The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Lt. Walter Sidlowski, an engineer, marveled at the rangers. “My guys had always felt we were in good shape physically,” he remembered, “but watching the rangers using most of their time double-timing, with and without arms and equipment, push-ups and various other physical exercise whenever they were not doing something else, was cause for wonder.”26

  “I can assure you,” Lieutenant Eikner of the 2nd Ranger Battalion commented, “that when we went into battle after all this training there was no shaking of the knees or weeping or praying; we knew what we were getting into; we knew everyone of us had volunteered for extra hazardous duty; we went into battle confident; of course we were tense when under fire, but we were intent on getting the job done. We were actually looking forward to accomplishing our mission.”27

  • •

  The combat engineers had the most complex job. They were organized into three brigades of three battalions each; the 6th Engineer Special Brigade was attached to the 116th Regiment on the right flank at Omaha; the 5th ESB was scheduled to go in with the 16th Regiment on the left at Omaha; the 1st ESB joined the 4th Division at Utah.

  Almost one-quarter of the American troops going in on the morning of D-Day would be engineers. Their tasks, more or less in this order, were to: demolish beach obstacles, blow up mines on the beach, erect signs to guide incoming landing craft through cleared channels, set up panels to bring in the troops and equipment (the color of the panel told the ships offshore which supplies to send in), clear access roads from the beach, blow gaps in the antitank wall, establish supply dumps, and act as beachmasters (traffic cops).

  There were all sorts of units attached to the ESBs. Naval beach battalions had semaphores and heliographs in addition to radios in order to communicate between the beach and the fleet. A chemical battalion was ready to decontaminate anything hit by poison gas and to deal with radioactive materials (there was a fear that the Germans were far enough along in their atomic research to use such poisons). There were medical battalions, ordnance battalions, grave-registration companies, MPs to handle prisoners, DUKW battalions, signal companies to lay telephone wire—sixteen specialized units in all, organized into special companies and battalions. As Lieutenant Colonel Thompson, who took command of the 6th ESB after the work of the Assault Training Center was completed, remarked, “Was there ever a unit so meticulously put together, so precisely engineered for a specific mission as this?”28

  The ESBs went through the Assault Training Center at Slapton Sands. Sgt. Barnett Hoffner of the 6th ESB participated in Operation Tiger, the April 27–28 exercise in which the LSTs were lost. “I was on the beach at the time with my squad. We were practicing taking up mines when we saw the bodies come floating in. I had never seen dead men before. We started down to the water’s edge to get the bodies when I heard a voice yell, ‘Sergeant! Get your men out of there!’ I looked up and saw two stars on the shoulders and recognized that it was Major General Heubner. I got my squad out of there fast. You don’t question anything a general says.”29

  The point was that everyone had a job. General Heubner wanted Sergeant Hoffner to concentrate on his. There were grave-registration crews to take care of the dead. On D-Day, the basic principle was that no one should stop to help the wounded, much less bury the dead—leave those tasks to the medics and grave-registration crews, and get on with your task.

  • •

  There were many other special units, including underwater demolition teams, midget-submarine crews to guide the incoming landing craft, tiny one-man airplanes with folded wings that could be brought in on Rhino ferries (42-by-176-foot flat-bottomed pontoon barges with a capacity of forty vehicles, towed across the Channel by LSTs, powered for the run into the beach by large outboard motors), put into operation on the beach and used for naval gunfire spotting. The 743rd Tank Battalion, like the other DD tankers, spent months learning how to maneuver their tanks in the Channel. The 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion (Colored) practiced setting up their balloons on the beach. The Cherokee code talkers (forty in all, twenty for Utah, twenty for Omaha) worked on their radios—they could speak in their own language, confident the Germans would never be able to translate.

  • •

  All the commando units were special, but some a bit more so than others. The 1st and 8th troops of No. 10 Commandos were French; Pvt. Robert Piauge was a member of 1st Troop. Piauge was born in Ouistreham, at the mouth of the Orne River, in 1920, his father already dead as a result of a World War I wound. He joined the French army in 1939, over his mother’s tearful protests, and managed to get to England in June 1940, where he rallied to De Gaulle’s call to arms. He joined the French commandos, which were part of the French navy but equipped, trained, and attached to the British commandos. That the French were eager to get back was obvious, Piauge especially so after he learned he would be landing at Ouistreham, where his mother still lived.30

  The No. 10 Commandos came from all over Europe. The various troops in No. 10 were Polish, Dutch, Norwegian, and Belgian. Like the French commandos, they were eager to get going. Like all commandos, U.S. rangers, airborne troops, and the other specialists, they trained to the absolute limit.

  The men in 3 Troop, No. 10 Commando, needed no motivating. They were young European Jews who had somehow managed to make it to England. From the moment they arrived, whether from Germany or Austria or Czechoslovakia or Hungary, they pleaded for a chance to fight. Adm. Lord Louis Mountbatten, commander of Combined Operations, sent them to the commandos, where they were organized into 3 Troop, with the thought that they would go through regular commando training, then be made into specialists in patrolling and intelligence matters. The key was their language ability. If challenged on a patrol, they could answer in good German; they could also conduct instant interrogation of prisoners. They were trained in all matters pertaining to the Wehrmacht—organization, documents, weapons, and methodology.

  Cpl. Peter Masters was a member of 3 Troop. Born in Vienna in 1922, he was there when the Germans marched into Austria on March 12, 1938, “so I lived under the Nazis for six months, which was quite sufficient to turn me from a kid that had been brought up as a pacifist to a volunteer eager to get into the action.” In August 1938 he managed to get to London; soon he joined the commandos.

  “Can you shoot?” he was asked by the recruiting officer. “Can you handle a boat? What do you know about radio?” Masters said he had once shot a BB gun, that he had rowed a boat but never sailed, and that he knew nothing about radios. He was so enthusiastic that the commandos took him anyway.

  Told to take a new name so as to avoid German retribution if captured, but only given a couple of minutes to think about it, he chose “Masters.” He got a dog tag with “Peter Masters” on it, plus “Church of England.” He and all the others in 3 Troop had to invent stories to explain why they spoke English with an accent. Masters’s story was that his parents traveled extensively and he had been raised by a German-speaking nanny who didn’t have much English.31

  Harry Nomburg was also a member of 3 Troop. “I was born in Germany,” he related, “and at the age of fifteen was sent by my parents to England to escape Nazi persecution. I left Berlin on May 21, 1939. It happened to be a Sunday, Mother’s Day. I never saw my parents again. At the age of eighteen, I joined the British army and in early 1943 volunteered for the commandos. Together with my green beret I was also given a brand-new name.” He chose “Harry Drew,” but went back to Nomburg after the war; Masters retained his English name.32

  (There was a former member of the Hitler Youth among the American paratroopers. Fred Patheiger was born in December 1919 in Rastatt, Germany. As a teenager he joined the Hitler Youth. His aunt wanted to get married; a Nazi Party investigation revealed that his great-grandfather had been Jewish; he was kicked out of the Hitler Youth. His mother contacted relatives in Chicago; in April 1938 Patheiger immigrated to the United States. His parents, aunt, and other relatives died in the concentration camps. When he attempted to enlist i
n 1940, he was classified “Not Acceptable—Enemy Alien.” He wrote J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI to protest, saying he wanted to fight Nazis, not Germans. Shortly thereafter he was classified “Acceptable” and joined up. He became a corporal in the 101st Airborne.33

  The men of 3 Troop were broken up for D-Day into five-man groups, each assigned to a different commando brigade. Masters went with a bicycle troop. They had cheap collapsible bicycles with baskets on the fronts to carry their rucksacks. The bikes had no mudguards, no pedals, just stems, and Masters found them damnable, But he soldiered on, overjoyed to be of service. The Nazis, who lived by hate, had built up a lot of hatred in Europe in the past five years. From Piauge, Masters, Nomburg, Patheiger, and other young refugees, the Nazis were about to get some of their own back.

  • •

  Racism was at the heart of the Nazi philosophy. Racism was also present in the American army. In 1937 senior officers at the U.S. Army War College had done a study to assess the strengths and weaknesses of black soldiers. Their conclusion was that “as an individual the negro is docile, tractable, lighthearted, care free and good natured. If unjustly treated he is likely to become surly and stubborn, though this is usually a temporary phase. He is careless, shiftless, irresponsible and secretive. He resents censure and is best handled with praise and by ridicule. He is unmoral, untruthful and his sense of right doing is relatively inferior.”

  As to strengths, “the negro is cheerful, loyal and usually uncomplaining if reasonably well fed. He has a musical nature and a marked sense of rhythm. His art is primitive. He is religious. With proper direction in mass, negroes are industrious. They are emotional and can be stirred to a high state of enthusiasm.”

  In World War I, two black U.S. divisions had fought in France. One, serving with the French army, did well; it won many medals and a request from the French for more black troops. The other, serving with the American army, with white Southerners as officers and woefully inadequate training and equipment, did poorly. The War College officers in 1937 concentrated on the failure and ignored the success, which led them to conclude that blacks were not capable of combat service. Consequently, although three black infantry divisions were organized for World War II, only one, the 92nd Infantry, saw combat.

  By March 1944, there were about 150,000 black American soldiers in the United Kingdom. Most of them were in Services of Supply, mainly working at the ports unloading ships or driving trucks. They were strictly segregated. In the mythology of the time, this did not mean they were objects of discrimination. Separate but equal was the law of the land back home, and in Britain.

  General Eisenhower issued a circular letter to senior American commanders that ordered, “Discrimination against Negro troops must be sedulously avoided.” But, he acknowledged, in London and other cities “where both Negro and White soldiers will come on pass and furlough, it will be a practical impossibility to arrange for segregation so far as welfare and recreation facilities are concerned.” When the Red Cross could not provide separate clubs for blacks, Eisenhower insisted that the blacks be given equal access to all Red Cross clubs. But he went on to tell local commanders to use “their own best judgment in avoiding discrimination due to race, at the same time minimizing causes of friction through rotation of pass privileges.” In other words, where there was only one Red Cross club in an area, or only a few pubs, the black soldiers would have passes one night, the whites on another.35

  The Red Cross built twenty-seven separate clubs for black troops, but they were not enough. There was some mixing of races in white clubs, and even more in the pubs. Some ugly scenes resulted. Fist fights almost always broke out when black and white GIs were drinking in the same pub. There were some shootings, most by whites against blacks (Maj. Gen. Ira Eaker, commander of the Eighth Air Force, declared that white troops were responsible for 90 percent of the trouble), and a few killings—all covered up by the Army.

  Eisenhower sent out another circular letter. He told his senior officers that in the interests of military efficiency “the spreading of derogatory statements concerning the character of any group of U.S. troops, either white or colored, must be considered as conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline and offenders must be promptly punished. . . . It is my desire that this be brought to the attention of every officer in this theater. To that end, I suggest that you personally talk this over with your next senior commander and instruct them to follow up the subject through command channels.”

  Lt. Gen. J. C. H. Lee, commanding Services of Supply and thus the man with the most at stake, ordered every one of his officers to read Eisenhower’s letter to their immediate subordinates and warned that “General Eisenhower means exactly what he says.”

  The order had little effect. The racial incidents continued. Eisenhower ordered a survey done on soldiers’ mail; officers censoring the enlisted men’s letters reported that most white troops commented, with varying degrees of amazement, on the absence of segregation in Britain. They were indignant about the association of British women with black soldiers. They expressed fears about what effect the experience American blacks had in Britain would lead to back home after the war. Black soldiers, meanwhile, expressed pleasure with the English and delight at the absence of a color line. One officer, after analyzing censorship reports for several weeks, reported toward the end of May 1944, that “the predominant note is that if the invasion doesn’t occur soon, trouble will.”36

  The best way to avoid trouble was to keep the troops, of whatever color, hard at work. Eisenhower ordered that “troops must train together, work together and live together in order to attain successful teamwork in [the coming] campaign.”37 As the white infantrymen practiced going ashore from their Higgins boats, the black soldiers loaded and unloaded LSTs and other vessels. The training was intense and seemed never to end.

  • •

  The Germans in France hardly trained at all. Instead, they put more poles in the ground, more obstacles on the beach, working through April and May as construction battalions rather than going through field maneuvers. An exception was the 21st Panzer Division. Colonel Luck, commanding the 125th Regiment, put his tankers through regular night exercises. He emphasized assembly points, various routes to the coast or to the bridges over the Orne River and Canal, fire and movement, speed and dash. On May 30, Rommel inspected the division. He was enthusiastic about a demonstration with live ammunition of the so-called Stalin Organ, a rocket launcher with forty-eight barrels. That evening, Rommel told the officers of the 21st to be extremely vigilant. He closed with these words, “You shouldn’t count on the enemy coming in fine weather and by day.”

  Staying vigilant was not easy. As Luck records, “For a panzer division, which in the campaigns so far had been accustomed to a war of movement, the inactivity was wearisome and dangerous. Vigilance was easily relaxed, especially after the enjoyment of Calvados and cider, both typical drinks of the region. There was, in addition, the uncertainty as to whether the landing would take place at all in our sector.”38

  In other words, even the elite of the Wehrmacht in Normandy had grown soft enjoying the cushy life of occupiers in the land of fat cattle and fine apples. For the ordinary Wehrmacht soldier, whether a teenager from Berlin or a forty-year-old Pole or Russian in an Ost battalion, life consisted of boring work during the day, enjoyment at night, waiting and praying that the invasion would come elsewhere—anything but getting ready for the fight of their lives.

  The long occupation of France made for special problems. There was an increasing incidence of German soldiers divorcing their German wives in order to marry French women. Further, there was a danger that individuals and even units might surrender wholesale at the first opportunity. Obviously, this was so with the Ost battalions, but it also existed with German-born troops who, according to a December 1943 secret high command report, had “the illusion of a confrontation with an adversary who acts humanely.” As Dr. Detlef Vogel of the Militargeschichtliches Forschung
samt put it, “As a result, hardly anyone was too much afraid of becoming a POW of the Allies. This was not exactly a favorable condition for endurability and steadfastness, as constantly demanded by the military commanders.”

  Dr. Goebbels put his propaganda machine to work to convince the German soldiers in the West that they faced a “life-and-death struggle, an all-out conflict.” Shortly before the landing, General Jodl tried to bolster spirits by arguing, “We shall see who fights better and who dies more easily, the German soldier faced with the destruction of his homeland or the Americans and British, who don’t even know what they are fighting for in Europe.”

  Rommel could not count on it. As Dr. Vogel writes, on the eve of the invasion “It remained quite doubtful whether the German troops in the West would resist in the same death-defying manner as they were frequently doing against the Red Army, for the often assumed motive of the German soldier defending his homeland certainly did not have the same significance to the soldiers in the West as to their brothers-in-arms on the Eastern Front.”39

  To counter such defeatism, the commanders lied to their troops. Peter Masters discovered in his interrogations of POWs on D-Day and after that the men had been told, “We will easily push them back into the sea. Stukas will dive bomb them; U-boats will surface behind their fleet and shell and torpedo them; bombers will sink their landing craft; panzers will rout them on the beaches.”40

  How many, if any, believed such fantasies is open to question. The truth is that the Wehrmacht was full of doubts, which were best expressed by Rommel’s insistence that more concrete be poured, more poles stuck in the ground, rather than training for quick movement and lightning strikes. On the other side of the Channel, meanwhile, the men of the AEF were putting in nearly all their time getting ready.

  * * *

  I. Mabry stayed in the infantry. He was awarded the Medal of Honor and retired a major general.