The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  There are hundreds of young, and not so young, historians of World War II and of American foreign policy who are beholden to Dr. Pogue. He has brought up an entire generation of historians. His generosity with his time and knowledge goes far beyond the call of duty. To see him at a conference, surrounded by young historians and graduate students eager to hear and learn from him, is to see a great man doing great service. None of us can ever repay our debt to him, nor fully express our gratitude. He has touched our lives as a person and made us better at our craft. He is the first and the best historian of D-Day. That he has allowed me to dedicate this book to him fills me with pride and pleasure.

  My interest in D-Day, first inspired by Dr. Pogue’s writing, was strengthened in 1959 when I read Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day. I thought then, and still do, that it was a superb account of the battle. Although I have developed some disagreements with Ryan over what happened on June 6, 1944, and have come to some different conclusions, I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge my debt to his great work.

  This book is based overwhelmingly on oral and written histories collected from the men of D-Day by the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans over the past eleven years. The Center now has more than 1,380 accounts of personal experiences. This is the most extensive first-person, I-was-there collection of memoirs of a single battle in existence. Although space limitations made it impossible for me to quote directly from each oral history or written memoir, all the accounts contributed to my understanding of what happened. The contributors are listed in alphabetical order in Appendix A. To every man who contributed, I offer my deeply felt thanks.

  Russell Miller of London has done extensive interviewing with British D-Day veterans. Student workers at the Eisenhower Center have transcribed some of his tapes, which he has graciously allowed me to use in this book. The Imperial War Museum in London has also provided tapes of the interviews the staff has done over the years, which have been transcribed by the Eisenhower Center. Andre Heintz has done interviews over the years with residents of the Calvados Coast; they are today in the Battle of Normandy Museum in Caen; he has kindly allowed me to use them for this book. The United States Army Military Institute at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, allowed me to use its extensive collection of interviews done by Forrest Pogue, Ken Heckler, and others, and its extensive manuscript holdings.

  Phil Jutras, an American paratrooper who settled in Ste.-Mère-Église and who is the director of the Parachute Museum there, also collected oral histories from American veterans and from residents of Ste.-Mère-Église, which he has most generously donated to the Eisenhower Center and allowed me to use for this book.

  Capt. Ron Drez, USMC, a rifle-company commander at Khe Sahn in 1968, is the assistant director of the Eisenhower Center. For nearly ten years he has been doing group and individual interviews at veterans reunions, in New Orleans and around the country. Because of his own distinguished combat record, he has excellent rapport with the D-Day veterans. He gets them to talking and reminiscing as few others can do. His contribution to this book is invaluable. Dr. Günter Bischof, a native of Austria whose father was a Wehrmacht soldier and eventually a POW in America, is the associate director of the Center. He has done and is doing interviews with German veterans. His contribution is also invaluable. The Center is exceedingly lucky to have Drez and Bischof on the team.

  Ms. Kathi Jones is the major force of the Eisenhower Center. Without her, none of us could do our work. She handles our correspondence, keeps the books, maintains our schedules, makes our appointments, runs our annual conferences, directs our student workers on their transcribing tasks, organizes the oral histories and memoirs, reaches out to the veterans, soothes damaged egos, and in general serves as our chief of staff. Her dedication to her work and her ability to keep our myriad of activities running smoothly are exemplary. She does all this, and more, without ever losing her temper or her good humor. Dwight Eisenhower once called Beetle Smith “the perfect chief of staff.” So say we of Kathi Jones.

  Mrs. Carolyn Smith, secretary of the Eisenhower Center, along with student workers Marissa Ahmed, Maria Andara Romain, Tracy Hernandez, Jerri Bland, Scott Peebles, Peggy Iheme, Jogen Shukla, and Elena Marina, graduate students Jerry Strahan, Olga Ivanova, and Gunther Breaux, and volunteers Col. James Moulis, Mark Swango, C. W. Unangst, John Daniel, Joe Flynn, John Niskoch, Joe Molyson, Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs, and Edie Ambrose are all underpaid (or not paid at all) and overworked. They have stayed with it; without them there would be no Eisenhower Center, no oral history collection. The transcribers have had a terrible time with the names of French villages (as pronounced by American GIs) but they have persevered and triumphed. My debt to them is very great.

  The Eisenhower Center will continue to collect oral histories and written memoirs, artifacts and wartime letters, from the men of D-Day, from all services and nations, so long as there are survivors. We urge all veterans to write us at the University of New Orleans, New Orleans, La. 70148, for instructions on preparing their histories.

  In 1979 my dearest friend, Dr. Gordon Mueller, persuaded me to lead a battlefield tour, “From D-Day to the Rhine in Ike’s Footsteps.” Mr. Peter McLean of Peter McLean, Ltd., in New Orleans organized the tour. Mr. Richard Salaman of London served as courier for the tour. It was a great experience for me, primarily because more than two dozen D-Day veterans joined the tour—ranging in rank from general officer to private—and gave me on-site accounts of their D-Day experiences. We repeated the tour eight times. McLean and Salaman are great guys to work with and dear friends who have contributed mightily to my knowledge and understanding of D-Day.

  So have many others, scholars, authors, documentary makers, and veterans, far too many to list here—they know who they are.

  Alice Mayhew, as always, was an outstanding editor. Her staff at Simon & Schuster, especially Elizabeth Stein, as always did an excellent job of production. My agent, John Ware, was a fine source of encouragement and support.

  My wife, Moira, has been my partner in this enterprise, flying back and forth across the Atlantic and to veterans’ reunions in the States. Every one of the hundreds of veterans she has met will attest that she has a wonderful way with them, putting them at their ease, making them comfortable, enjoying being with them, fascinated by their stories, providing a soft, sensitive woman’s touch to our meals, meetings, tramps over the battlefields, and airplane hassles. In addition, as with all my writing, she is my first and most critical reader. Her contribution to my work and my life is beyond measure; indeed, she is as dear to me as life itself.

  • •

  As I’ve tried to make clear in the preceding paragraphs, this book is very much a team effort. I like to think that General Eisenhower would have approved. From the moment he took up his responsibilities as Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force until the German surrender, he insisted on teamwork. Of all his outstanding characteristics as leader of the multination, multiservice Crusade in Europe, his insistence on teamwork was the key to victory.

  General Eisenhower liked to speak of the fury of an aroused democracy. It was in Normandy on June 6, 1944, and in the campaign that followed, that the Western democracies made their fury manifest. The success of this great and noble undertaking was a triumph of democracy over totalitarianism. As president, Eisenhower said he wanted democracy to survive for all ages to come. So do I. It is my fondest hope that this book, which in its essence is a love song to democracy, will make a small contribution to that great goal.

  STEPHEN E. AMBROSE

  Director, The Eisenhower Center

  University of New Orleans

  “The most difficult and complicated operation ever to take place.”

  WINSTON CHURCHILL

  “The destruction of the enemy’s landing is the sole decisive factor in the whole conduct of the war and hence in its final results.”

  ADOLF HITLER

  “The history of war does not know of an undertaking comp
arable to it for breadth of conception, grandeur of scale, and mastery of execution.”

  JOSEPH STAUN

  “Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.”

  DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER,

  Order of the Day, June 4, 1944

  “In this column I want to tell you what the opening of the second front entailed, so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you.”

  ERNIE PYLE, June 12, 1944

  Airborne and infantry divisions in World War II armies were made up of:

  Squads (usually nine to twelve men)

  Three squads to a platoon

  Three or four platoons to a company

  Three or four companies to a battalion

  Three or four battalions to a regiment

  Three or four regiments to a division

  plus attached engineers, artillery, medical, and other support personnel.

  U.S., British, and Canadian infantry divisions were from 15,000 to 20,000 strong on D-Day.

  Allied airborne divisions were about one-half that size.

  Most German divisions were less than 10,000.

  PROLOGUE

  AT 0016 HOURS, June 6, 1944,I the Horsa glider crash-landed alongside the Caen Canal, some fifty meters from the swing bridge crossing the canal. Lt. Den Brotheridge, leading the twenty-eight men of the first platoon, D Company, the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry Regiment, British 6th Airborne Division, worked his way out of the glider. He grabbed Sgt. Jack “Bill” Bailey, a section leader, and whispered in his ear, “Get your chaps moving.” Bailey set off with his group to pitch grenades into the machine-gun pillbox known to be beside the bridge. Lieutenant Brotheridge gathered the remainder of his platoon, whispered “Come on, lads,” and began running for the bridge. The German defenders of the bridge, about fifty strong, were not aware that the long-awaited invasion had just begun.

  As Brotheridge led his men at a fast trot up the embankment and onto the bridge, seventeen-year-old Pvt. Helmut Romer, one of the two German sentries on the bridge, saw the twenty-one British paratroopers—appearing, so far as he was concerned, literally out of nowhere—coming at him, their weapons carried at their hips, prepared to fire. Romer turned and ran across the bridge, shouting “Paratroopers!” at the other sentry as he passed him. That sentry pulled out his Leuchtpistole and fired a flare; Brotheridge fired a full clip of thirty-two rounds from his Sten gun.

  Those were the first shots fired by the 175,000 British, American, Canadian, Free French, Polish, Norwegian, and other nationalities in the Allied Expeditionary Force set to invade Normandy in the next twenty-four hours. The shots killed the sentry, who thus became the first German to die in defense of Hitler’s Fortress Europe.

  • •

  Brotheridge, twenty-six years old, had been training for this moment for two years, and for the specific task of seizing the bridge by a coup de main operation for six months. He had come up from the ranks; his company commander, Maj. John Howard, had recommended him for the OCTU—Officer Cadet Training Unit—back in 1942. His fellow platoon officers were university graduates, if not rich at least well-to-do, if not aristocrats at least upper class, and at first they were a bit uneasy when Brotheridge returned as an officer because “He wasn’t one of us, you know.”

  Brotheridge played soccer, not cricket. He was a first-class athlete, good enough that it was freely predicted he would become a professional soccer player after the war. He got on easily with the men and had no sense at all of that vast gulf that so often separates British subalterns from the enlisted men.

  Brotheridge would go into the barracks at night, sit on the bed of his batman, Billy Gray, and talk soccer with the lads. He would bring his boots along and shine them as he talked. Pvt. Wally Parr never got over the sight of a British lieutenant polishing his boots while his batman lay back on his bed, gassing on about Manchester United and West Ham and other soccer teams.

  Den Brotheridge was a lanky, laughing, likable sort of chap, and his fellow officers warmed to him. Everyone admired him; he was fair, conscientious, hard-driving, quick to learn, a master at all the weapons in the company, an able teacher and an apt pupil, a natural leader. When Major Howard selected Brotheridge as leader of 1st Platoon, the other lieutenants in the company agreed that Den was the right man to lead the first troops to go into action on D- Day. Brotheridge was as good as any junior officer in the British army, among the best the country had produced to fight for its freedom in the life-and-death struggle.

  Brotheridge had more at stake in the struggle than most, for he was one of the few married men in D Company, and his wife, Margaret, was eight months pregnant. So he had had an unborn child’s future on his mind during the flight over the English Channel.

  • •

  Romer’s shout, the Leuchtpistole flare, and Brotheridge’s Sten gun combined to pull the German troops manning the machine-gun pits and the slit trenches on both sides of the bridge into full alert. They began opening fire from their Maschinengewehr (MG-34) and their Gewehrs and Karabiners (rifles and carbines).

  Brotheridge, almost across the bridge, his platoon following, the men firing from their hips, pulled a grenade out of his pouch and threw it at the machine-gun pit to his right. As he did so, he was knocked over by the impact of a bullet in his neck. He fell forward. His platoon ran past him, with two other platoons from two other gliders close behind. The men of D Company cleared out the machine-gun pits and slit trenches in short order; by 0021 the enemy in the immediate vicinity of the bridge had either been killed or had run off.

  Private Parr went looking for Brotheridge, who was supposed to set up his command post at a café beside the bridge. “Where’s Danny?” Parr asked another private. (To his face, the men all called him “Mr. Brotheridge.” The officers called him “Den.” But the men thought of him and referred to him as “Danny.”)

  “Where’s Danny?” Parr repeated. The private did not know. Parr ran to the front of the café. He found Brotheridge lying on the ground in the road opposite the café. His eyes were open and his lips were moving, but Parr could not make out what he was saying. Parr thought, What a waste! All the years of training we put in to do this job—it lasted only seconds and there he lies.

  Stretcher-bearers carried Brotheridge back across the bridge to an aid station. The company doctor, John Vaughan, found the wounded lieutenant “lying on his back looking up at the stars and looking terribly surprised, just surprised.” Vaughan gave him a shot of morphine and began to dress the bullet hole in the middle of his neck. Before he could complete the first aid, Brotheridge died. He was the first Allied soldier to be killed by enemy fire on D-Day.

  • •

  Lt. Robert Mason Mathias was the leader of the second platoon, E Company, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, U.S. 82nd Airborne Division. At midnight, June 5/6, 1944, he was riding in a C-47 Dakota over the English Channel, headed toward the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy. Two hours later, the plane was over France and starting to take some flak from German guns. At 0227 hours, Lieutenant Mathias saw the red light go on over the open door of the plane, the signal to get ready.

  “Stand up and hook up!” Lieutenant Mathias called out to the sixteen men behind him as he hooked the clip from his parachute to the static line running down the middle of the roof of the aircraft. He stepped to the open door, ready to jump the instant the pilot decided the plane was over the drop zone and turned on the green light.

  The Germans below were firing furiously at the air armada of 822 C- 47s carrying the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions into battle. Flakvierling-38s (20mm four-barreled antiaircraft guns) filled the sky with explosions; machine-gun tracers—green, yellow, red, blue, white—arched through the sky. The sight was at once awesome (nearly every paratrooper thought this was the grandest Fourth of July fireworks display he had ever seen) and terrifying. For every visible tracer,
there were five unseen bullets. Unseen, but not unheard—the bullets rattled against the wings of the C-47s, sounding like rocks being shaken in a tin can. Flying at less than 1,000 feet and slower than 120 miles per hour, the planes made easy targets.

  Looking out the door, Lieutenant Mathias could see an intense fire raging. A hay barn on the edge of the village of Ste.-Mère-Église had caught fire, probably from a spent tracer, and was burning fiercely, illuminating the horizon. As the C-47 lurched this way and that, a consequence of the pilot’s futile attempts to escape the flak, the men behind Mathias were calling out “Let’s go,” “For Christ’s sake let’s go,” or “Jump, damn it, jump.” As machine-gun bullets came up through the fuselage, the men instinctively put their hands over their crotches. They had made a dozen or more practice jumps; never had it occurred to them they would be so eager to get out of an airplane in flight.

  Mathias had his hands on the outside of the doorway, ready to propel himself into the night the instant the green light went on. A shell burst just beside him. Red-hot flak ripped through his reserve chute into his chest, knocking him off his feet. With a mighty effort, he began to pull himself back up. The green light went on.

  At twenty-eight years of age, Mathias was five or so years older than the other lieutenants in the 508th, but he did not look it. He had reddish blond hair and an Irishman’s freckles, which gave him a boyish appearance. Long and lanky (six foot one, 175 pounds), he was in superb condition, all raw bone and muscle, strong enough to survive a blow that would have felled an ox and recover almost instantly. He regained his feet and resumed his post at the door.

  • •

  It was the kind of action his men had learned to expect from Bob Mathias. He was immensely popular with his platoon and fellow officers. For two years he had been preparing himself and his platoon for this moment. He was known to be absolutely fair, totally dedicated. He was the best boxer in the regiment, and the best marcher. On one twenty-five-mile march, an intraplatoon competitive hike, when everyone was pushing to the limit, one of his men gave out. Mathias picked him up and carried him the last three-quarters of a mile home.