The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  Clementine Churchill hastened home to alert the prime minister, who was still reviewing papers in his bed at 10 Downing Street. “The Guards Chapel,” she told him, “is destroyed.” He hurried to Birdcage Walk and watched salvage teams lift out the dead. Among others, several musicians from the Coldstream Guards band were found in a side gallery, still holding their instruments as if in a wax tableau, surely faithful unto death. Churchill wept.

  That afternoon he motored to Bushy Park and asked Eisenhower to redouble efforts against the flying bomb. In a memo on Sunday evening, the supreme commander ordered that the targets code-named CROSSBOW, comprising V-1 launch areas, supply dumps, and related sites, “are to take first priority over everything except the urgent requirements of the battle.” Yet more than thirty thousand attack sorties already had flown in the past six months, dropping the tonnage equivalent of four Eiffel Towers on CROSSBOW in an effort to eviscerate a program Allied intelligence knew was in development. Some launch sites were hit forty or more times before analysts realized that the V-1 could be fired from elusive mobile launchers. Ideas for defeating the flying bombs poured in from the public: harpoons fired from tethered Zeppelins; huge butterfly nets; projectiles filled with carbolic acid. One patriot offered to put a curse on German launch crews.

  CROSSBOW countermeasures in the coming weeks were more conventional but fitfully efficacious. Two thousand barrage balloons were deployed on approaches to London in hopes that their tethering cables would bring down the bombs in flight; German engineers responded by fitting V-1 wings with Kuto-Nasen, sharp blades to cut the cables. Fighter pilots grew adept at shooting down the bombs with 20mm cannons—at 380 miles per hour, the RAF Tempest could overtake the V-1—and some even learned to use their wings to create enough turbulence to send a bomb spiraling out of control. Although a V-1 was considered eight times more difficult to bring down with ground fire than a German bomber, more than a thousand antiaircraft guns were shifted from greater London to the southeast coast for better fields of fire, along with 23,000 gunners and 60,000 tons of ammunition and radar equipment. Sussex and Kent in the southeast became known as Bomb Alley.

  Eisenhower’s “first priority” edict dismayed his air force chieftains, who favored the uninterrupted smashing of German cities, oil facilities, and other strategic targets. The order stood: one-quarter of all combat sorties in the next two months would be flown against CROSSBOW targets, and crews would drop 73,000 tons of bombs—another eight Eiffel Towers. This enormous diversion of bombers had little impact on German launches; typically, one hundred V-1s were still fired at Target 42 each day. Few could doubt that the best solution was for Allied armies to overrun what was now dubbed the Rocket Gun Coast of northwestern France. “We must give the enemy full credit for developing one of the finer weapons of the war,” the war diary for the U.S. Strategic Air Forces acknowledged. “People are beginning to get a bit jittery and jump when a door slams.”

  A British study calculated that “the average Londoner” could expect to be within a half mile of a V-1 detonation once a month, odds that did “not appear unduly alarming.” Few Londoners saw it that way. V-1 explosions sucked workers from office windows, incinerated mothers in grocery stores, and butchered pensioners on park benches. A lieutenant who was recuperating in a hospital hit by a flying bomb wrote his wife that the blast “pushed through the walls and surrounded us, gripped us, entered us, and tossed us aside.” He confessed to being “more afraid than I have ever been of anything in my life.”

  Soon not a pane of glass remained in city buses. Tens of thousands of houses were smashed. “The most horrible thing was the sound of burning timber,” a witness reported, “the crackling, malicious sound, like little devilish laughs.” Eisenhower complained in a note to Mamie that he had been forced into a Bushy Park air raid shelter nineteen times one morning. When a V-1 was heard during a performance at the St. James Theatre, one patron muttered, “How squalid to be killed at this disgusting little farce.”

  Fewer and fewer were willing to accept the risks. By August, 1.5 million Londoners would evacuate the city, more than during the Blitz. Of 10,492 V-1s ultimately fired at Britain, about 4,000 were destroyed by fighters, balloons, and antiaircraft guns, while others veered off course or crashed prematurely. But about 2,400 hit greater London, killing 6,000 and badly injuring 18,000. (Not one struck Tower Bridge.) It was, an official British history concluded, “an ordeal perhaps as trying to Londoners as any they had endured throughout the war.”

  How Easy It Is to Make a Ghost

  WEST of Bayeux, the Norman uplands displayed the gnarled visage that had been familiar to Celtic farmers even before the Romans marched across Gaul. Over the centuries ten thousand tiny pastures had emerged from the limestone and pre-Cambrian schist, girdled by sunken lanes the width of an oxcart and enclosed with man-high hedgerows of thatched hawthorn roots, raspberry bushes, lupine, violets, and greasy mud. The sylvan noun for this terrain—“bocage,” defined as a grove, or “an agreeably shady wood”—belied the claustrophobic reality of what one infantryman would call “the Gethsemane of the hedgerows.” To Pacific veterans like General Collins, this jungly corner of France resembled Guadalcanal.

  “I couldn’t imagine the bocage until I saw it,” Omar Bradley would say after the war. That failure of imagination was in fact a failure of command: Allied generals had been amply forewarned, and even Caesar had written of hedgerows that “present a fortification like a wall through which it was not only impossible to enter but even to penetrate with the eye.” More recently, an August 1943 military study on French topography included two dozen photographs of “Norman bocage”; in mid-April, a First Army report described “embanked fields interspersed with thickets” and advised that tactics for fighting “through bocage country should be given considerable study.” Aerial photos of an eight-square-mile swatch revealed some four thousand hedged enclosures. Yet, as in the amphibious assaults on North Africa and Sicily, planners preoccupied with gaining the hostile shore devoted little thought to combat beyond the dunes. “We were rehearsed endlessly for attacking beach defenses,” a battalion commander later wrote, “but not one day was given to the terrain behind the beaches, which was no less difficult and deadly.”

  Now that difficult, deadly terrain played hob with First Army’s timetable. As Rommel had predicted, American troops cut the Cotentin Peninsula early on June 18, after two regiments from the 9th Infantry Division lunged west to the sea near Barneville. Three divisions abreast in Collins’s VII Corps then began clawing north toward Cherbourg, thirteen miles distant. In the south, the 29th Division commander on June 17 reported, “I feel we’ll be getting to St. Lô before long.” Alas, no: although barely five miles from the American line, that linchpin town would remain out of reach for another month.

  Tank companies now reported that to advance 2,500 yards typically required seventeen tons of explosives to blow holes through nearly three dozen hedgerows, each defended like a citadel parapet. “Each one of them was a wall of fire,” a soldier in the 30th Infantry Division wrote, “and the open fields between were plains of fire.” An officer noted that “the enemy can be ten feet away and be undetected. He can fight up to spitting range.” That intimacy neutralized Allied air and artillery advantages. “There were snipers everywhere,” Ernie Pyle reported, “in trees, in buildings, in piles of wreckage, in the grass. But mainly they were in the high, bushy hedgerows.” A sliding scale of rewards awaited the proficient German sniper, according to a SHAEF document: “10 corpses—100 cigarettes; 20 corpses—20 days’ leave; 50 corpses—Iron Cross 1st Class and wristwatch from Himmler.”

  Enemy panzers, artillery, and savage small-arms fire made western Normandy ever more lethal. The poet-infantryman Louis Simpson described the “short, velvet bursts” of German machine pistols, and added: “The purr of the bullets is wicked.” A soldier hesitant to cross an open pasture to a farmhouse wrote, “I lie in the grass pondering whether to take the chance. Yes-no-yes-no.”
In this “land of great danger,” as Pyle called it, no weapon was more feared than the mortar—described by one soldier as “a soft siffle, high in the air, like a distant lark, or a small penny whistle, faint and elf-like, falling.” Mortar fragments caused 70 percent of the battle casualties among four U.S. infantry divisions in Normandy; radar that could backtrack the parabolic flight of rounds to the firing tubes would not be battle-ready for months. Close combat heightened the animal senses; like many riflemen, Simpson sniffed for a smell “we have come to recognize as Germany—a compound of sausage and cheese, mildewed cloth, and ideas. Some ideas stink. Every German hole … exudes the smell of their philosophy.”

  French civilians waving white strips of don’t-shoot cloth scurried to their chicken coops during lulls, gathering eggs that they sold to GIs for the equivalent of eight cents apiece. Soon even the henhouses were blown to smithereens, birds “plastered to the walls like pats of mud.” Almost 400,000 buildings in Normandy would be demolished or badly damaged. Livestock casualties included 100,000 cows; bulldozers buried them by the herd, as stiff-legged as wooden toys. Many towns were beaten to death—“as if somebody had pulled them down with a gigantic rake,” in one description; pilots reported smoke tinted red from pulverized brick. In St.-Sauveur “there was not a building standing whole,” Don Whitehead reported. A medic told his family in Indiana of a smashed village “deserted and silent. Not the silence that you know, but a more profound and depressing silence.”

  Each contested town, like each hedgerow, added more dead, wounded, and missing to a tally that in OVERLORD’s first fortnight exceeded eighteen hundred each day for the U.S. First Army alone, or one casualty every forty-seven seconds. A French nurse told her diary of wounded men “white as sheets, their nostrils tight, their eyes rolled back. Wide bleeding lacerations, shattered limbs, internal injuries, faces in shreds.” Sharp spikes in combat exhaustion—a term coined in Tunisia to supplant the misnomer “shell shock”—reflected the stress of bocage combat; by mid-July, such neuropsychiatric cases would account for one of every four infantry casualties in 21st Army Group, with the worst of them “crouched down like hunted animals” in battalion aid stations. First Army by early August would also investigate more than five hundred cases of suspected “S.I.W.”—self-inflicted wounds—typically a gunshot to the heel, toe, or finger. “A fine division was burned up taking the village of La Haye–du–Puits,” one lieutenant colonel wrote. “There are 100 such villages between here and Paris. Have we 100 divisions to expend on them?”

  There was nothing for it but to pound away. “Things are always confusing and mysterious in war,” Pyle wrote. “I squatted there, just a bewildered guy in brown, part of a thin line of other bewildered guys.” Captain Keith Douglas, a British veteran of North Africa and perhaps the most poignant poetic voice of the Second World War, had written of killing the enemy, “How easy it is to make a ghost.”

  And how easy to become one: Douglas died south of Bayeux, slain by a mortar splinter so fine that his body appeared unblemished. “I buried him close beside the hedge near where he was killed,” a chaplain wrote. “Being quite alone and reading the brief Order of Service over the grave affected me deeply.”

  * * *

  Only the sharpest weather eye could have noticed a faint tremor in the barometer glass on Sunday night, June 18. Despite a cold front descending from Iceland and a restless Mediterranean depression, SHAEF forecasters predicted fair skies and calm seas along the invasion coast for several days, in keeping with the benign season. Channel Pilot, a bible for mariners sailing the Norman coast, put the chance of a June gale near zero. Another analysis of storm records since the 1870s rated the odds at three hundred to one.

  More than two hundred ships now plied the invasion anchorage each day. Though men and machines blackened the beaches, the 218,000 tons of supplies landed since D-Day amounted to 30 percent less than planned. Confusion reigned, both in jammed British ports and on the Far Shore, where ship captains often anchored off the wrong strand, manifests went missing, and petulant officers in small boats puttered from ship to ship demanding to know the contents of each bottom. Surfeits piled up: one quartermaster depot would report receiving 11,000 brooms, 13,000 mops, 5,000 garbage cans, and 33,000 reams of mimeograph paper. An officer was heard pleading, “Please, oh, please, stop sending me stuff I don’t need.”

  But shortages were more common, ranging from compasses and helmet nets to shovels. Bradley’s units desperately needed another six thousand M-7 grenade launchers. Thousands of tons of jumbled cargo was unloaded from nineteen ships in an urgent search for a few hundred bundles of maps. No need was more pressing in the bocage than 81mm mortar ammunition. The failure to find enough rounds in the anchorage led to a desperate requisition for nearly all of the ammo, of every sort, in the United Kingdom. Soon 145,000 tons lay offshore; troops rummaged through every hold for the right type, but strict firing limits would be imposed on eight divisions anyway. First Army on June 15 had also placed severe restrictions on artillery fire missions after some batteries, expected to shoot 125 rounds per gun daily, fired four times as much in only twelve hours.

  Salvation appeared to be rising from the sea off beaches Omaha and Gold, where a pair of gigantic “synthetic harbors” took shape after two years of planning under excruciating secrecy. In one of the most ambitious construction projects ever essayed in Britain, twenty thousand workers at a cost of $100 million had labored on the components; another ten thousand now bullied the pieces across the Channel and into position with huge tow bridles, hawsers, and 160 tugs. Each artificial harbor, Mulberry A and Mulberry B—American and British, respectively—would have the port capacity of Gibraltar or Dover. Among other novelties, seventy-five derelict ships ballasted with sand had sortied from Scottish ports for Normandy in what was described as a “final journey of self-immolation”; they included superannuated merchantmen, antique side-wheelers, and ancient battleships like the British Centurion and the French Courbet, flying an enormous tricolor. Scuttled in three fathoms parallel to the shore, the vessels formed long breakwaters called Gooseberries.

  To this suicide fleet were added 146 immense concrete caissons, each weighing up to six thousand tons. Towed like floating apartment buildings across the Channel, the caissons were then sunk near the Gooseberries to form additional breakwaters. Also shipped to the Norman coast were ten miles of floating piers and pierheads, with telescoping legs to rise and subside with the tide. In all, two million tons of construction materials went into the Mulberries, including seventeen times more concrete than had been poured for Yankee Stadium in the 1920s. Skeptics yawped—“One storm will wash them all away,” warned Rear Admiral John L. Hall, the senior salt at Omaha—but unloading had begun at Mulberry A on the night of June 16. Liberty ships and the like could now unburden more than half a mile from shore, and LSTs could be emptied in under an hour. At last, the OVERLORD beaches seemed rational and right.

  And then, as if to rebuke those intent on taming the sea, the old gods objected. That trembling barometer abruptly plummeted, gray squalls and a rising wind piled seas against the lee shore, and one of the worst June gales in eighty years began to blow. By midmorning on Monday, June 19, unloading had halted; by noon, H.M.S. Despatch logged winds at Force 8—almost forty miles per hour—and seas exceeding five feet. Anchors dragged and fouled, tethers snapped, antiaircraft crews were evacuated from the Mulberry gun platforms after waves carried off handrails and catwalks. Tuesday was fiercer, with seas over nine feet racing down the Channel. Oil spread along the Gooseberries calmed neither sea nor nerves. “Storm continues if anything worse than before,” a British lieutenant wrote. “In considerable danger of being swept away.”

  Swept away they were, pier by pier, and pierhead after pierhead, with the sound of steel grinding steel above the howling wind. Runaway vessels smashed into the pontoon piers despite shouted curses and even gunshots from sailors manning Mulberry A. Of three dozen steel floats—each two hundred feet l
ong and twelve feet wide—twenty-five broke loose to rampage through the anchorage off Omaha. Pounding waves broke the backs of seven ships in the Omaha Gooseberry, including the venerable Centurion, and many concrete caissons fractured. Distress calls jammed all radio channels and the plaintive hooting of a hundred boat whistles added to the din. “This is a damnable spell we are going through,” Admiral Ramsay told his diary on Wednesday, June 21.

  After eighty hours, the spell broke. “The shriek dropped to a long-drawn sigh,” a witness wrote. “In the west a rent in the sky revealed blue.” Force 7 gusts continued through midafternoon Wednesday, but the Great Storm was spent, the havoc wreaked. “Not even a thousand-bomber raid could have done as much damage,” a Navy salvage officer concluded. Eight hundred craft of all sizes had been tossed ashore, including a small tanker deep in the dunes, and dozens more were sunk. From Fox Red to Dog Green, every exit off Omaha was blocked by sea wrack. More than two miles of articulated steel pier, under tow from England when the blow began, were lost at sea.

  Mulberry A was a total loss, washed ashore or bobbing as flotsam around the Bay of the Seine. Some scraps would be salvaged for Mulberry B, which had been less grievously injured because it was shielded by shoals and—the British believed—because the Gooseberries were positioned with greater care than the Yanks had exercised. Regardless, Ramsay decried the Mulberries as “an even more formidable abortion than I had anticipated,” while Admiral Hall called them “the greatest waste of manpower and steel and equipment … for any operation in World War II.”