by Jay Winik
The nation agreed.
SINCE DAWN, THE NATION had been marking the day. In cities across the land, bells rang. For the first time since the funeral of Chief Justice John Marshall in 1835, Philadelphia’s mayor rapped the Liberty Bell with a wooden mallet, and the sound was broadcast from coast to coast over the web of radio airwaves. Meanwhile, on Broadway the show did not go on; the theaters stayed dark for D-Day. There were no baseball games. The New York Stock Exchange halted for two minutes of silent prayer before trading began. Macy’s was closed, but in a burst of patriotism, the store rigged up a radio outside to give updates about the invasion throughout the day. In Columbus, Ohio, citizens paused for five minutes to join the national prayer: every truck, every bus, every car, every worker, and every pedestrian froze in place. And across the rest of the nation, in small towns and large, air raid sirens screeched, factory whistles hooted, and telephone switchboards were overwhelmed with friends and families calling each other.
The New York Times editorialized, “We have come to the hour for which we were born.” Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York City announced, “It is the most exciting moment in our lives.” Worshippers carried their Bibles to churches, or rushed to synagogues across the nation. In office buildings and on assembly lines, men and women spontaneously halted work, put their hands over their hearts, and prayed before returning to their tasks. At the same time, masses of people flooded to the hospitals to donate blood. Across the globe, there were wild celebrations. In England, people spontaneously stood and sang “God Save the King”; in Moscow, the Party elite and common people alike danced in the streets; and in Rome, newly liberated Italians waved American, French, and British flags.
As early as December 16, 1943, the New York Times had commented that Germany was “suffering severely,” and that 1944 could well be the year when it would “collapse.”
If all went as planned, for Roosevelt, D-Day would be the greatest day of his presidency.
6
“Could We Be Granted Victory This Year, 1944?”
ROOSEVELT MAY HAVE BEEN far away from the battle, but in his mind’s eye he was able to visualize the carnage now taking place on the beaches of Normandy. A former assistant secretary of the navy, as president he routinely liked to drop by the White House map room with Admiral Leahy. This low-ceilinged basement room had previously been a coatroom for women and then a billiard room, with score beads draped along a makeshift wire strung between the walls and cue sticks racked alongside. But after Pearl Harbor, it was transformed. Now it held detailed charts of the Atlantic and Pacific military theaters that were updated two or three times daily to reflect the ever-shifting locations of the enemy and Allied forces. Here, Roosevelt could examine the rapidly changing military tides marked by little multicolored flags, curved arrows in thick grease pencil, and differently shaped pins. The special pins marking the location of the Big Three particularly delighted him: Churchill’s pin was in the shape of a cigar, Stalin’s was a briar pipe, and his own was a cigarette holder. As D-Day progressed, Roosevelt watched with satisfaction when the grease pencil markings moved steadily off the beaches and out into the French countryside. At this moment, everything was in the hands of Eisenhower and his men.
Seven months earlier, en route to the summits in Cairo and Tehran, Roosevelt had taken a detour and spent the day with Eisenhower viewing the ruins of the ancient city of Carthage. There, he was able to gaze at the hideous remnants of the bloody North African campaign that the Allies had waged against Rommel and Kesselring: burned-out shells and tanks littering the plain, blown-up ammunition dumps, blackened tank traps, and uncleared minefields left over from the battle for Tunisia. As he rode with Eisenhower in the backseat of a dusty Cadillac, the general recounted at great length the pitched, often bewildering winter campaign the Allies had fought at Tebourba, Medjez-el-Bab, and the Kasserine Pass, as well as the spring struggles when they finally choked off the Axis forces at Tunis.
Reaching back into history, Roosevelt mused aloud about whether the U.S. and German tanks might have been fighting on the same ground involved in the legendary battle of Zama, where the great Roman general Scipio Africanus had defeated Hannibal and the Carthaginians on the vast, open plain. Would the Allies defeat the Germans on D-Day as the world’s earliest republic had routed the Carthaginians? Roosevelt surely hoped so.
Munching on a sandwich, Roosevelt had then joked, “Ike, if one year ago, you’d offered to bet on this day the president of the United States would be having his lunch in the Tunisian roadside, what odds would you have demanded?”
Now, Roosevelt could well have been asking, what were the odds that a president who three months earlier had appeared to be dying would be presiding over the destruction of Hitler’s vaunted Wehrmacht?
DESTRUCTION WAS THE WORD. The long wait, the huge buildup of forces, and the intricate planning by Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military command—all were now paying dividends. Along many miles of the Normandy coast, villages were all smoke and flames. The Allied armies had jabbed, bruised, and pushed forward against the Nazi defenders. Within hours, thousands of Allied planes crisscrossed the sky above, while below the beaches were swarming with men, tanks, and amphibious supply carriers, as well as fresh supplies that were arriving as quickly as the sea and tide would allow. On Utah Beach, the troops had met with little resistance, and what resistance they did meet was second-rate: the Germans quickly folded. At the British and Canadian sites—Sword, Gold, and Juno beaches—the fighting also went better than expected. Even at Omaha, despite the dead and wounded strewn along the beach, despite the gridlock of intermingled vehicles and bodies, despite the agonizing hours of bloodshed, by the day’s end some thirty-four thousand American troops were able to gain a foothold on French soil.
The Germans were not only outmatched but outsmarted. Remarkably, Rommel wasn’t even at the front. On June 5, he had chosen to be at his home near Ulm, spending a day of repose strolling with his wife, Lucie. She was trying on the new sandals that he had bought for her birthday. As a result, on D-Day itself, the vaunted German commander was nowhere to be found. He was not alerted about the attack until 10:15 a.m. He then spent the next several hours madly racing over four hundred miles of road to his ornate command post at La Roche Guyon, cursing himself and shouting at his driver, “Tempo! Tempo! Tempo!”—“Faster, faster, faster!” With the Luftwaffe a mere shell of itself, Rommel was reluctant to fly. Incredibly, he didn’t arrive at his headquarters until after 6 p.m. By then, the beaches, bluffs, and artillery nests had been all but cleared. Meanwhile Hitler, pale and delusional, was cloistered at Berchtesgaden, reminiscing about the old days and watching newsreels during the evening. Actually, when the news of the invasion arrived, he was asleep and his staff was afraid to wake him. When he finally arose from his bed at 10 a.m., he vainly believed he could crush the invasion, but he delayed the dispatch of two panzer tank divisions, which were stationed 120 miles away from the beaches, until it was too late. “We waited for orders, and we waited,” the commander of the Twenty-first Panzer Division later lamented. “We couldn’t understand why we weren’t getting any orders at all.”
So the tanks stayed in place, vulnerable to the Allied bombing runs. And when their orders finally arrived, they could only crawl along under a shroud of tall oaks in the roadside woods until darkness came to avoid the relentless bombardment from overhead; some panzers were pulverized anyway. In the meantime, the German forces across Normandy were powerless against the Allied air attacks that pummeled the railroads, highways, marshaling yards, and bridges, and which bottled up the German reinforcements in the interior. Incredibly, Hitler’s other top general, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, continued to believe throughout the morning that the landings were a diversion.
The contrast between the Americans and the Germans couldn’t have been greater. At noon, an invigorated Eisenhower was crouched over maps in his command tent. He turned on his heel, shuffled over to his door, pushed it open, and look
ed up into the sky, magnificently declaring, “The sun is shining.”
And thousands of Allied planes were ruling that sunny sky—they flew ten thousand sorties on D-Day. What they saw as they returned home was unforgettable: the French countryside was littered everywhere with white parachutes and pieces of crushed gliders, while along the coast hundreds of landing craft were disembarking tens of thousands of men. It looked as though small cities had been erected on the Normandy shore. As one GI said, it was “the greatest show ever staged.”
By nightfall the Allied forces were rushing forward in such numbers that they seemed to be springing up like King Aetes’s mythical warriors rising from the soil Jason the Argonaut had scattered with dragon’s teeth. After capturing Gold Beach, the British had thrust about six and a half miles inland and linked up with the Canadians on their left. At Juno Beach, Canadian tanks sprinted inland, as far as ten miles, so quickly that they had to halt and wait for the infantry to catch up. Their forward elements penetrated deeper into France than any other division, advancing to within three miles of the outskirts of the city of Caen. At Sword Beach, after all the smoke and haze had cleared, and the fighting had died down, 29,000 British troops waded ashore, with only 630 casualties. At Utah Beach 23,000 men came ashore with only 210 killed or wounded. Nearly 18,000 paratroopers had landed during the night, though their losses had been great. When the sun finally set over Normandy, some 175,000 men—Americans, British and Canadians—were established on French soil; to be sure, in some places they had only a narrow foothold, and some of their positions were isolated, but nonetheless their presence stretched across fifty-five miles. And behind them, a million more men would be coming within a few short weeks—actually, by July 4.
One American pilot remarked, watching the beaches and sea filled with a seemingly endless stream of American men and matériel coming ashore in France, “Hitler must have been mad to declare war on the United States.”
The supposedly impregnable Atlantic Wall, a product of Hitler’s fanatical vision and thousands of frantic man-hours, had taken four years for the Germans to build, and months for Rommel to reinforce. With the exception of Omaha Beach, which took a day, the Allies cracked it in under an hour.
Now, the Allies were methodically on the move. And the Germans were left to retreat, regroup, and watch.
ON JUNE 6, AS the Allies made their way in from the beaches, two more escapees from Auschwitz—Czeslaw Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin—arrived at the Slovakian border; actually, they thought the war was over. Like Vrba and Wetzler, they were met by Slovak Jewish leaders and interviewed by Oskar Krasnansky. They had fled the camp on May 27; by that time, the Hungarians were arriving en masse. The two men told of a spur railroad track being completed by crews “working night and day.” This new track allowed transports to be brought straight to the crematoriums, without the bother of the selection process. And with the crematoriums overwhelmed, “great pits” were dug, “where corpses were burned day and night.” As Rudolf Vrba would note, “Wetzler and I saw preparations for the slaughter. Mordowicz and Rosin saw the slaughter itself.”
Inside Auschwitz, while the Allies were overrunning Normandy, on July 6 Nazi records noted that 496 Jews arrived and 297 of them were gassed.
AT THE SAME TIME, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, a Jewish businessman, Otto Frank, hiding with his wife and daughters and friends in the annex of a house on Prinsengracht, hung a map of Normandy on the wall. He followed whatever news reports he could get and used colored pins to mark how far the Allies had advanced into France and toward the Low Countries.
But even as the German war machine was slowly retreating from the beaches of Normandy, over 850 miles away, the trains continued to chug north and east, past the glory that was once Vienna, past ancient Kraków, pulling into the Auschwitz station. The disabled, the sick, the children, the elderly—all were being gassed at the astounding rate of two thousand every thirty minutes—adding up in a few hours to more people than were lost in the first day’s assault at Normandy.
By the day of the invasion ninety-two trains in the last month alone had carried almost 300,000 Hungarian Jews to death. This was as though all the inhabitants of Boston were forced onto the Metroliner and taken to Washington, D.C., to be brutally murdered—or as if the bloodshed at Normandy were repeated more than 10,000 times.
And inside the dank, drab, stuffy rooms of the “secret annex” in Amsterdam, hidden behind a hinged bookcase that disguised a door, a young Jewish girl destined for immortality, fourteen-year-old Anne Frank, waited with her family, often looking at the map on the wall. With her chestnut eyes and unceasing curiosity, Anne was all audacity and eloquence. Despite the innumerable difficulties of a life in hiding, she worked on her studies, fell in love, and did chores. Despite the madness swirling all around her, she pondered great philosophical and political questions about war and peace (“the whole globe is waging war . . . the end is not yet in sight”) and ruminated about the fate of others, “real slum kids with running noses.” And despite her own terror, she never lost her compassion, worrying about her father’s “sad eyes” and about the wretched victims sent to “filthy slaughterhouses.”
She and her family had survived the howling Nazi mobs, and the unnerving stillness in the streets after the many roundups of Jews. They had survived the endless waiting—waiting anxiously for the dreaded SS to knock on the door; waiting wistfully for deliverance by the Allies; waiting, waiting, always waiting. Anne had survived, in her own words, wandering “from one room to another, downstairs and up again, feeling like a songbird whose wings have been brutally clipped and who is beating itself in utter darkness against the bars of his cage.” And they had all survived their many quarrels, during which “the whole house thunders!”
Now, after their years of hiding from the Nazi terror, of being caged like hamsters in four small rooms, of always keeping silent when the SS walked by and even fearing to cough loudly when they had flu, D-Day was the most delirious day of Anne’s life. Often, to keep her sanity, she would climb a steep ladder to the attic, sit at the skylight and look at her beloved chestnut tree or listen to the birds, wistfully pondering the lives of the people living freely in the house opposite hers.
Free people—an almost unfathomable concept. The house across the street, owned by gentiles, might as well have been an ocean away. But perhaps no longer. Taking pen to paper, she wrote in her diary on June 6, “This is the day. The invasion has begun!” She eloquently continued: “Would the long-awaited liberation that has been talked of so much, but which still seems too wonderful, too much like a fairytale, ever come true? Could we be granted victory this year, 1944? We don’t know yet, but hope is revived within us; it gives us fresh courage, and makes us strong again.”
“Oh,” she wrote, “the best part of the invasion is that I have the feeling that friends are approaching. We’ve been oppressed by those terrible Germans for so long, they’ve had their knives so at our throats, but the thought of friends and delivery fills us with confidence!”
BUT WERE FRIENDS COMING to free them? Anne Frank didn’t know—nor did the Jews of Hungary, nor, for that matter, did Roosevelt or Churchill—that on D-Day both British and American intelligence agents were poring over air reconnaissance photos: photos that showed in chilling detail the buildings at the main camp of Auschwitz. Three photographs in particular revealed the death chambers in Birkenau. Indeed by the end of June, the reconnaissance images were so detailed that the intelligence agents could make out the ramps and people walking to the crematoriums, and with the use of a magnifying glass, even the prisoners’ tattooed numbers. Examining these aerial photographs could have been the critical first step toward bombing Auschwitz. Yet the analysts skipped over the apparatus of death—as it happens, their superiors had given them no reason to examine that part of the camp closely. They instead focused on their actual mission: the nearby synthetic rubber and oil plants, part of the so-called oil war. Those targets were crucial to the air campaign
intended to strangle Germany’s war machine.
And in the dark recesses of a distant Polish forest, the trains continued to roll into Auschwitz with melancholy regularity.
AS JUNE WORE ON, the war was far from over, even though there were increasing signs that the Nazi Reich was crumbling. On the eastern front, Stalin made good on his promise to Roosevelt at Tehran. A new summer Soviet offensive inflicted a series of calamitous defeats on the Germans: the Soviets rapidly pushed westward, cutting off the Third Panzer Army in Vitebsk and encircling the Ninth Army two days later near Bobruysk. Meanwhile, in the air, the Allied sorties continued. During the first four months of 1944, their planes had dropped 175,000 tons of bombs against Germany, while on June 6 alone, the Allied Mediterranean Air Force flew more than 2,300 sorties; they pounded rail yards and oil refineries in the Balkans and in Romania, again and again. Inside the Reich, chaos was intensifying. Munich, Bremen, Düsseldorf, and Duisberg were among the cities that suffered serious damage or even destruction; Germany’s glittering cultural centers were slowly being turned into wastelands.
And in light of all this, far from becoming a latter-day Caesar, Adolf Hitler himself was now sickly and prematurely aged. He was hunched like an old man; his left arm trembled uncontrollably, and there was shaking in his left leg. His once piercing eyes were red, his once black hair had turned gray, then white, and the skin on his face sagged. Tormented by persistent gastrointestinal distress, and unable to sleep, he was taking as many as twenty-eight different pills a day. His physical decline was matched by his mental deterioration: fits, incessant tantrums, unchecked egomania, and out-of-control paranoia. It was a fact that not once in 1944 did he show his face to deliver a speech—he intuitively understood that he no longer had the favor of the nation. And only twice did he address the country on the radio. Not, however, after D-Day.
