Invasion

  “How can a country win a war when all their men walk like geese and they follow a little misfit who can’t grow a mustache?” Duncan asked. “Did you know that the greatest German ever — that Beethoven guy — was deaf? He composed all their best songs and he was deaf! That make sense to you? Does that make sense to you, Woody?”

  “No,” I said.

  “They beat the French in no time,” Freihofer said. “But if Eisenhower is telling people to stay off the roads already, he must be pretty confident. Tell that to your mom, Woody. She’ll be glad to hear it.”

  “She’ll be even gladder to see me when I get back to Virginia,” I said. “Me and Marcus, the black guy I was talking to today, signed up together, and then we went to my house and told my mom. She was crying, and laughing, and hugging us both. I was eighteen then, I’m nineteen now, and I’ll probably be twenty before she sees me again.”

  “Your mom’s a religious nut, right?” Duncan asked.

  “No.”

  “Then how did you get a name like friggin’ Josiah?”

  “The family name is Wedgewood,” I said. “Somebody in the family found out that we were vaguely connected to the British Josiah Wedgwood family that made dishes, and I got stuck with the name.”

  “What kind of dishes?”

  “I don’t know, plates and cups and saucers — stuff like that,” I said, seeing that the conversation wasn’t going too well.

  “You’re a nineteen-year-old, but you’re skinny and young enough looking to be sixteen,” Sergeant Duncan said. “And you’re named after a friggin’ cup! The Army is supposed to make men out of you boys, but you’re never gonna make it, kid. You’re never gonna make it.”

  I thought I was going to make it. What they said about the Germans not really wanting to fight, I believed that, too. I just couldn’t see a Kraut standing up to an American.

  “Okay, listen up!” Captain Bobby Joe Arness was a big man who looked like he might have played football somewhere. “There was a meeting this morning in which the whole invasion plan was laid out. To me, it sounds good. This is how this thing is going to work: The key is to deliver the maximum punch in the shortest amount of time. Move in, hit them hard, and keep hitting them! Don’t let them regroup or even take a breather. What we’ve been waiting for is two days in a row of good weather so we can make sure that everybody gets into place when and where they’re supposed to be. This is going to be a team effort, and we’re going to be the first on the field.”

  “Why do we need two days?” Sergeant Duncan asked. “If the first day goes good, the rest of the guys can come in on tugboats if they got to.”

  “Duncan, I think Eisenhower knows a little more about this than we do. He’s sending in the 101st, our paratroopers, in waves,” Arness said. “A lot of their men are going in the night before the invasion with specific objects in mind. They’ll also be sending in dolls all along the coastline as a distraction.”

  “Did you say dolls?” a soldier still lying in one of the top bunks asked.

  “What would you do if you saw a doll come floating down from the sky, soldier?” Arness asked.

  “Shoot the shit out of it!” was the quick answer. “And wonder what the Americans were sending out dolls for!”

  “Exactly,” Arness answered. “You’d be wasting ammunition shooting at dolls and you’d be thinking instead of fighting against the guys coming at you from a different direction. Got it?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Then the rest of the 101st will go in with us and a ranger battalion. We need two days of good weather so we don’t send the airborne in and then cancel our landing because of bad weather.

  “So the airborne goes in the night before, then the bombers hit them, and then we go in and finish the job. Any questions?”

  “Yeah. It took you three minutes to tell us,” a corporal said. “How come your meeting with the brass took three hours?”

  A couple of the guys laughed, and Captain Arness even grinned.

  “They made us review, and memorize, some of the beach maps,” Arness said. “Each assault unit has their own plans and routes to get off the beach and into the surrounding areas. Sergeant Major Ravell of the Royal Scots Fusiliers will tell you what to expect on approaching the beach.”

  The Scottish soldier stood up and looked at us. He wasn’t more than five feet five, but he was stocky. He didn’t move his head once he stood up, but his eyes darted around the room. For a long time he didn’t say anything, either, just looked at us. After a while it got to be a little silly, and some of our guys started smiling.

  “I’m going to try to talk with an American accent,” he said. His voice was high and thin. “I’ll talk the best I can, and you listen the best you can. When you hit the beaches we don’t want any surprises. Anything that holds you up from getting on the beach and getting your weapons in action could cause you to go down.

  “The first obstacle you have to deal with is the water. Depending on where the boat stops, you might be in as much as three to four feet of water when the ramp drops. Hopefully, you’ll be in closer. Then there are obstacles in the water: poles pointing toward the shore so the boats will run up on them and either tip over or hang up on them. Some are just logs driven into the seabed; others are more elaborate iron structures that look like …” He turned to Captain Arness. “What did your major call them?”

  “Jacks,” Captain Arness said. “They have little spikes sticking out at different angles. Only these are seven to eight feet high. Then there are rolls of barbed wire just to make life difficult for you. Hopefully, a lot of this will have been cleared away by the bombers. The bombing should leave craters for you in case there is any return fire.”

  “Some of the obstacles have mines attached to them,” Ravell said. “They’re called Teller mines, but the bombing before you land should clear a lot of that away. The bombs will set off any mines they’ve got buried on the beaches, too. The Germans had a few floating mines in the water, but they’ve been there a long while, and I know that some of them aren’t any good anymore. Once you get past the barbed wire, you’re on French soil.”

  “How do you know all this?” Sergeant Duncan asked. “The Krauts send you a full report?”

  “No, Yank, I’ve been on reconnaissance missions on these beaches four times in the last two months,” Ravell said. “I’ve come up in four different places, swimming underwater. I’ve looked at the mines, disarmed the ones that I could handle safely, and made drawings of their defenses. Plus, we have a great deal of information from the French Resistance. But nobody was shooting at me when I was over there swimming around, so it’s liable to be a lot different when the actual landings start.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant Major.” Captain Arness stood and shook the Scottish soldier’s hand.

  “And thank you, Captain,” Ravell said. “And sláinte to all of you.”

  Ravell left, and Captain Arness continued.

  “We all know which assault team we’re on. We should just about know where the Vierville Draw, the road leading into the town, lies. We might or might not get some resistance, but the road should be pretty obvious. There’s a steep area on either side of the draw, so they’ve probably got it zeroed in, and there might be some heavy fighting until we kill off their artillery. But we will get through, and once we do we set up defensive perimeters in and around Vierville and put down any forces still trying to shell the beach. Anybody got questions?”

  “Yeah, sir. Did that Tommy actually go up on the beach like he said?” Petrocelli from Bayonne, New Jersey, was wide-eyed, as if he didn’t believe Ravell.

  “He’s actually walked up on the beach and met with some of the French Resistance fighters,” Arness said. “He knows what he’s talking about. But don’t let it sound too easy. The tricky thing will be to find the draws after we land. We can see where they are on the maps, but all of the landmarks should be obliterated by the time we land.”

  “By the bombers?” Lyman as
ked.

  “By the bombers,” Arness said. “If everything goes well there might not be any landmarks, and we’ll just have to sort ourselves out once we’re on the beach. It shouldn’t be a big deal. You know your officers and you know what the problems are. We have to get on the beach and off of it so that the next wave of men can land as well as the supplies.”

  “And the Germans don’t have any idea of what’s going on?” Sergeant Duncan asked.

  “They’ve got a damned good idea of what’s going on, Duncan. They know we’re coming, but they don’t know when and they have a thousand miles of coastline to cover. Every day we’re getting intelligence about where they think we’re going to land.”

  “How do we know we’re not just a decoy?” Minkowitz asked. “And maybe the real attack will be somewhere else?”

  “Could be, soldier, but wherever you land, you give them hell, okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The big brass thinks that we should be well established around Vierville within six hours,” Arness went on. “Or at least that’s when they start sending in the dancing girls to entertain us.”

  “If it’s going to be this easy, why don’t the Krauts just give up?” Stagg asked.

  Stagg was a hardcase, as my grandfather back in Bedford would have called him. He didn’t speak to anybody unless he had to, and nobody spoke to him because we didn’t want to.

  “Eisenhower is giving them that option,” Arness said. He looked satisfied. “We’re dropping thousands of leaflets telling them that it might be a good idea to pack it in while they’re still breathing.”

  I was feeling good about the invasion. I had read about how the Nazis had moved across Europe, crushing people and carting some of them off to work camps. But, like Sergeant Duncan had said, they had never gone up against anybody like the United States Army. I knew our guys in the 29th were ready. Mostly country boys, we weren’t ones to shy away from a good fight when we had God and the country on our side.

  The papers were talking about how our planes were blowing up their oil fields in Italy. Over two thousand planes had moved in from Africa and bombed the Germans and what was left of the Italian army silly.

  By the time Captain Arness left, we were all feeling a little puffy around the gills and pleased with ourselves. All except Stagg, who looked at everything suspiciously.

  I wrote to Vernelle again. I was so full of myself that it was all I could do not to propose marriage to her right then and there. I knew I couldn’t tell her exactly where I was or anything, or how the invasion was going to go, but I did tell her that maybe I could get to see her on my birthday. She had to know that it was in October, so if she put two and two together she could have figured out when I’d be leaving to head back home.

  I also thought about writing to a few other girls, but then I thought better of it. No use in writing to a girl if you don’t know how she’s going to take it. I didn’t want to go home and find a half-dozen women thinking they were going to marry me!

  We were halfway through supper — which consisted of roast beef, peas, carrots, chicken stew, some lettuce with pink stuff on it, and ice cream — when my stomach started growling. I cleaned my tray off and headed right to the latrine.

  If there’s anything I can’t get used to it’s sitting on a GI John. In our john they had a long trough to piss in along one wall and ten toilets along the other wall. The toilets were really just benches, about a foot and a half high, with holes for your butt. Each hole was over another, deeper, hole in the ground. They filled the holes in the ground with lime and dirt to keep the stink down, but that didn’t keep the flies from eating you up alive if you had to sit there for any length of time. Anyway, I didn’t like doing my business in front of six or seven other guys. I guess I’m just funny that way.

  But going right after dinner wasn’t too bad because it was only me and Mac, and he never said anything to anybody anyway. Mac was in the john, reading a paperback book and smoking his pipe. It was like he was at home or something.

  “What’re you reading?” I asked.

  “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” he said. “Hemingway.”

  “Shouldn’t that be For Who the Bell Tolls?” I asked.

  Mac gave me a look and shook his head. I didn’t like that.

  Some whistles blew and I heard some guys running around outside the latrine. I figured it was another alert — we had one every two days or so — or another stupid night drill. It wasn’t; it was another march off to the ships.

  “Okay, guys, drop your cocks and grab your socks!” Sergeant Duncan was yelling outside the latrine. “We’re going again!”

  This would be the fourth time we had started off for the invasion, sometimes not even getting to the ships before it was called off.

  “What day is this?” Mac asked me.

  “I think it’s Saturday,” I said.

  “No, it’s later than that,” Mac said. “I had a Stars and Stripes for Saturday already.”

  “Could be,” I said. “I still think they’re going to wait until the Fourth of July before they actually have the real invasion.”

  “If I were a German, that’s what I’d think,” Mac answered, pulling his pants up. “And I’d probably be right.”

  We had to keep our packs ready and stowed, so all I had to do was check it and buckle it up. We had each been issued twenty clips of ammo — with 8 rounds in a clip, that’s 160 rounds apiece. A couple of guys had carbines with 15 rounds, but I didn’t like them. The M1 rifle had more kick, and it would shoot no matter what you did with it.

  We lined up and kind of half marched, half walked from the camp area for the two and a half miles to the transport ships. The night was clear and a little cool. As we had our names checked off going up the ramp onto the ship, I got a funny feeling. I told Lyman that I thought we were really going this time.

  “Why do you think that?” he asked.

  “Just a feeling,” I said. Lyman looked a little flaky to me, a little too good-looking, maybe, and I always wondered what he was thinking.

  “You scared?” he asked.

  “Of what?”

  “Of getting shot or something,” he said.

  “No, not really,” I said. “I just want to get it over. You know what we should do?”

  “What?”

  “Let’s ask Duncan for a leave now,” I said. “We’ll put our bid in now, and soon as the fighting’s over maybe we can take some time off in Paris.”

  “He’ll give you a leave because he wants you to draw him messing with some girls,” Lyman said. “Me, I’m not sure.”

  “Okay, here’s the deal. I got it figured out to a tee.” Duncan again. “We land on the beach, and then everybody jumps up and down, see? With all of the equipment we’re carrying, the whole country will flip over. Then the Germans and the French will go flying over the channel and into England. Then the Brits will beat the crap out of the Krauts while we sit up in Normandy and have parties.”

  “We’ve got so much gear because we have to clear the beach right away,” Captain Arness said. “All the first assault teams are supposed to be off the beach within three hours.”

  “Captain, no disrespect, sir.” Victor Polucci was a pimply-faced guy from Pennsylvania. “But I like Sergeant Duncan’s plan better. We jump up and down, flip the country, and toss all the Germans over the channel. Then, if they want to get back to France, it’s their problem, not ours.”

  “Well, you work on that plan, soldier,” Captain Arness said. “When you get the details ironed out, give it to me and I’ll pass it upstairs.”

  The Navy has a boat for everything, even small boats to take you out to their big boats. We started off toward the Thomas Jefferson, the transport ship that was supposed to take us across the channel to Normandy, in good spirits. We had started this trip before, only to have the whole thing called off. On shore there were soldiers loading trucks, stacking crates of ammunition, and others waiting for the landing craft and utility
boats to take them to whatever transport would take them to Europe.

  In my heart I thought there were good signs that things were going to work out for us. We were boarding the Thomas Jefferson on Sunday, a good day to start anything. And Jefferson, besides being the third president of the United States, was a Virginia man who had lived only eighty miles from Bedford. He had understood what liberty was about, and he would have understood what we were doing better than just about anyone.

  “When we left from New York to come to England, they had a band playing for us and a bunch of pretty girls waving their handkerchiefs,” Minkowitz said.

  “Maybe the Germans will have a band waiting for us in France,” Duncan said.

  I didn’t think that was so funny, but I didn’t want to get into it with Duncan. He was a wiseass, but I liked him.

  We had to climb up the rope ladders to get on the Thomas Jefferson. The sailors waiting for us had lists of where we would bunk, and we made our way down into the cabin area. The gray iron stairs were hard to maneuver down with our backpacks and rifles, and the sleeping area was dingy and dark, but we got to stow our gear and stretch out for a while. The bunks were four deep, and Minkowitz said he was glad he wasn’t on the bottom bunk.

  “If the guy on the top bunk gets seasick and throws up, it’s got to go somewhere,” he said.

  I knew how important our mission was, and how dangerous it was going to be. No matter what happened, some of us might not make it back. The officers were called for another meeting, and the rest of us just sat around. Some of the guys shook hands and wished one another luck. Mostly we were pretty calm. One guy — I knew him from the National Guard — got upset when he found he didn’t have his spare socks with him.

  “What the fuck did I do with them?” He was searching through his backpack.

  “You’re from around Bedford, aren’t you?” I asked, throwing him a pair of my socks.

  He looked up at me, tried to figure out what I was saying, then took a deep breath and kind of calmed down. “Yeah, Moneta,” he said. “You from Bedford?”