Hitler waved away the proposal—“You must stay where you are”—then changed the subject. Great things were afoot, he said, magical things. New jet-propelled aircraft would soon dominate the skies. New sea mines, triggered by pressure waves from passing ships and almost impossible to sweep, had already holed a number of Allied ships. But the greatest secret weapon had just come into play. Until now, the Reich had no answer for the Anglo-American bombers devastating the Fatherland; a single German city might absorb more bombs in twenty-four hours than had fallen on Britain in all of 1943. That was about to change.
Hitler had once dismissed rocketry as “imagination run wild,” but in September 1943 his scientists had begun production of a self-propelled bomb in a Volkswagen factory. Technical glitches and thirty-six thousand tons of Allied explosives dropped on suspected launch sites had delayed the program, but German engineers found that simple mobile equipment using little more than a flimsy metal ramp would suffice to get the bomb off the ground. The weapon was a flying torpedo, twenty-five feet long with stubby wings, a crude jet engine, and a one-ton warhead. It could cross the English coast twenty minutes after launch; when the fuel ran dry, the engine quit and the bomb fell. Hitler called them “cherry stones.”
The first salvo, launched from western France early Tuesday morning, had flopped: in Operation RUMPELKAMMER—JUNKROOM—just four of the initial ten bombs even reached England, and only one caused any casualties. But subsequent volleys showed greater promise. By noon on June 16, of 244 launches, 73 cherry stones had reached “Target 42,” also known as London. This very morning the nameless weapon had been anointed the Vergeltungswaffe—reprisal weapon—or V-1. “Terror is broken by terror,” the Führer liked to say. “Everything else is nonsense.”
Rundstedt suggested that the V-1 be used against those half million enemy soldiers now massed in the beachhead. Rommel agreed. Hitler summoned a military expert who explained that the flying bomb’s inaccuracy made any target smaller than London difficult to hit: the V-1s were aimed at Tower Bridge on the Thames, but the margin of error might be fifteen kilometers or more. Relentless pummeling of Target 42, Hitler told the field marshals, would “make it easier for peace.” Panic would paralyze Britain, with psychological and political chaos.
They broke for lunch, a joyless repast taken in silence. Two SS guards stood behind the Führer’s chair as he wolfed down a plate of rice and vegetables—first sampled by a taster—garnished with pills and three liqueur glasses of colored medicines. A sudden warning of sixty Allied planes approaching sent Hitler and the field marshals scuttling into a cramped bomb shelter for another leaden hour until the all-clear sounded.
Hitler walked Rommel to his car at four P.M., promising to visit him at La Roche–Guyon the next morning. “What do you really think of our chances of continuing the war?” Rommel asked with his habitual effrontery. Was it not time to consider coming to terms with the West, perhaps in common cause against the Bolsheviks? “That is a question which is not your responsibility. You will have to leave that to me,” Hitler snapped. “Attend to your invasion front.”
A laconic Rundstedt later summarized the conference with concision: “The discussion had no success.” Rather than press on to Rommel’s headquarters, Hitler would abruptly bolt for Bavaria after an errant V-1 flew east rather than west and detonated near the Margival bunker; it did little damage but brought court-martial investigators sniffing for possible assassins. Back in Berchtesgaden, the Führer bemoaned Rommel’s gloom. Had the Desert Fox lost his strut? “Only optimists can pull anything off today,” Hitler told his courtiers.
In fact, Rommel felt buoyant, having been beguiled once again by the master he served. He “cannot escape the Führer’s influence,” an aide wrote home. After supper on Saturday he walked the château grounds with his chief naval adviser, Vice Admiral Friedrich Ruge, to discuss the day while admiring the mother-of-pearl vistas along the Seine. Movies often were projected on a cave wall behind the castle, and the sound of laughter from staff officers watching a light comedy carried on the evening air. Ruge was reading Gone with the Wind, and Rommel enjoyed hearing the latest plot twists. In Scarlett, Rhett, and the doomed Confederacy, the admiral detected “endless parallels with our time” and an affirmation that “rebuilding after a total defeat was possible.”
Rommel retired to his chambers, beyond the ancient portcullis slot and the curiosity room with its glass cases of mounted insects and its stuffed hawk. In the morning he would dash off a “dearest Lu” note about Margival and the new V-1 campaign. “The long-range action has brought us a lot of relief,” he told her. “The Führer was very cordial and in a good humor. He realizes the gravity of the situation.”
* * *
Even on the Sabbath morn, antiaircraft crews across Target 42 manned their guns and scanned the southeastern sky for the apparition soon called Doodlebug, Hell Hound, Buzz Bomb, Rocket Gun, Headless Horseman, or, simply, It. Earlier in the week some gunners had crowed in jubilation at shooting down what they believed were German bombers but were now known to be pilotless bombs designed to fall from the sky. This Sunday, June 18, was Waterloo Day, and worshippers packed London churches to commemorate the British Army’s victory over Napoléon in 1815, and to petition for divine help again.
In the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks on Birdcage Walk, across from the former pig meadow and leper colony currently known as St. James’s Park, a full-throated congregation belted out the “Te Deum” and prepared to take communion from the bishop of Maidstone. “To Thee all angels cry aloud,” they sang, “the heavens and all the powers therein.” At 11:10 A.M. an annoying growl from those same heavens grew louder. Ernest Hemingway heard it in his Dorchester Hotel suite, where he was making pancakes with buckwheat flour and bourbon; from the window he looked for the telltale “white-hot bunghole” of a jet engine. Pedestrians in Parliament Square heard it and fell flat, covering their heads. Clementine Churchill, the prime minister’s wife, heard it in Hyde Park, where she was visiting the gun battery in which her daughter Mary volunteered. The Guards Chapel congregation heard it and kept singing.
Then they heard nothing—that most terrifying of all sounds—as the engine quit, the bunghole winked out, and the black cruciform fell. Through the chapel’s reinforced concrete roof It plummeted before detonating in a white blast that blew out walls, blew down support pillars, and stripped the leaves from St. James’s plane trees. A funnel of smoke curled fifteen hundred feet above the wrecked nave; rubble ten feet deep buried the pews even as six candles still guttered on the altar and the bishop stood unharmed. One hundred and twenty-one others were dead and as many more injured. Two thousand memorial plaques accumulated by Guards regiments during eons of war lay pulverized, although a mosaic donated by Queen Victoria remained intact: “Be thou faithful unto death and I will give thee a crown of life.”
Clementine Churchill hastened home to alert the prime minister, who was still reviewing papers in his bed at 10 Downing Street. “The Guards Chapel,” she told him, “is destroyed.” He hurried to Birdcage Walk and watched salvage teams lift out the dead. Among others, several musicians from the Coldstream Guards band were found in a side gallery, still holding their instruments as if in a wax tableau, surely faithful unto death. Churchill wept.
That afternoon he motored to Bushy Park and asked Eisenhower to redouble efforts against the flying bomb. In a memo on Sunday evening, the supreme commander ordered that the targets code-named CROSSBOW, comprising V-1 launch areas, supply dumps, and related sites, “are to take first priority over everything except the urgent requirements of the battle.” Yet more than thirty thousand attack sorties already had flown in the past six months, dropping the tonnage equivalent of four Eiffel Towers on CROSSBOW in an effort to eviscerate a program Allied intelligence knew was in development. Some launch sites were hit forty or more times before analysts realized that the V-1 could be fired from elusive mobile launchers. Ideas for defeating the flying bombs poured in from the
public: harpoons fired from tethered Zeppelins; huge butterfly nets; projectiles filled with carbolic acid. One patriot offered to put a curse on German launch crews.
CROSSBOW countermeasures in the coming weeks were more conventional but fitfully efficacious. Two thousand barrage balloons were deployed on approaches to London in hopes that their tethering cables would bring down the bombs in flight; German engineers responded by fitting V-1 wings with Kuto-Nasen, sharp blades to cut the cables. Fighter pilots grew adept at shooting down the bombs with 20mm cannons—at 380 miles per hour, the RAF Tempest could overtake the V-1—and some even learned to use their wings to create enough turbulence to send a bomb spiraling out of control. Although a V-1 was considered eight times more difficult to bring down with ground fire than a German bomber, more than a thousand antiaircraft guns were shifted from greater London to the southeast coast for better fields of fire, along with 23,000 gunners and 60,000 tons of ammunition and radar equipment. Sussex and Kent in the southeast became known as Bomb Alley.
Eisenhower’s “first priority” edict dismayed his air force chieftains, who favored the uninterrupted smashing of German cities, oil facilities, and other strategic targets. The order stood: one-quarter of all combat sorties in the next two months would be flown against CROSSBOW targets, and crews would drop 73,000 tons of bombs—another eight Eiffel Towers. This enormous diversion of bombers had little impact on German launches; typically, one hundred V-1s were still fired at Target 42 each day. Few could doubt that the best solution was for Allied armies to overrun what was now dubbed the Rocket Gun Coast of northwestern France. “We must give the enemy full credit for developing one of the finer weapons of the war,” the war diary for the U.S. Strategic Air Forces acknowledged. “People are beginning to get a bit jittery and jump when a door slams.”
A British study calculated that “the average Londoner” could expect to be within a half mile of a V-1 detonation once a month, odds that did “not appear unduly alarming.” Few Londoners saw it that way. V-1 explosions sucked workers from office windows, incinerated mothers in grocery stores, and butchered pensioners on park benches. A lieutenant who was recuperating in a hospital hit by a flying bomb wrote his wife that the blast “pushed through the walls and surrounded us, gripped us, entered us, and tossed us aside.” He confessed to being “more afraid than I have ever been of anything in my life.”
Soon not a pane of glass remained in city buses. Tens of thousands of houses were smashed. “The most horrible thing was the sound of burning timber,” a witness reported, “the crackling, malicious sound, like little devilish laughs.” Eisenhower complained in a note to Mamie that he had been forced into a Bushy Park air raid shelter nineteen times one morning. When a V-1 was heard during a performance at the St. James Theatre, one patron muttered, “How squalid to be killed at this disgusting little farce.”
Fewer and fewer were willing to accept the risks. By August, 1.5 million Londoners would evacuate the city, more than during the Blitz. Of 10,492 V-1s ultimately fired at Britain, about 4,000 were destroyed by fighters, balloons, and antiaircraft guns, while others veered off course or crashed prematurely. But about 2,400 hit greater London, killing 6,000 and badly injuring 18,000. (Not one struck Tower Bridge.) It was, an official British history concluded, “an ordeal perhaps as trying to Londoners as any they had endured throughout the war.”
How Easy It Is to Make a Ghost
WEST of Bayeux, the Norman uplands displayed the gnarled visage that had been familiar to Celtic farmers even before the Romans marched across Gaul. Over the centuries ten thousand tiny pastures had emerged from the limestone and pre-Cambrian schist, girdled by sunken lanes the width of an oxcart and enclosed with man-high hedgerows of thatched hawthorn roots, raspberry bushes, lupine, violets, and greasy mud. The sylvan noun for this terrain—“bocage,” defined as a grove, or “an agreeably shady wood”—belied the claustrophobic reality of what one infantryman would call “the Gethsemane of the hedgerows.” To Pacific veterans like General Collins, this jungly corner of France resembled Guadalcanal.
“I couldn’t imagine the bocage until I saw it,” Omar Bradley would say after the war. That failure of imagination was in fact a failure of command: Allied generals had been amply forewarned, and even Caesar had written of hedgerows that “present a fortification like a wall through which it was not only impossible to enter but even to penetrate with the eye.” More recently, an August 1943 military study on French topography included two dozen photographs of “Norman bocage”; in mid-April, a First Army report described “embanked fields interspersed with thickets” and advised that tactics for fighting “through bocage country should be given considerable study.” Aerial photos of an eight-square-mile swatch revealed some four thousand hedged enclosures. Yet, as in the amphibious assaults on North Africa and Sicily, planners preoccupied with gaining the hostile shore devoted little thought to combat beyond the dunes. “We were rehearsed endlessly for attacking beach defenses,” a battalion commander later wrote, “but not one day was given to the terrain behind the beaches, which was no less difficult and deadly.”
Now that difficult, deadly terrain played hob with First Army’s timetable. As Rommel had predicted, American troops cut the Cotentin Peninsula early on June 18, after two regiments from the 9th Infantry Division lunged west to the sea near Barneville. Three divisions abreast in Collins’s VII Corps then began clawing north toward Cherbourg, thirteen miles distant. In the south, the 29th Division commander on June 17 reported, “I feel we’ll be getting to St. Lô before long.” Alas, no: although barely five miles from the American line, that linchpin town would remain out of reach for another month.
Tank companies now reported that to advance 2,500 yards typically required seventeen tons of explosives to blow holes through nearly three dozen hedgerows, each defended like a citadel parapet. “Each one of them was a wall of fire,” a soldier in the 30th Infantry Division wrote, “and the open fields between were plains of fire.” An officer noted that “the enemy can be ten feet away and be undetected. He can fight up to spitting range.” That intimacy neutralized Allied air and artillery advantages. “There were snipers everywhere,” Ernie Pyle reported, “in trees, in buildings, in piles of wreckage, in the grass. But mainly they were in the high, bushy hedgerows.” A sliding scale of rewards awaited the proficient German sniper, according to a SHAEF document: “10 corpses—100 cigarettes; 20 corpses—20 days’ leave; 50 corpses—Iron Cross 1st Class and wristwatch from Himmler.”
Enemy panzers, artillery, and savage small-arms fire made western Normandy ever more lethal. The poet-infantryman Louis Simpson described the “short, velvet bursts” of German machine pistols, and added: “The purr of the bullets is wicked.” A soldier hesitant to cross an open pasture to a farmhouse wrote, “I lie in the grass pondering whether to take the chance. Yes-no-yes-no.” In this “land of great danger,” as Pyle called it, no weapon was more feared than the mortar—described by one soldier as “a soft siffle, high in the air, like a distant lark, or a small penny whistle, faint and elf-like, falling.” Mortar fragments caused 70 percent of the battle casualties among four U.S. infantry divisions in Normandy; radar that could backtrack the parabolic flight of rounds to the firing tubes would not be battle-ready for months. Close combat heightened the animal senses; like many riflemen, Simpson sniffed for a smell “we have come to recognize as Germany—a compound of sausage and cheese, mildewed cloth, and ideas. Some ideas stink. Every German hole … exudes the smell of their philosophy.”
French civilians waving white strips of don’t-shoot cloth scurried to their chicken coops during lulls, gathering eggs that they sold to GIs for the equivalent of eight cents apiece. Soon even the henhouses were blown to smithereens, birds “plastered to the walls like pats of mud.” Almost 400,000 buildings in Normandy would be demolished or badly damaged. Livestock casualties included 100,000 cows; bulldozers buried them by the herd, as stiff-legged as wooden toys. Many towns were beaten to death—“as
if somebody had pulled them down with a gigantic rake,” in one description; pilots reported smoke tinted red from pulverized brick. In St.-Sauveur “there was not a building standing whole,” Don Whitehead reported. A medic told his family in Indiana of a smashed village “deserted and silent. Not the silence that you know, but a more profound and depressing silence.”
Each contested town, like each hedgerow, added more dead, wounded, and missing to a tally that in OVERLORD’s first fortnight exceeded eighteen hundred each day for the U.S. First Army alone, or one casualty every forty-seven seconds. A French nurse told her diary of wounded men “white as sheets, their nostrils tight, their eyes rolled back. Wide bleeding lacerations, shattered limbs, internal injuries, faces in shreds.” Sharp spikes in combat exhaustion—a term coined in Tunisia to supplant the misnomer “shell shock”—reflected the stress of bocage combat; by mid-July, such neuropsychiatric cases would account for one of every four infantry casualties in 21st Army Group, with the worst of them “crouched down like hunted animals” in battalion aid stations. First Army by early August would also investigate more than five hundred cases of suspected “S.I.W.”—self-inflicted wounds—typically a gunshot to the heel, toe, or finger. “A fine division was burned up taking the village of La Haye–du–Puits,” one lieutenant colonel wrote. “There are 100 such villages between here and Paris. Have we 100 divisions to expend on them?”
There was nothing for it but to pound away. “Things are always confusing and mysterious in war,” Pyle wrote. “I squatted there, just a bewildered guy in brown, part of a thin line of other bewildered guys.” Captain Keith Douglas, a British veteran of North Africa and perhaps the most poignant poetic voice of the Second World War, had written of killing the enemy, “How easy it is to make a ghost.”
The Liberation Trilogy Box Set Page 230