by Lynne Olson
OF OPERATION OVERLORD, historian Max Hastings has written: It was “the greatest organizational achievement of the Second World War, a feat of staff work that has dazzled history, a monument to the imagination of British and American planners and logisticians which may never be surpassed in war.” That analysis was written, of course, well after the D-Day landings took place. Before they occurred, many of those involved in their planning, including Eisenhower himself, were consumed with worry that the Allies were not ready for the operation and that it would end in utter failure—”a disaster” as Frederick Morgan put it, “of the most crushing dimension.”
The sheer magnitude of Overlord made Torch—and virtually every other previous American or British military operation—look like a kindergarten exercise. In all, nearly two million soldiers, sailors, and airmen from half a dozen Allied countries would take part in the landings and subsequent march across Normandy, causing logistical and other problems that staggered the imagination. The Allies would have to accomplish what no one had done since William the Conqueror in 1066—mount a successful assault across the English Channel.
There were doubts and anxieties about virtually every aspect of the operation—from insufficient numbers of landing craft to the famously unpredictable weather over the Channel to a shortage of supplies. For weeks, Eisenhower wrangled with the Allied bomber barons, Tooey Spaatz and Arthur Harris, who continued to believe that their air forces could win the war on their own, all evidence to the contrary, and balked at placing their planes and crews under Ike’s direct command. “By God,” Eisenhower stormed to a British colleague, “you tell that bunch that if they can’t get together and stop quarreling like children, I will tell the Prime Minister to get someone else to run this damn war!” Both Spaatz and Harris eventually capitulated, but as General Omar Bradley, who was to lead the U.S. First Army in Normandy, later noted, one result of their recalcitrance was that “we went into France almost totally untrained in air-ground cooperation.”
As difficult as the Air Force commanders were, they were far from the main concern of Eisenhower and his lieutenants. Above all, the SHAEF brass feared that the Allied ground troops—the linchpins of the operation—would not measure up to the task. Ike, Bradley, and other combat commanders had been unimpressed, to put it mildly, by the troops’ performance in amphibious and other exercises they had witnessed on the south coast of England that spring. Bradley called the simulated amphibious landing “more like a peacetime maneuver than a dress rehearsal of an assault against the continent.” Harry Butcher wrote in his diary that many young American officers seemed to lack drive and purpose, seeming to “regard the war as one grand maneuver in which they are having a happy time.”
Haunted by memories of the calamitous Gallipoli landings and the bloodbath of World War I, Churchill shared Eisenhower’s worries. Having resisted Overlord, with its enormous dangers, for so long, both Churchill and Alan Brooke were, in Brooke’s words, “torn to shreds with doubts and misgivings” as the operation’s launch date grew closer. “I never want to go through a time like the present one,” Brooke wrote in his diary on May 27. “The cross-Channel operation is just eating into my heart.”
For his part, Eisenhower, who had been one of the foremost champions of that operation since the beginning of the alliance, exuded confidence in public as he always did. Emotionally and physically, however, he was a wreck. He was smoking and drinking too much and suffered from headaches, recurring throat infections, a bad cough, skyrocketing blood pressure, stomach pains, and chronic insomnia. “He was as nervous as I had ever seen him and extremely depressed,” Kay Summersby observed.
With Overlord, the SHAEF commander knew, there would be no second roll of the dice. “In this particular venture, we are not merely risking a tactical defeat,” he wrote in early April, “we are putting the whole works on one number.”
WHILE EISENHOWER and his staff agonized over D-Day at Bushy Park, a frenzied carnival atmosphere took hold in overcrowded, clamorous London. Traffic was gridlocked, restaurants and clubs were packed, and it took days, sometimes weeks, for newcomers to the capital to find a vacant hotel room or flat. Many of the new arrivals were American journalists, flooding in from all over the globe to be on hand for the biggest story of the war. Ernie Pyle, who had come to London from Tunisia, wrote: “I decided that if the Army failed to get ashore on D-Day, there would be enough American correspondents to force through a beachhead on their own.”
Like Pyle, many of the five hundred U.S. reporters now in the British capital had arrived from other battlefronts—North Africa, Italy, Asia, the Pacific. Some of the correspondents were grizzled veterans who had covered World War I, while others were wide-eyed journalistic novices, fresh from their newspapers’ city, society, and sports desks. A good number represented publications like Vogue and Sporting News, never previously known for their keen interest in war reporting. Bemused by the eclectic nature of his new, untried colleagues, Pyle quipped that “if Dog News didn’t get a man over pretty quickly to cover the dog angle of the invasion, I personally would never buy another copy.”
While waiting for D-Day, the newcomers found themselves caught up in London’s superheated social life; for many, the weeks before the invasion turned into one continuous party. There were lunches, dinners, cocktail parties, dancing cheek to cheek at nightclubs, and all-night poker sessions in hotel rooms reeking of gin and cigarettes. By then, liquor and wine had become almost impossible to find for most London residents, but, with their quasi-officer status and large salaries and expense accounts, U.S. journalists, like their compatriots in the military, had no trouble unearthing large quantities of both.
Years after the war, Bill Paley looked back fondly on those hedonistic preinvasion days and nights. Recalling a riotous, boozy stag party at Charles Collingwood’s apartment that spilled out into the street and didn’t end till dawn, the head of CBS said: “Everything that happened that night was funny…. Everyone loved each other and it was just a brawl, a big lousy brawl, but it was one of those nights in my life that was very outstanding.”
Another inveterate partyer during that period was Ernest Hemingway, who had arrived in London in May as a special reporter for Collier’s. The famed novelist’s assignment to cover Overlord stemmed not from a late-blooming passion to become a war correspondent but from a desire to spite his journalist wife, Martha Gellhorn, from whom he had become estranged. A Collier’s correspondent herself, Gellhorn, who had covered the Italian campaign, wrote to Hemingway in late 1943: “I believe you will feel very deprived, as a writer, if this is all over and you have not had a share in it.”
Knowing that if he wrote for Collier’s, he would overshadow Gellhorn at the magazine, he wangled an assignment to cover the RAF. Once in London (which he insisted on calling “dear old London town”), he took up residence at the Dorchester, intent more on drinking and womanizing than on journalism. John Pudney, a young RAF public relations officer assigned to help Hemingway, found him boorish and offensive. “To me, he was a fellow obsessed with playing the part of Ernest Hemingway,” Pudney said, “a sentimental nineteenth-century actor called upon to act the part of a twentieth-century tough guy. Set beside … a crowd of young men who walked so modestly and stylishly with Death, he seemed a bizarre cardboard figure.”
Within days of his arrival in London, Hemingway had met Mary Welsh and announced he planned to marry her. To Welsh, he complained about being beset by a throng of London socialites and aristocrats, who, enticed by his fame and macho image, came to his hotel room for flirtations and brief sexual encounters. “They want to stay all night,” he groused, “and then have [me] take them home just in time to meet His Lordship leaving for the office in the morning.”
NOT EVERY AMERICAN journalist, however, participated in the capital’s frenetic social whirl. Ed Murrow, like several other longtime London correspondents, was too busy planning the news coverage of Overlord to have time for such frivolity. In a reflection of his status
as the preeminent American journalist in the capital, Murrow, now the president of the American Foreign Correspondents Association, was deeply involved in virtually every aspect of the D-Day preparations. Along with three other reporters, he collaborated with SHAEF to work out the myriad logistical problems of press coverage: how many journalists would cover the landings, how they would get there, where they would go, how they would file their stories. Because of the uncertainties of broadcasting from France, the American radio networks had agreed to pool their Overlord reports, and Murrow had been named to direct their combined efforts. He also had been chosen to broadcast Eisenhower’s proclamation to Allied troops on D-Day.
All these duties were a signal honor for the CBS broadcaster, but he was happy with none of them. The assignment he coveted was to cover the invasion. For the last four years, he had done little actual war reporting, staying behind in the backwater of London and envying his correspondents who were on the front lines, from Tunisia to the South China Sea. For a man who hated sitting behind a desk, such inaction was torture.
The night before Charles Collingwood left for North Africa in 1942, he and Murrow went out drinking. As they stumbled back to Murrow’s apartment in the blackout, both more than a little drunk, Murrow kicked over a garbage can and shouted, “By God, I envy you for going off! I wish I could go along with you!” A few months later, he did spend a few weeks at the front in Tunisia, but his CBS superiors made clear to him that he was too valuable to the network to risk his life like that on a regular basis. Of the twenty-eight U.S. correspondents named to cover D-Day, five would represent CBS—a remarkable achievement for a news organization that didn’t even exist seven years before. But as he knew from the beginning, the man who had been most instrumental in creating that organization would not be among the lucky five.
Still, although he was barred from the battlefield, Murrow managed to find a way to court wartime danger. In the previous five months, he had hitched a ride on more than a dozen RAF and Eighth Air Force bombing missions, most of them bound for Germany. Murrow’s story about one of his flights, made in December 1943, was among the best-known news broadcasts of World War II. An unvarnished account of the terror of aerial warfare, both on the ground and in the sky, it began with the sentence: “Last night, some of the young gentlemen of the RAF took me to Berlin.” An exhausted, shaken, red-eyed Murrow, just back from the mission, talked of the killing that had gone on around and below him—”Men die in the sky while others are roasted in their cellars”—and described how “very frightened” he was when his RAF bomber was trapped in the glare of German searchlights. That night, he said, Berlin was “a kind of orchestrated hell…. In about 35 minutes it was hit with about three times the amount of stuff that ever came down on London in a nightlong blitz.”
In the days that followed, the CBS newsman was besieged by congratulatory letters and telegrams from around the world. The BBC, calling his story “one of the finest broadcasts ever,” transmitted it across the country, and newspapers throughout England and the United States published it on their front pages. Among them was the Daily Express, whose editor, Arthur Christensen, termed the piece “magnificent” and “the only good bombing story written.” He sent a check to Murrow, which the broadcaster used to buy books and a new radio for the RAF base housing the aircrew that flew him to Berlin. “Ed was cynical about life in general,” Pamela Churchill observed, “but the one thing he could absolutely one hundred per cent admire were the young flyers.”
At a gala dinner at the Savoy celebrating the BBC’s twenty-first birthday, Brendan Bracken, the minister of information, turned the occasion into a paean to Murrow (“the most faithful friend of Britain”) and his story (“one of the finest pieces of writing I’ve seen”). About the same time, Bracken wrote to Murrow: “My dear Ed, Your attempts to corner trouble are altogether deplorable. The value of your war work cannot be over-estimated. And no one can take your place.” Bracken, like many of Murrow’s other friends, was appalled by his penchant for putting himself in harm’s way again and again. One bombing mission to Germany, perhaps. But more than a dozen? Why did he do it?
In the view of BBC executive Dick Marriott, the reason lay in Murrow’s sense of guilt for not participating in the fight himself: “I think this was a compensation in a way for not being in the war.” Herbert Agar believed it was the lure of danger that drew the newsman to the bombing missions: “It was a drug without which he felt deflated…. Ed was always at his best when the bombs were falling or he had broken all the rules to go aloft and have another look at death.” Eric Sevareid said his boss had “a thing about speed…. He loved speeds, high speeds. It gave him some kind of thrill.”
For his part, Murrow had several rationales for why he repeatedly gambled his life in the air. One reason, he acknowledged to The New Yorker, was, as Sevareid surmised, his love of speed. Another was vanity: “Three or four times in London, when I’d be sitting in the office, we’d hear the BBC playing back things I’d said, and nothing has ever made me feel as good as that.” To a friend, he wrote: “In order to write or talk about danger, you must experience it. The experience teaches you something about what happens to fighting men and, perhaps more important, it teaches you something about yourself.” But, as he acknowledged in a letter to his sister-in-law, he also used the missions as an escape from the ceaseless personal and professional pressures to which he subjected himself. He was living, Murrow wrote her, in an almost continuous state of “fatigue and frustration.” His stresses at work were multiplying, and his home life was increasingly tense and unhappy, thanks in large part to his affair with Pamela Churchill. “When I fly,” he said, the unhappiness “seems to go away. But it always returns.”
Whatever the reasons for Murrow’s compulsion, Bill Paley wanted it to stop. “I tried to convince him that he was a damn fool to go out on so many missions,” Paley recalled. “I thought he had a death wish. I don’t know what it was, but danger to him was an exhilarating experience.” In 1943, the CBS chairman extracted a promise from Murrow not to go on any more flights, but within days, he had broken his pledge. By the time the war was over, Murrow had flown on twenty-four bombing raids. Just a few days before D-Day, he made the first live radio broadcast from an American bomber, flying on a mission over occupied France.
AT THE END of May 1944, London began to empty out. The throngs of soldiers, sailors, and airmen—who just days before had sauntered down Piccadilly, eyeing the girls on corners and pushing into already packed pubs—were fast disappearing. They were on their way to marshaling camps on the south coast of England, which had been sealed off to visitors. Day after day, seemingly endless lines of camouflaged trucks, some of the convoys stretching for miles, rumbled down country roads, their occupants bound for Channel ports—and ultimately for Normandy.
For many Americans and Britons, it proved to be a wrenching leave-taking. Among those who felt a sense of loss was Robert Arbib, who like a number of other GIs had come to feel at home in England. “No longer a strange, unknown land,” Britain and its way of life had become “our way of life, and its people were my friends,” Arbib later wrote. “Just as we had been reluctant to leave America, we were reluctant now to say good-bye to England.”
In Bristol, a column of U.S. Army trucks braked to a halt outside a house at 4 A.M. so a young American soldier could dash in and say goodbye to a family who had befriended him. “We stood out on the sidewalk, hugged and kissed and had our spell of tears,” he recalled years afterward. In a small town in southern England, another convoy of American tanks and trucks came to a brief stop in front of a row of houses, watched by a crowd of townspeople. Suddenly, a woman emerged from a house carrying bowls of strawberries and cream. She handed one to a young lieutenant named Bob Sheehan, kissed his forehead, and whispered, “Good luck. Come back safe.” Galvanized by her gesture of kindness, other townspeople disappeared into their houses and moments later brought out tea and lemonade for the hot, thirsty GIs. Still others i
nvited some of the Americans inside for a bath or a shave. For those few minutes, Sheehan remembered, “there was a kind of togetherness that I had never seen before. A sharing of spirit. It was no longer them and us. We were family, and danger was afoot.”
Later that day, a young woman in Plymouth watched as hundreds of American troops boarded their assault craft in the harbor. “My heart ached,” she recalled. “I could hardly see for tears.” Another young Englishwoman noted: “It was so drab when they had gone. The whole world had been opened up to me, and then it was closed down again.”
WHEN THEY HEARD the roar of the bombers, the people of England knew that D-Day had finally come. Just after midnight on June 6, hundreds of British and American aircraft filled the air over East Anglia, the loud throb of their engines sounding, in Ed Murrow’s words, “like a giant factory in the sky.” Throughout the night, the thunder continued, and when day finally broke, Britons rushed out of their houses, waving tablecloths and Union Jacks at the fleet of planes flying wing to wing above them toward France. “In perfect, geometric formation, they roared overhead,” one woman remarked. “They kept coming and coming, as if the whole sky belonged to them.” An Eighth Air Force crewman recalled: “The sky looked like we were being invaded by locusts…. Having been one of the early Americans to cross the Channel when fifty to one hundred planes was an enormous flight, it put a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye. The Luftwaffe had had its day, and now we were having ours.”
The official announcement of the invasion came shortly before 9 A.M. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have landed in France,” the managing director of a British aircraft factory told his workers. There was stunned silence, then, as one, the people standing before him, many with tears coursing down their cheeks, began singing “Land of Hope and Glory.” After that, said a worker, “We went quietly back to work—for victory.”