The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945

by The New York Times

  WEATHER NOT FAVORABLE

  The weather was uncertain but possibly a decisive factor. It was not favorable to the attacking forces. It was revealed at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force that the great blow had been postponed one day because the barometer had started to fall—not an unusual occurrence in this land of fickle weather.

  On the basis of reports from his meteorologists, General Eisenhower postponed the launching of his attack twenty-four hours. Then the weather men assured him that an improvement was coming and he was faced with the problem of gambling on their science or postponing the attack another month. His was a grim decision, for it waslearned at Supreme Headquarters that had the meteorologists been wrong the whole expedition might have met with disaster.

  As it was, the weather was not good, but it improved. At the start clouds obscured air targets and winds swept the Channel into one of its hellish moods, so a large part of the invading force must have been seasick when they landed to do battle with the enemy.

  The tides of the Channel, which in the days of the Spanish Armada favored England, changed in the crucial hours between dark and daylight. Minesweepers had to switch their gear from one side to the other and never slow down or stop lest the cutting tools they drag behind them sink to the ocean floor.

  The first communiqué merely said Allied troops had landed in northern France. Later this was expanded unofficially to mean Normandy, where the apple trees have just shed their blossoms and begun to bear fruit.

  U.S. troops disembarking from landing crafts during the D-Day invasion, June 6, 1944.

  The attempt at liberation of the Continent has begun auspiciously. Later the Allies will count upon the help of the resistance movements of Europe, but radio broadcasts by Gen. Charles de Gaulle, head of the French Committee of National Liberation; Dr. Pieter S. Gerbrandy, Netherlands Premier; Hubert Pierlot, Belgian Premier, and General Eisenhower have made it clear that the time is not yet. All these speakers advised the people of occupied Europe to wait for orders to rise against the Nazi occupation.

  JUNE 9, 1944

  Editorial

  IN JUSTICE TO FRANCE

  Two great phases of history are unfolding today on the new Western Front. One is the destruction of the Nazi power. We cannot come to grips with that power today on the soil of Germany itself. We must encounter it first on the soil of France, where if we could avoid it we would not shatter one ancient wall, cut down one tree or trample a single poppy under foot. The love for France, for the French culture, for the French landscape, is shared by all civilized men. It is pitiful that we must hurt what we love in order to kill what we hate.

  This awful necessity must burden everyone in authority, from President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill down to the company commander who has to open fire on a Norman farmhouse in order to clear out snipers. If it so weighs on us, how heavy must be the burden on all true Frenchmen. No doubt freedom is greater than Paris and honor outbalances even a village whose houses may have seen Joan the Maid pass by. But we should have reverently in mind the agony that is mingled at this moment with French hopes.

  And surely the two great Governments which are chiefly responsible for Allied military and political policy in France should go as far as they possibly can to spare the feelings of those Frenchmen, in and out of France, who did not surrender in 1940. Some progress has indeed been made toward full cooperation with the French Committee of National Liberation. General Eisenhower and General de Gaulle are now “in complete agreement on the military level.” That is good news. But military agreement is not sufficient. As soon as battle conditions permit we shall want and need to hand over liberated French territory to Frenchmen, To what Frenchmen shall we hand over the guardianship of French soil until the French people themselves by popular choice have created a new Government? Obviously to those, both inside and outside of France, who have been loyal to their country and to liberty.

  We do not believe there is any basic difference of opinion on this score either in Washington or in London. Yet there has been a shocking lack of preparation for this political emergency. There may have been good reasons for our present uncertain policy toward the National Committee, but, if so, they have been kept inexcusably secret.

  Our soldiers need the eager support of every French civilian. How much easier would their task be if there could now be awakened in France the spirit that brought the Marseillaise marching to Paris in 1792! The Fourth Republic is about to be born in fire and pain. Cannot it be welcomed into the world with something more stirring than a businesslike agreement between two generals?

  JUNE 11, 1944

  Allies Landed Men Months Ago To Dig Sample Of Normandy Soil

  By Cable to The New York Times.

  SUPREME HEADQUARTERS, Allied Expeditionary Force, June 10—A “commando” raid by a group of civilian scientists, a search through obscure seventeenth–eighteenth-century French manuscripts, months of study of geological reports, experiments with model beaches—all these were a part of the Allied preparations for the invasion of Normandy that is one of the most remarkable stories of the war.

  Months before the invasion parties of civilian scientists, not all of them young or signally muscled, landed on the beaches up which the Allied infantry were to scramble last Tuesday. Wriggling along on their bellies, within range of German guns, they obtained samples of sand soil so when the tanks and trucks bustled ashore the drivers would be prepared for the terrain and equipment would be on hand to bridge the worst spots.

  The dramatic story of the preparations, which began in musty libraries, shifted to laboratories and ended on the shell-swept beaches, was told today by a mild-mannered professor in baggy clothes.

  When the invasion was planned he was consulted by the Allied staff on the character of the beaches. He referred the officers to the old manuscripts, which, he said, stunned the staff officers. “But I convinced them they were worth studying so we went to work,” he said.

  “The geologists expected trouble because the area had been an Ice Age forest,” the scientist added. “But the military people did not like all this book talk. So the only thing to do was to go and see.”

  Photographs and pre-war reports helped in the study of the beaches, but the final investigation had to be carried out on the spot. According to the scientist, a few months before the invasion “some very bright lads got over nicely and quietly by night, causing no disturbance and attracting no notice.

  “They crawled half a mile on their bellies on the beach, with special instruments taking samples and charting the positions of the soft clay patches on the beaches, then brought the results to England.”

  With the samples to go on, the scientists recommended the type of vehicles that could best be used on the beaches and marked the points where steel carpets would have to be laid over the soft spots. Then the team of scientists got to work on the enemy’s beach defenses. These were copies, and the experiments showed the troops how they could best be dealt with on landing.

  Most of the defenses were reconstructed from photographs and other intelligence reports.

  In the same painstaking manner the scientists assembled data on flooded areas around Carentan. Every scrap of information was gathered. Here, too, there were manuscripts to be studied as well as military references to the Frenchflooded area in the Franco-Prussian War seventy-four years ago.

  Carentan lies in the center of the whole series of tidal river valleys. By the simple process of openingthe sluice gates at high tide andclosing them at low tide, the Germans converted the entire area into a mass of shallow lakes and ponds.

  JUNE 11, 1944

  This Is the Europe We Came to Free

  The ordeal of Nazi rule has created a welter of hungry, rebellious peoples.

  By PIERRE MAILLAUD LONDON

  (By Wireless).

  What kind of Europe are the Allied armies going to discover as they penetrate the areas of German conquests in Western Europe? One may wel
l say “discover” rather than “rediscover,” for long years of ordeal have wrought such deep changes that even former visitors to the old Continent won’t be able to retrace their steps on once familiar paths.

  To such a Europe there is no available Baedeker. Its national traditions, beliefs, basic ways of living, even its frontiers, have all been thrown back into the melting pot. The old molds have been broken; Europe has refused to be cast into the new German one. Nothing quite similar has happened in history since the tenth century, when, through the dismemberment of Charlemagne’s empire, the first European framework was shattered and the Continent fell back on feudal anarchy.

  Our contemporary Europe, to be sure, had several hundred years of national traditions behind her, but these traditions, deep-rooted in the West, were less settled in eastern and Balkan Europe, where frontier and minority feuds had never ceased and have lately been deliberately fanned by the Germans. In the West the foundations of social life and many tenets of national life have been shaken. For more than four years Europe has existed chiefly on negative sentiments—hatred of German rule and a burning will to free herself from the German yoke.

  This is not to say there are no currents of thought, no political tendencies, no valuable trends of social evolution, no ethical life in shackled Europe. That would be far from the truth. But there is no means of coordination among these diverse tendencies so that the general pattern of the Continent is infinitely variegated and confused not only to the onlooker but equally so to the citizen of any occupied nation who cannot communicate either in thought or deed with his fellow countrymen or his fellow Europeans. From tales of the experiences of travelers, fugitives and combatants one can form a general picture of the Continent. Let us paint it in broad strokes:

  It is a hungry, rebellious, touchy, hypersensitive welter of peoples, among whom all contradictions can coexist and even be somewhat reconciled or merged. It is idealistic in its long-term aspirations, often cynical in the attempt to satisfy its daily needs. It believes in man’s future, yet often sets little store by human life. Large sections of the population cling to past memories as antidotes to present sufferings, while iron-hard groups of resistance live only for the future in ruthless indifference to their own temporary plight or their own lives.

  It is apt to be parochially nationalistic in its sentimental reactions, through years of national humiliation, yet its hopes are broadly European and even world wide. Its men and women folk, who queue up for hours for a few ounces of bread and live for days on end on the single obsessive thought of getting food, suddenly stake their own and their children’s lives on an act of defiance of the enemy or charity to a friend. They chafe under Allied bombings, if they feel they have more than their share, but they will take any risks to save an Allied pilot.

  Hunger, hope, depression and exaltation, the overpowering pressure of daily needs, acts of utter self-denial, contrasts between the urgency of the small problems of life and the general yearning for great accomplishment, contradictions between the narrowness of the day-today outlook and the broadness of long-term conceptions which is the reaction against moral and intellectual servitude, greed and generosity, brutal realism and idealism—such are the elements of the European make-up. It is at once soft and hard. Life is spasmodic. Such a Europe, for which emergency has become a habit, is in many respects incalculable. In it the largest allowances must be made for the unexpected.

  More than any other event in history, the invasion will be, above all, for better or for worse, a meeting between peoples on which lasting impressions will be formed. This is not to suggest that responsibility for the consequences will lie solely with Allied soldiers and not with the continental peoples as well.

  But it must be realized that humiliated nations are nationally touchy, that their pride has been deeply hurt, that anything suggestive of a patronizing attitude toward them would touch a very sore point. They are purchasing at a very high cost the right of being treated as equals.

  What inferiority complex the western nations of the Continent may therefore have suffered since June, 1940, has been largely redeemed by their share in the struggle, both in the internal and external theatres of war. British and American soldiers will find themselves among people who will be oversensitive to their behavior for good or evil.

  It is impossible for the average American citizen, or for that matter for the British, to form an approximate picture of the appalling misery inflicted, and inflicted with ruthless and perverse deliberation, by the German invader. To cause enduring, and if possible irreparable, damage to the body and soul of Europe was, and still is, a part of the German—and not only the Nazi—policy. So that under-feeding, destitution, political and literal slavery have been dominant notes in the lives of the occupied peoples for more than four years. The spectacle of physical fitness, relative abundance and freedom which their allies will present, in striking contrast to the continental plight, will therefore be all the more welcome if it is not coupled with the display, conscious or not, of superiority in wealth or conduct.

  Readers may, perhaps, find the above picture too gloomy, or feel that if the outlook of the occupied nations is such as I have tried to describe it, it shows a degree of ingratitude. They must, however, understand that nations cannot endure appalling physical and moral sufferings without finding some compensatory element This can only be found in the hardening of national pride, which in itself entails a strain on relationships with others—including friends.

  To take this into account and turn the present operations into a reunion of peoples as well as a military victory is the great ambassadorial task not of statesmen only but of every citizen-soldier who sets foot on the Continent. No task was ever worthier, nor its fulfillment more fatefully decisive.

  JUNE 14, 1944

  ALLIES’ CENSORSHIP WORKS WITH SPEED

  Average Time for Dealing With Invasion Story 11 Minutes—3 Nations Take Part

  By E. C. DANIEL

  By Wireless to The New York Times.

  LONDON, June 13—At one of the touchiest moments of the war, it still takes an average of only eleven minutes apiece for invasion news dispatches to be read and censored by the three-nation military censorship at Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force.

  These dispatches are pouring through London at the rate of 500,000 to 750,000 words a day. Front-line dispatches generally consist roughly of 300-word “takes,” or sections, each.

  On the stroke of D-day, the special SHAEF censorship force representing the United States, Britain and Canada and the ground, sea and air forces was at “action stations” in London. Sixteen field censors with three radio transmitters crossed the Channel with the fighting forces to handle dispatches under fire.

  They had received not only full training in censorship but also field training to fit them for the rigors of the front, and they had thoroughly studied the organization, personnel and secret weapons of the invasion units about which the correspondents would be writing. Several of them served in Africa. The censors have already started functioning and news dispatches are being sent by wireless from the beachhead to London, ready for immediate publication or transmission overseas.

  HEADED BY BRITISH OFFICER

  At headquarters the news censorship consists of a vast enlargement of an American organization that has been functioning for months as an advisory and auxiliary body to the highly geared press censorship operated by the British Ministry of Information since the beginning of the war. The SHAEF censorship, which does not cover political matters, is a branch of the Supreme Headquarters public relations department, under a British officer, Lieut. Col. George Warden, formerly a military adviser to the British censorship. He has as his operations officer an American, Lieut. Col. Richard H. Merrick, who was for several months the United States Army censor inthis theatre.

  Colonel Merrick commands an organization with the unwieldy name of “SHAEF Joint Press Censorship Group.” Its battleground is known to every corresp
ondent as“Room 16” in the Ministry of Information Building. Its personnel consists of 138 censors, including the sixteen in the field, from the British, American and Canadian armed services.

  The censor makes any necessary emendations, stamps the copy “Passed for publication as censored,” and marks it with his initials and number. The dispatch is then returned to the senior censor, who, if he has time, inspects it for too much or too little censorship. Of fifty representative dispatches recently passed—dispatches of all types and lengths—it was found that two minutes was the shortest time for censorship and thirty-eight minutes was the longest. This record can be expected to improve as the first rush of dispatches subsides and the censors become more familiar with the material.

  Dispatches written in the London offices of American newspapers and news agencies and sent to cable companies for transmission in the usual routine are referred, usually by telephone, to the SHAEF censorship if they contain disputable points about operations in France. The censors at the cable companies are the same British censors who have functioned there for years, augmented by eighteen American censors “lent-leased” to the British for the rush.

  JUNE 16, 1944

  STUNNING BLOWS STRIKE FOE IN PACIFIC ARENA; SAIPAN IS STORMED

  By GEORGE F. HORNE

  By Telephone to The New York Times.

  PACIFIC FLEET HEADQUARTERS, June 15—American troops who fought their way ashore on Saipan Island in the Marianas Islands on Wednesday have firmly established their beachheads and are making good progress in an advance inland against heavy opposition, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz said in a communiqué tonight.