1944
And it was not only the firing at the shoreline that proved to be so deadly. True terror came again when the men of the Sixteenth Infantry reached Omaha’s grass-covered slopes. The assault was more like a slow-motion re-enactment of General George Pickett’s disastrous charge across no-man’s-land at Gettysburg than a well-ordered action of World War II. Along this ten-kilometer stretch, many of the officers were cut down or wounded even before they stepped onto the beach. From the minute that the Higgins boats dropped their ramps, the Germans ferociously unleashed mortar fire, artillery fire, and machine gun fire. They also used mines wound tight with wires, so that a German soldier sitting in a bunker could detonate the mine for maximum impact when a landing craft reached the shore. Worse still, with one exception, every unit ended up in the wrong place. The men were buffeted by winds of eighteen knots and waves that were kicking up as high as six feet; in fact, in the aftermath of the storm, there were whitecaps rising as far as twelve miles out from the coast.
Meanwhile, heads and arms of the dead were bobbing up and down in the water. It looked like a slaughter.
Photo reconnaissance had also grossly fallen short. The Americans were, as a practical matter, blind, unable to decipher whether the German fire was coming from the little, weathered cottages dotted along the shore, or from the maze of concrete emplacements burrowed into the top of the bluff.
Also, the assault troops were like overloaded pack mules—one private who weighed 125 pounds was carrying over a hundred pounds of gear ashore, including a drum of flamethrower fluid and a cylinder of nitrogen. As a result, the men found it impossible to fire their weapons, or sometimes even to stand up straight; they were soaking, confused, and unable to wade through the wet sand and the web of mined obstacles before them. Among the first ashore was Company A; of its two hundred men, some 60 percent—the now famous Bedford boys—all came from the same little Virginia town. Within fifteen minutes they were reduced to a couple dozen; the rest were strewn across the battle-scarred landscape, or their bodies were washing helplessly onto the shore. With frightening speed, another company lost 96 percent of its men in the attempt to haul grenades, dynamite charges, machine guns, mortars, mortar rounds, flamethrowers, and other equipment ashore. As the minutes ticked by, the beach was littered with burning landing craft and corpses, corpses with no hands, corpses with no feet.
The original plan had been for the troops to occupy the bluff by 7:30 a.m. Instead, everywhere on the beach, there were shreds of flesh and thousands of abandoned gas masks, grenades, bazookas, radios, rifles, machine guns, and ammunition boxes. And at the bottom of the Channel were hundreds of tanks, jeeps, and self-propelled artillery that had simply sunk.
There was no letup from the melee. Soon, the beach was jammed with the dead and the dying. In the water itself, the Allied landing craft were exploding or bursting into fire. Dead men were floating facedown, while the living were slogging through the sea with their faces raised, gasping for air. Some of the men in the sea pretended to be dead, hoping the Germans would stop firing and the tide would simply take them in. Said one sergeant, simply, “God, it was awful.” Onshore, the Germans in the pillboxes concentrated their gunfire on the beach, while the Americans huddled behind whatever obstacles they could find, often in ankle-deep water, or crawled aimlessly through the muddy, bloodstained beaches on their elbows and knees. Frantically, they dug in the sand to open up makeshift foxholes or trenches where they might wait out the mortar fire. Many men wet themselves. Others broke down sobbing. From their nests on the bluffs, German snipers coolly picked off Americans who, after a hush, bravely took turns racing out to the water’s edge, hopscotching around clumps of the dead to drag wounded men to safety. It was a sickening sight. Leaderless and directionless, GIs sought to evade machine-gun fire only to be exposed to mortar fire; they sought to evade mortar fire only to be exposed to light cannon fire. “I became,” one private recalled, “a visitor to hell.”
The wounded had their own special hell. Some had been hit in the chest, or they were bleeding from hip to shoulder, or their upper jaw might be shattered and a cheekbone left exposed, blood pouring from the wound. In rare cases, their buddies gave them morphine shots and stayed with them until they exhaled a final breath. Some men were burning inside their gear because the fuel tanks had been lit on fire; they dashed, often in vain, into the water. Too frequently, men died forlorn, utterly and totally alone, a final, attenuated prayer on their lips. One dying soldier simply cried, “Mother, Mom,” before his eyes froze, his lifeless gaze locked onto the clouds above.
To receive first aid from the medics the wounded had to be taken out not to the rear, as had almost always been the case in battle since the advent of warfare, but forward, toward enemy fire. That added to the psychological toll. With chaos swirling around them, some men snapped or lapsed into shock. The din alone was terrifying: a naval barrage behind them, artillery and mortar fire before them, aircraft overhead, and the noise of engines and calls and cries of the wounded all around them. For some, it was simply too much.
Standing on the bridge of the cruiser Augusta, watching his men, General Omar Bradley was convinced that Omaha Beach was “an irreversible catastrophe,” and he prayed that the men could simply “hang on.” He knew the beach was already too congested, that hundreds of landing craft were circling aimlessly offshore, that sending in reinforcements could actually compound the problem. Yet retreat was not a feasible strategy; to leave a gap of thirty-seven miles between Utah and Gold beaches would have imperiled the entire invasion.
Remarkably, the Allies kept coming. At 7:30 a.m. the main command group waded onto the shore, only to have their numbers almost immediately cut down. Exposed to enemy fire, pinned down, and realizing that the previous assault plans were worthless, the remaining commanders began improvising. The men couldn’t stay where they were; that was madness. Yet they had no way to flank the Germans or push forward—or move backward for that matter. There was no discernible route to climb through the heavily mined swamp or to scale the bluffs to pry the Germans out of their trenches. And there were thick rolls of barbed wire in front of them. On its face this was a crisis of unconscionable proportions.
But in fits and starts, small groups began making their way up the bluffs, and slowly pockets of leadership—colonels and generals, but also lieutenants as well—began to form, waving their hands and shouting and screaming for their men to keep moving. One colonel blustered, “We might as well get killed inland as here on the beach.” At the same time engineers meticulously began to lay tape to show where the Allies had cleared minefields, while other men swam across antitank ditches filled with water. Each moment they were waiting for the Germans to counterattack. A counterattack would have, with minimal effort, “run us right back into the Channel,” as one battalion commander said. But it never came.
Instead, came the most exhilarating sight of all: three Americans pinned down behind the foundation of what was once a house looked up at what had to have seemed like a marvel—Americans doggedly making their way along the crest of the German-held bluffs.
They had made it to strategic high ground.
THE AMERICANS WERE RELENTLESS. As larger landing craft began to arrive, tanks, half-tracks, jeeps, trucks, and self-propelled artillery streamed ashore. Not long after H-hour, Operation Overlord was moving into full swing. The Allies were pounding Hitler’s men again and again and, despite high casualties, were inching forward. And elsewhere, at Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches, the Allies were progressing nearly unimpeded.
Eisenhower himself was up before 7 a.m., having already been informed that things seemed to be going “by plan.” For a few minutes he lay quietly in his bed, smoked a cigarette, and with a broad grin flipped through a dime-store western novel. He chatted with his close aide Harry Butcher. Then he began his customary pacing.
It was around this time that General George H. Marshall, the influential army chief of staff, picked up a phone to awaken President Roosevelt.
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THE WHITE HOUSE OPERATOR took the call first, at 3 a.m. Washington time. Asking General Marshall to hold a moment, she promptly rang Eleanor, and requested that the first lady rouse the president. Aside from the soft rustling of the Secret Service agents in the hallways, and the never-ending hubbub in the classified map room where top-secret dispatches came in at all hours, the White House was quiet, a quiet that Eleanor found nerve-racking. She herself had been too anxious to sleep. Now she eased open the door to the president’s bedroom and explained that Marshall was on the phone and the invasion was under way. The president promptly sat up in bed, pulled on a sweater, and put the phone to his ear. Marshall briefed him on the progress of the invasion thus far; actually, Eisenhower had already buoyantly told Marshall that “the light of battle was in [the troops’] eyes.” Roosevelt flashed a smile, and from that point on, he began working the telephone lines.
MEANWHILE, WORD ABOUT THE invasion was filtering out across the nation and the world. Transocean, the official mouthpiece of the Nazis, was actually the first to announce that Overlord had begun, stating that British parachute troops were landing on the French coast. With the help of its translators, the Associated Press immediately followed suit, putting the news out on the wire. The BBC quickly joined in. Not to be outdone, the New York Times put a special “late city edition” on the streets by 1:30 a.m.—it was aptly called a “postscript.” There was no actual story yet, only a headline in full caps: “HITLER’S SEA WALL IS BREACHED, INVADERS FIGHTING WAY INLAND; NEW ALLIED LANDINGS ARE MADE.”
Within half an hour, people were beginning to stir, already forming long lines at newsstands or, coffee in hand, sitting in pajamas by their radios, turning up the volume and nervously awaiting the latest battle news. At 2 a.m. eastern time, news came. The radio stations, as jittery as the American people, interrupted their regular programs to declare: “German radio says the invasion has begun.” This report, however, was both confused and fragmentary, actually warning that the Germans’ announcement might be a trick to flush out the French Resistance. Within hours, that notion was dispelled. Americans could listen to the actual recording of Eisenhower reading the orders he had given to the troops on the eve of the invasion. It had first been broadcast over loudspeakers on the transports in southern England; now the American people could listen to the same stirring words the Allied troops had heard before their ships left the English coast.
Addressed to the “Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!” the message was: “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we’ve striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. . . . You will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
“Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.
“But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940–41. . . . Our home fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!
“Good luck!”
The American people hung on every word. For their part, the GIs, earlier, had folded up the order and slipped it into their pockets. Many of those who survived stuck it on their walls when they returned home.
THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE proclaimed this “a colossal moment in history,” and it was. For the whole country the suspense was “agonizing.” Workers audibly gasped when they heard the news broadcast over loudspeakers. As the night turned into dawn, the anticipation heightened. It was quickly becoming a day not only of prayer but of quiet hope and restrained rejoicing. Let news of the invasion race across the nation from ocean to ocean, the American people exulted. Let it be proclaimed in the newspapers, and sung in thousands of newscasts across the country, that Roosevelt’s Allied armies were moving forward on the verge of a great triumph.
The news became unstoppable. So was the delirium. The kings of Norway and England addressed their nations. In Belgium and the Netherlands, the respective premiers did the same. So did Charles de Gaulle, who addressed the French. Then, after an hour of making calls, President Roosevelt lifted the phone one more time and gave the White House operator a simple message: begin waking up all of his aides and tell them they were expected to be at their desks immediately. Soon thereafter, the president’s old hands, men like Steve Early and Pa Watson, got to work in the West Wing, to keep control over the documents and messages that were flooding in. In the clatter of the map room, the officers who manned it around the clock in three shifts sought to keep up with the rapidly changing battle. And throughout the White House’s tiny offices and partitioned cubbyholes, Roosevelt’s staff struggled with the tide of concerns coursing in.
In these stirring, emotion-packed hours, Roosevelt could feel that the Allies were on the way to a great triumph, even if some of the first reports were less than heartening. It brought to mind a comparable moment at the White House seventy-nine years before, in early April 1865, when Abraham Lincoln was presented with several captured Confederate flags after the victory of Five Forks. “Here is something material,” he had rejoiced, “something I can see, feel and understand. This means victory, this is victory.”
Now, as afternoon began on the beaches and a new round of troops continued to come ashore, more than ever Roosevelt too had begun to believe. At 9:50 a.m., he wheeled himself into the Oval Office and briefed the speaker of the House, the cantankerous, wily Sam Rayburn. At 11:30 a.m. his military leaders—General Marshall, Hap Arnold, and Admiral King—filed in, to stand near his massive desk and feel the weight of history. They were far away from the battle, and the details they had were still scanty. Things were going badly at Omaha Beach, though on the other fronts the troops were steadily thrusting forward. Yet by the time Roosevelt was picnicking outside with his daughter shortly after midday, under the cooling shade of his favorite magnolia tree, it was clear that the tide was decisively turning in favor of the Allies.
Later that afternoon, the president held his regular press conference for nearly two hundred correspondents who eagerly bustled in. Initially, there was a hush. They could make allowances for the fact that he had been up most of the night—he had slept only four hours—but even so, they saw that he looked deathly tired. His face was heavily lined and gaunt; his cheeks were sunken. Sitting in his large green swivel chair, however, Roosevelt maintained his fine form, and he had dressed the part: he wore a snow-white shirt, with the initials FDR embroidered on his left sleeve, and sported a dark blue dotted bow tie. And he had a yellow-amber cigarette holder cocked in his mouth, indicating to more than one of the journalists in the room that he was “pleased with the world.” Pads and pencils in hand, the reporters recorded Roosevelt’s every word, while the president’s dog, Fala, playfully bounded on the furniture. Roosevelt was in good spirits, grinning broadly and joking that the assembled reporters themselves were “all smiles.”
Nonetheless, he struck a cautionary note. “You just don’t land on a beach and walk through—if you land successfully without breaking your leg—walk through to Berlin,” he said, adding, “and the quicker this country understands it, the better.” He concluded, “This is no time for overconfidence.”
But beneath his words, there was confidence. As to specifics, Roosevelt was vague, indicating only that the invasion was “up to schedule.” And how was he holding up? Roosevelt hesitated, his eyes sparkling, and flashed another broad smile. “Fine—I’m a little sleepy.”
After meeting with one of his top Pentagon officials, John J. McCloy, Roosevelt was wheeled past the office of White House physician Ross McIntire—which contained a dentist chair, a rubdown table, and closets filled with various medications—and taken past the
spacious indoor pool he had recently built, on his way to a 7:30 p.m. dinner with Eleanor.
Later in the evening, just before 10 p.m., Roosevelt once again took to the airwaves, this time to lead the nation in prayer. His words were brief (only ten minutes) but lyrical, and among the most captivating of his presidency. Like a priest watching over his flock—an estimated 100 million Americans were fastened to their radios—he solemnly prayed first for “our sons, pride of our Nation.” This day, he pointed out, the Allies had set out on a mighty endeavor, “a struggle to preserve our Republic . . . our civilization and to set free a suffering humanity.” He continued, his voice at its mellifluous best: “Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. They will need Thy blessings. The road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces, success may not come with rushing speed,” to which he added commandingly, “We shall return again and again.”
As for the Allied troops, “They fight not for the lust of conquest,” he added emphatically. “They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate.”
And sensing the mood of a still anxious country, he saved his most trenchant words for last, a soaring invocation for all the people at home, for the parents yearning for their sons to return untouched from battle, for the wives yearning for their husbands to make it through safely, for the boys and girls waiting for their fathers to walk through the front door, all of whom intuitively understood what was at stake. “Some will never return,” Roosevelt intoned gently. “Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade.”