The Longest Day Page 6

  Eisenhower now polled his commanders one by one. General Smith thought the attack should go in on the sixth—it was a gamble, but one that should be taken. Tedder and Leigh-Mallory were both fearful that even the predicted cloud cover would prove too much for the air forces to operate effectively. It might mean that the assault would take place without adequate air support. They thought it was going to be “chancy.” Montgomery stuck to the decision that he had made the night before when the June 5 D Day had been postponed. “I would say, Go,” he said.

  It was now up to Ike. The moment had come when only he could make the decision. There was a long silence as Eisenhower weighed all the possibilities. General Smith, watching, was struck by the “isolation and loneliness” of the Supreme Commander as he sat, hands clasped before him, looking down at the table. The minutes ticked by; some say two minutes passed, others as many as five. Then Eisenhower, his face strained, looked up and announced his decision. Slowly he said, “I am quite positive we must give the order … I don’t like it, but there it is…. I don’t see how we can do anything else.”

  Eisenhower stood up. He looked tired, but some of the tension had left his face. Six hours later at a brief meeting to review the weather he would hold to his decision and reconfirm it—Tuesday, June 6, would be D Day.

  Eisenhower and his commanders left the room, hurrying now to set the great assault in motion. Behind them in the silent library a haze of blue smoke hung over the conference table, the fire reflected itself in the polished floor, and on the mantelpiece the hands of a clock pointed to 9:45.

  11

  IT WAS ABOUT 10:00 P.M. when Private Arthur B. “Dutch” Schultz of the 82nd Airborne Division decided to get out of the crap game; he might never have this much money again. The game had been going on ever since the announcement that the airborne assault was off for at least twenty-four hours. It had begun behind a tent, next it had moved under the wing of a plane, and now the session was going full blast in the hangar, which had been converted into a huge dormitory. Even here it had done some traveling, moving up and down the corridors created by the rows of double-tiered bunks. And Dutch was one of the big winners.

  How much he had won he didn’t know. But he guessed that the bundle of crumpled greenbacks, English banknotes and fresh blue-green French invasion currency he held in his fist came to more than $2,500. That was more money than he had seen at any one time in all his twenty-one years.

  Physically and spiritually he had done everything to prepare himself for the jump. Services for all denominations had been held on the airfield in the morning and Dutch, a Catholic, had gone to confession and communion. Now he knew exactly what he was going to do with his winnings. He mentally figured out the distribution. He would leave $1,000 with the adjutant’s office; he could use that on pass when he got back to England. Another $1,000 he planned to send to his mother in San Francisco to keep for him, but he wanted her to have $500 of it as a gift—she sure could use it. He had a special purpose for the remainder: that would go on a helluva blowout when his outfit, the 505th, reached Paris.

  The young paratrooper felt good; he had taken care of everything—but had he? Why did the incident of the morning keep coming back, filling him with so much uneasiness?

  At mail call that morning he had received a letter from his mother. As he tore open the envelope a rosary slid out and fell at his feet. Quickly, so that the wisecracking crowd around him wouldn’t notice, he had snatched up the beads and stuffed them into a barracks bag that he was leaving behind.

  Now the thought of the rosary beads suddenly gave rise to a question that hadn’t struck him before: What was he doing gambling at a time like this? He looked at the folded and crumpled bills sticking out between his fingers—more money than he could have earned in a year. At that moment Private Dutch Schultz knew that if he pocketed all this money, he would surely be killed. Dutch decided to take no chances. “Move over,” he said, “and let me get at the play.” He glanced at his watch and wondered how long it would take to lose $2,500.

  Schultz wasn’t the only one who acted strangely this night. Nobody, from enlisted men to generals, seemed eager to challenge the fates. Over near Newbury at the headquarters of the 101st Airborne Division, the commander, Major General Maxwell D. Taylor, was holding a long, informal session with his senior officers. There were perhaps half a dozen men in the room and one of them, Brigadier General Don Pratt, the assistant division commander, sat on a bed. While they were talking another officer arrived. Taking off his cap, he tossed it onto the bed. General Pratt leaped up, swept the cap onto the floor and said, “My God, that’s damn bad luck!” Everybody laughed, but Pratt didn’t sit on the bed again. He had chosen to lead the 101st’s glider forces into Normandy.

  As the night closed in, the invasion forces all over England continued to wait. Keyed up by months of training, they were ready to go, and the postponement had made them jittery. It was now about eighteen hours since the stand-down, and each hour had taken its toll of the patience and readiness of the troops. They did not know that D Day now was barely twenty-six hours away; it was still much too early for the news to filter down. And so, on this stormy Sunday night, men waited, in loneliness, anxiety and secret fear, for something, anything, to happen.

  They did precisely what the world expects men to do under such circumstances: They thought of their families, their wives, their children, their sweethearts. And everybody talked about the fighting that lay ahead. What would the beaches really be like? Would the landings be as tough as everybody seemed to think? Nobody could visualize D Day, but each man prepared for it in his own way.

  On the dark, wave-tossed Irish Sea, aboard the destroyer U.S.S. Herndon, Lieutenant (j.g.) Bartow Farr, Jr., tried to concentrate on a bridge game. It was difficult; there were too many sober reminders all around him that this was not just another social evening. Taped to the walls of the wardroom were large aerial reconnaissance photographs of German gun positions overlooking the Normandy beaches. These guns were the Herndon’s D-Day targets. It occurred to Farr that the Herndon would also be theirs.

  Farr was reasonably certain he would survive D Day. There had been a lot of kidding about who would come through and who wouldn’t. Back in Belfast Harbor the crew of the Corry, their sister ship, had been giving odds of ten to one against the Herndon’s return. The Herndon’s crew retaliated by spreading the rumor that when the invasion fleet set out the Corry would remain in port, because of low morale aboard ship.

  Lieutenant Farr had every confidence that the Herndon would return safe, and he with her. Still, he was glad he had written a long letter to his unborn son. It never occurred to Farr that his wife, Anne, back in New York, might give birth to a girl instead. (She didn’t. That November the Farrs had a boy.)

  In a staging area near Newhaven, Corporal Reginald Dale of the British 3rd Division sat up in his bunk and worried about his wife, Hilda. They had been married in 1940, and ever since both had longed for a child. On his last leave, just a few days before, Hilda had announced that she was pregnant. Dale was furious; all along he had sensed that the invasion was close and that he’d be in on it. “This is a hell of a time, I must say,” he had snapped. In his mind he saw again the quick hurt that had come into her eyes, and he berated himself once again for the hasty words.

  But it was too late now. He could not even telephone her. He lay back down on his bunk and, like thousands of others in British staging areas, tried to will himself to sleep.

  A few men, nerveless and cool, slept soundly. At a British 50th Division embarkation area one man was Company Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis. Long ago he had learned to sleep whenever he could. The coming attack didn’t worry Hollis too much; he had a good idea what to expect. He had been evacuated from Dunkirk, had fought with the Eighth Army in North Africa and had landed on the beaches of Sicily. Among the millions of troops in Britain that night Hollis was a rarity. He was looking forward to the invasion; he wanted to get back to France to ki
ll some more Germans.

  It was a personal matter with Hollis. He had been a dispatch rider at the time of Dunkirk, and in the town of Lille during the retreat he had seen a sight which he had never forgotten. Cut off from his unit, Hollis had taken a wrong turn in a part of the town that the Germans had apparently just passed through. He found himself in a culde-sac filled with the still warm bodies of over a hundred French men, women and children. They had been machine-gunned. Embedded in the wall behind the bodies and littering the ground were hundreds of spent bullets. From that moment Stan Hollis had become a superb hunter of the enemy. His score was now over ninety. At D Day’s end, he would notch his Sten gun with his one hundred and second victory.

  There were others who were also anxious to set foot in France. The waiting seemed interminable to Commander Philippe Kieffer and his 171 tough French commandos. With the exception of the few friends they had made in England, there had been no one for them to say goodbye to—their families were still in France.

  In their encampment near the mouth of the Hamble River, they spent the time checking weapons and studying the molded-foam-rubber terrain model of Sword Beach and their targets in the town of Ouistreham. One of the commandos, Count Guy de Montlaur, who was extremely proud to be a sergeant, was delighted to hear this night that there had been a slight change of plan: His squad would be leading the attack on the resort’s gambling casino, now believed to be a strongly defended German command post. “It will be a pleasure,” he told Commander Kieffer. “I have lost several fortunes in that place.”

  One hundred fifty miles away, in the U.S. 4th Infantry Division’s staging area, near Plymouth, Sergeant Harry Brown came off duty and found a letter waiting for him. Many times he had seen the same sort of thing in war movies, but he never thought it would happen to him: The letter contained an advertisement for Adler Elevator Shoes. The ad particularly galled the sergeant. Everyone was so short in his section that they were called “Brown’s midgets.” The sergeant was the tallest—five feet five and a half inches.

  While he was wondering who had given his name to the Adler Company, one of his squad showed up. Corporal John Gwiadosky had decided to repay a loan. Sergeant Brown couldn’t get over it as Gwiadosky solemnly handed him the money. “Don’t get any wrong ideas,” explained Gwiadosky. “I just don’t want you chasing me all over hell trying to collect.”

  Across the bay, on the transport New Amsterdam anchored near Weymouth, Second Lieutenant George Kerchner of the 2nd Ranger Battalion was occupied with a routine chore. He was censoring his platoon’s mail. It was particularly heavy tonight; everybody seemed to have written long letters home. The 2nd and 5th Rangers had been given one of the toughest D-Day assignments. They were to scale the almost sheer one-hundred-foot cliffs at a place called Pointe du Hoc and silence a battery of six long-range guns—guns so powerful that they could zero in on Omaha Beach or the transport area of Utah Beach. The Rangers would have just thirty minutes to do the job.

  Casualties were expected to be heavy—some thought as high as sixty percent—unless the air and naval bombardment could knock out the guns before the Rangers got there. Either way, nobody expected the attack to be a breeze. Nobody, that is, except Staff Sergeant Larry Johnson, one of Kerchner’s section leaders.

  The lieutenant was dumbfounded when he read Johnson’s letter. Although none of the mail would be sent out until after D Day—whenever that would be—this letter couldn’t even be delivered through ordinary channels. Kerchner sent for Johnson and, when the sergeant arrived, gave him back the letter. “Larry,” said Kerchner dryly, “you better post this yourself—after you get to France.” Johnson had written a girl asking for a date early in June. She lived in Paris.

  It struck the lieutenant as the sergeant left the cabin that as long as there were optimists like Johnson nothing was impossible.

  Almost every man in the invasion forces wrote a letter to someone during the long hours of waiting. They had been penned up for a long time, and the letters seemed to give them emotional release. Many of them recorded their thoughts in a way that men seldom do.

  Captain John F. Dulligan of the 1st Infantry Division, slated to land on Omaha Beach, wrote his wife: “I love these men. They sleep all over the ship, on the decks, in, on top, and underneath the vehicles. They smoke, play cards, wrestle around and indulge in general horseplay. They gather around in groups and talk mostly about girls, home and experiences (with and without girls)…. They are good soldiers, the best in the world…. Before the invasion of North Africa, I was nervous and a little scared. During the Sicilian invasion I was so busy that the fear passed while I was working…. This time we will hit a beach in France and from there on only God knows the answer. I want you to know that I love you with all my heart…. I pray that God will see fit to spare me to you and Ann and Pat.”

  The men on heavy naval vessels or large transports, on airfields or in embarkation areas, were the lucky ones. They were restricted and overcrowded, but they were dry, warm and well. It was a different story for the troops on the flatbottomed landing ships heaving at anchor outside nearly every harbor. Some men had been on these vessels for more than a week. The ships were overcrowded and foul, the men unbelievably miserable. For them the battle began long before they ever left England. It was a battle against continuous nausea and seasickness. Most of the men still remember that the ships smelled of just three things: diesel oil, backed-up toilets and vomit.

  Conditions varied from ship to ship. On LCT 777, Signalman Third Class George Hackett Jr., was amazed to see waves so high that they smashed over one end of the wallowing craft and rolled out the other. LCT 6, a British landing craft, was so overloaded that Lieutenant Colonel Clarence Hupfer of the U.S. 4th Division thought it would sink. Water lapped at the gunwales and at times washed over into the craft. The galley was flooded and the troops were forced to eat cold food—those who could eat at all.

  LST 97, Sergeant Keith Bryan of the 5th Engineer Special Brigade remembers, was so overcrowded that men were stepping over one another, and it rolled so much that those lucky enough to have bunks had difficulty staying in them. And to Sergeant Morris Magee of the Canadian 3rd Division the heaving of his craft “was worse than being in a rowboat in the center of Lake Champlain.” He was so sick he could no longer throw up.

  But the troops who suffered most during the waiting period were the men in the recalled convoys. All day they had ridden out the storm in the Channel. Now, water-logged and weary, they glumly lined the rails as the last of the straggling convoys dropped their anchors. By 11:00 P.M. all the ships were back.

  Outside Plymouth Harbor, Lieutenant Commander Hoffman of the Corry stood on his bridge looking at the long lines of dark shadows, blacked-out landing ships of every size and description. It was cold. The wind was still high and he could hear the shallow-draft vessels slopping and slapping the water as they rolled in the trough of every wave.

  Hoffman was weary. They had returned to port only a short while before to learn for the first time the reason for the postponement. Now they had been warned to stand to once again.

  Below decks the news spread quickly. Bennie Glisson, the radio operator, heard it as he prepared to go on watch. He made his way to the mess hall and when he got there he found more than a dozen men having dinner—tonight it was turkey with all the trimmings. Everybody seemed depressed. “You guys,” he said, “act like you’re eating your last meal.” Bennie was nearly right. At least half of those present would go down with the Corry a little after H Hour on D Day.

  Nearby, on LCI 408, morale was also very low. The Coast Guard crew were convinced that the false start had been just another dry run. Private William Joseph Phillips of the 29th Infantry Division tried to cheer them up. “This outfit,” he solemnly predicted, “will never see combat. We’ve been in England so long that our job won’t start until the war is over. They’re going to have us wipe the bluebird shit off the White Cliffs of Dover.”

  At midnight Coa
st Guard cutters and naval destroyers began the huge job of reassembling the convoys again. This time there would be no turning back.

  Off the coast of France the midget submarine X23 slowly came to the surface. It was 1:00 A.M., June 5. Lieutenant George Honour quickly undid the hatch. Climbing up into the little conning tower, Honour and another crewman erected the antennae. Below, Lieutenant James Hodges flicked the dial on the radio to 1850 kilocycles and cupped his earphones with his hands. He hadn’t long to wait. Very faintly he picked up their call sign: “PADFOOT … PADFOOT … PADFOOT.” As he heard the one-word message that followed, he looked up in disbelief. Pressing his hands more firmly over the earphones, he listened again. But there was no mistake. He told the others. Nobody said anything. Glumly they looked at one another; ahead lay another full day under water.

  12

  IN THE EARLY-MORNING light the beaches of Normandy were shrouded in mist. The intermittent rain of the previous day had become a steady drizzle, soaking everything. Beyond the beaches lay the ancient, irregularly shaped fields over which countless battles had been fought and countless more battles would be fought.

  For four years the people of Normandy had lived with the Germans. This bondage had meant different things for different Normans. In the three major cities—Le Havre and Cherbourg, the ports which bracketed the area on east and west, and between them (both geographically and in size) Caen, lying ten miles inland—the occupation was a harsh and constant fact of life. Here were the headquarters of the Gestapo and the S.S. Here were the reminders of war—the nightly roundups of hostages, the never-ending reprisals against the underground, the welcome but fearful Allied bombing attacks.