Eisenhower had set D-Day for June 5. Loading for the assault began on May 31, running from west to east—from Falmouth and Fowey for the U.S. 29th Division, from Dartmouth, Torquay, and Exmouth for the U.S. 4th Division, from Weymouth and Portland for the U.S. 1st Division, from Southampton for the British 50th and Canadian 3rd divisions, from Portsmouth and Newhaven for the British 3rd Division. Those coming from a distance rode to the quays by bus or truck; those whose sausages were close to the harbors formed up into their squads, platoons, and companies and marched.
Everything was on the move, jeeps, trucks, big artillery pieces, tanks, half-tracks, motorcycles, and bicycles. Crowds gathered on the streets to watch the apparently never-ending procession. The adults were giving the V-for-Victory sign, but as one company of the 1st Division marched through a village, a boy of eleven or twelve called out to a sergeant, “You won’t come back.” The boy’s mother gave a gasp, picked him up, and ran to the front of the column. As the sergeant passed, the boy sobbed through his tears, “You will come back! You will!”1
Death was on the mind of many of the men. As Pvt. Clair Galdonik remembered his bus ride to Dartmouth, “Few words were spoken among us. No joking or prankster stunts. We felt closer to each other now than ever before.”2 Motor Machinist Charles Jarreau of the Coast Guard was on LCI 94, watching the gathering on the quay at Weymouth. “The troops were just flooding the docks,” he recalled. “People everywhere. Priests were in their heyday. I even saw Jews go and take communion. Everybody scared to death.”3
In most cases anticipation overrode fear. The men were eager to get going. The excitement in the air was nearly overwhelming. The Allied high command had deliberately brought the men to the highest level of readiness, mentally and physically. Training had been going on, in most cases, for two years or more. Although there had been transfers and replacements, a majority of the men were in squads and platoons that had been together since boot camp. They had shared the drudgery and the physical and mental demands of training, hated or loved their COs together, eaten their meals together, slept in the same foxhole on maneuvers together, gotten drunk together. They had formed a bond, become a family. They knew each other intimately, knew what to expect from the guy on their left or right, what he liked to eat, what he smelled like.
Not many of them were there by choice. Only a few of them had a patriotic passion that they would speak about. But nearly all of them would rather have died than let down their buddies or look the coward in front of their bunkmates. Of all the things that the long training period accomplished, this sense of group solidarity was the most important.
Some commanders gathered their men together for one last talk before they boarded their transport vessels. The commander of the 115th Regiment, Col. Eugene Slappey, looked at all the shaved heads in his outfit, took off his helmet, scratched his own bald head, and declared, “You men have a good idea there. Lots cleaner. But I never realized that I had been getting ready for an invasion for a long time.”
After the laughter he grew serious, talking to his men like a father to his sons: “There isn’t much us old fellows can do now. The success of this invasion is up to you men. We have done a lot of planning: I wish you could know the amount of preparation that has gone into this thing. It’s the greatest military effort that the world has seen. And all of you know the stakes, the course of history depends on our success. It’s a great satisfaction to know that no unit was ever better prepared to go into combat; that’s why we got the job.”
Slappey concluded, “I’ll see you in France.” As Lieutenant Eastridge walked away, he was struck by the thought, It will be a sad day for this regiment if we ever lose that old man.4
General Bradley gathered nearly a thousand officers in a vast aircraft hangar, the general officers on the platform, the colonels on the front-row benches, the lieutenants at the rear. Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., son of the late president, was assistant division commander of the 4th Division. Because of his age, fifty-six, and his physical condition (he had a bad heart), Roosevelt had been forced to obtain a stack of dispensations and special orders, then plea for permission to go ashore on Utah with one of the first waves. He had finally got what he wanted. He sat on the platform, grinning.
Bradley opened, “Gentlemen, this is going to be the greatest show on earth. You are honored by having grandstand seats.”
Roosevelt frowned, shook his head, and in a deep bass whisper said, “Hell, goddamn! We’re not in the grandstand! We’re down on the gridiron!”
The acoustics of the hangar were such that everyone heard him. There was an eruption of laughter and an easing of tension. Bradley grinned and continued his pep talk.5
THE COAST GUARD and Navy crews were waiting for the men. Charles Jarreau remembered that on LCI 94 there were four officers and twenty-six men. The officers were “ninety-day wonders,” graduates of officer training school, in their early twenties, but the skipper was an old man of thirty-two. He had ten years in the merchant marine and “the rules were his, not the Navy’s; he did not like the Navy’s.” Two days before LCI 94 picked up its soldiers, he told Jarreau, “There’s nobody going to leave this ship, so you go out and get the liquor you want and we are going to have a party.” It started at 0700 “and boy, at the end of the day, everybody was just crapped out, but it sure relieved the tension. After a night’s sleep we sobered up and started taking troops on board.”6
Familiarity with the loading process helped immensely to ease tension. The men of the AEF had been through the drill many times. By early June 1944, the continuous stream of mounting, marshaling, embarkation, and landing had become monotonous and routine. Many of those involved commented later that they could have done it in their sleep; others said that until the definitive announcement came over the ship’s loudspeaker they half believed this was just another exercise. Those were exactly the attitudes their commanders wanted them to have.
The troops indulged themselves in the age-old tendency of fighting men going into battle to carry too much stuff with them. The Assault Training Center exercises had led planners to recommend that the men in the assault waves should not carry more than forty-four pounds of equipment, but most were taking on more than double that extra weight, some even more. Partly this was the fault of the regimental commanders, who wanted the first waves to carry in land mines, satchel charges, extra ammunition, spare radios, mortars, and the like. Partly this was the men’s own fault, as there was always something extra to carry—a French phrase book or a Bible, an unauthorized knife or pistol, most of all cigarettes.
The cigarettes were handed out at the quays, along with rations. Pvt. Robert Patterson of the 474th Antiaircraft Battalion told the quartermaster to never mind the cigarettes because “I don’t smoke.”
“You might as well take them,” the quartermaster replied, “because by the time you get where you’re going, you will.” Forty years later Patterson commented, “He was right. On that ship I learned to smoke and did so for a lot of years thereafter.”7
One soldier in the 4th Division was addicted to Camels. He went into a panic over the thought of running out, so he bought, borrowed, or traded for every pack he could. He went on board carrying ten cartons. Most men carried two cartons and depended on the Army to get more up to them when needed.
Vehicles were also grossly overloaded with ammunition, jerry cans, picks and shovels, canteens, field rations, weapons, and more. Nevertheless, the loading proceeded smoothly and according to the elaborate schedule. It seemed impossible that each of the thousands of ships and landing craft could find its own specific place, or that the passengers could locate the right vessels, but they did. Tanks, artillery, trucks, and jeeps backed into their LCTs—last on, first off. They used specially constructed “hards,” cement aprons extending into the harbor at the right slope to accommodate the LCTs.
Men moved onto their LSTs and LCIs or other transports “in an astonishingly short time,” according to Lieutenant Eastridge. Almost at once both decks of LST 459 were loaded, with vehicles and guns chained to the deck. The ship was overcrowded, with only one bunk for every three men, so they would rotate sleeping hours, eight to a man. There was insufficient space at the docks and hards for all the transports and LSTs, so many of the infantry companies were ferried out to vessels anchored in the bays on Higgins boats.