The press stared. For the Fifth Army! How about the Eighth Army, the angry British correspondents muttered to one another? The Eighth, that had come all the way from Cairo fighting every step of the way? And what of the Poles, and all the others? But beyond that, Eric Sevareid wondered, wasn’t every victory over Hitler a victory for Europe’s enslaved civilians, for the Jews on the beltlines of Nazi slaughter, for people all over the world who had sacrificed so much and were still suffering in the mincing machine of war? Not to Mark Clark, it wasn’t. He saw to it that photographers and correspondents were given everything they needed, and cleared cable traffic to make sure everything would be on editors’ desks next morning. It arrived. But unhappily for Clark, the next day was June 6, 1944—D-Day in Normandy.
***
Due north of Portsmouth dockyard, in a thicket of hazel trees near Southwick House, one of the stately homes of England, stood a shabby trailer whose unusual furnishings included a red telephone for scrambled conversations with Washington and a green phone, a direct line to No. 10 Downing Street. In it, sometime during that blustery week preceding the greatest amphibious assault in history, Dwight Eisenhower, now wearing four stars, scribbled two messages. The first, now long famous (“You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade”), would congratulate his troops if they established a foothold on Normandy’s shores. The other would be handed to the press if Dunkerque was repeated:
Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air, and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.
Long after they happen, historic events take on an air of inevitability. In thinking of D-Day, we assume that the Germans in France never had a chance—that with Eisenhower’s huge armies and unlimited supplies, protected by Anglo-American armadas in the Channel and the air overhead, his crusade was as good as won. Even men who knew better at the time fall under the spell of myth: Montgomery later wrote that “the battle was fought exactly as planned before the invasion.” It wasn’t.
Much has been made of the rough weather, and how it hampered landing operations. It was really a blessing. Because the weather was poor, key German officers were absent from their headquarters when the blow fell—Rommel, the most gifted of Hitler’s field marshals, had taken the day off to celebrate his wife’s birthday with her in Ulm. Ten highly mobile panzer divisions were available to throw the invaders back into the Channel. On D-Day only one of them saw combat. Even so, it broke the British line at Caen and drove through to the beach. That force was too small, but if only three of the ten panzer divisions had been thrown into Normandy, wrote B. H. Liddell Hart, the eminent military strategist, “the Allied footholds could have been dislodged before they were joined up and consolidated.”
Had Rommel not been so faithful a husband he would have remained in France, and the Allies might have been liquidated. To be sure, the field marshal would first have been obliged to phone Hitler. But the Führer was already convinced that a cross-Channel thrust must be stopped at the waterline; that, he believed, would prevent the reelection of Roosevelt, who, “with luck,” would “finish up somewhere in jail.” Curiously, Hitler’s intuition had told him from the first that the landings would come in Normandy. Then he listened to his advisers and changed his mind. Calais, he said: their main force will land near Calais; Normandy is just a feint. This was the best possible piece of luck for Eisenhower. His troops had enough on their hands as it was. For the past year the Germans had been mining coastal waters, driving great antitank tripods of steel rails into the ground, erecting six-foot-thick concrete pillboxes, fortifying cement tunnels, and weaving military obstacles into natural defenses, using their vast stock of slave labor for the work. From the first, the British were on timetable on their beaches (Juno and Sword), but the American beaches (Omaha and Utah) were taken at great cost. Then the soldiers moved inland and encountered Normandy’s hedgerows, ideal for stubborn defenders.
On the other side of the Atlantic a hundred million Americans hovered near radios, awaiting the latest word from France. Franklin Roosevelt was one of them. The President had followed every detail of the massive preparations. He knew how the landing ships built on Lake Michigan had been floated down the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, to sail eastward and then be packed beam to beam with GIs in British ports. Daily reports had briefed him on the construction of fleets of LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank) in California, and the trial runs of the tanks, bulldozers, and trucks they would carry. He had kept abreast of Ike’s postponement of D-Day and the nerve-racking, inconclusive predictions of Army meteorologists. He had been told how the general paced the crunching cinder path outside his trailer, rubbing lucky coins from the invasions of North Africa and Sicily. And he had heard from SHAEF how the general had said in a strangled voice, “I’m quite positive we must give the order…. I don’t like it, but there it is….” Then, slamming his right fist into his left palm: “O.K. We’ll go.”
With those words, the great bound into Hitler’s Europe began. Ed Murrow, a man not given to fantasy, stood beneath the roaring bombers headed for France, and thought he heard the strains of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The commander in chief, not that close, could only pray, and that is what he did. Over the weekend, at the Charlottesville home of “Pa” Watson, his military aide, he had reread the Book of Common Prayer, looking for D-Day invocations. On the evening of that Tuesday, June 6, he went on the radio to lead the nation in asking benediction for “our sons, the pride of our nation… lead them straight and true,” he beseeched, “give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed. But we shall return again and again.” Then he asked guidance for those, like himself, who must watch from home: “Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade….”
Meanwhile the issue was being decided amid the hedges and poppies of Normandy. After eleven days of fighting, Bradley announced his first casualties: 3,283 dead and 12,600 wounded. He had little to show for it, and London had a fresh reason for demanding results; on June 14 Dr. Wernher von Braun had begun the massacre of British civilians with his V-1 rockets, launched from Nazi sites in France and Belgium.1 The Allies needed a victory, the generals needed a major port, and everyone wanted an end to the Battle of the Bridgehead. Cherbourg didn’t fall until Tuesday, and the Germans had done everything they could think of to spoil the spoils. Breakwaters were smashed, cranes destroyed, piers sown with mines and boobytraps. It would be August before Army engineers could clean up the mess. For the present the expedition had to rely on Mulberry, the artificial harbor they had brought with them and sunk off Arromanches.
Nevertheless, the buildup continued. On July 4 Eisenhower reported to Washington that the millionth man had been landed in France, and 566,648 tons of supplies and 171,532 vehicles were ashore. Furthermore, the Battle of the Bridgehead was turning out to be a disguised blessing. The very ferocity of the fighting had drawn the bulk of Germany’s western forces into the Cotentin Peninsula. Panzer divisions were thrown in piecemeal to plug holes in the German line and were methodically chewed up—thus depriving the Nazis of future mobility when they would need it most, behind the peninsula, in the open country of France’s heartland. At the same time, Hitler’s order not to retreat an inch shackled his field commanders and made tactical retreats impossible. Caen fell to the British on July 9, and Saint Lô—the road junction linking Normandy with Brittany—to U.S. troops on July 25. Now Patton was in the cockpit, driving hard. On July 25 he broke out in a powerful armored thrust toward Avranches and into Brittany, and by August 10 he had overrun Brittany and cut it off. Lord Beaverbrook’s Lo
ndon Express said, “Americans have proved themselves to be a race of great fighters, in the very front rank of men at arms.”
On Friday, August 25, General Leclerc’s Free French jeeps entered the suburbs, and on Saturday de Gaulle made his triumphant march while across the Atlantic Lily Pons, wearing her USO uniform, sang “The Marseillaise” in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Plaza. It was an electric moment, although observers in Paris found the aftermath of the city’s liberation to be more complex than they had expected. The Gaullists and their comrades in the underground French Forces of the Interior had a blacklist of seven hundred thousand collaborators, and French girls who had slept with Germans were forced to submit while their heads were shorn and then shaved. But many collaborators escaped humiliation or bought their way to freedom. Paris disturbed some Americans. It didn’t look at all like an enslaved capital. Compared to London, it was prospering. Ed Murrow was surprised by the number of well-dressed women on the streets. Not only had the French textile industry flourished throughout the war; the French had developed the first practical television transmitters and sets. All the famous couturiers were in business—Molyneux, Lanvin, Schiaparelli—and their French customers were wearing full skirts and mutton-legged sleeves, which had long been out of the question for American and British women limited by clothes rationing. Discussing the liberation with an American reporter, one Parisian designer sighed and spread his hands in a Gallic gesture. “What shall I do with all this nonsense going on?” he asked. “All my best customers are in concentration camps, because of course they were working for Vichy.”
London was still in greater danger than Paris. On September 8 the British capital’s lights were turned up after 1,843 dark nights, and for the first time in memory, eight-year-old Julie Andrews saw a lighted city. It didn’t stay lit long. That same night von Braun began hurling his V-2 missiles at Britain—Englishmen called them “Bob Hopes” (“Bob down and hope for the best”)—and a return to blackouts seemed sensible. For a few weeks the troops in France and the civilians in England had persuaded one another that the war was all but over. The broken Wehrmacht seemed finished; even Hitler, one thought, must realize that he had lost the war. On September 12 GIs crossed the border and entered Germany near Eupen and Trier and probed the outer defenses of the Siegfried Line; western Germany had been invaded. In rapid succession that autumn the Canadians cleared the Scheldt estuary, the U.S. First Army took Aachen and penetrated the Siegfried Line itself in the process, Patton’s U.S. Third Army captured Metz and Strasbourg, and other American troops reached the Roer River. That was on December 3. Less than two weeks later, Hitler caught the Allies with a major counterattack. Crack troops flung themselves at the Americans with Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s battle cry ringing in their ears: “Your great hour has struck. Strong attacking Armies are advancing today against the Anglo-Americans. I do not need to say more to you. You all feel it. Everything is at stake. You bear the holy duty to achieve the superhuman for our Fatherland and Führer!”
This was the overture to the Battle of the Bulge. The havoc wrought by English-speaking Germans in GI uniforms; the 101st Airborne’s gallant stand at Bastogne; the German ultimatum and Brigadier General Mc-Auliffe’s reply of “Nuts!”; Patton’s classic maneuver in wheeling to relieve Bastogne, with his lead tank commanded by a thirty-year-old lieutenant colonel in the 4th Armored named Creighton Abrams—all this belongs to American military lore. It was the GIs’ finest hour in the ETO. Asked what had turned the tide, Montgomery replied, “The good fighting qualities of the American soldier. I take my hat off to such men. I salute the brave fighting men of America—I never want to fight alongside better soldiers. I have tried to feel that I am also an American soldier myself.”
The Bulge was Hitler’s last mad gamble, and was followed by disintegration. The Russians opened their final offensive in January 1945. Beginning in early February the Allies cleared Holland, took the Saar, captured an unblown bridge at Remagen, and then threw nine more bridges across the Rhine than the Germans had at the beginning of the war, enveloped the Ruhr, captured 325,000 prisoners there, and then seized Mannheim and Frankfurt-am-Main. The end was approaching; everyone in Europe could sense it. Though London was to remain blacked out for another month, Paris became France’s city of light once more in the first week of April. Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Essen, Düsseldorf, Nuremberg, and Frankfurt had been bombed to rubble; Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday was two weeks away, but there were no plans to celebrate it.
At noon on April 11, 1945, the U.S. Ninth Army reached the Elbe. In Warm Springs at 6 A.M. on April 12, President Roosevelt lay asleep in his corner bedroom. He had retired expecting to read of new developments in the morning, but the mail had been delayed. Instead of his usual newspapers—the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and Washington Post—he would be limited to the Atlanta Constitution. Its headlines were:
9TH 57 MILES FROM BERLIN
50-MILE GAIN IN DAY
SETS STAGE FOR EARLY U.S.-RUSS JUNCTURE
And, from the Pacific:
MARINES GAIN
ON OKINAWA;
FIGHTING HEAVY
150 SUPERFORTS HAMMER TOKYO
IN TWO-HOUR DAYLIGHT RAID
Here in Georgia it was unseasonably warm for early April; the dogwood and wild violets were out, and a neighbor was planning an outdoor barbecue for FDR, with a chair under an old oak tree, where he could enjoy a breathtaking view of the valley. Since the mail had also held up his daily bale of paperwork, there was nothing for the President to do except sit for his portrait. Two years ago Lucy Rutherfurd had commissioned a painter to paint a watercolor of him; now he himself had asked the same artist to do another, as a gift from him to Lucy’s daughter.
With the President down here, Bill Hassett and Dr. Bruenn breathed more easily, though they were beginning to despair of recovery. They had heard the gasps in the crowd at Warm Springs station on March 30 when he had been carried from his train to the platform; he had sagged in his wheelchair as he was pushed toward his car, his head bobbing out of control. He had rallied long enough to drive the car here, but they had learned to distrust these brief upturns. In the evening, after the President had retired, they had faced each other in anguish. Hassett had said that Roosevelt was just drifting toward death. His dashing, flamboyant signatures had faded out; they didn’t even look like good forgeries. He was the President of the United States and he couldn’t write his own name. Bruenn had given his professional opinion: Roosevelt’s case was hopeless unless he could be protected from pressure. Hassett said that was out of the question; no President could be so isolated. The two men had been at the point of tears. Hassett confided to his diary:
Shocked at his appearance—worn, weary, exhausted. He seemed all right when I saw him in the morning. He is steadily losing weight—told me he has lost twenty-five pounds—no strength, no appetite, tires easily—all too apparent whenever you see him after midday. Again observed this to Dr. Bruenn. He admits cause for alarm.
This morning, however, they agreed that his color was much better. The news was good; that helped. And the absence of mail was a godsend. Once more, as so often in these last few weeks, they persuaded one another—against all evidence—that he might, just might, make it.
***
Among the papers awaiting action on the President’s Washington desk were an urgent note from Albert Einstein and an attached memorandum from Leo Szilard, both begging him to order an immediate suspension of all work on an atom bomb. The world situation had changed, they explained; much which they had taken for granted was either untrue or no longer relevant. Any brief military advantage the United States might gain with nuclear weapons would be offset by political and psychological losses and damage to American prestige. The United States, Einstein argued, might even touch off a worldwide atom armaments race.
Obviously something had happened—or not happened—in Hitler’s Reich. The blunt truth was that the Nazis had no atomi
c weapons. This seemed so beyond comprehension that Allied scientists at first suspected an attempt to humbug them. Samuel A. Goudsmit, the senior member of the Alsos intelligence team which landed in Normandy, believed (and continued to believe in the 1970s) that Carl von Weizsäcker, and Nobel laureates Max von Laue and Werner Heisenberg, the three most brilliant German physicists, could have built bombs between them with support from the state. They asked German scientists: what about it?
In those days Germans were blaming Hitler for everything, but in this instance their account was plausible. The Führer’s anti-Semitism had driven their most promising colleagues out of the country, the Nazi bureaucracy was indifferent toward long-term research, technical equipment was unavailable, and—a typical example of inept rivalry within the Nazi hierarchy—uncoordinated atomic research was being carried out by the Ministry of Education, the War Office, and even the Post Office Department. The turning point for the Germans had come on June 6, 1942, just as the American scientists were approaching their breakthrough. That Saturday Heisenberg briefed Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of Supply, on progress in the Reich’s uranium research. There was definite proof, he said, that Germany had the technical knowledge to build a uranium pile and acquire atomic energy from it, and theoretically an explosive for atom bombs could be produced from such a source. The next step would be to investigate technical problems—the critical size, for example, and the possibility of a chain reaction. At that point he and von Weizsäcker were talking about a pile not only as a weapon in itself but as a prime mover in weapon production. Speer gave them tentative approval. The work would continue, but on a smaller scale, and their target should be a pile usable as a generation of power. Speer was only echoing Hitler. The Führer, certain of imminent triumph, had just ordered the termination of all new weapon projects except those which would be ready for use in the field within six weeks.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 50