. Within a few moments a long line of men, marching in single file, came down the road. As the 4th Division passed through, Caldron lifted his little son high on his shoulders. The boy was not fully recovered from his tonsillectomy of the day before, but this was a sight Caldron did not want his son to miss. Suddenly the baker found himself crying. A stocky U.S. soldier grinned at Caldron and shouted, “Vive la France!” Caldron smiled back, nodding his head. He could not trust himself to speak.
The Longest Day Page 24
