The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Howard’s sickness gave the men a great laugh, something the company badly needed, as it was in danger of going stale. In barracks, Wally Parr relates, “We would be sleeping, midnight, and all of a sudden the door burst open and in would come a load of screaming maniacs from Sweeney’s platoon, throw the beds up in the air, the whole lot. I’m talking about cannon crackers that we used to use for exercises and that, just throwing them about the place, left, right, smoke stuff, a lot of it. It was sheer vitality coupled with total frustration.”

  Parr, by this time a corporal in charge of the snipers, could not stand the boredom any longer. “Me and Billy Gray and another fellow was bored one night so we decided, just for the fun of it, we’d go and rob the NAAFI1; so we waited until it was pretty dark and then we drifted off to sleep and forgot it, then we woke up about five o’clock and thought, ah, hell, we might as well, so we went over and we broke into the NAAFI and we emptied it of soap, soap powder and everything and came back with it in sackfuls, which we spread all over the cobblestones and pavement. A nice rain stirred it up. You’ve never seen so much soap in all your life. Everything was foam.”

  Howard busted Wally back to private and sentenced him to a fortnight in jail; he put Billy Gray and the other lad in jail for twenty-eight days.

  Howard’s colonel, Mike Roberts, wanted to RTU Private Parr. Howard protested that the punishment was excessive, and in any case told Roberts, “Parr might only be a private but he is the man that when I get to the other side will be promoted straightaway; he is a born leader.” Roberts let Howard keep Parr. There were a number of similar outbursts; Howard called the perpetrators “my scallywags” and says, “All the scallywags, when we got to the other side, they were the best. In battle they were in their natural environment. Unfortunately, most of them were killed because of their nature and their way of going about things.” He did re-promote Parr on D-Day plus two.

  Howard’s solution for boredom was to keep the men physically exhausted. He drove himself hardest of all. He would go for long periods with only two or three hours’ sleep per day, preparing himself for what he anticipated would be a major problem in combat, the making of quick decisions with an exhausted mind.

  Howard also set out, on his own, to make D Company into a first-class night-fighting unit. It was not that he had any inkling that he might be landing at night, but rather he reckoned that once in combat, his troops would be spending a good deal of their time fighting at night. He was also thinking of a favorite expression in the German Army that he had heard: “The night is the friend of no man.” In the British Army, the saying was that “the German does not like to fight at night.”

  The trouble was, neither did the British. Howard decided to deal with the problem of fighting in unaccustomed darkness by turning night into day. He would rouse the company at 2000 hours, take the men for their run, get them fed, and then begin twelve hours of field exercises, drill, the regular paper work—everything that a company in training does in the course of a day. After a meal at 1000 hours, he would get them going on the athletic fields. At 1300 hours he sent them to barracks to sleep. At 2000 hours, they were up again, running. This would go on for a week at a time at first; by early 1944, as Parr recalls, “We went several weeks, continuous weeks of night into day and every now and then he would have a change-around week.” And Parr describes the payoff: “Oh, we were used to it, we got quite used to operating in nighttime, doing everything in the dark.”

  D Company was developing a feeling of independence and separateness. All the sports fanaticism had produced, as Howard had hoped it would, an extreme competitiveness. The men wanted D Company to be first in everything, and they had indeed won the regimental prizes in boxing, swimming, cross-country, soccer, and other sports. When Brigadier Kindersley asked to observe a race among the best runners in the brigade, D Company had entered twenty runners, and took fifteen of the first twenty places. According to Howard, Kindersley “was just cock-a-hoop about it.”

  That was exactly the response Howard and his company had been working so hard for so long to get. The ultimate competitiveness would come against the Germans, of course, but next best was competing against the other companies. D Company wanted to be first among all the gliderborne companies, not just for the thrill of victory, but because victory in this contest meant a unique opportunity to be a part of history. No one could guess what it might be, but even the lowest private could figure out that the War Office was not going to spend all that money building an elite force and then not use it in the invasion. It was equally obvious that airborne troops would be at the van, almost certainly behind enemy lines—thus a heroic adventure of unimaginable dimensions. And, finally, it was obvious that the best company would have the leading role at the van. That was the thought that sustained Howard and his company through the long dreary months, now stretching into two years, of training.

  That thought sustained them because, whether consciously or subconsciously, to a man they were aware that D-Day would be the greatest day of their lives. Nothing that had happened before could possibly compare to, while nothing that happened afterward could possibly match, D-Day. D Company continued to work at a pace that bordered on fanaticism in order to earn the right to be the first to go.

  • • •

  By spring 1943, Jim Wallwork had completed his glider pilot training, using mainly Hotspurs, in the process surviving a grueling course that less than one-third of the volunteers passed. After graduation, Wallwork and his twenty-nine fellow pilots went to Brize Norton, an old peacetime airdrome, “and that is where we saw our first wheel glider, which was the Horsa, and we immediately fell in love with it.”

  The Horsa was a product of Britain’s total war effort. In December 1940, the Air Ministry, responding to the need to conserve critical metals and the need to draw the woodworking industries into wartime production, ordered an all-wooden glider. The prototypes were built at what is now Heathrow Airport; five more were built at Airspeed’s Portsmouth works, which went on to build seven hundred production models. It must have been the most wooden aircraft ever built; even the controls in the cockpit were masterpieces of the woodworker’s artistry. It was a high-wing monoplane with a large Plexiglas nose and a tricycle landing gear. Wingspan was eighty-eight feet and fuselage length was sixty-seven feet. It could carry a pilot and a copilot, plus twenty-eight fully armed men, or two jeeps, or a 75-mm howitzer, or a quarter-ton truck.

  So much for the bare facts. Now let Wallwork describe his reaction the first time he saw a Horsa: “We were astonished at the size to start with. It was like a big, black crow. When we first got in, before we ever flew and felt the controls, saw the size of the flaps, we were very impressed, particularly so since we were going to have to fly it.” The seats in the cockpit were side-by-side “and very big.” Visibility through the front and side was excellent. Each pilot had proper dual controls. The instruments included an airspeed indicator, a turn-and-bank indicator, air-pressure gauge, compass, and altimeter.

  “Flying a glider,” according to Wallwork, “is just like flying an aircraft. The instruments and controls are the same; the only thing that is short in the glider is the rev count and the temperature gauge. Really, flying a glider on tow is just the same as flying an aircraft except that the engine is a hundred yards ahead and someone else is in control of the engine.”

  The glider was tugged on a rope with a Y arrangement; there was a line on each wing that came together in front of the nose and ran on as a single line to the bomber doing the tugging. A telephone line ran along the rope, making possible voice communication between the pilot of the bomber and the glider pilot.

  By midspring, Wallwork had qualified on Horsas, one of the first to do so. He was then shipped down to North Africa.

  • • •

  In March 1943, Rommel called von Luck to come see him at his headquarters near Benghazi. Von Luck drove up and together they dealt with some of the supply problems. Then Rommel asked von Luck to
go for a walk. Rommel regarded von Luck as almost a second son, and he wanted to talk. “Listen,” Rommel said, “one day you will remember what I am telling you. The war is lost.”

  Von Luck protested hotly. “We are very deep in Russia,” he exclaimed. “We are in Scandinavia, in France, in the Balkans, in North Africa. How can the war be lost?”

  “I will tell you,” Rommel answered. “We lost Stalingrad, we will lose Africa, with the body of our best-trained armored people. We can’t fight without them. The only thing we can do is to ask for an armistice. We have to give up all this business about the Jews, we have to change our minds about the religions, and so on, and we must get an armistice now at this stage while we still have something to offer.”

  Rommel asked von Luck to fly to Hitler’s headquarters and plead with the Führer to execute a Dunkirk in reverse. It was all up in North Africa for the Axis, Rommel said, and he wanted to save his Afrika Korps. Von Luck went, but did not get past Field Marshal Jodl, who told von Luck that the Führer was in political discussions with the Rumanians and nobody wanted to butt in with military decisions. “And anyway,” Jodl concluded, “there’s no idea at all to withdraw from North Africa.” Von Luck never returned to Tunisia. Rommel flew out. The Afrika Korps was destroyed or captured.

  Von Luck went on to teach at the military academy for half a year. In the late fall of 1943 he got orders to join the 21st Panzer Division in Brittany as one of the two regimental commanders. He had been specially requested by the division commander, Brigadier General Edgar Feuchtinger, who was close to Hitler and thus got the officers he wanted. Feuchtinger was reviving 21st Panzer from the dead, but his contact with Hitler made it a feasible task. His officers were exclusively veterans, most from Africa or the Eastern Front. The troops—almost sixteen thousand of them, as this was a full-strength division—were volunteers, young, eager, fit. The equipment was excellent, the tanks especially so. In addition, the new 21st Panzer had an abundance of SPVs (self-propelled vehicles), put together by a Major Becker, a reserve officer who was a genius with transport. He could transform any type of chassis into an SPV. On the SPVs he would mount all sorts of guns, but his favorite was the multibarreled rocket launcher, the so-called Stalin organ, with forty-eight barrels.

  Von Luck set to with his regiment. Among many other exercises, he began to give the men extended night-training drills. At the end of 1943, Rommel—as commander of Army Group B—took control of the German Seventh Army in Normandy and Brittany. His arrival and his personality injected badly needed enthusiasm and professional skill into the building of the Atlantic Wall to protect Hitler’s Fortress Europe.

  Even Major Schmidt, guarding the bridges over the Orne waterways, caught some of the enthusiasm. He had come to Normandy some months earlier and quickly adjusted from frantic Nazi to a garrison soldier ready to enjoy the slow pace of the Norman countryside. He had put his men to work digging bunkers and slit trenches, and even an open machine-gun pit; with Rommel’s arrival, the pace of construction sped up, and the scope of the defensive emplacements was greatly increased.

  In March 1944, two reinforcements arrived at the bridge. One was Vern Bonck, who had got caught by the Gestapo in Warsaw, sent to a six-week training camp, where he could hardly understand the German NCOs, and then was posted to the 716th Infantry Division on the coast north of Caen. Helmut Romer had finished his Berlin schooling, been drafted, sent to training camp, and then was also posted to the 716th.

  At the café, Thérèsa Gondrée had given birth to another daughter, to go with six-year-old Georgette.

  Heinz Hickman spent most of 1943 fighting. He participated in the campaign in Sicily, then fought at Salerno and Cassino. At Cassino his regiment took such heavy losses that it had to be pulled back to Bologna for rebuilding and for training recruits. Through the winter of 1943-44, Hickman and his parachute regiment, like Howard and D Company, like von Luck and 21st Panzer, were training, training, training.

  • • •

  In June, Jim Wallwork went to Algeria, where he learned to fly Waco gliders, American-built gliders that landed on skids, carried only thirteen men, were difficult to handle, and were altogether despised by the British Glider Pilot Regiment. The pilots were delighted when they heard that Oliver Boland and some others were going to fly a few Horsas down to North Africa, all the way from England. Wallwork told his American instructors, “You, you be here tomorrow, you’ve got to be here to see a proper bloody glider. You’ll really see something.”

  Then, “By golly, here came the first Halifax and Horsa combination.” Turning to his instructor, Wall-work bellowed, “Look at that, you bloody Yank, there’s a proper airplane, a proper glider, that’s a proper thing. Oh, the truth of it!”

  The Horsa cast off, did a circuit, came down, “and broke its bloody nose off. Imagine this. It was the first one in. Well, our American friends were delighted about that.”

  On the day of the invasion of Sicily, Jim flew a Waco with a lieutenant, ten riflemen, and a hand trailer full of ammunition. The tug pilots were Americans, flying Dakotas, which had no self-sealing tanks and no armored plate. Their orders were to avoid flak at all costs. When they approached the coastline and flak began to appear, most of the American pilots cast off their gliders and turned back to sea. As a consequence of being let go too far out, twenty of the twenty-four gliders never made it to shore. Many of the men were drowned (upon hearing this news, John Howard stepped up his swimming requirements).

  In Jim’s case, he kept telling the Dakota pilot, “Get in, get in.” But the pilot would not get in; instead he turned away to sea. He made a second run and told Jim to drop off, but Jim would not; he could see that the coast was too far away, and he yelled, “Get in, get in.” A third try, a third refusal by Jim to be let go. On the fourth pass, the Dakota pilot said calmly but firmly, “James, I’m going now. You’ve got to let go.” Jim let go, thinking he could just make it. He did, skidding in over the beach, onto a little rough field, fairly close to an Italian machine-gun nest.

  The Italians opened fire, “and we all jumped out; we knew by then to get out of the glider quickly.” Jim turned his Sten gun on the Italians, thinking to himself, “Right, this will do you buggers.” He pulled the trigger and nothing happened. The Sten had misfired. Fortunately the Bren gun knocked out the opposition. As the section then began to unload the glider, the lieutenant asked Wallwork, “Well, where in the hell are we? Do you know where we are?”

  “As a matter of fact, sir,” Jim replied, “I think you should be congratulated.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “I think you are the first Allied officer to attack the soft underbelly of Europe through the toe of Italy.”

  Wallwork claims today that he was so confused by all the passes he had made at the beach that he really did think he had come down on the Continent proper. But his lieutenant merely snorted, “Well, I don’t think much of that idea,” and went about his tasks. Later that fall, Wallwork was shipped back to England to participate in operation Deadstick.

  • • •

  Deadstick was the result of decisions General Gale had made. Studying his tactical problem, Gale had decided that the best way to provide protection for the left flank of Sword Beach would be to blow up the bridges over the River Dives, through paratrooper assaults, then gather his paras in a semicircle around the bridges at Ranville and Bénouville, the ones that crossed the Orne waterway. Without those bridges, the Germans could not get at the left flank of the invasion. Gale could not afford to simply blow up the Orne bridges, however, because without them he would have an entire airborne division in the middle of enemy territory, its back to a major water barrier, without proper antitank weapons or other crucial supplies, and with no means of getting them.

  The bridges had to be taken intact. Gale knew that they had a garrison guarding them, and that they had been prepared for demolition. Paras might be able to take the bridges, and certainly could destroy them, but would probably not be able
to capture them intact. The relative slowness with which a para attack could be launched would give the Germans adequate time to blow the bridges themselves. Gale concluded that his only option was to seize the bridges by a coup de main, using Horsas, which could set twenty-eight fighting men beside a bridge simultaneously. Best of all, in gliders they could arrive like thieves in the night, without noise or light, unseen and unheard. Gale reports in his memoirs that he got the idea of a coup de main by studying German glider landings at Fort Eben Emael in Belgium in 1940 and the Corinth Canal in Greece in 1941. Gale was sure that if his glider pilots and his company commander were good enough, it could be done. He thought the real problem would be holding the bridges against counterattack until help could arrive from the paratroopers.

  Gale briefed Brigadier Poett, explaining his conclusions and his reasoning. He told Poett he was putting the glider company under his, Poett’s, command for the operation, because Poett’s would be the para brigade that got to the gliders first. He told Poett, “The seizing of the bridges intact is of the utmost importance to the conduct of future operations. As the bridges will have been prepared for demolition, the speedy overpowering of the bridge defenses will be your first objective and it is therefore to be seized by the coup de main party. You must accept risks to achieve this.”

  Next Gale went to Kindersley, explained his coup de main idea, and asked Kindersley who was the best company commander in his brigade to carry out the mission. Kindersley replied, “I think that all my men are jolly good leaders, but I think Johnny Howard might do this one rather well.” They decided to find out if he could.