Salinger

by David Shields

  STAFF SERGEANT DAVID RODERICK: The beach at Utah Beach had a long and gentle upward slope. We surprised the Germans by assaulting Utah at low tide when the obstacles would be exposed. However, that gave our troops over one hundred yards of exposure in addition to approximately 100 yards of water. Our 4th Infantry Division troops were debarked in 3 feet to 6 feet of water and struggled the approximate 200 yards to the seawall. The seawall was 3 feet to 8 feet high with sand dunes behind them as high as 10 feet. Fortifications along the beach could sweep it with small arms fire, machine guns, and artillery.

  My opinion is that the only question Salinger had—the only question any of us had—was “Am I gonna make it? Am I gonna make it to the beach?” I was particularly anxious about that because I wasn’t a good swimmer. The life preservers that they gave you were a single wide strip that went around your waist, and you had all this heavy equipment on your back. If you weren’t careful, if you fell in the water and inflated that thing, it might just turn you upside down and you’d drown.

  PRIVATE ALBERT SOHL: “Get ready!” the coxswain shouted above the laboring engine. He skillfully swerved our craft inland between the milling maritime traffic. Sporadic explosions from inland artillery marched along the water’s edge on invisible seven-league boots. My heart was pounding faster, but I still could not see anyone on shore resembling our foe. Approximately fifty yards from the beach, our pilot shoved the screws into reverse. As the boat hove to, he abruptly released the forward ramp. Guns blasted from afar. Planes zoomed overhead. Ragged shards of black smoke from swift-moving destroyers drifted across the chaotic scene. “This is the end of the line!” the coxswain shouted above the din. “Move your asses, I gotta go back for more passengers.”

  COLONEL GERDEN F. JOHNSON: The men felt their muscles tighten as the word was whispered back that the coast was just ahead. As they raced toward the shore, the skipper yelled for more blankets. That meant there were wounded on the beach, which scared the hell out of everyone. The immediate problem of every man came sharply into focus. Everyone knew that if they were going to get through that day alive, they would first have to survive the run into the beach. Nothing else mattered now. It was the all-important thing. If they made it, somehow they would have to live through what would seem an eternity of wading through water from the ramp to the landing craft to the beach—wading while held back by the burden of heavy equipment—an eternity when they would feel nakedly exposed to the murderous fire of someone behind the beach.

  GENERAL MATTHEW RIDGWAY: For the first time I saw the loneliest and most ominous of all landscapes, a battlefield. And I knew for the first time that strange exhilaration that grips a man when he knows that somewhere out there in the distance, hostile eyes are watching him and that at any moment a bullet he may never hear, fired by an enemy he cannot see, may strike him.

  CAPTAIN GEORGE MAYBERRY: Never before in my life had I wanted so badly to run, but I could only wade slowly forward. It was approximately a hundred yards to the edge of the shore and it took me two minutes to reach the shallow water. Those two minutes were extremely long. Even on the beach I couldn’t run, as my uniform was sodden and heavy and my legs were numb and cramped.

  Heavy shells commenced exploding on the beach, as well as sporadic mortar fire from a short distance inland. A soldier just ahead of me was blown to pieces by a direct hit. The instant it happened, something small hit me in the stomach—it was the man’s thumb.

  STAFF SERGEANT DAVID RODERICK: I noticed equipment, life preservers, lumber from a boat that hit a mine, floating in the water. Two hundred yards away I heard a loud explosion; B Battery, artillery, hit a mine and its landing craft blew up, a tremendous explosion. There were four artillery pieces and 60 men in the landing craft. We all watched in horror as bodies and metal flew into the air: 39 of the 60 men were killed.

  —

  STAFF SERGEANT DAVID RODERICK: We moved fast. Everyone’s goal was the same: Get off and get to the seawall as quickly as possible. We were directly exposed to enemy fire. I remember one guy who went in with the first wave, struggling to stay afloat once he got off the landing craft. Some big guy grabbed him by the seat of the pants, lifted him up, and said, “Hey, Shorty, you better get your feet on the ground.” Before Shorty could thank the guy, his rescuer took a bullet through the head.

  Artillery poured down on us and snipers picked off my friends. In fact, the first man killed under my command was shot between the eyes on the beach by a German sniper. I could hear machine guns further down the beach where one battalion was attacking an enemy fortification.

  U.S. soldiers behind a seawall at Utah Beach.

  JOHN McMANUS: There was a photo of an American soldier killed by a sniper on Utah, right before he got to the seawall. His body looked pristine, killed by a single shot to the head. It was one of the long-term images of Utah Beach.

  WERNER KLEEMAN: Once we were on the beach we saw hundreds of little flags bearing the warning “Achtung, Minen!” (Attention! Mines!), but the mines turned out to be dummies. We saw that some soldiers had already been killed and were lying in a ditch before the seawall.

  JOSEPH BALKOSKI: The 4th Division’s entire first wave, consisting of more than 600 infantrymen in 20 landing craft, had come ashore considerably south of its intended landing point.

  [Brigadier-General Theodore Roosevelt Jr.] was one of the first soldiers to discern this disturbing mistake. His command—“We’re going to start the war from right here!”—would become the defining moment of the Utah Beach invasion.

  EDWARD G. MILLER: The landmarks that Salinger had trained to spot, to orient himself once ashore, weren’t there. The only fortunate thing was that the German defenses were a bit weaker there than they might’ve been had Salinger and his unit landed farther to the north on the Cherbourg Peninsula, but nonetheless the bullets were the same. The explosions, the artillery, the churning sand, the surf, the confusion, the rain, the smoke, the seasickness.

  Advancing on Utah Beach, D-Day.

  Salinger saw an introduction to combat that I don’t think he or, for that matter, anyone in the army was prepared for. Day One ashore for Salinger would’ve been sheer terror. The urgency of getting himself ashore, getting set up ashore, protecting himself, the soldiers around him. Fire. Smoke. Yelling. No amount of training could’ve prepared him for that. The experience was brutal and sudden and shocking. It was simply burned into his soul.

  Wounded soldier on Utah Beach.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger’s only story that directly evokes war, “The Magic Foxhole,” was written shortly after D-Day and is clearly based on that experience. It was never published. Cynical toward even the idea of war, the story relates the battle fatigue suffered by two soldiers, one of whom, Garrity, tells the story in rapid-fire monologue. In the opening scene, a chaplain who is trying to find his glasses beneath dead bodies on Normandy beach gets killed. God is now not only sightless but dead. Salinger will spend the rest of his life trying to find a replacement vision, a replacement for God.

  J. D. SALINGER (“The Magic Foxhole,” unpublished):

  We come in twenty minutes before H-Hour on D-Day. There wasn’t nothing on the beach but the dead boys of “A” and “B” Company, and some dead sailor boys, and a Chaplain that was crawling around looking for his glasses in the sand. He was the only thing that was moving, and eighty-eight shells were breaking all around him, and there he was crawling around on his hands and knees, looking for his glasses. He got knocked off. . . . That’s what the Beach was like when I come in.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: Many of the passages in “The Magic Foxhole” are autobiographical and exactly what Salinger witnessed. A similar account comes from Private Ray A. Mann, who landed on Utah Beach with the 8th Regiment.

  PRIVATE RAY A. MANN: Our team rushed out of the craft and headed across the beach in small groups[. Just like that,] about 15 to 20 feet across the beach, shells started to fall. The first few landed in a group just ahead of me. Up to that point, I felt li
ke that was almost like previous manoeuvres in Florida, even Slapton Sands. But when I saw our wounded men agonizing in pain and heard them scream, I knew that we were playing for keeps. A second group of shells landed near my group and hit apparently our First Sergeant. Never saw him again. The company clerk was also hit. . . . I finally reached the seawall and the German pillbox and paused to get my bearings. Even in the short time between my landing and the time we got to the seawall, I was shocked by the number of men who were landing and the number of wounded that I saw spread out over the beach. I saw a chaplain here and there praying over dead men.

  ALEX KERSHAW: Only combat can teach you what fear does to the human body and the mind. All Salinger wanted to do is stay alive.

  JOHN McMANUS: The D-Day veterans that I have interviewed told me they were thinking, “I can’t wait to shoot somebody,” and just a second later, “I don’t want to shoot somebody.”

  —

  STAFF SERGEANT DAVID RODERICK: Our artillery made a swishing sound going out. One of the things Salinger would have learned very quickly was what was incoming mail [German artillery] and what was outgoing mail [American artillery]. Our artillery made a swishing sound going out. Incoming mail—he would have tensed up and taken cover. He would have learned very quickly the difference in sounds, especially the German .88, which was the best artillery piece in the war, and it shot like a rifle. There wasn’t much time between when you heard it and when it landed. It was just bang and on top of you. It was a great weapon for the Germans. They also had what we called Screaming Meemies, which was mortar rocket fire that went up real high before coming down. You could hear them screech, and that brought a chill to your bones. It didn’t have an artillery shell, so it didn’t spin like one in the air, which made the noise a little different, more eerie than normal artillery. I lost eight men on the second day from Screaming Meemies.

  ALEX KERSHAW: Salinger knew that what was going to kill him was shrapnel, machine-gun fire, and artillery pieces. And the best way for him to stay alive was to get down, preferably with his head below ground; if not below ground, then as close to the ground as possible at all times.

  JOHN CLARK: I had seen many terrible sights: pieces of bodies lying on the beach, guys blown all to hell. I think the thing that bothered me most was seeing a tank with a blade moving up the road and shoving the bodies into the ditch so they wouldn’t be run over by the advancing tanks and trucks.

  A wounded soldier receiving first aid at Les Dunes de Madeleine.

  EDWARD G. MILLER: Once ashore, the first object for Salinger and the rest of his regiment was to organize and secure the beachhead. Some of the worst of the fighting wasn’t at the beaches. That was over and done with in the first few hours, but the utter grind, the sheer hell of grueling infantry combat, came once they cleared the beach.

  ALEX KERSHAW: Utah Beach was not the bloodiest beach on D-Day. There were two-hundred-odd casualties suffered by the 4th Infantry Division on Utah, and these were men Salinger knew and had trained with. The issue about Utah and D-Day is not one of casualties sustained on D-Day but the casualties sustained in the days immediately after. Because Utah was not the bloodiest beach on D-Day, there was a false sense of security among the 4th Division, certainly among Salinger and his comrades, as to what was to come next.

  Soldiers on Utah Beach after initial assault.

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  COLONEL GERDEN F. JOHNSON: Following the breakout from the beachhead, the American Third Army . . . sent six divisions racing toward Brittany in order to surround the Germans and open a route to Paris. These divisions had to be funneled through a narrow corridor east of Avranches, formed when the Germans flooded an area as large as Rhode Island.

  STEPHEN E. AMBROSE: Colonel Russell “Red” Reeder was CO [Commanding Officer] of the 12th Infantry. . . . Reeder led his men through a hole in the seawall to the top of the dune, where he saw [Theodore] Roosevelt. “Red, the causeways leading inland are all clogged up,” Roosevelt yelled. “Look at it! A procession of jeeps and not a wheel turning.” To Reeder, “Roosevelt looked tired and the cane he leaned on heightened the impression.” . . . Reeder made his decision. “We are going through the flooded area,” he yelled.

  COLONEL RUSSELL REEDER: The Germans had flooded the surrounding lowlands and meadows by damming streams, making a lake a mile wide. We had to cross the lake. We knew from spies and loyal Frenchmen that before the Germans made the lake, they had bulldozed furrows so that every now and then the water, instead of being chest high, was about ten feet deep. Back in England our general had told us we might have to ford it. He equipped us with inflatable life preservers, and we had paired men who could not swim with swimmers. I gave an arm signal and 3,000 heavily burdened infantrymen walked into the man-made lake. . . . When I saw non-swimmers near me in the lake struggling to go forward, hanging on to their weapons and equipment, I knew that we would win the war.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Colonel Reeder’s men struggled to cross the inundated fields. Later, Reeder recalled that moment: “Just before we departed England, the division commander said to me, ‘Spies have informed us that the Germans have a way to put flammable material on the flooded areas. Tell the men what to do if this happens.’ ” In a 1958 letter to Cornelius Ryan, Reeder remarked, “I’m still searching for an answer.”

  STAFF SERGEANT DAVID RODERICK: There were only four causeways—we called them “causeways” or “exits”—that ran through those flooded areas toward Sainte-Mère-Église. Salinger would have had to get across the beach, over the seawall and the sand dune, onto the exits, and across the exits, where he would have begun to make his struggle inland. The 82nd Airborne and the 101st Airborne were responsible for being sure that we were able to cross the causeways. The 101st was to drop inland and attack and control the inward entrances. The 82nd was to protect the whole landing on the other side of Sainte-Mère-Église.

  At this time, my hope, Salinger’s hope—all of our hopes—was that rather than our just being shot or killed on the beach, Airborne would be able to control those exits so we wouldn’t get caught out in the open, because if we got caught in the causeways or the flooded area, we were gonna be slaughtered.

  We went six miles inland the first day, didn’t stop until about midnight. We’d had to walk across the flooded area, and when we came onto a dry road, there were a couple villages where they gave us some wine.

  ALEX KERSHAW: Salinger probably thought landing on D-Day was going to be the hardest thing, but in the days after he landed, when he went into a series of fields and hedgerows, he would have learned that everything he’d been taught in basic training didn’t apply. Every field was going to cost twenty, thirty guys. One field of one hundred yards would sometimes cost a whole platoon. They had to advance day after day. Sometimes a whole company, two hundred guys, would spend a day taking one field of a hundred yards.

  The infamous hedgerows.

  COLONEL GERDEN F. JOHNSON: In choosing their defensive positions, the Germans had wisely taken advantage of an area soon to become famous as the hedgerow country. The hedgerows of Normandy, according to local legend, were planted by the Romans to protect their small fields from half-civilized local tribes. Hedgerows are mounds of earth with stone and twisted roots imbedded in them, packed tight by the centuries into tough, steep-sided walls. They surround small, irregular fields called “bocages” by the Norman peasants, the earth and stone ramparts themselves being from three to seven feet high, often in double rows with a ditch between them. . . . The hedgerows made excellent fortifications. A handful of Germans with a few machine-guns hiding behind the hedges could hold off a regiment of infantry. The summer foliage concealed them from the air. A few tanks, strategically placed in the corners of fields under overhanging branches, gave terrific firepower to the enemy infantry.

  CLYDE STODGHILL: Bodies were lying in a field, and there were cries for help. Some who had fallen were moving a little and some lay still. Several of those who moved would jerk as aimed shots from Germ
an riflemen found their mark. Some men had taken shelter behind dead cows, but none dared rise up to fire. No one was still running toward the German hedgerow. The frontal attack had been doomed from the start, of course. Our ranks were considerably thinner, and one German was dead; that was all that had been accomplished.

  COLONEL GERDEN F. JOHNSON: We ran into elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, bloody but tough. They told us how the Nazis had slit the throats of their paratroopers as they dangled helplessly from the shrouds of their parachutes caught in trees, of deliberate murder on the ground before the men could get clear of their chutes. Our men listened with rising anger—mingled with admiration for these comrades of the 82nd who had paved the way for us. Fear and doubt melted into one unanimous passion of hate.

  STAFF SERGEANT DAVID RODERICK: Happy Birthday to me, 22 today. How nice it would be to be at home instead of here on the coast of France.

  BILL GARVIN: During the days that followed, we became hardened to the realities of war. [The Germans] had the advantage of concealment, position selection, and withdrawal routes. We, the aggressors, had no choice but to advance into their gun sights if we were to take ground. We began losing heavily from snipers, constant artillery, and high concussion Nebelwerfers or Screaming Meemies fired in salvoes with grinding and wailing sound. The concussion from the close explosion of these rockets was so great that with helmet chinstraps fastened, one’s neck could easily break.

  DEBORAH DASH MOORE: Salinger had to keep going through the hedgerow fighting, which was very difficult fighting. He would have barely moved a couple of feet, and he would have seen a lot of guys go down. He would have seen men he cared about wounded, killed.