Then, aimed more directly at us, was that American traitor, Fred W. Kaltenbach, the boy just like us from back home in Kansas. Kaltenbach’s broadcasts to his old neighbors more recently come over from the United States, were in homely terms (very different from Haw-Haw’s cultured English) opening always with his folksy, “Hello, Yanks!” And from that brotherly greeting, he proceeded next to assure us we were all just plain suckers—simps for whom his heart ached, falling for the wiles of Wall Street and those “International Jews,” like Barney Baruch, for instance, who had no country, really, but did have our President wrapped about his little finger.
And of course, we Americans were just barbarians and uncouth hicks who should be learning from, not fighting against, the super-cultured Nazis amongst whom he had the luck to find himself in Berlin. For instance, our fellow fliers in our forces then under Mark Clark trying to advance on Rome, had deliberately and maliciously bombed and destroyed that irreplaceable monument to medieval culture, the Leaning Tower of Pisa. But, Kaltenbach added sarcastically, in our crude American fashion, we’d probably try to make that damage good by putting up in its place a 1200 foot high skyscraper as an improvement. The fact that the Leaning Tower was at that very moment, and is even yet, standing undamaged in all its medieval glory, was nothing to Kaltenbach—he knew that not one of his American listeners could get behind the Nazi lines in Italy to take a look for himself at the Leaning Tower and then to expose his lie.
But the program which Goebbels staged as “Invasion Calling” seemed to me potentially the most damaging of all to our fighting morale—it came across completely in English, of course, but it featured no traitors, British or American, in putting over its punch. It depended purely on psychology, and in that field, Dr. Joseph Goebbels showed he was entitled to his doctorate.
“Invasion Calling” got all the G.I. listeners, at whom it was deliberately aimed. It opened always with the same song “Lili Marlene,” sung in honeyed tones in English by a girl, who, if her figure by any chance came near matching the seduction in her voice, could easily have put Venus herself out of the business of competing for any male attention. “Lili Marlene,” tops as the perfect blend of German sentimentality and Teutonic militarism, the song the Desert Rats of the British Eighth Army in Libya regarded as the most valuable bit of loot they gathered in from Rommel’s routed Afrika Korps, the song like no other in any language expressing the passionate ache of the soldier long away to crush again his sweetheart in his arms. “Lili Marlene,” sung to soldiers in the field by a girl who must have been a lineal descendant of that voluptuous Rhein Mädchen, depicted always on her rock as clad only in her flowing flaxen hair, Lorelei herself. And quite as successful as Lorelei, with her siren song, in captivating each man into believing she was singing to him alone, of helping lure every G.I. within range of her voice to his destruction.
And with the range given to her voice by Goebbels’ powerful radio, that ran the number up to near a million.
That girl with her “Lili Marlene” roped in the G.I. listeners, poised far away in their camps and barracks on the Near Shore waiting the signal to embark for the jump off. What 100% on the Hooper Rating is, I don’t know, but if Goebbels had ever asked the Hooper outfit for their rating on his Lorelei in the weeks before D-day, that’s the answer he would have received—100%—she had them all gathered around the barrack’s radios, listening raptly in on her “Lili Marlene.”
And then, having finished her stint of luring in the customers, “Lili Marlene” dissolved into thin air, leaving her listeners with their tongues hanging out, ready bait for Goebbels as he proceeded next to put on his commercials.
Uproarious laughter began to spout from the loud-speaker in front of you. Something was so excruciatingly funny, the Nazis roundabout that microphone in Berlin just couldn’t control themselves—they must be rolling on the floor. What could the joke be, you wondered? Why—“INVASION!” sneered out one Nazi; “INVASION!” sarcastically cackled back another. And then all hands practically died laughing again—presumably nothing so silly had ever before been heard along Unter den Linden as that those fool Americans listening on the Near Shore were actually considering throwing themselves against Hitler’s Atlantic Wall in an invasion!
When, presumably, the incredulous Nazis had laughed so much over that one that they’d finally choked, and the laughter at last had died away, came another song.
Nothing erotic this time, nothing to give you the idea the sponsors were again about to float you off in the loving arms of Aphrodite—this one was gruesome. In mingled male and female voices, it painted a picture, purposefully vague and mysterious, of the frightful weapons waiting to slaughter you on the Far Shore, and urged you to delay no longer in coming over to meet your fate—the Nazis on the Far Shore, and more especially the lovely girls now singing to you, a little impatient already at your delay, were waiting eagerly to welcome you there with open arms—holding incidentally in them a beautiful White Cross with your name on it, all ready to drive into the soft earth over your freshly dug grave! Then followed the grisly suggestion you write home and prepare your folks for your coming finish.
And the program signed off always with the same Nazi punch line, uttered in faultless and precise English with such a striking rise in interrogatory inflection on the final syllable as almost to lift you into the air with it as, still ringing in your ears, it left you wondering:
“Do you realize all your sacrifices are at the direction of Jewish power politics in Washington and Moscow?”
Moscow? I hadn’t realized before that the Jews controlled Moscow. I had thought that Leon Trotsky, the only Jew ever with any power of his own amongst the Bolsheviks, had first been out-maneuvered, then driven out of Moscow, and finally murdered by his more ruthless comrade, Joe Stalin. And at that moment, from everything I saw, Stalin, no Jew himself, was giving every evidence of being pretty well in solitary control of things in Moscow, in spite of all Goebbels’ pronouncements to the contrary.
And as for Washington, if Joseph Goebbels knew so little of American politics as really to believe that anybody controlled Franklin Roosevelt, then he’d believe anything. But whether he really believed that or not, he judged his American listeners were stupid enough to believe it, if only he told them so often enough. Which religiously he did every night while, a little more wrought up after each broadcast over what faced us, we awaited D-day.
What lay behind all this was the Nazi fear that our talked-of invasion was only a hoax—that actually we never meant to invade. Hitler had no fears about his Atlantic Wall being able to hold us, while Rommel shot us to pieces and his Panzers stood poised to crush any spearhead which might break through. His fear was that we might never give him the chance thus to slaughter us—consequently the taunts and gibes at us for our delays.
For now in 1944, the war situation on the Eastern Front was such that Hitler could no longer hope for victory there—the best he could expect for his retreating armies on the Russian front was a stabilized line somewhere in Poland and Czechoslovakia, perhaps, which he could hold while he negotiated a stalemated peace leaving him in possession of all Western Europe and a substantial part of Eastern Europe.
But he could never achieve that stalemated peace so long as Britain and America cherished the delusion that they could successfully invade on the Western Front. Consequently, the sooner they had that absurd idea knocked out of their heads, the sooner he could force the stalemate. Consequently, odd as it might seem, Hitler welcomed the invasion, looked forward to it hopefully as providing a swift solution to his mounting troubles on the Eastern Front. And to that end, Dr. Goebbels labored manfully—first, to insure invasion; second, to insure its failure.
CHAPTER 15
What awaited us, come D-day, when the ramps of our landing craft went down and the G.I.’s in our first wave plunged into the surf to wade ashore in Normandy, had already received the most intensive investigation possible from our invasion planners. Except for suc
h new and secret weapons as Hitler might actually have and still be holding under wraps to greet us with on our arrival (weapons clothed always in mystery but nevertheless in terrifying hints blared nightly into our ears) everything else awaiting us was only too obviously in view from myriad reconnaissance photos taken from the air at all stages of the tide on the beach that we called Omaha. And what was already in view there, even though nothing more at all should ever be unwrapped, was not helpful to the morale of any man who might fancy himself having to breast his way shoreward on the Omaha Beach, whether in the first wave or in the tenth.
Rommel on the Far Shore was showing himself no adversary to be despised. When the area along the Normandy shore enclosing our proposed Omaha Beach had initially been chosen in 1943 (long before the coming of Rommel to Normandy) by Lieut. General Sir Frederick Morgan and his planners as not only the most feasible, but practically the only, point of assault, those wide Normandy beaches had been only wide strips of open sands, still just as Nature had made them, complicated only by the tremendous Channel tides which alternately covered and exposed them. You could disregard those sands in attack—it was then only what was behind them that caused the planners worry. For, enfilading the beaches from the rocky and steep bluffs behind them were the camouflaged concrete gun emplacements and the machine-gun nests of the Atlantic Wall, formidable enough in themselves to give any general cause for deep thought before daring to fling his attackers against them alone.
But those dismaying fortifications were not alone. For well the planners knew that behind that Atlantic Wall, poised for counterattack, waited Hitler’s fanatic Panzer divisions, those armored irresistibles that already once had knifed through both Maginot Line and the combined armies of France and Britain as if they had all been but cardboard dummies. That was where our Mulberry harbors were to come into the picture; they were necessary to give our men the overwhelming edge in tanks and guns to counter those Panzers, once we were through the Atlantic Wall.
That was how it was in 1943, and even into early 1944, during our initial build-up. For up until then, von Rundstedt, Commander in the west of all Nazi forces, like any other veteran Field Marshal whom Hitler might have placed in that command, had been content to put his main reliance in smothering promptly any invasion, upon counterattack with his tried and trusted mobile Panzers, should the Atlantic Wall even momentarily be breached and some invaders get inland.
But Rommel, younger and more ferocious, once he had been assigned by Hitler in February of 1944 as von Rundstedt’s new field commander for the Nazi mobile forces and for all those fortifications in the Normandy sector, had quite different ideas. Rommel had decided on the basis of his experiences in fighting in the Libyan Desert, that the open beaches before the Atlantic Wall, not the bocage country behind it, were the best place to end all nonsense about invasion. So on those beaches he would pin his enemies down while from the high bluffs above he very thoroughly shot them to pieces. To effectuate that design, Rommel began, immediately on taking over, to improve on nature, so far as the previous innocuous aspect of those open sands was concerned.
On the wide stretches of beach between the high and the low tide marks, set so as just to be covered with water and therefore invisible to attackers racing in at high tide, obstacles began to sprout profusely from the tidal sands—all sorts of obstacles.
Nearest inshore on the sands came the hedgehogs, wicked-looking welded assemblages of pointed steel bars—French anti-tank obstacles originally, once intended to ruin the tractor treads of Nazi tanks on the roads now in Rommel’s rear leading southward from the French borders to Paris. From the roads in his rear Rommel had no longer any fear of attack. So up from the shoulders of those roads where they had been parked since the French surrender in 1940 and down on the Normandy sands promptly went every one of the anti-tank obstacles in northern France. Planted now in the Channel sands in staggered rows, decorated on top with mines, and all joined with tangled barbed wire to hang up any infantrymen from sunken landing craft trying to wade ashore in between them, these hedgehogs, set so as all to be just covered and thus unseen at high tide, were sure death to any landing craft which might have got that far and were still trying to get their troops in over them and up to the high-water mark on the beach beyond.
Those deadly hedgehogs took care of the shallow areas closest in to the high-water mark—they stood only a few feet high—their job was to finish off a landing craft, should it by any freak ever get by the outer obstacles.
Then, further out, as the beach gradually sloped down and the water below the high tide level became somewhat deeper, heavy logs slanted to seaward were planted irregularly and generously all over the sands, with the sharpened tops ending a foot or so below high tide level, so that they also should be invisible. Each log was stout enough of itself to punch a hole through or rip a gash in the bottom of any landing craft unfortunate enough to ride over it, but that alone wasn’t relied on—each stake was finished off on top, as frosting on the cake, with a contact mine. If the mine didn’t finish off your craft, the log itself, as a lance or can opener, certainly would. And then in between those logs, to take care of you after you’d gone overboard, again was draped more barbed wire to tangle you up as you floundered in the water while the machine guns on the bluffs above worked you over till you’d quit floundering.
Still farther out, where the water at high tide began to get to a really respectable depth, came the worst of all, the “Belgian Gates,” the Element “C,” standing about ten feet up from the sands. Like all the other obstacles, these were set also so as to be just covered and out of sight at high water, which was the only time the Nazis could envision any assault as being staged.
These “Belgian Gates” were very substantial steel barricades, solidly latticed backward to withstand heavy impact, with three stout steel beams protruding vertically at their tops, nicely set to impale and slice open the bottoms of all landing craft, wood or steel, coming their way and trying to ride over them. And as usual with all the other obstacles, with a mine lashed to the top of each vertical beam. And for good measure, with more barbed wire draped in festoons between them to help drown in the deep water there any such poor G.I.’s as might still be living after their craft had been blown apart or ripped open to sink from beneath them.
Those were the obstacles—the fiendish devices with which Rommel was decorating the beaches. The devil himself couldn’t have done better in making that approach to the Atlantic Wall impassable to boats when the tide was in and those obstacles were all lost to view just below the surface.
Our air photographs, taken at low tide, duly showed them all, scanty in March, plentiful in April, still more profuse as May drew along. And immediately what those new photographs of the Normandy beaches unmistakably showed kicked our invasion schedule and our planning right in the stomach. For up to the day Rommel intruded his hobnailed boot into the pattern of our designs, our intended D-day (still waiting to be set definitely till our build-up was more complete) had always been that day on which high water on the beaches should come an hour after dawn—our best combination for assault, as not only we but the Germans also perfectly well knew. That would allow us to make our approach from the sea covered by darkness. Then as the dawn broke, it would permit us to land our first wave in light enough to see what we were attacking on a strange shore, high up on the beaches, subjected to fire for the least time while we advanced on our objectives on the bluffs above. And thereafter, it would give us the longest amount of daylight possible in which to bring in supporting waves to help carry through and overwhelm those objectives.
In every book on tactics, the proper time for a surprise assault is set down as dawn. When additionally the surprise assault is to be amphibious then it must take place only on such a day as high tide, also necessary, comes at dawn. In our planning, we’d carefully followed the book—that was just common sense, as much to us as to the Germans, who never believed our invasion would take place on any day which
didn’t meet those two conditions. Following the tides, which follow the moon, such periods came just once about every two weeks—roughly a day later every lunar month. One such day was coming very early in May—tentatively, our original D-day. Another such was due about June 1.
Now with his obstacles, Rommel had thoroughly muddled our plans. Attacking at high tide as we had intended, we’d never get troops enough in over those obstacles even to put up a decent battle on the beaches beyond. It would be a fiasco worse even than Dieppe. There, though with no obstacles on the beaches to hash up the British landings, it had taken the Nazis, with only such forces and beach defenses as they had already on the spot, not more than nine hours to wash up the invaders and force those few not already dead or captured to flee back to Britain. So some way had to be found to knock out or to circumvent that forest of submerged obstacles, or our assault just wasn’t on.
Hastily an exact replica of those obstacle-laden Normandy beaches, copied from our air photographs, was set up in the United States in a secluded spot on one of our wide Florida sands, with “Belgian Gates,” mined logs, hedgehogs and all, including the barbed wire. And in our thoroughgoing American way, we set out with that replica to find some scheme to provide safe channels in the water over or through those obstacles for our landing craft.
The obstacles were bombed from the air at high tide, at low tide, and at tides in between. No go. Destroyers from offshore fired torpedoes at them, trying with live warheads to blast a clear channel through. It was a fizzle. As a last resort, an LST, which probably would be sunk by Nazi gunfire before ever it could get close enough inshore actually to duplicate the experiment on the Omaha Beach, was nevertheless for the Florida trial paved with an extraordinarily thick layer of concrete inside its flat bows to make it immune to the mines, and then sent in over our trial course to steam-roller flat the obstacles, leaving us, it was hoped, a safe path astern for troop-laden landing craft. It failed.
The Far Shore Page 12