On June 5, 1944, the night before the invasion, he visited the paratroops assembling near their planes. As he strolled from group to group, his talk with them brought them the comfort, many for the last time in their short lives, of being paid attention to, and the warmth of recalling their homes back before all this awfulness began.
“What’s your job, soldier?”
“Ammunition bearer, sir.”
“Where is your home?”
“Pennsylvania, sir.”
“Did you get those shoulders working in a coal mine?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good luck to you tonight, soldier.”
A paratrooper who saw him frowning made him smile by saying, “Now quit worrying, General, we’ll take care of this thing for you.” Eisenhower watched the planes take off and then walked slowly back to his car. There were tears in his eves.
He knew, and the soldiers knew, what they were facing. He told the truth in his invasion field order passed out to every soldier, sailor and airman. “Your enemy is well trained,” he warned, “well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.” Thus the need to “beseech the blessings of Almighty God on this great and noble undertaking.” Back home, President Roosevelt, in his broadcast D-Day prayer. recognized the unavoidable horror of what was to come:
“Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor … They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces … They will be sore tried, by night and by day … The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men’s souls will be shaken with the violences of war.”
The president’s fears were widely shared. The whole country knew on June 6 that something dire, something that might fail, was taking place. In New York, Macy’s and Lord & Taylor were closed all day, baseball games and horse racing were canceled, and in a Brooklyn shipyard, welders knelt on the decks of their Liberty ships and recited the Lord’s Prayer. At the opening, the New York Stock Exchange observed two minutes of silent prayer. All over America church bells tolled, and the Liberty Bell was rung in Philadelphia. In Columbus, Ohio, at 7:30 in the evening, all traffic stopped for five minutes while people prayed in the streets.
If the home front needed an arm to lean on, the boys heading for their ordeal on the French coast needed it even more. Most were green troops, never before tested in battle. A colonel commanding an airborne battalion said to his men before they boarded their planes, ‘Although I am not a religious man, I would like all of you to kneel with me in prayer-and do not look down with a bowed head but look up, so that we can see God and ask His blessing and help in what we are about to do." (The colonel ,vas killed the next day.) As some troops headed toward their embarkation port they passed a priest standing in front of his church and making the sign of the cross as each truck went by. On the piers priests in full regalia held services. A paratrooper, installed irrevocably in his plane and plying his rosary, promised the Blessed Mother that he would never again violate the Sixth Commandment. Another prayed, “Lord, please don’t let me get anybody killed and don’t let me get killed either. I really think I’m too young for this.” One man’s petition to God was, over and over, “Give me guts.”
There were cowards and cop-outs as well as heroes. In England the jails were full of soldiers who refused to go. Self-inflicted wounds and suicides were a problem. A woman in the Red Cross recalls that in the staging areas, “belts and ties were removed from some of these young men.” One soldier tried to make himself a hospital case by devouring a tobacco sandwich.
The Germans had been fortifying the French coast for years. They had built huge concrete blockhouses to shield hundreds of large-caliber guns and dug foxholes and trenches to protect their machine guns and mortars. They had positioned countless obstacles to stop landing craft, installed miles of barbed wire and planted 4 million mines. Since the Germans couldn’t be flanked, they would have to be surprised by a modern kind of envelopment, a vertical one. Hence the attack the night before by the 13,000 paratroopers dropped from more than 800 planes. They were to land behind the Germans, and their support of the landings would be assisted by hundreds of heavy bombers dumping their loads directly on the beaches and gunfire from 6 battleships, 20 cruisers, and 68 destroyers. Offensive power like this should have made the assault not too different from the numerous maneuvers the infantry had been through for months.
But almost nothing went right. Cloud cover and antiaircraft fire caused paratroops to be dropped off target, and glider infantry landed miles from their marks. At the last moment, the Germans moved a high-quality division into position at Omaha Beach, and at Utah Beach the landing craft delivered the troops to the wrong place. The bombers dropped their loads too far inland to count, and the troops, led to expect bomb craters on the beach for cover, found none. At Omaha they also found that German fire was covering every square inch of the beach-a shock to some soldiers who for morale purposes had been led to believe, as one man remembers, “that there would be no living thing on the beach, no life of any kind. It would be a piece of cake.”
The rough seas that persuaded the Germans that no landing could take place right then occasioned further surprises for the attackers. Soldiers’ legs were smashed, crushed between ships and lurching landing craft. Seventeen loaded landing craft carrying more than 500 men were sunk by high waves on the way in, and many of the overloaded troops, bailing frantically with their helmets, drowned. All the artillery sank, as did all but five of the 32 floating tanks-their crews did not all escape, and their bones are still in their tanks on the sea bottom. The troops in the landing craft had been issued anti-seasickness pills, but their main effect was to cause sleepiness, and on the way in, the soldiers, packed in so tightly that they couldn’t make their way to the gunwales, vomited over each other. Many were so scared that they lost control of their bladders and bowels. Leaders discovered that their water-soaked radios didn’t work and that the noise of the naval bombardment kept shouted orders from being heard at all. As the craft finally grounded and the front ramps dropped and the men ran out, they found themselves not on the beach but in waist-deep, sometimes neck-deep water, facing pointblank machine-gun fire. Many were killed before leaving their boats. Men carrying explosives blew up and the lucky ones struggled through the red foam to crawl to the beach.
If the landing on Utah Beach went much better than expected, Omaha was a catastrophe. For hours, instead of advancing briskly according to schedule, soldiers lay on the beach, paralyzed by surprise and horror while the German artillery and mortars and machine guns pounded their bodies. Many men cried, many called for their mothers. In 10 minutes one rifle company of 205 men had 197 of them killed or wounded, including every officer and sergeant. With ruined radios, soldiers ashore couldn’t tell the ships to stop the further waves from landing and crowding onto “that terrible strip of sand,” as one survivor calls it.
After hours of motionless horror, what finally got them moving off that deadly beach? “Leadership,” of course-but what is it? Did it take the form of exhortation, example, commands, threats of punishment? The ground forces, when training leaders, like to invoke the image of a wet strand of spaghetti on a slippery surface. Push it from the rear and it goes nowhere. You have to pull it from the front. But what if the leader, government-appointed or self-appointed, shouts “Follow me!” and no one does’? Why do men sometimes follow him, and shout enthusiastically too? Something called “character” must be apparent in the leader. The followers must like him and want to be like him-or want him to like them. When it’s all over, they want him-private, sergeant, lieutenant, or even General Eisenhower-to clap them on the shoulder and say he’s proud of them. Sometimes quite unemotional appeals to reason will get them moving. At Omaha, one officer, sick of the carnage, stood up and shouted, “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach, the dead and those who are going to die.” That did it. The deadlock was broken, and in the next 24 hours 175,000 men and 50,000 vehicles came ashore.
But a glance out to sea and along the beach showed the price. On the ocean, as far as sight could reach, half-sunken ships, blown-up landing craft, floating bodies. On the edge of the beach, a litter of smashed and waterlogged radios, weapons, abandoned packs and helmets, gas masks, life preservers, bits of uniform and bandages, together with pocket-size New Testaments and hundreds of cartons of cigarettes and one guitar and one tennis racquet. And washing back and forth in the shallow water, hundreds of bodies and body parts: heads, torsos, arms, legs.
General Eisenhower was short on combat experience but not on imagination and sympathy. He knew beforehand that the invasion could easily fail. that the men who depended on his plan of attack could be murdered uselessly. After his agonizing decision, on the night of June 5, to give the “Go” signal regardless of the chancy weather, he quietly penciled on a bit of notebook paper a brief statement to issue if D-Day should turn out to be an irrecoverable disaster:
“Our landings … have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops … If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.”
The troops were right about him. They respected him, and that’s why, despite their fear, they did what he said had to be done. He was the leader-as-gentleman and he followed a noble code, perhaps more common then than now: when you succeed, give all the credit to others; when you fail, take all the blame Yourself. It was that kind of moral courage that was required to win D-Day and finally to win the war. ..MR.-
ROBERT SLAUGHTER SGT., 29TH INTANTRY DIV.
We let the tide carry us to shore, then rushed behind the sea wall. Mortar and artillery shells rained down; there were terrible noises and smells. There were 400 yards of sand, then a promenade, then 400 more yards until the bluff. It’s hard to say how vulnerable you feel. Across the beach a lieutenant colonel had secured refuge. We were trying to summon the courage to run, when our company leader, Colonel Canham, came rip-roaring up the beach. His right arm had been shot and it was in a sling, but he ran right up to the lieutenant colonel and yelled, “Get those damn men off the beach!” That lit a fire under me. He must have been in horrible pain, but if he could do it, we could do it.
ORWIN C. TALBOTT CAPT., 90TH INFANTRY DIV.
I was the commander of an M-4 tank. There were four other men in the tank, none of us with any combat experience. We were so darn busy that I didn’t notice a jeep had driven up alongside. The man in the passenger seat was gesticulating wildly to get my attention. I looked over and saw ROUGH RIDERS on the bumper and then I looked at the man: it was Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr.-57 years old. The picture is indelible in my mind. I can’t explain the feeling of being a 19-year-old kid, with a general officer leading you, at grave risk to himself, in the midst of combat. It was inspirational. We realized he wanted us to take out some German artillery. When I looked around again the jeep was gone.
OWEN GAVIGAN PFC., 4TH INFANTRY DIV.
We were lying so close, all the Germans had to do was keep shooting and they would hit someone. My regiment’s leader, Col. George Taylor, stood up and yelled, “There are only two kinds of people on this beach. Those who are dead and those who will die. Move in to the beach!” His words had a galvanizing effect. I started to repeat them to the men around me. We pulled an our gear. We followed a path around the mines that had been inadvertently laid for us by the wounded. We crossed the beach and got to where the Germans couldn’t direct fire at us. It took five or six hours to reach the crest of the hill. I had seen a lot of terrible things by the time I got to the too.
NORBERT N. PETERS PFC., 1ST INFANTRY DIV.
In front of us, blocking our way to the cliffs, was a 15-foot-high fence. In all of our training for this moment, no one had ever mentioned a barbed-wire fence. It was too high to scale, and anyone who tried would be nailed. After hiding behind the rocks for an hour, I saw four or five engineers with bangalore torpedoes. Each man slid his torpedo under the wire and linked it with the ones in front and in back. Hundreds of us, hiding behind the rocks, cheered them on. When they lit the fuse and the fence blew up, it was like a touchdown. Everyone was ecstatic. We flew across the sand to the bluffs, If they hadn’t blown up the wire, me and about 2,000 other men would have been continually under fire. Two of the engineers were killed while they were working.
THOMAS M. RICE S/SGT., 101 AIRBORNE DIV.
I had just jumped and landed in a field. Hidden in the bushes was an American lieutenant. He said, “Sergeant, I want you to walk around the perimeter of this field and see if you draw any fire:, Clearly, the sergeant thought there might be snipers in the trees. I thought, wall, the tough part-parachuting-was already over So I walked around the field as quickly as possible. When I got back to the entrance the lieutenant was gone. I obeyed the man; it was a legitimate combat order. But it took me quite a while to clue in: he had wanted some dummy to walk around the field. He wanted the Germans to use me as a target. He was my superior and I did what he asked, but there was a lack of leadership on his part-it was really anti-leadership.
THOMAS R. MCCANN CPL., 1ST INFANTRY DIV.
When I think about leadership, the person who comes to mind is Carlton Barnett. He was a private and a little-bitty fellow just about five feet tall. Boy, was he fearless. A few days before D-Day, he volunteered to act as a guide for our division. That meant hold go in with the 16th [regiment], Figure out where our division was supposed to go and then lead us across the beach once we arrived. That was a very dangerous job. I mean, there are some things you don’t volunteer for.
Before the invasion, everyone knew what job they were assigned to do. But this being war, everything went awry. When Carlton landed, there were hundreds of casualties from the first few ships. Men would be stepping off a ship into the surf and immediately shot. Even though it wasn’t his division, that boy spent the morning helping the wounded. He got them out of the water and ferried them to an evacuation boat offshore. There was artillery fire everywhere. He risked his life with each man he saved, but he must have saved at least 200.
