by Jay Winik
Now, it was two hours after midnight, and a bright moon lit up the sky.
Cradling their guns or lighting cigarettes, the men were struck by how placid the water was. The air was brisk, and the visibility was fair; morale among the men was high. Some hours earlier, during the last flickers of daylight, assault forces of the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division had successfully disembarked and gone ashore on Slapton Sands. Now with HMS Azalea in the rear, the convoy of ships prepared to make the night assault. It was an imposing sight as eight Allied landing ships moved steadily toward Slapton Sands. On board were many elements of the invasion: engineers; chemical experts; quartermaster troops; waterproof tanks; and jeeps.
Earlier in the day, Eisenhower himself had watched some of the exercises. At last, everything seemed in readiness.
But little did the troops or their commanders realize that across the very same water, German listening posts on Rommel’s Atlantic Wall were steadily picking up the increased chatter of American radio traffic about the training assault. Though this was only an exercise, this was one of Eisenhower’s worst nightmares; the Germans had been alerted to the Allies’ activity.
Suddenly, everything went wrong. Nine supercharged German torpedo boats emerged like ghosts out of the darkness into Lyme Bay; moving stealthily and painted black for nighttime camouflage, they glided, unimpeded while observing radio silence. For the Americans, this was a disaster in the making. It began with human error. When, just after midnight, one of the accompanying British picket ships spotted the German torpedo boats—which by then had breached the Allies’ westward defenses, another egregious oversight—the report quickly reached a British corvette, but not the American vessels. Because of a typographical error in the orders, the U.S. ships were using a different frequency from the British naval headquarters ashore. These mistakes would be costly.
Within the hour, there was mayhem.
For a few moments, some of the Americans assumed these hundred-foot German attack ships might be part of the exercise. Actually, in their codebooks was a special signal, “W boats attacking,” to be used if they spotted a convoy of German vessels. Suspecting nothing, however, they took no defensive actions, and the surprise was complete.
The Germans’ E-boats began firing torpedoes. The next thing the Americans felt was a furious jolt. Then there was a deafening sound.
Geysers of water spewed into the air as the German torpedoes punched wide holes in the unprepared American ships. As the soldiers watched in horror, the LST 531 was hit and quickly burst into flames. The torpedoes tore through the starboard side, exploding first in the tank deck and then in the engine room. At this stage there was little the Americans could do. Within seconds, more torpedoes hit their mark. It seemed as though the fires might be containable, but then they quickly began to spread at almost exponential speed; the flames were being fed by the gasoline in the vehicles aboard. Savage explosion followed explosion. And men were running, stumbling, or crawling. The heat and smoke were so intense that gasping firefighters were forced to abandon their efforts. Soon, the crackling of flames mingled with the wild screams of the soldiers—while pleading for help, they were roasting alive. The sounds and sights were appalling. Severed limbs and headless bodies were strewn about. And with the gamey scent of charred flesh filling the air, blood was mingled with the salty water.
The sky throbbed with flashes of bright yellow and white light—the Germans were sending up magnesium flares. The Americans sought to return fire, but to no avail. When that didn’t work, the decision was made for the ships to go their separate ways. This dispersal didn’t work either. Elsewhere, German torpedoes tore into a second ship, LST 289, though here at least the damage was not fatal. Everywhere on LST 289 were blackened holes, twisted steel, and flaming oil; the ship lost its stern, but after recoiling, it somehow survived and hobbled into port. From another ship, American troops watched dumbstruck as a surface torpedo screamed toward LST 58, then barely missed it. A third ship, that had been struck earlier, LST 507, was not so lucky. As the men scrambled to unleash its guns, there were two thunderous explosions and great columns of fire rose from the vessel’s belly. Soon, water shot through a hole in the ship’s hull and over the sides, and the electric power was cut. As the alarm began to sound for the men to abandon ship, suddenly the ship buckled, then began to roll. In desperation, men ran about on the decks. Within only six minutes, the vessel sank. In the course of the battle, five other ships would be damaged as well.
There are many ways to lose one’s life in war, and this was among the cruelest. Trapped below the decks and engulfed by flooding water, hundreds of frantic soldiers and sailors went down with their ships. In the chaos, others appeared to be better off; they managed to leap into the sea. But many of them soon drowned anyway, because they had not been taught how to put on their life preservers; they had wrapped these around their waists rather than under their armpits. Many other men drowned because their overcoats were waterlogged. They struggled a bit, then in almost slow-motion, disappeared underwater. Still others were shocked by the freezing water. While shrieking for help, they slipped into the sea, succumbing to hypothermia.
Some men were crying hysterically—they couldn’t swim and were terrified of water.
Few of them made it.
And for those who did, clinging to life rafts, they were shaking and sobbing quietly to themselves, thanking God that they had somehow survived. They may have gotten out in the nick of time, but they suffered the agony of remembering what they had seen, and of not knowing what had happened to their comrades. There was also fear about what the next few hours would bring, and whether they would be found.
If the exercise went disastrously awry, so did the rescue. As the night wore on, more men, puking their guts out on the rafts, simply gave up, sometimes only minutes before the rescue ships made their way into Lyme Bay. It took as much as an hour for an Allied flotilla to dash westward, to reach Slapton Sands. When these seamen arrived, they were stunned at the carnage. At first the entire scene seemed suspended in an eerie, unnerving stillness. Hundreds of bloated, burned corpses floated and bobbed in the water. Most were fully clad, with steel helmets firmly fastened. Indeed, many had such badly charred hands and blackened faces that from a distance the rescue workers thought they were “colored troops.” And there were hundreds of pieces of unrecognizable flesh that had simply bled into the water.
It was also frightfully hot as the atmosphere was still thick with the odor of smoke and heated air. Ammunition was exploding. Meanwhile, the sea was covered with oil, and fires continued to burn furiously, hissing and sparking and crackling. The bodies, the wreckage, the twisted steel, and the other remains—life preservers, guns, ammunition cartridges, sinking tanks, burned jeeps, and grotesquely mangled trucks—were all lit by the infernal glow.
Many of the numb, exhausted survivors were swallowing a toxic combination of blood, fuel, and salt water. Hanging on to their life rafts, they fought off the urge to sleep and continued to drift for hours in the mist and the “unbearably cold” water, waiting to be rescued. Some never were.
Throughout the evening and early morning, rescue teams—some with tears in their eyes—sought to save as many of the living, and to recover as many of the dead, as they could, but often in vain. One navy man recalled, “It was the saddest thing I ever saw,” and a British rescuer deemed it “a ghastly sight.” For days, bodies would continue to wash ashore. The dead totaled 749—551 soldiers and 198 sailors—and 300 others were wounded; this was the most costly training exercise in the entire war. In fact, more men were lost in this mock assault than in the actual battle of Utah Beach. For that matter, more Americans died at Slapton Sands than on all of D-Day’s beaches besides Omaha.
Attended by his naval aide Harry Butcher, an infuriated Eisenhower, pacing in his office, was promptly informed of these terrible losses. Butcher remarked to Eisenhower that he was concerned about “the absence of toughness and alertness” of the young Americ
an officers in the exercises. In this, Butcher was not alone: many witnesses considered Slapton Sands a bad omen. And for Eisenhower and the Allied high command, there was another profound concern. Ten officers aboard the sunken ships were among the very few who knew exactly where the D-Day landings would take place—and all of these ten were now missing.
It quickly became a race between who would find these officers first: Eisenhower or Rommel. If they fell into the Germans’ hands, it would be a disaster of the worst order. The Americans and the British, “in a panic,” immediately began a thorough search of the bay to find them.
Eisenhower knew that the fate of the invasion was potentially at stake.
AWAKENING THE NEXT MORNING, a recuperating Roosevelt knew about none of this. No one had called him. His codeine shot had worn off, but not his pain. Still intensely uncomfortable, he remained under the doctors’ orders to stay in bed. For once he complied, bringing to mind a wry cable he had sent to Churchill the previous December, when the prime minister was laid low with pneumonia. “The Bible says you must do just what [your doctor] orders,” the president had written from Washington, “but at this moment I cannot put my finger on the verse and chapter.” It was perhaps significant that over the fireplace in his room was an etching depicting his alma mater, Harvard, winning a crew race against Oxford in 1876. Now, of course, Roosevelt was in an altogether different kind of contest: holding out until Overlord could begin a second front. But as his commanders moved Allied armies and naval convoys around like pieces on a chessboard, Roosevelt, nestled in the Baruch mansion, could scarcely move himself.
Nevertheless, his determination never flagged. As the days passed, the president’s health improved. His face noticeably brightened—one reporter observed that the “tired seams were smoothed from his face”—and his spirits and demeanor had also improved considerably. He cut his drinking back to one and a half “cocktails per evening,” and tanned himself “brown as a berry.” The New York Times editorialized “We can all be glad he has had a chance to enjoy a month of rest and relaxation from the almost overwhelming burdens which his office forces him to carry. He earned every hour of it.” William Hassett, Roosevelt’s aide, agreed, noting that his boss was “radiant and happy,” insisting he had had a complete rest. But Hassett added one disquieting note: “He is thin, and although his color is good I fear that he has not entirely shaken the effects of the flu, followed by bronchitis, which have bedeviled him for many weeks now.”
After Roosevelt’s train reached Washington on Sunday morning, May 7, he jauntily wrote to Harry Hopkins, that he had “slept 12 hours out of the 24, sat in the sun, never lost my temper, and decided to let the world go hang.”
He added playfully, “The interesting thing is the world didn’t hang. I have a terrific pile in my basket, but most of the stuff has answered itself.”
5
“This Is the Year 1944”
THAT WAS NOT QUITE true. One supreme irony of the war was that a man who couldn’t walk, and whose health was failing, was now symbolically carrying the free world on his back.
In the spring of 1944, amid the rising crisis for the Jews and the escalating military situation on the ground, Franklin Roosevelt had been president of the United States for an unprecedented eleven years—three years longer than George Washington, six years longer than Abraham Lincoln. For all those who knew him, or for those under the Nazi thumb in distant parts of the globe who knew of him, he remained the most extraordinary and enigmatic political leader perhaps on the earth. Like his wartime partner, Winston Churchill, he was an overwhelming personality and a superbly convincing figure. With just a subtle, well-timed hint, he could rouse deep passions and even outsize affection. In the run-up to his third term in 1940, Roosevelt sent a message telling the Democratic delegates that he would not be a candidate unless he was drafted. And the loudspeaker at the convention had shouted back, “We want Roosevelt . . . THE WORLD WANTS ROOSEVELT!”
His conversations were an intoxicating blend of earthy wisdom and carefully rendered humor. His wartime summits were marked by a subtle blend of diplomacy and a thespian’s gift of charm—he invariably knew when to give in, or when to hold firm. And his fireside chats galvanizing a nation to arms were the stuff of legend. So was his cunning, which was well hidden, and his steadfast defense of democracy, which was not.
Despite his deteriorating health, his prodigious determination and singular focus on winning the war were almost without equal. Perhaps they had to be. In the western theater alone, many millions fervently depended on his leadership: the British, the free French, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Danes, and the Norwegians; the embattled peoples of Luxembourg, Poland, and Czechoslovakia; the Greeks and the Turks; and increasingly, the Italians and Hungarians as well. There was also Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leadership, not to mention the peoples of the Soviet Union; and, of course, the dwindling numbers of European and Soviet Jews.
Roosevelt was sixty-two, and more than ever, the burdens of leadership sat heavy on him. Weary from the incessant fatigue and fighting, he was now trying to lose weight to relieve his painful gallbladder. His face was haggard and gaunt, and his shirt collar gaped around his neck. His blood pressure continued to rise and his skin had taken on a grayish hue. With victory in sight, there was now a race between his own body, the enemy within; and the Axis powers, the enemies without. Did he ever brood, feeling that opportunities were slipping away? He never said so—never to his aides, never to his intimates, never to the nation or the world at large. Never while scribbling notes in the corners of memorandums or while mixing drinks during his beloved cocktail hour. Never while cherishing his dream of a peaceful postwar order. And however much he was ailing, however much he may have had trouble juggling all the competing demands on him, Roosevelt knew one thing: under the strain of the Allied assault, Berlin, the center of the Nazi Empire, was trembling, and Hitler’s Third Reich itself was increasingly at the point of collapse.
Now, Roosevelt felt, he had to keep pushing. Moreover, he believed there was a spillover effect. As the War Department stated, “We must constantly bear in mind the most effective relief which can be given victims of enemy persecution is to ensure the speedy defeat of the Axis.”
WAS THAT TRUE? IRONICALLY, this narrow focus on the battlefront was just what the Nazis were counting on as they prepared their death machine at Auschwitz to slaughter an unprecedented number of victims under the cloak of secrecy. Now, in May 1944, a crisis would come to a head: between the battlefield, with Operation Overlord looming, and the gas chambers in Auschwitz.
IN SLOVAKIA, VRBA AND Wetzler’s report had been typed. One copy was given to a courier bound for Istanbul. Another copy went to the Slovak Orthodox Jewish rabbi, who promised to try to smuggle it into Switzerland, because from there it could reach the west. A third copy was passed to the Vatican’s chargé d’affaires in Bratislava. But arguably, except for Roosevelt himself, the most important recipients would be the Hungarian Jews. One of the men who had questioned Vrba, Oskar Krasnansky, translated the report into Hungarian and gave it to the head of the Hungarian Jewish Rescue Committee, Rudolf Kastner. So by early May 1944, the committee head and his advisers had the report. But there the report stayed, hidden. Remarkably, these men made no move to release it, to share it, or to publicize it in any way in Budapest or beyond. Why?
As Vrba and Wetzler were reaching freedom, Adolf Eichmann and the Germans were at the Nazi headquarters in Budapest concocting a colossal Ponzi scheme to confound the Jews and Allies alike, all the while weaving further threads of entrapment, mass death, and disposal. They began by bartering with the leaders of the Hungarian Jews in what would become known as “blood for goods.” The Germans proposed that Hungary’s Jewish population would be spared death if the Nazis received hard goods, such as trucks: ten thousand trucks (likely to be used against the Soviets), along with tea, soap, coffee, and sugar. Desperate for any possibility of escape, desperate to live, the Hungarian Jewish leaders gr
asped at this German straw. They dispatched Joel Brand, a member of Hungary’s Relief and Rescue Committee, to negotiate on their behalf; on May 19, he arrived in a small plane at Istanbul bearing a stunning offer. As a goodwill gesture, he said, the Germans were even willing to release a few thousand Jews as soon as the Allies agreed to the plan. But absent an agreement, the Jews would be killed. The British, deeply suspicious, detained Brand and began a detailed interrogation of him in Cairo.
For their part, the Soviets balked, believing it was a ruse by Germany to establish a separate peace with the western Allies. The Americans and British were also deeply skeptical; the American OSS called the offer an “incredible Nazi black maneuver.” Still, no one could be certain whether the Nazis were seriously contemplating “saving” any of Hungary’s Jews or this was simply an elaborate attempt to divide both the Jews and the Allies.
By then, however, it hardly mattered. The first trains from Budapest had already long since left for Auschwitz, and were now arriving there at a relentless pace.
The mass uprising that Vrba and Wetzler had believed would take place in Hungary was not to be. In fact, by sending Vrba and Wetzler’s report to the Jewish leaders in Hungary, who at that moment were focused on the chance of making a separate deal with the Nazis, the Slovakian Jews were unwittingly playing into Hitler’s hands. And so, hundreds of thousands of Jews unknowingly boarded railcars that chugged slowly toward death.
AS ELIE WIESEL NOTES, Roosevelt knew in broad brushstrokes about this impending tragedy—though it would be months before the full Vrba-Wetzler report reached the White House—and so did Churchill. The Vatican also knew about it, and so did Switzerland. And so did the New York Times—even without the Vrba-Wetzler report. Only the intended victims remained in the dark. “Panic in Hungary would have been better than panic which came to the victims in front of the burning pits in Birkenau,” Vrba later wrote. “Eichmann knew it,” he added, “that is why he smoked cigars with the Kastners, ‘negotiated,’ exempted the ‘real great rabbis,’ and meanwhile without panic among the deportees planned to ‘resettle’ hundreds of thousands in an orderly fashion.”
