The Prelude

 

 

 

 

Private Vernon Scannell, Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders

From far away, a mile or so,

The wooden scaffolds could be seen

On which fat felons swung;

But closer view showed these to be

Sacks, corpulent with straw and tied

To beams from which they hung.

The sergeant halted his platoon.

‘Right lads,’ he barked, ‘you see them sacks?

I want you to forget

That sacks is what they are and act

As if they was all Jerries – wait!

Don’t move a muscle yet!

‘I’m going to show you how to use

The bayonet as it should be done.

If any of you feel

Squeamish like, I’ll tell you this:

There’s one thing that Jerry just can’t face

And that thing is cold steel.

‘So if we’re going to win this war

You’ve got to understand you must

Be brutal, ruthless, tough.

I want to hear you scream for blood

As you rip out his guts and see

The stuff he had for duff.’

The young recruits stood there and watched

And listened as their tutor roared

And stabbed his lifeless foe;

Their faces were expressionless,

Impassive as the winter skies

Black with threats of snow.

1944. If wars are fought by young men, they are planned for by men with age and its assumed attribute, wisdom. As England and Western Europe shivered in the snow of the New Year, the leaders of the Allied invasion of France, already selected in the last days of 1943, began taking up their appointments. Montgomery arrived in England on 2 January. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, landed on 15 January, holding his first full meeting of staff and commanders at Norfolk House, London, six days later.

Captain H.C. Butcher, aide to Eisenhower

Diary, London, Friday, 21 January 1944
The new Supreme Commander, moving into his job with an Anglo-American staff already created by General Morgan, is busily engaged in meetings.

The meeting held with Admiral Ramsay, General Montgomery, and Air Marshal Leigh-Mallory today may prove to be one of the most important of the war. Ike wanted the strength of the assault increased from three to five divisions and the area of the attack widened. He also wanted to employ two airborne divisions on the Cotentin (Cherbourg) Peninsula and not to use one against Caen. Leigh Mallory felt that it would be wrong to use the airborne on the Cotentin Peninsula and that losses will be seventy-five to eighty per cent. Ike believes it should be done to cut the ‘neck’ of the peninsula, and so does Monty. They will still use one airborne near Caen to seize bridges over the Orne and Dives, but will not try to take the city itself from the air. With all these changes, the need for postponing the assault for a month is apparent.

Three days before, the designated commander of the US First Army in the invasion, in England since the previous autumn, was confirmed in his appointment by ‘Ike’. The news came in an unofficial fashion.

General Omar Bradley, US First Army Group

The news that I was to command this Army Group came to me suddenly and indirectly: I read it in a morning paper. On January 18 as I turned through the lobby of the Dorchester Hotel bound for breakfast at the mess across the street, I stopped to pick up a copy of the four-page Daily Express.

The clerk at the counter grinned. ‘This won’t be news to you, sir,’ he said and pointed to a story in which Eisenhower had announced that ‘51-year-old Lieut.-General Omar Nelson Bradley, who led the US Second Corps in Tunisia and the invasion of Sicily, is to be the American Army’s “General Montgomery” in the western invasion of Europe.’ But it was. For this was the first inkling I had that my Army Group command was to be more than a temporary one. Eisenhower had just arrived in England and I had not yet talked with him. In his press conference the day before, the first on his return, Eisenhower had been asked who would command the American ground forces on the invasion. ‘General Bradley is the senior United States ground commander,’ was his reply.

For the moment that statement was not clear, for it did not indicate whether Eisenhower meant First Army on the assault or the Army Group as an opposite number to Monty. It was not until later that Eisenhower said he meant the Army Group.

It was not only on the Allied side that the commanders were taking their positions for the invasion that all knew would come, sooner or later. Though Field Marshal Geyr von Rundstedt was the Wehrmacht Supreme Commander West, Hitler had directly charged Erwin Rommel with the task of thwarting the Allied invasion of his Festung Europa. Rommel, with an energy that amazed his staff, set about building up the defences on the coast of France. He found himself, though, hampered in the job. He unburdened himself in his letters to his wife, Lucie-Maria.

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, Army Group B

19 January 1944
Returned today from my long trip. I saw a lot and was very satisfied with the progress that has been made. I think for certain that we’ll win the defensive battle in the West, provided only that a little more time remains for preparation. Guenther’s going off tomorrow with a suit-case. He’s to bring back my brown civilian suit and lightweight coat with hat, etc. I want to be able to go out without a Marshal’s baton for once …

… Situation in the East: apparently stabilized

… In the South: severe fighting and more heavy attacks to be met

… In the West: I believe we’ll be able to beat off the assault.

26 January 1944
The job’s being very frustrating. Time and again one comes up against bureaucratic and ossified individuals who resist everything new and progressive. But we’ll manage it all the same. My two hounds had to be separated, after the older one had well nigh killed the younger with affection.

Inevitably the Allies planned and plotted their Operation Overlord in conditions of great secrecy. They were especially zealous to guard the knowledge of the time and the place of the landing. Despite this, on two occasions secrecy was breached.

Captain H.C. Butcher, aide to Eisenhower
Diary, Widewing, Thursday, 23 March 1944
Possibility that essential facts of Overlord, including D-Day as originally set, may have been ‘compromised’ has stirred the high-level officials of SHAEF and the War Department. The G-2s are excited, particularly in Washington.

A few days ago Ike received a personal message from General Clayton Bissell, the new War Department G-2, saying that a package containing important documents concerning Overlord had been intercepted in Chicago. It had been sent from our Ordnance Division, G-4, and erroneously addressed to a private residence in a section of Chicago heavily populated by Germans. The package was poorly wrapped and, according to General Bissell, a casual perusal of the papers was made by four unauthorized persons in the headquarters of the Army’s 6th Service Command in Chicago, in addition to at least ten persons in the Chicago post office.

It now appears that the package was addressed by an American soldier who is of German extraction. He states that his sister, who lives at the Chicago address, has been seriously ill and thinks he simply erred in writing the address on the package because his mind was preoccupied with thoughts of home. Thus he wrote on the package his sister’s home address rather than the proper address in the War Department in Washington. The clumsy handling would indicate that no professional spy was involved, but, nevertheless, important facts, including strength, places, equipment, and tentative target date, have been disclosed to unauthorized persons – just another worry for the Supreme Commander.

Lieutenant-General Frederick Morgan, Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander [COSSAC]

What was probably the most acute internal conflict was that which took place between the so-called movement staffs of the Navy and Army branches of COSSAC. The duties of these two sub-divisions of a combined staff are of course bound of their very nature to overlap, and it is almost inevitable that friction should be set up. Over long years the general line of demarcation between Army and Navy has been set as High Water Mark at Ordinary Spring Tides. But this last war has played ducks and drakes with many land and sea marks, amongst them ‘HWMOST’. Largely owing to the great work of the Combined Operations staffs, it no longer rouses comment to find soldiers attired in lammies manning ships at sea or sailors dressed in khaki battledress driving trucks in the heart of a continent. But this didn’t come about overnight. When, as was the case with the COSSAC Staff, the whole affair virtually hinged upon rates of movement of men, vehicles and material from shore to sea and from sea to shore again, there was present every sort of opportunity, not only for inter-service rivalry but for inter-service jealousy and ultimately inter-service conflict. At one moment a point was reached at which the soldier glared at the sailor saying, ‘This much has got to be done at this place in this time,’ or words to that effect. The sailor replied with equal or greater emphasis, ‘This cannot be done,’ or its verbal equivalent. For a few hours it seemed as though unbreakable deadlock was reached. Figures, which as the axiom says cannot lie (though as our American staff repeatedly pointed out, liars can figure), were overhauled and recalculated ad nauseam with ever the same result. ‘One shall have them,’ said the Army. ‘They shall not pass,’ said the Navy. And relief came in what one would like to say was the typical COSSAC way. One of the soldier boys, though dead beat to the point of exasperation with hours and days of argument, called up his last reserves of humour, sat up all one night and produced a notable document all by himself. This took the form of a complete plan down to the last detail of an imaginary operation which the author christened ‘Overboard’. Whereas our real project for the great invasion, operation ‘Overlord’, was classified in the terminology of the time as American Secret, British Most Secret, the plan for operation ‘Overboard’ bore the proud heading, American Stupid, British Most Stupid. There followed an extremely witty skit on the whole of our activities, and the subsequent laughter completely cleared the air and brought about the reconciliation so earnestly sought after.

But even this little outburst of humour had its serious side and, in fact, brought us within an ace of disaster. Our security experts were quick to see that in spite of its lightness of touch and apparently nonsensical content, the plan set forth for this hypothetical operation ‘Overboard’ bore of necessity many marked resemblances to the original, the aping of which was the secret of its fun. We had, therefore, to ensure as far as we could that distribution of the plan for operation ‘Overboard’ was severely restricted. Apart from personal complimentary copies sent to the Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, the Chief of Combined Operations and to the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, it was enacted that the whole affair should be kept strictly within the walls of Norfolk House. This unfortunately was not done, and a copy somehow made its way across the Atlantic. It certainly was tough that such a gem should be born to waste its sweetness on the confined spaces of COSSAC Headquarters, as the poet might have said but didn’t quite. Anyway, if one had not had much experience of the necessity for absolute security, Washington DC was a whale of a way from Berlin, and what could it really matter?

But our luck held. Some weeks went by and the whole episode had been overlaid in the mind by many more pressing events before I received a note from General Gordon Macready of the British Army Staff in Washington in which he told me he had just been visited by a representative of The Pointer, the weekly publication by the Corps of Cadets, West Point, who considered himself fortunate to have obtained a copy of the paper produced in London entitled ‘Plan for Operation “Overboard”’. This seemed eminently worthy of publication even in this august periodical but, seeing as the material was produced in England, it was thought only right that before publication, official sanction should be sought from the British authorities. Without knowing too much of what was afoot at the time in England, these same British authorities were quick to perceive a distinct aroma of rat. Hence the friendly note to me and thus it was not only that The Pointer was deprived of a notable contribution but what might have proved a serious leak of priceless information was effectively stopped.

But as well as maintaining secrecy about their own designs, the Allies needed information about the sites in Occupied France which were proposed for the invasion. Those who gathered such information took incredible risks.

General Omar Bradley, US First Army Group

Before recommending that the assault be made against the Calvados coast of Normandy, Morgan’s planners had scrutinized the shore line of Europe from the Netherlands to Biarritz. From their intelligence archives the British had culled volumes of patient research on subsoils, bridges, moorings, wharfage, rivers, and the thousands of intricate details that went into this appraisal of the Overlord plan.

Characteristic of the enterprise the British applied to this intelligence task was the answer they brought in reply to our inquiry on the subsoil of Omaha Beach. In examining one of the prospective beach exits, we feared that a stream running through the draw might have left a deposit of silt under the sand and shingle. If so, our trucks might easily bog down at that unloading point.

‘How much dope can you get on the subsoil there?’ I asked Dickson when G-3 brought the problem to me.

Several days later a lean and reticent British naval lieutenant came to our briefing at Bryanston Square. From his pocket he pulled a thick glass tube. He walked over to the map on the wall.

‘The night before last’, he explained dryly, ‘we visited Omaha Beach to drill a core in the shingle at this point near the draw. You can see by the core there is no evidence of silt. The shingle is firmly bedded upon rock. There is little danger of your trucks bogging down.’

To get this information the lieutenant had taken a submarine through the mine fields off the coast of France. There he paddled ashore one evening in a rubber boat directly under the muzzles of the Germans’ big, casemated guns.

The men – the GIs, Tommies, matelots and flyers – who would put Overlord into effect, who would translate its words and lines into bullets and blood, were a diverse group. They came from Nebraska, from Glasgow from Swansea, from the Bronx, from Kentucky, from Calgary, and from small villages in England’s West Country. Perhaps all they had in common was their age, for few of them were past their mid-twenties. Some had volunteered to join the armed services in a passionate desire to beat Nazism, some succumbed to pressure of the times and their peers and reluctantly ‘volunteered’, some were regulars and a surprising number joined up for the adventure. And many, unsurprisingly enough, were drafted.

Lance-Bombardier Stanley Morgan, RA, 112th Heavy AA Regiment, aged 26

I was a militia boy, you see, and should have gone for six months military training being over twenty-one, but the war came. I was working on a farm and everybody said, ‘Oh, you’ll get out [of being conscripted].’ But farming wasn’t a reserved occupation then. I had to go in. I did six and a half years.

John Houston, US 101st Airborne Division

We were all volunteers who had come into the paratroops because we wanted to help put an end to Hitler’s evil government as fast as possible. I remember reading about the treatment of the Jews in Poland one day in the fall of 1942 and going to the recruiting station the next day.

Marine Stanley Blacker, RM, 606th Flotilla LCM, aged 19

I would have been conscripted anyway had I not volunteered, and by volunteering I could go into what I wanted to go into, which was the Royal Marines.

Corporal Ted Morris, 225 Para Field Ambulance, 6th Airborne Division, aged 24

I never did well in school. I was a lazy bugger, and just didn’t settle in – I had this urge to get out and about. Now everybody of my age from around here [Towyn] joined the Air Force, which was glamorous and there wasn’t any work anyway. But about 1935 they fetched out a propaganda film, OHMS – On His Majesty’s Service. John Mills starred in it and it was all about a rookie in the Army. And I’m convinced that that film and the fact I wasn’t getting anywhere at school made me join the Army. This was in 1936.

Nevin F. Price, USAAF 397th Bomb Group, aged 19

I would have been drafted anyway, so I thought I might as well volunteer and get the branch of service I wanted. I didn’t.

Alfred Leonard, Merchant Navy, aged 16

I wanted to join the Merchant Navy. Lots of my friends were already in it. I was chuffed to death when I got in, but I can’t imagine what my parents really thought. I pressurized them to sign me in.

Leading Aircraftman Gordon Jones, Combined Operations, aged 22

Things were intensely patriotic. There were about fifteen of us – all good friends – and they had all gone into the war. I was literally the only one left and was sick and tired and fed up of being in a reserved occupation – an aircraft cost clerk, put there by a doting uncle. I was an only child and my mother obviously said to him, ‘Oh my God, I’m worried about Gordon with the war!’ Understandably! Anyway I stuck it for some months and then got the bus one lunchtime and went down to the RAF recruiting office in Bristol. I passed Grade I for aircrew. This was probably a Monday or a Tuesday and I thought I’d be in by the next week. I had to wait a year, and by then there had been many volunteers for aircrew and my eyesight was deemed below standard. So I met this Squadron Leader who said, ‘Gordon, we have some rather bad news for you – you’ve failed your eyesight test and unfortunately we can’t accept you for aircrew. As you’ve volunteered from a reserved occupation you have the option to go back to civvy street, but I’m sure you don’t want to do that.’ He gave me a cigarette and called me Gordon, so he really hit it off with me. I looked at a list of trades he gave me – armourer, policeman, pigeon keeper – and asked what armourer entailed. And that was it. I became an armourer.

To be in uniform or in the Merchant Marine, however, was no guarantee of ‘seeing action’ on D-Day, or any other day. To be there on 6 June 1944 was a matter of luck, good or bad. For most men under arms life in World War II was a steady routine of polish, parades and exercises, a matter of enduring the boredom that forms 95 per cent of all war. Fewer than a quarter of the British Army, Churchill lamented, would ever ‘hear a bullet whistle.’ Some deliberately joined units most likely to go into combat; others simply found themselves in units earmarked for Overlord, a fate over which they had no say; and some took every precaution to ensure they were not in Normandy in June 1944, but still found themselves there.

W. Emlyn ‘Taffy’ Jones, Commando Signal Troop, 1st Special Service Brigade, aged 23

I got fed up with doing nothing. At one time I was in tanks as a wireless operator and all you were doing was going on exercise. Then another one. I thought, ‘There’s a bloody war going on out there, what the hell am I doing?’ Then you’d get a chap who would join you, in a new intake, and of course he’d have the Africa Star – he’d done something. I could see the war passing me by. So I went and joined this new unit. I didn’t know it was the Commandos then.

Sergeant H.M. Kellar, Devonshire Regiment

We were called to a special parade and addressed by the Company Sergeant-Major. He read out a message from General Montgomery requesting volunteers for his 21st Army group. I was bored stiff as usual, so I stuck my hand up and I was on my way in a few days and joined the 2nd Battalion of the Devons.

Donald Thomas, 53rd Airlanding Light Regiment RA, 6th Airborne Division

I was in the Anti-Tank Regiment until 1942. Our Colonel volunteered for all of us to join the 6th Airborne.

Seaman C.J. Wells, Empire Crossbow, Merchant Navy, aged 20

My brother had been on the Murmansk run, Merchant Navy, and he told me not to hand over my ID card when I went up to the Shipping Federation offices because they stamp a great big V for Volunteer in it – you haven’t been asked, but you’ve volunteered for the invasion. So I got up to the Glasgow Shipping Federation offices and they asked for my card behind the counter, which was like a Post Office counter, but I said, ‘No I don’t want no V in my card, I’m not volunteering for the invasion.’ So I got on this Empire Crossbow at Glasgow and went down to Southampton. A few days before the invasion the Special Branch came aboard for a security check on all of us. I went in front of this officer with my papers, and the officer said, ‘I see you haven’t got a V in your card.’ I said, ‘No, and I aint no bloody volunteer either.’ He said, ‘It’s like this laddie’ – a Scotsman he was – ‘you’ve been through all the security checks and you are going. But you won’t get the pound a week extra danger money, a couple of bars of chocolate, the cigarettes and a couple of cans of beer if you don’t have a V.’ I said, ‘If it’s like that put a V on there.’ That’s how I volunteered for the invasion.

The men who went to the far shore on 6 June and in the weeks that followed were supremely trained. Many had been in training since 1942, long before the invasion details had been agreed by the political and military heads of the Allied camp. In 1944, however, the training was stepped up; and then up again. Troops and sailors practised landings on beaches in Devon, Pembrokeshire, Scotland – anywhere in Britain that resembled the coast of France they would hit on the sixth. As the invasion would be the biggest seaborne assault of all time most training required an essential ingredient – water.

Lance-Bombardier Stanley Morgan, RA

If there was a hole or gravel pit in the south of England with water in it, we went through it in our waterproofed vehicles.

Leading Aircraftman Gordon Jones, Combined Operations, aged 22

We used to run and march eight miles to Erlin, get into landing craft and go out in the bay, then run down these ramps, charge ashore, back on the boats, day after day. And then do vehicle landings in Jeeps which we had to waterproof ourselves. There were huge drums of Harbutt’s plasticine and we used to get handfuls of this stuff, which was very malleable, like putty, and put it all around the distributors and all the electrical points under the bonnet. An exhaust came straight up from the engine vertically and another pipe went up vertically which was the air intake for the carburettor. The jeeps were loaded on board the landing craft and we drove them off. You were in about five feet of water. Your head and shoulders were above the water but you were driving this thing like a bodiless driver. You’d see busts going through the water towards land.

Sergeant H.M. Kellar, Devonshire Regiment

There [Loch Fynne] we met up with the Glenroy and spent a week on board, practising boarding our landing craft. Each landing craft carried a platoon of infantry, about thirty men. We would land on the beaches of the loch and return to the Glenroy. This was what we termed a cushy number, nothing very strenuous and good food aboard ship, plus the daily rum ration we were allowed, the same as the crew. The thought inevitably crossed my mind that we were being fattened for the kill.

Major F.D. Goode, 2nd Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment

In March [1944] the battalion moved to Inverary to train for the assault of the beaches. We practised getting in and out of the landing craft which was manned by enthusiastic marines. One of them, we were told, had been too enthusiastic and steering his assault craft across the loch in semi-darkness he hit a buoy. Thinking it was the beach he ordered ‘Down doors’ – and some ten fully equipped infantry dashed into the loch and vanished forever.

Colonel H.S. Gillies, King’s Own Scottish Borderers

Moray Firth, 1 January 1944
I threw myself into the uninviting swell and struggled ashore, followed by my company. During the next three days of the exercise my clothes froze on me, but it illustrates our then high state of physical fitness that I did not even get a cold.

Among those given the most extensive and safety-conscious training were the tank crews who might land General Percy Hobart’s amphibious DD tanks in Normandy – in case the tanks floundered and sank like stones.

Trooper Peter Davies, 1st East Riding Yeomanry, aged 21

We had to go through a lot of swimming exercises, and everyone had to learn to swim. I couldn’t as it happened. We trained in open-air baths in the middle of winter, dressed in denims which were soaking wet. We were in and out of open-air swimming pools for about a month. We also had to learn to swim underwater, and to do that we used the Davis escape apparatus that submariners use to bring you back to the surface. We tested it by having weights on us, as divers do, and we had to go down iron steps into a tank of water and walk along the bottom wearing this escape apparatus, which consisted of an airline fastened to your chest, with a nose-clip and goggles. We did this for about two days. This period culminated in us being trained by the Navy for a couple of days in a huge concrete tank about 30 feet deep, into which they had placed the hull and turret of an old tank. It was without tracks, just sitting on the bottom. We had to go down there and sit in the positions as we normally would in a fighting tank. And then they flooded the concrete tank to a depth of about 20 feet, through 20-inch pipes. Within seconds the water was rising. We had ten seconds to get the escape equipment on, then wait until the hull and turret were full and get out. We had two failures. The first time one of our crew shot out immediately before the tank was full, so we had to wait for the concrete tank to be drained again, sitting there in wet clothes. On the second time I got hit on the side of the head by one of the lads getting out. They spotted it and the test was immediately stopped again. So we had three goes at that.

The training had its desired effect. The men of June 1944 were at the peak of their physical preparedness. The comments of this commando can stand for many.

W. Emlyn ‘Taffy’ Jones, Commando Signal Troop, 1st Special Service Brigade

I stood in a pub in London, bought a pint and looked around and thought to myself, ‘I could clear this lot out of here if I wanted to.’ It wasn’t that I wanted to, but I felt so fit, so full of confidence, that I could handle anything.

But a question mark hung over the combat and mental readiness of the thousands of US infantry – few of whom had any experience of war for real – pouring into Britain at the rate of tens of thousands a month in the build-up to Overlord. Accompanying General Eisenhower to the US training ground at Slapton Sands in Devon, his aide confided his worries to his diary.

Captain H.C. Butcher, aide to Eisenhower

Diary, 4 April 1944
I am concerned over the absence of toughness and alertness of young American officers whom I saw on this trip. They are as green as growing corn. How will they act in battle and how will they look in three months’ time?

And it was at Slapton Sands that the Americans suffered their greatest training tragedy. A force of nine German E-boats intercepted the American landing craft, sinking them in a duck-shoot. On the harbourside when the Americans returned was a young British sailor.

William Seymour, RN

A large American craft came into Poole; it was quite a mess. Six hundred of them [Americans] had been killed, and some of them were on this ship. I saw a number of bodies being carried to shore. It put us off a bit. Until then we hadn’t really worried about war.

Not all of the training for the assault on Fortress Europe involved water. Huge areas of farmland were given over to infantry and tank exercises, so the ‘dog-faces’ and the Tommies could undertake realistic training for the battles which would come in Normandy after they got off the beaches and into the countryside. Farmers whose land was requisitioned for these exercises were seldom pleased, particularly if the Occupiers happened to be American.

Anonymous woman farmer, Berkshire

The troops would arrive in luxury coaches in the morning, leaving them to block the lane all day, walk down the hill to the battle area (apparently American soldiers don’t march) and begin the battle. Unfortunately they seldom warned me that they were coming, so sometimes we were at work, ploughing, drilling, threshing and so on in their area, and had to abandon work and beat a hasty retreat to avoid the bullets and shells, all of which was very annoying and disorganizing … I don’t know how many of their people got shot, it was a miracle they never shot any of us … I once saw them using a flame-thrower, a ghastly weapon, and they completely burned up a little spinney with it.

It was not just farmers who disliked the ‘Yanks’. One opinion poll found them more unpopular among the British public than Mussolini. As far as the British were concerned, the Americans ‘were oversexed, overpaid, and over here’. For their part the Americans thought the ‘Limeys’ aloof – at least initially – but tended to admire their ‘pluck’.

Anonymous GI, 1st Infantry Division

You always had the feeling that the Brits were looking down their nose at you. It didn’t matter how low-born they were themselves. They obviously thought every Yank was a hick, a country cousin with no breeding. Someone actually used that word with me once, ‘breeding’. They weren’t exactly friendly, the men especially, but it improved after a while, when we’d rubbed shoulders a bit.

There was one section of the Great British Public which liked the Americans without reserve. Kids found their easy manners, their relative affluence, and their stylishness near-magnetic.

John Keegan, schoolboy

How different they looked from our own jumble-sale-quality champions, beautifully clothed in smooth khaki as fine in cut and quality as a British 0fficer’s … and armed with glistening, modern, automatic weapons. Thompson sub-machine guns, Winchester carbines, Garand self-loading rifles. More striking still were the number, size and elegance of the vehicles in which they paraded about the countryside in stately convoy.

The British Army’s transport was a sad collection of underpowered makeshifts, whose dun paint flaked from their tin-pot bodywork. The Americans travelled in magnificent olive-green, pressed-steel, four-wheel-drive juggernauts, decked with what car salesmen would call optional extras of a sort never seen on their domestic equivalents – deep-treaded spare tyres, winches, towing cables, fire extinguishers. There were towering GMC six-by-sixes, compact and powerful Dodge four-by-fours, and, pilot fishing the rest or buzzing nimbly about the lanes on independent errands like the beach buggies of an era still thirty years ahead, tiny and entrancing jeeps, caparisoned with whiplash aerials and sketchy canvas hoods which drummed with the rhythm of a cowboy’s saddlebags rising and falling to the canter of his horse across the prairie.

John G. Coleman, schoolboy

At that time I was about 12 years old and recall the massive presence of American troops camped on the Penllwyn at Pontllanfraith. We used to rush home from school at Libanus, have our tea and rush straight up to the American or ‘Yankee Camp’, as we called it, with my mother’s wicker shopping basket. The reason for the shopping basket was, the Yanks loved our fish and chips and we would take their orders and go down to Burris’s Fish Shop, get a basketful and run like hell back to the camp, which was about a mile away. When we returned to the camp and distributed the fish and chips, we would be paid with Lucky Strike or Camel cigarettes. After we had had our puff, we would rub our fingers in the grease on the bottom of the basket, lick it off our fingers to hide the smell of smoke on our breath.

Across the English Channel Erwin Rommel and his men were also preparing for, even looking forward to, the forthcoming conflagration.

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel

Letter to his wife, 27 April 1944
It looks as though the British and Americans are going to do us the favour of keeping away for a bit. This will be of immense value for our coastal defences, for we are now growing stronger every day – at least on the ground, though the same is not true for the air. But even that will change to our advantage again some time.

My little dog is touchingly affectionate and loves sweet things. He sleeps in my room now, underneath my luggage stand. He’s going to be inoculated soon against distemper. Went riding again yesterday, but I’m feeling my joints pretty badly today.

Still no signs of the British and Americans … Every day, every week … we get stronger … I am looking forward to the battle with confidence.

Gefreiter Werner Kortenhaus, 21st Panzer Division, aged 19

In April 1944 we were still stationed in Brittany but were then moved to the area of Caen at the end of the month. I believe that this was at the order of Rommel himself. In the weeks that followed we actually occupied ourselves less with military training, but more with manual work because we had to dig holes in which to bury our tanks, so that only the gun barrel was above the earth. It was very strenuous physical work for young people, and when we had finished that, there were still the lorries and munition stores to dig in. And added to all this was also the fact that the large flat plains where we were were expected to be a site for enemy air landings, so we stuck lots of trees – chopped down trees – vertically into the earth. We called these ‘Rommel asparagus’, because it was Rommel who had ordered them. The point of them was that nobody could land on the flat plains without accident. We did all this as well as our usual army work.

Then, in May, the load became even greater because our guard duties were very, very much stepped up. Every day we had to run patrols. At the end of the month the weather was very hot – and we expected the invasion then, we were prepared for it – the only question was whether it would come in our sector or somewhere else.

Our tanks were very well prepared; that was one thing we did not have to worry about. We had spent months and months previously getting them ready. We knew our tanks, we had full command of them. The technical side of things was something which interested us young men. We were, though, not able to carry out many exercises because we always had to be frugal with petrol and also with ammunition. On shooting exercises perhaps only one or two shots would be fired. For the real thing, though, we were fully equipped, with about 100 shells for each panzer. Our big problem was rationing of food, and the quality of the food, something a lot of people complained about. Often we had potatoes which were so bad we had to throw them away. Sometimes we bought some provisions, such as eggs and butter, from the French. The French were a bit aloof, a bit isolated, but we were very, very concerned that nothing untoward should happen. If something like a theft occurred, the offender would be very, very heavily punished and locked up.

Yet, even with the workload and the poor provisions, morale was actually quite good in our unit. Because we had spent so many months together and had celebrated together – Christmas and birthdays – we became a good team. I know I and most of my friends did not give a thought to political things, though we were already a bit sceptical about how the war would pan out for Germany. After all, we had already had Stalingrad and El Alamein, so weren’t totally confident about the situation as a whole, but we assumed we would be able to push back a sea landing. Indeed, we took it for granted. You know, people are amazed by this but we young panzer men were burning at the thought we were perhaps going to be involved in some action. Of course, we had no idea what that would mean. No idea at all.

In Britain in late April military leave was cancelled and the Allied troops who would cross the channel were slowly moved into huge assembly camps along the south coast, which were guarded by grimfaced ‘Snowdrops’ (American MPs – military police) and ‘Red Caps’ (British MPs). Large signs dotted the perimeter of these camps, warning: DO NOT LOITER. CIVILIANS MUST NOT TALK TO MILITARY PERSONNEL. The country began to resemble a vast military encampment. The movement of the men involved – fourteen British divisions, twenty American divisions, three Canadian, one Polish, one French division and thousands of commandos and support units – choked the narrow roads with trucks, tanks, field guns and jeeps (accidents were common). In the ports the build-up of craft was no less impressive.

Lance-Corporal R.M. Wingfield, Queen’s Royal Regiment

When we returned from Embarkation Leave, they were sharpening bayonets.

‘Guess who?’ leered the Armourer Sergeant.

… We stood rigidly to attention before our kit. A sergeant stepped forward.

‘The Company Commander will now inspect you and your kit for the last time before you go overseas. He is a man of vast experience. He will ask each of you a question of vital importance to see if you are really ready for battle. You must know the answer to that question. It may save your life one day.’

The Major looked at my kit and walked all the way round me. He now stood before me. I stared, frozen-faced, at his Adam’s apple. It moved.

‘How many needles in that housewife [sewing kit] of yours?’

… The train pulled slowly out of Halesworth Station. Our old Platoon Sergeant, grim-faced, saluted.

‘Gawd!’ said someone. ‘He’ll be presenting arms in honour of the dead next!’

As the train gathered speed past the end of the platform, we saw a sentry at the ‘Present’.

We felt ill.

Captain Philip Burkinshaw, 12th Yorkshire Parachute Battalion

It was about this time that my father, mindful of the fact that the 2nd Front must be imminent and expecting that my division would be in the van of any attack, had procured for me at considerable expense a canvas covered breastplate, the strength of which he proceeded to test with the most powerful and penetrating weapons in his armoury of pistols and revolvers! He was an avid collector of all kinds of small arms from the early Colts onwards.

Having satisfied himself that it would withstand almost anything the enemy could bring to bear on it, he handed it over to me when I was home on a short leave in April 1944 and advised that once in action I should never leave it off. Suffice it for me to say that had I followed his advice and been inclined to emulate Don Quixote, I would, accoutred as I already was with over half a hundredweight of equipment, guns, grenades and ammunition, never have risen from the Normandy soil!

George Collard, 1st RM Armoured Support Regiment, aged 23

In April we moved from Corsham to Lord Mountbatten’s Estate near Romsey in Hampshire. The move was by road, and the Royal Marine tanks must have looked a little odd with ration boxes and five naval hammocks lashed up behind the turret.

Going through Devizes, near the Moonraker public house, was a high wall belonging to a large house. Our tank, driven by a three-badge Royal Artillery man, left the road and promptly crashed through the wall. When passing through in later years I’ve often tried to check where it was repaired.

Trooper Peter Davies, 1st East Riding Yeomanry

Tanks, lorries and everything was lined up on the roads of every town and village that we went into down on the South Coast. Streets, roads – all filled both sides with military vehicles.

Sub-Lieutenant Alun Williams, RNVR

About six weeks before D-Day I moved to Dartmouth to take charge of the minesweeping base there, and I found the transformation staggering. The width of the Dart appeared to have been halved by LST after LST moored alongside one another, manned by US Navy personnel. My abiding recollection is that endless records of Glenn Miller and his band were played over the public address equipment of such ships, presumably to boost the morale of the homesick American troops.

Bombardier Richard ‘Dickie’ Thomas, RA

We were put into a field – marched into a field, I should say – which was completely surrounded by barbed wire, to make sure we didn’t get out. We didn’t have the foggiest idea what was going on. It was a good 8 foot of barbed wire.

Alan Melville, RAF war correspondent

Our assembly camp was in Hampshire, near a little village called Hambledon. One day I want to go back to it and see it as it really is: I imagine a very pleasant place. But by May it had been completely engulfed by preparations for the invasion. Three-ton lorries, trucks, tanks and jeeps lined its meandering main street and every house had three or four vehicles attached to it by camouflage nets, like barnacles on the side of a ship. The roads were a mass of signs directing military traffic to the many camps and headquarters in the district, and military policemen were at every crossroad. The dear old English village bobby had wisely decided that the whole thing was beyond him, and had thrown in the sponge. The nature of the countryside was ideal for concealing huge quantities of men and supplies: rolling hills covered with glorious woods. I can’t remember a lovelier spring: the lilac and laburnum were so heavily blossomed that they were bent almost double; the fruit trees, even though they had been caught by a late frost, still made a wonderful show. But, however hard one concentrated on the setting, it was impossible to get away from what was being hatched in it. If you looked long enough at the laburnum, you realized that an amphibious Jeep was tucked away behind its yellow bunches of bloom; if you wanted to admire the tulips in somebody’s garden, you had to wedge your way between a couple of tanks in order to lean up against the garden fence. The King came down one day to inspect troops: several thousand of them were drawn up in a great green well formed by a dip in the hills. When the first part of the inspection was over, the men of the Armoured Brigades concerned in it were allowed to fall out until the rest of the ceremony had finished. I had been watching the King walk along the long lines of Lord Lovat’s special brand of Commandos, and hadn’t noticed the others falling out. I thought at first, on looking back at the hillside, that it was completely covered in rhododendrons. Then I realized that it was completely covered with men. There was a solid mass of them, only distinguishable as human beings when the sun glinted on some buttons or on someone wearing glasses. It was like that all over the south of England in the days before the balloon went up: the rhododendrons were as plentiful as ever, but they were crowded out by men in uniform.

Life in the assembly camps was a round of training, equipment preparation (including more waterproofing of vehicles), briefings, reviews by dignitaries and a desperate battle against boredom. The men also learnt for the first time that their destination was France.

Lance-Corporal R.M. Wingfield, Queen’s Royal Regiment

The first thing which met our eyes was a large board giving details of the ever-open NAAFI and the continuous film show. This should have put us on our guard, but our suspicions were finally confirmed when … we marched to our quarters. There, beneath the trees, were neat two-man tents, each with two American Army cots – and sheets.

‘Lofty’ stared, then roared:

‘I’ll bet we’re not here long. The condemned man ate a hearty bloody breakfast!’

He was right.

P.H.B. Pritchard, No. 6 Commando, 1st Special Brigade

We were eight to a tent and slept on canvas folding beds with US Army issue woollen blankets which impressed us with their quality, as did everything the US issued. Each group of four tents had a urinal bucket for night use. These were emptied by a US private wearing gloves, who used to grumble, ‘When I left the States I thought I was going to be a soldier, but here I am emptying p—s buckets. I guess the folks back home will call me chicket s—t!’ So we nicknamed him that!

…

At nights we were shown the latest films from America and the food was generally very good and plentiful. Our other spare moments were spent in reading US-Army-issued novels by Steinbeck or Hemingway and other such authors. Also for those so inclined there were the inevitable, and endless, games of ‘two up’ (Australian swy) which was extremely popular in No. 6 Commando generally. I did not indulge and neither did my chum Gunner Puttick (Royal Artillery); we just read the books and had our hair cut by Corporal Draper (‘Ginger’), using a comb and a pair of nail scissors.

…

We paraded on a road by lining each side in single file. H.M. [His Majesty], I seem to remember, walked between our ranks, and spoke with several soldiers (not me unfortunately). In the same park various tanks and other vehicles all of special design, i.e. Flails, Crocodile, AVREs, [Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers, a modified Churchill tank] etc., were parked under trees. I understand that these were also for inspection by H.M. To be inspected by the King was regarded as a great honour, which indeed it was.

Driver John Osborne, 101 Company General Transport Amphibious

In mid-May groups from each unit were lined up in a country lane and who should come along accompanied by a number of top brass but King George VI. As he passed us, all he said was, ‘So these are the men who drive the DUKWs!’ Even so, it was quite something to have been inspected by the King.

T. Tateson, Green Howards

I was most impressed though by the Yanks’ washing-up facilities, which we shared. In the British Army in those days a single bin full of lukewarm grey water was all we had to dip our mess tins in, in a rather hopeless effort to clean them. The Yanks had a row of three bins of hot water to be used in sequence, so that the third one remained practically clear and clean. A simple and common-sense refinement, but one which made all the difference and seemed to us a luxury.

Alan Melville, RAF war correspondent

Two big marquees had been put up in the garden and joined together to make one enormous briefing tent. Round the walls of the tent were maps: large-scale maps of the beach sectors on which we were going to land. They were accurate in every detail except one: the place-names had been altered. You found with a slight jolt to your geography that, for example, Madrid was a village only a few kilometres west of Vienna. To supplement the maps, there were a large number of aerial photographs – the best and most detailed I have ever seen. Every feature of the beaches and the hinterland leading from them was made absolutely clear by those photographs: the obstacles which the enemy had put up on the beaches, the sand dunes, the roads leading inland, the houses and buildings beyond. There was a little port or seaside town to the left of our own sector; it looked an attractive little place, with nice houses and big gardens stretching down to the sands. The sort of place where people who could afford it would take a house for the summer and let the children run loose on the sands. As well as the maps and photographs, there were large, gaily-painted diagrams showing how our forces would deploy on landing, and the exact position of each transit area, command post, supply and ammunition dump, and so on. Plus a blackboard for such extra diagrams as were needed in the briefing. Even if we hadn’t been told a thing about what was going to happen, there would have been no excuse after studying all that evidence for not knowing exactly what our own strip of the beach maintenance area looked like.

Alan Moorehead, Australian war correspondent

I found my place in one of the tents and set up my camp bed. There was nothing to do, so I lay down on the bed and stared through the open flap of the tent at a field where the soldiers were playing football. On the opposite bed a young naval officer was trying on his harness. There was a rucksack full of explosives, a trenching tool, pistol, ammunition, a butcher’s knife, gas-cape, helmet, a small sack that looked as though it contained hand grenades, a tin of rations. He strapped all this gear on himself and began making alterations so as to distribute the weight more evenly. Then he practised slipping the bundles on and off until he found he could do it in the space of thirty seconds or so. I tried to think what his job was. To wade ashore and plant explosives on the sea-wall? He was a boy of twenty-one or twenty-two, and he went about this buckling and unbuckling of his kit quite oblivious of his surroundings. Presently he too lay down on his bed and began watching the footballers outside.

‘It looks as though we are going to have good weather.’

‘Yes.’

He did not want to talk. After an hour I got up and began walking round the camp. Some of the soldiers were lying on the grass near the recreation tent. They were talking and listening to a radio loudspeaker hanging from one of the trees. A disembodied dialogue was coming out of the marquee marked Camp Cinema, and occasionally there was a burst of laughter from the audience inside. At the paymaster’s tent I asked how much money I could change.

‘Ten pounds if you like.’

‘Into what currency?’

‘Francs.’

So it was going to be France then; that was definite. The same flimsy notes with their pastel shades, the bundles of wheat and the buxom women in the corner, Banque de France. Five years ago, when I shut up my home in Paris, I had changed the last of those notes at the Gare de l’Est, and these were the first I had seen since then, and they were the first clear passport for my return. But it was not going to be the same. I stood outside the tent looking at the notes and expecting a nostalgia for the things that had made France a better country to live in than anywhere else on earth. But it was no good. The mind projected itself forward as far as the embarkation, as far as the landing. Then there was a blank, a kind of wall over which the mind would not travel.

In the mess tent the food was very bad. We sat at rickety trestle tables, eating slices of cold bully beef and cold white cabbage. Then there were army biscuits, margarine, a mug of tea. A few made some attempt to talk, but most of the officers sat eating silently, and brushing the flies away from their plates. Every few minutes a loudspeaker outside the tent began calling numbers. These were the numbers of units which were to prepare themselves to go down to their ships and invasion barges. As the numbers were called the men at the table cocked their heads slightly to listen. One or two men got up and left the tent. The rest went on eating the cold cabbage.

I went back to the tent and got down on the bed again. There was nothing to do. My driver had packed the jeep. The kit was stowed on board, chains, petrol cans, blankets. The engine had been plastered with waterproofing glue so that the vehicle could travel through water. A long flexible hose ran up from the exhaust and was tied to the top of the windscreen. He too, the driver, showed that he was feeling the strain of waiting. Everybody felt it. Over all the camp, over a hundred other such camps, over all the Army at that moment there was this same dead weight, this same oppressive feeling that the delay might continue indefinitely, growing more and more unbearable as the days went by. The invasion was already like an over-rehearsed play.

Alan Hart, RCS, aged 19

Diary, June 1944
On the day after – Bank Holiday Monday – we were issued with 100-franc notes. So we at least knew that the town of ‘Poland’, the port of ‘Oslo’ and the stretch of coast we were to touch down on was France.

Stars and Stripes newspaper [pre-invasion issue]

Don’t be surprised if a Frenchman steps up and kisses you. That doesn’t mean he’s queer. It means he’s French and darn glad to see you.

Lieutenant C.T. Cross, 2nd Battalion Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry

For quite a long and very tedious time before the thing [DDay] began we were cooped up tightly in a tented camp opposite an operational aerodrome near Oxford. It was incredibly hot while we were there (Whitsun) but they stretched a point and allowed us out of camp to go across to the RAF mess and have a bath. ENSA sent a show down one afternoon – held in plain air – quite amusing. And occasionally we packed a few sweaty men very tightly into a tent and showed them a film. But it was a trying time and a lot of money changed hands at cards. Meanwhile, the officers and NCOs were very busy hearing the story of what we were going to do, memorizing maps, studying models, air photograph intelligence reports and that sort of thing. All done near nude in a Nissen hut, whose doors and windows had to be kept shut!

Trooper Peter Davies, First East Riding Yeomanry

It took two or three months to prepare the tanks before D-Day. It was quite a job. We had to seal every part of the hatches where the driver and gunner get in, and where the guns come out. They had to be sealed and covered in rubberized canvas and stuck with Bostic glue. The turret flaps and turret ring had to be sealed, and the exhaust at the back was covered with a metal box affair which carried it four or five feet up into the air so that it was way above the waterline. The engines were tested as well. Exactly three weeks before D-Day we had to weld additional armour – plates about an inch thick – onto the sides of the Shermans where the ammunition sponsors were. I never forget the day the welding was done because it happened to be my twenty-first birthday and I had the greatest prank played against me. I had forgotten it was my birthday and we were working like blacks in a wood north of Portsmouth. I fell asleep lying on top of the tank in the brilliant sunshine. I suddenly realized that it had gone quiet. Everybody had gone. It was lunchtime. I tried to get off the tank and I thought I was paralysed: my legs wouldn’t move. I couldn’t make out what was wrong for about five minutes – what had happened was that they had welded the steel heels of my boots to the tank, and everybody had vamoosed. I had to get out of my boots, take a hammer and chisel from the tool box and cut my boots off the top of the tank. I put them on and trotted through the woods to where the mess hut was. I got in there and a tremendous cheer went up, and they sang ‘Happy Birthday’. I really thought I’d been paralysed. It was a great trick.

…

Most fellows were elated but impatient and wanted to get on with it, get on with the job we were supposed to do. Basically, ‘Let’s get it over.’ One or two fellows married with children, whose wives were perhaps not that far away, wanted to sneak off home. Only a couple I know of attempted to get out of the camp, because they were fenced in by barbed-wire entanglements and the perimeter was patrolled by military police and civilian police. There wasn’t much chance of getting out.

Leading Aircraftman Gordon Jones, Combined Operations

The drinking was confined to NAAFI beer, which was quite pleasant but it didn’t get you anywhere. There was houseyhousey and also guys would play cards. The funny thing was that after only an hour or so of having been given this French money, some of the guys were walking around with their battle dress bulging with thousands of notes and other guys were saying, ‘Can you give us a couple of notes for a beer?’ They were completely skint.

Lance-Bombardier Stanley Morgan, RA

We were told that the Germans weren’t very clean, so a lot of people had their hair cut short, in case they were getting amongst louse.

Donald S. Vaughan, 5th Assault Regiment, 79th Armoured Division, aged 19

In the holding camp we had four or five chaps blown up. They were dismantling a torpedo, a Bowes torpedo, which was a 3-inch cast-iron pipe full of gelignite. Gelignite, after a certain time, starts to deteriorate, it sweats. So they were taking it out to refill it. Something went wrong and they were killed.

Captain Douglas G. Aitken, Medical Officer, 24th Lancers

[In May 1944 he was given the ‘strange job’ of organizing the loading of a landing ship tank.] I struggle with innumerable forms in duplicate trying to discover whom we have brought, who ought to be there – both our own and other units – and what and which vehicle has arrived or ought to be there. This takes me every spare moment of my time and I have my meals brought to me rather than go in next door to get them. We have chaotic conferences every morning and afternoon. They want us to go to the boat in one order. I want to go in reverse stowage order, and they promise eventually this will be done. I spend more hectic hours working out which vehicle will have to be landed first and therefore which order they will go in the boat. But the job is eventually finished and the rest depends on the organization official.

Donald Burgett, US 101st Airborne Division

The next few days were spent in briefing tents studying aerial photographs, maps and three-dimensional scale models of Normandy. Each paratrooper had to learn the whole operation by heart, know his own and every other outfit’s mission to the most minute detail and be able to draw a map of the whole area from memory. We even knew that the German commandant of St Come-du-Mont owned a white horse and was going with a French schoolteacher who lived on a side street just two buildings away from a German gun emplacement. Troops wearing different German uniforms and carrying enemy weapons roamed constantly through the marshalling area to familiarize us with what the enemy looked like and what weapons they carried.

Flight Lieutenant J.G. Hayden, RAF, aged 22

A lot of time was spent studying a model of the run-in to the dropping area. The model was built in a room which was kept secret, and the navigators and bomb-aimers were taken in at certain times to study it carefully. Then you had to close your eyes, and someone would ask questions: ‘What comes after the bridge X?’ or ‘Whereabouts is Y? just to make sure that you had the run-in definitely in your mind, so you’d be very, very sure to be on the right place on the night.

As the big day approached some units became sombre, even shaky in their morale.

Staff Sergeant Henry Giles, US 291st Combat Engineer Battalion

Diary
The whole outfit now has a very bad case of the invasion shakes. Very little talk about anything but assault landings, what it will be like, what the casualties will be etc. Any way you look at it, it’s not going to be any piece of cake. After the alert this morning, I caught myself several times looking around and wondering for the hundredth time how the hell I got here and what the hell I’m doing here – me, Henry Giles, an old farm boy from Caldwell Ridge, Knifley, Kentucky! For the first time in years a uniform doesn’t seem to fit me. A little too tight.

Even the troops of the experienced US 1st Infantry Division, ‘The Big Red One’, were gloomy.

Corporal Sam Fuller, US 1st Infantry Division

They [the men of the division] had had their fill of combat and they had rightfully assumed … that somebody else should carry the ball this time … They would stand no chance of walking off that beach. Their luck would not stretch that far.

This pre-invasion tension was not confined to the GIs of America. There were British regiments in a near-rebellious state, considering that they had already ‘done their bit’. In others the tension boiled over into fights and riots.

Major F.D. Goode, Gloucestershire Regiment

A regiment which shall be nameless had been the previous occupants of the camp and they were so bloody-minded at having to do another landing that they booby-trapped some of the area with live grenades. Removing them was good training and no one was hurt but we did have one unfortunate who was playing in his tent with a loaded rifle and accidentally shot himself in the heart. I arrived a minute after to find blood spurting literally six feet and no hope. We notified his next of kin after the landing that he had been killed in action; it seemed kinder.

Sergeant William B. Smith, Intelligence Corps, aged 36

One evening there was a riot in the camp in which a good deal of damage was done, especially broken windows. This caused some concern and nobody seemed to know exactly how it started. The next day it was announced that henceforth each night a sergeant was to be detailed to close the bars at 10 p.m. On inspecting the roster, I found to my horror that I was the sergeant detailed for the first night. I was not looking forward to the job, as a good many of the troops concerned were from the 7th Armoured Division [the Desert Rats] who had been brought to England from North Africa and, as the division responsible largely for the only British victory up to that time, had a very high opinion of themselves, and were not inclined to be ordered about by anybody, let alone those who themselves had never been in action. As it happened I managed things without much opposition, and for the next few days discipline prevailed.

Until the 3rd of June the date of D-Day – which was initially intended to be the 5th of June – was known only by the most senior planners and military commanders. On the third the men themselves were let in on the secret of ‘when’. The change of mood was tangible.

Alan Moorehead, Australian war correspondent

It was absurd to try and rationalize the thing that had to happen in a day or two. Yet (one argued) it was a monstrous contradiction of reason. You cannot present fear and death and risk in this cold way, with all this calculation. You can accept these things vicariously in a theatre. You accept them when you are angry. But cold cabbage. A lot of numbers shouted on a loudspeaker. A tent with a number on it. A number even on you. What sort of preparation was this? And to let it go on hour after hour. To try and tabulate a thing that was essentially a matter of passion and excitement. It simply drove the mind into a fixed apathy. It made you reluctant to walk, to talk, to eat, to sleep. There was no taste in anything any longer. Not even in drinks, and there were no drinks in the camp anyway. Just waiting, waiting until your number turned up. And meanwhile no loose talk. What you had to do, your job, your place in the machine, was everything, but you must not talk about it. You were not even told where you were going. You were given no idea of your place in the plan. You had no method of assessing the black space ahead. You had to be suspicious even of the other soldiers in the camp. Everything had to be secret. You were driven back into yourself to the point where you lacked even a normal companionship with the others, who after all were in exactly the same situation. It was not fear that oppressed you, but loneliness. A sense of implacable helplessness. You were without identity, a number projected in unrelated space among a million other numbers.

On 3 June these were the ideas that made this camp the most cheerless place that had come my way since the war began. And all around, in the mess, and along the earthen tracks, one could read the same ideas in the heavy sullen faces of the soldiers going by. No wonder another twenty men had deserted in the night.

That evening the soldiers were told the plan and what they had to do. The change was electric. The suspense was snapped. A wave of relief succeeded it. Now that the future was known and prescribed everything would be easier. We were to embark the following afternoon. We would sail during the night. H-Hour was the following morning. An immense aerial and naval bombardment would precede the landing. Ten thousand tons of bombs would fall along the coast on which we had to land. The naval guns would silence the shore batteries. The brigade had been given a small strip of beach on which to land, a strip marked on the map as ‘King Beach’. Other brigades would be landing to the right and left of us. Airborne divisions would be arriving by glider and parachute to clear the way inland.

All this was an immense reassurance. As the men stood in their ranks listening to the colonel you could feel the confidence growing. Here at last was something practical and definite, something to which one could adjust oneself.

We were not yet told exactly where we would land, but maps with false names were issued. They showed every German position down to the last gun. Here a machine-gun nest. Here a minefield. Here a pill-box and a fortified wall. The defences did not appear nearly so formidable now that one knew the extent of them. Each company was given its objective, the distance it had to go, the obstacles in its way. And all the time continuous air cover, a continuous barrage of guns from the sea. Dinner was almost cheerful that night.

Private Robert Macduff, Wiltshire Regiment, aged 20 [born 6 June]

Then all hell broke loose. D-Day was to be 5 June. In came to the Signals Office a group of lads with a tiny piece of my birthday cake, and informed me that the cake had been cut up and well passed around. They handed me my tiny piece with the remark that where I was going I wouldn’t have time to eat any more.

Donald Burgett, US 101st Airborne Division

On 3 June they issued each of us with an escape kit, consisting of a small compass, an unmarked map, and seven dollars in French money. We were also issued a metal cricket apiece, one click being the challenge to anyone we met in combat and two the password to keep from getting one’s head blown off. The verbal challenge for all airborne was ‘Flash’, the password ‘Thunder’, and if a man wasn’t sure of who challenged him he could ask for the countersign ‘Welcome’. The way to challenge a man is to draw a bead on him, wait until he is not more than fifteen or twenty feet away, then whisper, just loud enough for him to hear, the challenge word, ‘Flash’. If he doesn’t answer with the password or two clicks of the cricket, pull the trigger.

That night we sat sharpening knives, cleaning weapons and sorting through the personal things we figured we could or would need after the heavy fighting was over, like soap, shaving equipment and cartons of cigarettes. Phillips, Liddle, Benson, several other troopers and I were in the tent next to company headquarters with Captain Danes, Speedy West, the Teeter twins and some officers. It was raining that night, and all the canvas and blankets were wet, but we didn’t mind, for most of us slept with our clothes on now, just removing our boots. After the usual joking and horseplay, things quieted down in the tent and we went to sleep.

Captain H.C. Butcher, aide to Eisenhower

Diary, Shaef Advance (near Portsmouth), Saturday, 3 June 1944
Ever since I have been with Ike, I have carefully followed his admonition never to arrange for a showing of a moving picture for him if use of the film deprives soldiers of entertainment. In North Africa, films were hard to get, particularly new ones, and there were many evenings when the General could have seen a film but all were in use for the GIs. Our new office caravan is ‘wired for sound’ and I arranged for a movie last night. I try these days to find something light and humorous, never anything on the war. Special Services had no film at Portsmouth but were bringing one down from main headquarters at Bushy Park. As there had been no arrangement for movies for soldiers at the forward headquarters, Special Services suggested 8 o’clock, which fitted in with Ike’s personal schedule. The projector, screen, and operator were driven to the camp during the day and because, as I later learned, the projector was being sent for the General, a later show was laid on for the GIs. However, Ike had some unexpected callers and we entered the caravan about 8.30, just as the GI operator was packing up the projector and the screen. He told the General – whom I had not bothered with the details then – he had another show, one for the Gls of the camp, and he would be too late if he ran the film for the General.

With this, the General was in instantaneous and complete agreement, but turned on me and gave me a good cussing out for arranging a film for him at a time which would cause GIs to see the later show and be kept up late. I knew then he really had the pre-D-Day jitters.

As Ike let the GIs in the Portsmouth camp watch movies, many of their fellows and other Allied troops were already being moved out of the assembly areas to the south-coast ports where they would embark for the Great Crusade. (Indeed, some had embarked on to their LCTs, LCIs and a host of other abbreviated craft which would carry them across the Channel as early as 31 May.) The troops moved to their marshalling areas and embarkation points in huge, slow convoys.

John G. Coleman, schoolboy

Then we realized something was up when we were stopped going to the camp, and all the surrounding area was patrolled by armed soldiers who came from Canada, Australia, and some of our own soldiers as well. They did their patrol in an area of about 3 miles, so all the playing woods and fields were completely out of bounds.

This coincided with the heavy build-up of armoured vehicles on the Forge Lane road at Bassaleg down to the Tredegar House.

Then suddenly they were gone without warning and everything was dead.

Major D. Flowers, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders

Our destination was Southampton, eighty-seven miles away by direct route, but well over a hundred miles by the way we were required to take to conform with the traffic arrangements which spread like a cat’s cradle over the whole of southern England. According to the book this far exceeded the maximum mileage waterproofed vehicles were supposed to cover, but in fact they all stood the strain well except the three-ton lorries, which boiled constantly, and the 146th Battery’s ‘slave-chargers’, which completely disintegrated.

The first event was a disappointment. So much was supposed to happen at the RCRP, in our case situated just outside Winchester, that when the advance party drew up importantly it was a shock to find nothing but a caravan beside the road containing one private who had never heard of the Regiment, and whose sole immediate ambition was to complete his shaving. We were deeply distressed, and in our state of excitement and nerves we imagined some awful disaster which would preclude our ever going abroad at all. We were not comforted by the arrival of an officer who assured us that officially we did not exist, but that he would try to fit us in somewhere. We lay on the grass half asleep after our long drive while he chattered on the telephone.

Just as Tom Geddes was setting out on his motor-cycle to stop the convoy somewhere by the roadside, so that they would not pile up at the RCRP, news came through that accommodation had been found for us in Camp 19. Thus by three o’clock in the afternoon we had got to the marshalling area on Southampton Common, the drivers remaining with their vehicles while the remainder were firmly imprisoned within barbed wire. Everyone who had been in the main column was suffering from eye strain, varying from a minimum slight soreness to Lieutenant Pothecary, who lost his sight completely and for some time had to be led about. This disturbing and painful ailment was brought about partly by the dust, and partly by the diesel fumes thrown up by M10s travelling head to tail, for the roads approaching all south-coast ports carried so much traffic that normal road discipline was abandoned and the order was ‘close up and get on’.

Bombadier Harry Hartill, RA, aged 24

The only place we recognized that day was Stonehenge and we spent the night in Bulford Army Camp on Salisbury Plain. Rumours were rife. We knew we were going to an embarkation port but our destination was a secret, and we seemed to be retracing our route as if to confuse enemy observations. I recognized Denham Film Studios just before we bedded down for the night at the roadside just outside London. Next morning we were off again, this time through the city of London. I felt like Montgomery himself as I drove over London Bridge at the wheel of the Bren gun carrier. We arrived at what I later found out was Tilbury docks.

Captain Douglas G. Aitken, Medical Officer, 29th Lancers

In the towns where we have long halts and more tea, the people take a little more interest, but security police keep everyone segregated and there is no mixing. The girls look much more attractive when we know we won’t see any for a long time to come. Three attractive ones pass on bicycles on their way to tennis – they look very cool and very English. I occasionally find myself thinking foolish thoughts about not coming back or being away for a hell of a long time.

Mary J. Thomson, Tilbury, aged 11

There were troops – mostly American and Canadian – all around [Tilbury], living in tents – bell tents and all sorts of tents, anything they could sleep in – covering every square inch of grass. By this stage we were confined to home, we weren’t allowed out. But the troops needed to get washed up, so some of them came knocking at the door and asked if we could spare a bucket of water, very politely. ‘Yes certainly,’ we said, a bit surprised. Then we discovered that there were lots of boys outside who wanted to get washed and shaved, so we invited them in. They said they couldn’t come in, but would be very grateful for the water. We filled up all the buckets and baths we could find and handed them out, and there were men washing on the lawn, on the path and on the drive. They also used our outside toilet at the back of the house, because it didn’t come into the house. When they finished they were very grateful and left us with lots of chewing gum. My mother even had a pair of nylons, which were beyond price. A really nice pair of stockings.

Alan Melville, RAF war correspondent

We received our last instructions and our emergency rations – bully, chocolate, chewing gum, two 24-hour packs and the natty little cooker for boiling hot water which was alleged to transform the chunk of rather sad wood-pulp issued to us into a luscious plateful of porridge with sugar and cream thrown in. Hermione was manoeuvred into position between two DUKWs and we were off. We weren’t, of course – but there is always a feeling of ‘This is it!’ when you leave the marshalling area. Actually, our convoy meandered through villages and country roads and then sat down for seven hours on the outskirts of Portsmouth. People didn’t pay much attention to us on the way; they were fairly blasé about convoys by that time. But Portsmouth had sensed that this wasn’t just another exercise, and the population turned out en masse. There were no bands and no flags: it was a very different farewell to the last war; but there was great friendliness. We had been given strict instructions that, for security reasons, we were not to ‘fraternize’ with the local inhabitants. But it is impossible not to fraternize with people who insist on bringing you out cups of tea every hour, who shower their sugar ration on you, who ask you into their homes for a wash and brush up. Anyway, no Army Council Instruction has ever succeeded in stopping the British soldier from fraternizing with the children – especially if you’re driving a ‘duck’ with a life-size painting of Donald on its side.

Alan Moorehead, Australian war correspondent

At three o’clock we were standing in a line on the path leading up to the gate. The young naval officer came by festooned with his explosives and rather surprisingly took up a position behind me. As each new group of troops turned up they exchanged wisecracks with the others already arrived. ‘Blimey, ’ere’s the Arsenal.’ … ‘’Ome for the ’olidays.’ … ‘Wot’s that, Arthur?’ ‘Them’s me water-wings, dearie.’ Even after waiting another hour there was still optimism in the ranks. Then we marched out through the gate and got on to the vehicles. An officer was running down the line making sure everyone was on board. He blew a whistle and we started off. Five miles an hour. Down Acacia Avenue. Round the park into High Street; a mile-long column of ducks and three-ton lorries, of jeeps and tanks and bulldozers. On the sidewalk one or two people waved vaguely. An old man stopped and mumbled, ‘Good luck.’ But for the most part the people stared silently and made no sign. They knew we were going. There had been rehearsals before but they were not deceived. There was something in the way the soldiers carried themselves that said all too clearly ‘This is it. This is the invasion.’ And yet they were cheerful still. It was a relief to be out of the camp and moving freely in the streets again. Every now and again the column halted. Then we crept on slowly again towards the hards.

Two hours went by and the soldiers began to grow bored. They seized on anything for amusement. When a girl came by on a bicycle she was cheered with salacious enthusiasm from one end of the column to the other. An athlete dressed in a pink suit began to pace round the cricket field. The soldiers watched him with relish for a minute. Then, ‘Hyah, Pinkie.’ ‘Careful, dearie.’ Derisive shouting followed him round the ground. Towards the end of the column a soldier who was trained as a sniper took down his rifle with its telescopic sights and fixed them upon two lovers who were embracing at the farther end of the park. His friends gathered round him while he gave them a lewd commentary on what he saw. The soldiers were becoming very bored. It grew dark and the cricket match ended. Every hour or so a tea-waggon came round and the men ran towards it with their enamel mugs. One after another the lights in the houses were blacked out and the soldiers, left alone in the empty street, lapsed into complete listlessness and tiredness. Rumours kept passing back and forth from vehicle to vehicle. ‘Our ship has fouled its anchor.’ ‘There has been a collision in the harbour.’ Or more spectacularly, ‘We have already made a landing on the Channel Islands.’

Towards ten o’clock the officers began running down the column shouting for the drivers to start. We began to edge forward slowly and presently came out on the dark promenade along the sea. There were many ships, both those moving in the sound and those which had brought their bows up on to the hard and had opened their gates to receive the vehicles. We were marked down for the Landing Ship Tank 816. A clamour of light and noise was coming out of its open bows. One after another the vehicles crept down the ramp and on to the great lift that took them to the upper deck. The sailors kept shouting to one another as they lashed down the trucks on the upper deck. All night the thump of army boots against the metal deck went on.

Alan Melville, RAF war correspondent

We lay at anchor for three days while our part of the invasion fleet mustered. It was difficult to realize that this was only part of the fleet. Whenever you came out on deck the scene had changed and new arrivals had crept into anchorage until the whole great stretch of water was a mass of grey ships. They were constantly manoeuvring: long lines of landing craft getting into their flotilla positions and moving slowly nearer the open sea, MTBs fussing round us, launches and packet boats scuttling between ships, sign-flashing all day and night. We added our own modest quota on the evening of the second day, when an immaculate RASC launch with its full crew came alongside and to my horror four more pigeons were hauled up on deck with a polite note from the Wing-Commander saying that we’d better be on the safe side, and that he hoped we were remembering to give Blood, Toil, Sweat, and Tears their water every evening.

Driver John Osborne, 101 Company General Transport Amphibious

The next few days in the Solent were rather boring and were spent in the main playing cards. Our bunks were in the sides of the LSTs and it was rather stuffy and claustrophobic down there. Up on the foredeck towards the bows, a cable ran from a winch through an eye in the bow, then to a steel raft called a rhino on which were two ambulance DUKWs belonging to 633 Company. Four of us used the cable as a ridge-pole and made tents with our ground sheets. No one moved us so we stayed there until D-Day.

Major F.D. Goode, Gloucestershire Regiment

We were issued with Mae Wests [lifebelts] and told to wear them at all times at sea. In fact, they made a very good pillow as the quarters were very cramped and one had to lie in a canvas berth with about two feet between the one above. Had we sunk there could not have been many survivors, so closely were we packed below … we were also issued with a pair of waterproof waders which came up to our waists and which were meant to enable us to arrive dry on the beaches: in the event they were a damn nuisance and quite useless.

The weather for D-Day had long been a preoccupation of the Allied chiefs. The assault needed a reasonable sea to disembark the troops and good visibility for the Allied aircrews who would give fighter cover and bomb the German defence installations. As June progressed the weather became increasingly bad, causing Eisenhower to make some tough decisions. No sooner had the men of D-Day been told the date for the invasion than it was postponed. The postponement inevitably increased the strain on the men waiting aboard the overcrowded ships and in the damp tents of the Airborne divisions.

Trooper Peter Davies, 1st East Riding Yeomanry

The storm when it brewed up was a real snorter of a storm. A number of barrage balloons suspended from the ships broke off and flew off God knows where. Some of the lads had been sick on the third even, some on the fourth, but on the fifth they really started to get seasick. Of course the boat was going like mad from side to side. Even though the tanks were holding the LST down it was still rocking violently at times.

General Omar Bradley, US First Army Group

At midnight I turned in and fell asleep. It was almost six when I was awakened on Sunday, 4 June. The weather in Plymouth harbor was soupy and wet; visibility was down and I shivered as I dressed. Kean came in with a copy of the Admiralty radio to Kirk.

‘Postponed?’ I asked.

‘Twenty-four hours.’

Captain H.C. Butcher, aide to Eisenhower

Diary, Shaef Advance (near Portsmouth), Sunday morning, 4 June 1944
D-Day was postponed by Ike for at least twenty-four hours last night. Weather looks very bad for air support, but suited Navy, as wind was from south-west and not expected to be so strong by morning, when the attacks were to have begun shortly after good light.

A large portion of the 4,000 ships already were at sea, from landing craft to battleships. They were notified shortly after the 4 a.m. meeting this morning. Each task force was previously instructed what to do in just this possibility.

Donald Burgett, US 101st Airborne Division

We lay there talking and joking with each other, wondering what combat would really be like, when suddenly the talk in the next tent came into focus and we heard the Captain ask Speedy to play ‘San Antonio Rose’ on his guitar. The music sounded good, and we listened as we went about our small chores, but the request was repeated each time the song ended. Finally someone yelled at the Captain and asked if he wouldn’t like to hear something else. He replied that he was from San Antonio and the plane he was riding in was also named that and he wanted to listen to that particular song until it was time to go.

The rain kept falling harder and harder through an increasing wind until it was coming down in torrential sheets and we thought for sure the whole operation would be called off. Suddenly a runner poked his head through the tent opening and said, ‘This is it, let’s go.’

We hit the outside on the double, and in columns of two started slogging our way toward the waiting planes. The ground was hard packed and grassless, and with the rain, the surface became slippery and slimy. Men kept sliding around until we got to the runways on the airfield; then it was easy walking, but still a long way to go. We found our assigned places at last, and looking and feeling like a bunch of half-drowned rats, we started to get ready. I was trying to get the wet parachute harness fastened while water ran into my eyes, off my nose and down my neck, every step bringing a squishy sound from my boots. All the extra equipment we had to carry didn’t make the job any easier. Jeeps were running around the field on various errands looking like shadowy ghosts through the downpour of rain. One pulled up, spraying us with grit-filled water from under its wheels, and the driver said the operation was postponed until further notice. Some of us just stood there not knowing whether to feel relieved or mad, because we knew that we would have to go through the same thing again either tomorrow or the next day at the latest. Back in the tents most of us lay on the cots and slept the best way we could in the chill dampness of night, under single blankets from the packs we had made up to carry into combat with us.

War Diary: 8th Canadian Infantry Brigade

Alan Moorehead, Australian war correspondent

Up to this point the morale had been steady. Everyone’s spirits had risen as we had come on board, although this act of embarking had been the final irrevocable break with England. But now with this renewed delay there was time to think again. And this at a moment when one had no desire to think or to write letters or engage on any distraction from the inevitable thing ahead.

816 was an American ship which had already made three assault landings: North Africa, Sicily and Salerno. On this their fourth landing the sailors showed no excitement or emotion. Their attitude was summed up by, ‘Another dirty job.’ The captain had sailed for twenty years. The crew had seen the sea for the first time at New York a year or two before. The captain himself had taken the wheel since he had no wheelman as they left New York. He himself had trained his officers on the voyage to Europe, during the actual assaults. He was gloomy. ‘This will be a bad one.’ It was perhaps more superstition than gloom. For eight or ten hours through the day inconsequent American swing music poured out of the ship’s loudspeakers. The American sailors liked to work to the music. They went about, loose-limbed, chewing gum, not mixing much with the soldiers. A negro sat in the stern peeling potatoes endlessly.

At least one American officer though, did take advantage of the postponement to write a final letter home.

Captain John Dulligan, US 1st Infantry Division

I love these men. They sleep all over the ship, on the decks, in, on top and underneath the vehicles. They smoke, play cards, wrestle around and indulge in general horse-play. They gather around in groups and talk mostly about girls, home and experiences (with and without girls) … They are good soldiers, the best in the world … Before the invasion of North Africa, I was nervous and a little scared. During the Sicilian invasion I was so busy that the fear passed while I was working … This time we will hit a beach in France and from there on, only God knows the answer … I want you to know I love you with all my heart … and I pray that God will see fit to spare me to you and Ann and Pat.

At SHAEF HQ, at 9.45 p.m. on 4 June, after polling his deputy commanders and the weather forecasters of Group-Captain Stagg, Ike decided that the invasion should go ahead for the sixth.

General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander

I’m quite positive we must give the order. I don’t like it, but there it is … I don’t see how we can possibly do anything else.

The die was cast.