The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  One of the glider pilots had a question. In an entirely innocent manner, he asked, “Sir, what do we do after we land our gliders?”

  The briefer was taken aback. After a silence, he confessed, “I don’t know. I guess we really never thought of that really.” There was nervous laughter when the glider pilot sitting next to Sgt. Charles Skidmore gave his own answer, “Run like hell!”24

  The Army being the Army, inevitably there were some jackasses around. Sgt. Alan Anderson of the 116th Regiment remembered being called into a tent where some colonel from public relations “got up and made an impassioned and patriotic speech about what a privilege it was for us to have this opportunity to be in this great invasion which would change the history of the world, and then at the end of his speech he made the remarkable announcement that he was sorry he couldn’t go with us. My buddy, Arkie Markum, poked me and said, ‘Well, he can have my place if he really wants to go!’ ”

  The PR colonel went on to say that the Army was ready to take nearly 100 percent casualties in the first twenty-four hours. Anderson remembered, “We all turned around and looked at each other and said, ‘Well, it’s tough that you have to go.’ ”25

  Once briefed, the troops were sealed in tight. MPs roamed the grounds and perimeter, no one allowed in without proper identification, no one allowed out without proper orders. Capt. Cyril Hendry, a British tanker, recalled that his father died on June 1 and was buried on June 3, and “I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral, I just wasn’t allowed, but my brother in the army who was stationed in Damascus was allowed to fly home for the funeral.”26

  Bravado comes easy to young men who think of themselves as indestructible, but the briefings and the detailed study of the beach defenses had a sobering effect on even the most lighthearted, unreflective soldiers. For all that they told each other nothing could be worse than the training regimen, they had some sense of what bullets and shrapnel can do to a human body. For the most part they had not been in combat, but they had been reading or seeing war news ever since September 1939. In their hometown newspapers or at the newsreels at the movie theaters they had followed the sweep of the Wehrmacht across Europe, watched it defeat the best the Poles, Norwegians, Belgians, British, French, Yugoslavs, Greeks, and Russians could put against it. The men of the AEF realized that the Wehrmacht was a thoroughly combat-experienced army that had once been unstoppable and might now be impregnable.

  As a consequence of these realizations, after the briefings the chaplains did a big business. After losing his $2,500, “Dutch” Shultz went to confession. The priest, a British chaplain, “really chewed me out about some of the sins I confessed to him involving the Sixth Commandment.” Shultz went to Mass every chance he had “and I should mention that it was a very inspiring sight to me to see Captain Stef, Major Kellam, Major McGinty, and other battalion officers serving as altar boys.”27

  Major Thomas of the 508th didn’t pay much attention at his briefing: “I had been in the airborne long enough to know that night jumps never went off as planned.” Afterward, he got into a poker game. He was losing so he thought “I better go and listen to the chaplain, so as to touch all the bases. About the time I was sitting down on a cot in the last row, the only seat left in the house, Chaplain Elder says, ‘Now, the Lord is not particularly interested in those who only turn to him in times of need.’ I thought, ‘Gee, he must have seen me come in.’ So I got up and left.”28

  When John Barnes learned that his outfit, Company A of the 116th Infantry, would lead the way, he went to Mass, “thinking this might be my last time.” He had been brought up by a devout mother whose heartfelt prayer had been that he would become a priest. When he graduated from high school, he had to tell her he wasn’t cut out for a religious life. But as he prayed at Mass, “I decided I would make a bargain with God. If my life was spared, I’d become a priest. Then I thought that was a bad bargain, either for Him or me, so I decided I’d take my chances.”29

  There were some who decided not to take any chances. “Dutch” Schultz remembered a paratrooper who “accidently” shot himself in the foot. A 1st Division sergeant, Joseph Dragotto, watched with astonishment as a man from another company calmly put a generous portion of pipe tobacco between two pieces of bread and ate the “sandwich.” That got him into the hospital—and out of the invasion. Dragotto also saw a man lift his rifle and start firing it into the pup tents. As the MPs descended on him, Dragotto wondered why he was doing such a crazy thing, “and then I realized he didn’t want to go to war.”30

  Other men dealt with their fears by making their appearance even more fearsome than it already was. In the 115th Regiment, the men of one squad got a hot idea and began cutting hair, shearing it right down to the scalp. The idea quickly spread; soon the company, then nearly the whole regiment took on the appearance of a convict colony.

  The paratroopers picked up on the craze, except that they left a band of hair down the middle of the scalp, so that they looked like Indians (“Mohawks,” the style was called). Col. Robert Sink, commanding the 506th PIR, saw the haircutting going on and said, “I forgot to tell you, some weeks ago we were officially notified that the Germans are telling French civilians that the Allied invasion forces would be led by American paratroopers, all of them convicted felons and psychopaths, easily recognized by the fact that they shave their heads or nearly so.”31

  Junior officers and noncoms worried: were they equal to the leadership task the army had assigned to them? Sgt. Alan Anderson talked to one of his privates, George Mouser, about his fears. Mouser responded, “Well, sarge, the only way this war is ever going to end, we’re going to have to cross the Channel and we’re going to have to end it. The quicker we get at it, the better. And of all the men that I have trained with, I would rather go with you into combat than anyone.”32 In the 506th PIR, Sgts. Carwood Lipton and Elmer Murray spent long hours discussing different combat situations that might occur and how they would handle them.

  • •

  There were nearly 175,000 men in the sausages waiting to cross the Channel on D-Day and it is obviously impossible to generalize about their mood. Some were apprehensive, some eager, some determined, some afraid. In part, attitude depended on age. Charles Jarreau was seventeen years old; he regarded his twenty-two- and twenty-three-year-old buddies as “old men.” He thought their feeling was, “Gee, let’s get this thing over so we can get home.” His own attitude was, “Let’s get to France so we can have some fun.”33

  To venture one generalization, there was more anticipation among the Americans than the British. For the Yanks, the way home led east, into Germany. For the Tommies, they already were home. Capt. Alistair Bannerman, a platoon commander in Sussex in southeastern England, wrote a long letter, stretching over his time in his sausage, to his wife. The letter captures his mood and that of at least some of his fellow Tommies.

  “We don’t feel majestic at all at the moment,” he wrote on May 28. “There are too many little pinpricks in this life. The eternal drill, the being pushed around, hobnailed boots and sweaty socks, and now the caged existence too. . . . I have tried explaining to my own platoon that we’re about to make history and that one day their children will read of our deeds in the history books, but all I get are faint smiles.

  “To soldiers . . . Churchill’s radio rhetoric sounds a bit embarrassing. They have no great faith in the new world, they have no belief in any great liberating mission. They know it’s going to be a charnel house. All they want is to put an end to it all, and get back to civvy street, to their homes, their private lives, their wives and loved ones.”

  On May 31, Bannerman wrote, “What a gigantic effort each man now has to make, to face up to something like this. Men who may have had only little of life, men with little education and little knowledge and with no philosophical supports, men with ailing, estranged or poor or needy families, men who have never been loved, men who had never had high ambitions or wanted a new world order. Yet we’re all here, w
e’re all going, as ordered, willingly into battle.”34

  • •

  In the first couple of days in June, the AEF began to load up and form up and move out for the journey across the Channel. The men left behind their duffel bags, taking with them only what they could carry—mainly weapons and ammunition, gas masks, photos of their loved ones, and a change of clothing (they were issued their cartons of cigarettes and C and K rations when they boarded). Lt. Col. Thompson spoke for all the men when he remarked, “Anyone who was there remembers with nostalgia the weeks spent in the concentration and marshaling areas.”35

  • •

  It is one of the great mysteries of World War II that although the Germans saw the buildup in southern England—they could hardly have missed it—they completely failed to draw the right conclusions from the concentration. There were nightly bombing raids over the sausages, no big deal, seldom more than a half dozen bombers, and regular flights over the harbors, with bombers dropping mines. German reconnaissance planes occasionally managed to sneak in, take some photographs, and roar away to the east. The situation cried out for a superhuman effort from the Luftwaffe to bomb the harbors and marshaling areas, but it never happened. Of course the Luftwaffe was but a shadow of its 1940 Battle of Britain self, and of course the dummy landing craft in eastern England supporting the Fortitude deception operation confused the Germans, but still to have missed the opportunity to hit the harbors and sausages with whatever they had was inexcusable and inexplicable. “It just seems a miracle,” Seaman Richard Freed of the merchant marine commented.36

  Another mystery: After the great success in late April against Tiger, when E-boats sank two LSTs and damaged six others, with no German loss, why did not the German navy make an all-out effort to use the E-boats in Caen against the Allied buildup? In fact, the E-boats made no effort at all. The German submarines, what was left of them, were meanwhile out in the North Atlantic. In the first week of June, U-boats sank two American destroyers in the mid-Atlantic, but they carried out neither reconnaissance missions nor torpedo attacks against the Overlord armada.

  That the Germans failed to conclude from what they knew of the buildup that lower Normandy was the target is not so surprising. The fact that the AEF had gathered in southern England was not a giveaway as to the site of the invasion. Portsmouth is closer to the Pas-de-Calais than it is to Caen. Control of the sea meant that the fleet moving out into the Channel could head straight east, to Calais, or straight south to Calvados and the Cotentin, or southwest to Brittany. The AEF had a mobility unprecedented in the history of war. As John Keegan rightly notes, thanks to the specialized landing craft, the creation of the airborne divisions, and the utilization of command of the air to isolate the landing zone, it was precisely “where the Allies felt themselves to be at their most vulnerable in their Second Front strategy [that] their greatest strength lay; in their reliance on the sea for the movement of their forces.”37

  The Allies carried out many miniature Fortitude operations in the weeks before D-Day, sending landing craft covered by cruisers and destroyers to simulate assaults against various beaches in France. These dummy assaults kept the Germans jumpy and sometimes revealed radar sites and local Luftwaffe capacity.

  Much more exact information on the Germans came from Ultra intercepts, the continuous and massive air reconnaissance, and the French Resistance. On June 3, the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee reported on “German Appreciation of Allied Intentions Regarding Overlord.” It was a most heartening document. It opened, “There has been no intelligence, during the last week, to suggest that the enemy has accurately assessed the area in which our main assault is to be made. He appears to expect several landings between the Pas de Calais and Cherbourg.” It noted that the Germans continued to “overestimate the size of the Allied forces likely to be employed” and to expect landings in Norway.38

  In “Weekly Intelligence Summary No. 11,” also issued on June 3, SHAEF G-2 assessed German strength. It noted the movement of various German divisions into France and closer to the coast. Later, much was made of the shift of some formations into the Cotentin and at Omaha Beach, as if this indicated that Hitler, Rundstedt, and Rommel had finally penetrated the secret; in fact, many German units were on the move, reinforcing the Atlantic Wall from northeast to southwest (the LXVII Corps, for example, was moved on the first day of June into the Somme estuary, with headquarters at Amiens). Total German strength in France had increased almost 20 percent, from fifty to sixty divisions (ten armored); inevitably some of those reinforcements went to the invasion site, but not the panzers.39

  Altogether, the intelligence gathered by the Allies was generally accurate, detailed, and helpful—just the opposite of the intelligence gathered by the Abwehr. The Allies knew what they were up against; the Germans could only guess.

  • •

  At Widerstandsnest 62 (WN 62), a fortification overlooking the Colleville draw at Omaha Beach, eighteen-year-old Pvt. Franz Gockel was involved in a debate with his comrades. Half the members of his platoon argued that the Allies would come here, in the next week or two. The other half argued that the defenses at Colleville were too strong—the Allies wouldn’t dare come here.

  WN 62 guarded an artillery observation post that spotted for a field battery about five kilometers inland. In front of the position there were 105mm cannon zeroed in on preplanned targets. WN 62 consisted of two casemates holding 75mm guns, a 50mm antitank gun, two light and two heavy machine guns, and twenty men, all, except for the Oberfeldwebel and the two NCOs, under nineteen years of age. The bunkers had two-meter-thick concrete ceilings and were connected by trenches.

  Private Gockel had never seen salt water before he was posted to Calvados in early 1944 with the 352nd Division. He sat behind his twin-mounted machine gun night after night, through April, May, on into June, watching, waiting, wondering. During the day, he dug. As one of his comrades put it on the afternoon of June 3, “If there will be any possibility at all of surviving an attack, it will only be with the help of this trench. Dig!”

  That evening, Gockel remembered, “nothing moved on the calm surface of the water, only the slow swells made their way to the beach. The fishing boats from Grandcamp and Port-en-Bessin remained in harbor. Until May they had routinely made their excursions along the coast, but now the sea was empty.”40

  * * *

  I. Had the invasion of Japan’s home islands gone ahead as planned in the fall of 1945, that would have been a larger operation. On the tenth anniversary of D-Day, at a press conference, President Eisenhower predicted that the world would never again see such a concentration in so small an area because in the atomic age it would be too vulnerable. In Operation Desert Shield in 1990–91, the UN forces gathered to attack Iraq were less than one-quarter the size of the AEF. The numbers of men involved in various battles on the Eastern Front in World War II were higher than those in D-Day, but on the Eastern Front the numbers of aircraft were far below those in the United Kingdom, and of course there was no sea armada.

  9

  LOADING

  EISENHOWER HAD SET D-Day for June 5. Loading for the assault began on May 31, running from west to east—from Falmouth and Fowey for the U.S. 29th Division, from Dartmouth, Torquay, and Exmouth for the U.S. 4th Division, from Weymouth and Portland for the U.S. 1st Division, from Southampton for the British 50th and Canadian 3rd divisions, from Portsmouth and Newhaven for the British 3rd Division. Those coming from a distance rode to the quays by bus or truck; those whose sausages were close to the harbors formed up into their squads, platoons, and companies and marched.

  Everything was on the move, jeeps, trucks, big artillery pieces, tanks, half-tracks, motorcycles, and bicycles. Crowds gathered on the streets to watch the apparently never-ending procession. The adults were giving the V-for-Victory sign, but as one company of the 1st Division marched through a village, a boy of eleven or twelve called out to a sergeant, “You won’t come back.” The boy’s mother gave a gasp, picked
him up, and ran to the front of the column. As the sergeant passed, the boy sobbed through his tears, “You will come back! You will!”1

  Death was on the mind of many of the men. As Pvt. Clair Galdonik remembered his bus ride to Dartmouth, “Few words were spoken among us. No joking or prankster stunts. We felt closer to each other now than ever before.”2 Motor Machinist Charles Jarreau of the Coast Guard was on LCI 94, watching the gathering on the quay at Weymouth. “The troops were just flooding the docks,” he recalled. “People everywhere. Priests were in their heyday. I even saw Jews go and take communion. Everybody scared to death.”3

  In most cases anticipation overrode fear. The men were eager to get going. The excitement in the air was nearly overwhelming. The Allied high command had deliberately brought the men to the highest level of readiness, mentally and physically. Training had been going on, in most cases, for two years or more. Although there had been transfers and replacements, a majority of the men were in squads and platoons that had been together since boot camp. They had shared the drudgery and the physical and mental demands of training, hated or loved their COs together, eaten their meals together, slept in the same foxhole on maneuvers together, gotten drunk together. They had formed a bond, become a family. They knew each other intimately, knew what to expect from the guy on their left or right, what he liked to eat, what he smelled like.

  Not many of them were there by choice. Only a few of them had a patriotic passion that they would speak about. But nearly all of them would rather have died than let down their buddies or look the coward in front of their bunkmates. Of all the things that the long training period accomplished, this sense of group solidarity was the most important.