Ernie Pyle, war correspondent
Dispatch, summer 1944
I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France.
It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead.
The water was full of squishy little jellyfish about the size of your hand. Millions of them. In the centre each of them had a green design exactly like a four-leaf clover. The good-luck emblem. Sure. Hell yes.
I walked for a mile and a half along the water’s edge of our many-miled invasion beach. You wanted to walk slowly, for the detail on that beach was infinite.
The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it. Anything and everything is expendable. And we did expend on our beachhead in Normandy during those first few hours.
For a mile out from the beach there were scores of tanks and trucks and boats that you could no longer see, for they were at the bottom of the water – swamped by overloading, or hit by shells, or sunk by mines. Most of their crews were lost.
You could see trucks tipped half over and swamped. You could see partly sunken barges, and the angled-up corners of jeeps, and small landing craft half submerged. And at low tide you could still see those vicious six-pronged iron snares that helped snag and wreck them.
On the beach itself, high and dry, were all kinds of wrecked vehicles. There were tanks that had only just made the beach before being knocked out. There were jeeps that had burned to a dull gray. There were big derricks on caterpillar treads that didn’t quite make it. There were half-tracks carrying office equipment that had been made into a shambles by a single shell hit, their interiors still holding their useless equipage of smashed typewriters, telephones, office files.
There were LCTs turned completely upside down, and lying on their backs, and how they got that way I don’t know. There were boats stacked on top of each other, their sides caved in, their suspension doors knocked off.
In this shoreline museum of carnage there were abandoned rolls of barbed wire and smashed bulldozers and big stacks of thrown-away lifebelts and piles of shells still waiting to be moved.
In the water floated empty life rafts and soldiers’ packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges.
On the beach lay snarled rolls of telephone wire and big rolls of steel matting and stacks of broken, rusting rifles.
On the beach lay, expended, sufficient men and mechanism for a small war. They were gone forever now. And yet we could afford it.
We could afford it because we were on, we had our toehold, and behind us there were such enormous replacements for this wreckage on the beach that you could hardly conceive of their sum total. Men and equipment were flowing from England in such a gigantic stream that it made the waste on the beachhead seem like nothing at all, really nothing at all.
A few hundred yards back on the beach is a high bluff. Up there we had a tent hospital, and a barbed-wire enclosure for prisoners of war. From up there you could see far up and down the beach, in a spectacular crows-nest view, and far out to sea.
And standing out there on the water beyond all this wreckage was the greatest armada man has ever seen. You simply could not believe the gigantic collection of ships that lay out there waiting to unload.
Looking from the bluff, it lay thick and clear to the far horizon of the sea and on beyond, and it spread out to the sides and was miles wide. Its utter enormity would move the hardest man.
As I stood up there I noticed a group of freshly taken German prisoners standing nearby. They had not yet been put in the prison cage. They were just standing there, a couple of doughboys leisurely guarding them with tommy guns.
The prisoners too were looking out to sea – the same bit of sea that for months and years had been so safely empty before their gaze. Now they stood staring almost as if in a trance.
They didn’t say a word to each other. They didn’t need to. The expression on their faces was something forever unforgettable. In it was the final horrified acceptance of their doom.
If only all Germans could have had the rich experience of standing on the bluff and looking out across the water and seeing what their compatriots saw.
Alexandre Reynaud, Mayor of Ste Mère Eglise
Before returning to Ste Mère Eglise, the captain stopped along the coast, near the former village of La Madeleine, in the commune of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont. A few years earlier, this little Normandy village was living a peaceful existence. It included several comfortable properties, half farm, half vacation home. A few hundred metres to the back, in the cemetery where no one had been buried for years, stood a very old chapel. It had a small openwork belfry in which a bell slept as though in a cage. It was surrounded by large trees: yews, oaks and elms, which almost hid it from view. It was an old, unused sanctuary which seemed to have retired there like an old woman behind her windowpanes.
Now, nothing remained of the village, not even ruins. The ground had been turned up, and the few stones that hadn’t been pulverized by shells and bombs had been used first by the Germans, then by the Americans, to pave the roads. The chapel was still standing, but it had been hit in several places and the belfry was awry.
In front of the village, on the dunes overlooking the sea, which were fairly high in this area, the Germans had built a blockhouse. It had been hit by Navy shells. We could still see the threatening mouths of the cannons sticking out of the loopholes facing the sea. Inside the enormous mass of reinforced concrete were several compartments separated by armoured doors. A metal ladder was embedded into the wall, to enable the lookout to climb to the top from inside and see the horizon with a minimum of danger.
Odette Lelanoy, Vire
Ruins. You might say that Normandy had been ravaged. The country houses, the hamlets hadn’t been touched, but we had been caught in the shell fire, the gun fire from the planes, the bombs. As soon as lorries grouped around a farm to find water or provisions, like hens, they took the horses to pull their lorries which had run out of petrol. There were houses and barns on fire. The towns had been damaged, all those which had been in the battleground during those long weeks while the Germans were holding out. All those villages, such as Tinges Bre, Condé sur Noireau, Falaise, had been destroyed. We returned home to find our house hadn’t been touched. It had been taken over. Only a small part of the building had been destroyed. But it had been used as a command post and when we returned to the house there was nothing left inside. We found bits and pieces in the dining room and the cellar which indicated that our house had been taken and used as a command post. Anyway, they’d driven us out by saying, ‘You must leave. If we find you here tomorrow we’ll shoot you.’ That’s what they said all the way through the war. They slipped into our midst in order to be able to retreat. But the house was untouched.
Friedrich Gadecke, Wehrmacht
Letter, France, 27 August 1944
Dear Parents,
A time of uncertainty, apprehension and fear is now beginning for you as well. I pray sincerely that God gives you courage each day, and that you don’t sink into worry but hold onto the certainty that your prayers will be heard. Rest assured and be happy! That is my wish and my plea to you. Don’t be afraid, even during the days when you hear nothing and can know nothing about how things are for me. Everything that I experience and am permitted to live through in these times reassures me that I will be kept safe for you, for God does nothing by halves. I shall come through these dangers. God granted me life through you. For that I am always grateful to you.
Your son,
Friedrich
[Died 13 September 1944]
Trooper Peter Davies, 1st East Riding Yeomanry
I hated Hitler and what he stood for, and I felt that we were there to free the French people – which we were. It was a just war.
…
It’s still terribly difficult when I visit my friends’ graves. It’s still hard to think back. It still brings a lump to my throat. I’m lucky, I’m here. It was worthwhile because if we hadn’t stopped Hitler and the Nazis doing what they did we wouldn’t be able to live the life we live today, wouldn’t have the freedom we have today. If we contributed only one little bit to the freedom of the world in 1944 it was worthwhile.
…
You shove the bits you want to forget into the back of your mind. If you can. You can’t always do it. Try and push them out of the way. You remember the fun, the comradeship that you had, the men that you lived with – they were like brothers, closer than brothers some of them, closer than your own family because you relied for your life on them, and they relied on you.
Leonard Miles, 168 General Transport Company
When I got home at the end of the war I found it very difficult adjusting. I felt terrible. As a matter of fact it took me a very long time – two or three years, really – because it was so different from the war. And we’d left so many behind, and I couldn’t get that out of my system. I was forever thinking about them.
Captain Edward W. McGregor, US 1st Infantry Division
Hell, what the English went through in the war. Nothing like it happened in America of course and that permeated my thinking. Incidentally I had an American girlfriend and had written her and said that I had met this very nice English girl. Well, she didn’t accept that I guess but I couldn’t disassociate myself from the war and everything. It was so different in America. I even kind of resented coming back to the States. I went through a terrible period – a psychological period – that started as soon as the war ended, by which time we were in Czechoslovakia. I was a Major then, the S3, plans and operations officer. Suddenly I received the order on the telephone from Division on 7 May: the order was ‘Cease all further forward movement.’ The effect, no guns any more … well there wasn’t a great feeling of elation to tell you the truth. We had been at it so long, those of us who had come all the way through. It was a very selfish thing in a way, but I realized that a mode of life had changed. It was the end of an era. I didn’t know what the future held in store. I wasn’t a regular officer then, I was a reserve officer – a lot of us were – on extended active duty. I didn’t know what to expect when I got home.
Marine Stanley Blacker, RM
I felt very, very proud of my country, and I felt proud of serving. I still do. We felt we were liberating Europe. There were hundreds who did more than I did, far more. But we all felt we were on a mission to liberate Europe from an age of darkness.
William Seymour, RN
We wouldn’t be free today. There’s a feeling of satisfaction to have been involved.
John G. Coleman
A little while later we heard reports that all the Americans based at the Penllwyn Pontllanfraith were killed on the Omaha beach landing.
Our hearts were sad for we knew those guys over the months they were camped at the Penllwyn, and now they were gone. I shall not forget them.
Captain Joseph T. Dawson, US 1st Infantry Division
My whole life since has been one of readjusting my feelings, because I had a very intense bitterness towards the Germans. I felt that they were an enemy that had to be destroyed, and I looked on them in that light rather than any human light, because I was not accustomed to taking human life. I was never a professional soldier. I was a civilian that was granted the opportunity to defend my country. My feelings had been developed over the years, a feeling that the Germans under Hitler were a menace to humanity. I volunteered as a private and ended up a colonel at the end of the war. I could see the war clouds in 1935 when we were shipping steel to Japan; it was obvious that the axis of Germany and Japan was hell-bent on America’s destruction and the dominance of the world. My personal feeling deepened when I was in England, when I came into contact with the English. My admiration for them is boundless. I couldn’t help but feel that they provided the front line of defence for the world.
…
I have come to realize, very deeply, that that moment of D-Day marked a turning point of the twentieth century – it was perhaps the most dramatic moment of the twentieth century, because it enabled the freedom of the world. There’s something sacred about it.
…
I was offered a full commission in the regular army if I retained my position, if I stayed in the army.
I will say with a great deal of pride that all my friends that served with me on Omaha beach retired as Major-Generals and Lieutenant-Generals and have made notable careers in the service. However, I was not a professional soldier – I was in the oil business before the war and thought I could serve my country in some other capacity than the army. But I didn’t know how I could adjust, having had so much of it, the war, in me for four and a half years, and in active combat for three years of that. So I had a real emotional and mental problem to resolve; fortunately the men that I was associated with prior to the war had saved a position for me with their company and I was able to adjust, through their help and a resolution on my part to make a life of service as a civilian. Mostly though I was able to adjust because I met the girl I would marry, who would become my wife. I think that was the thing which stabilized my life.
…
To be effective as an infantryman and to be able to subordinate your feelings to the reality that you’re destroying the enemy … well, that’s about as 180 degrees from civilian life as you can get. In war, you condition your mind to the reality of leaving all emotion out of your personal feelings and direct yourself to being effective in destroying the enemy. You can’t take that into civilian life, where if you have conflicts you don’t settle them in a mortal way. That was the main difficulty I had, getting the army and the war out of my system. It took a number of years to do that, but I was able to do it largely because of the wonderful relationship I have had with my family. War is ugly, it’s deadly, it’s dirty. A man has to almost reduce himself to an animal to be effective, because he’s got to lose all degree of emotion to be effective.
…
It’s taken years to overcome my bitterness towards the Germans, but at the same time I can’t ever completely erase my feelings. Near the termination of the war I had the unfortunate experience of being at Dachau [Nazi death camp] when we opened it up. It was something that has stayed with me so vividly throughout my life. At the time I was there I couldn’t have food in my stomach for a week, it unnerved me so much … I guess that’s the reason I’ve had such a deep bitterness towards the German people: they couldn’t have helped but know the things that were going on. There’s no way in God’s green earth that they didn’t know. There’s a certain strain in there that is evil – I can’t think of any other way of saying it. I know we all become bestial in combat, but combat is one thing and destruction of humanity in that way is disgusting, obscene. I’ll never get over it.
War is not a noble thing. You have to realize that in doing your duty you’ve got to do things which are bestial … but I guess you’ve got to go through the muck to get to the shining hour. It had to be done. You only had to visit one concentration camp to realize the nadir the German people had reached.
…
It is awesome, even now, to me to see how we could possibly have survived, because the terrain there [Omaha] is remarkable in that it has the high ridge overlooking the beach itself, in such a dramatic way. When I go back with members of my company today, we marvel how we ever got off there in the first place because they commanded such a tremendous advantage over us. It was only just the luck of God that allowed me to find a little opening which permitted us to get off of the beach. I’ve always felt a degree of humility as well as thanking God for having had the opportunity for making a break which allowed us to proceed off of Omaha.
Private Robert Macduff, Wiltshire Regiment
It seems to me sometimes that Nature’s way of overcoming the conscience factor and the traumas one goes through is to put them right at the back of the mind. If ever recalled, it becomes very painful.
Flight Lieutenant J.G. Hayden, RAF
At the time I left the RAF there was a cry for teachers. So I took the course, which was a new thing altogether, a new challenge which helped me adjust to civilian life reasonably well.
W. Emlyn ‘Taffy’ Jones, 1st Special Service Brigade
It was peculiar, you know, going back home afterwards. You didn’t know what to find, what reception you’d have. I saw a film once – oh, what was it called? About the Vietnam war and a Pole. The Deerhunter, that’s it – and it had one thing which stuck out in my mind, that moved me. It was when the character came back from Vietnam to his home town and he hid behind a telegraph pole or a tree wondering whether to go in or not. I had that same sort of feeling. It took me a couple of years to get myself sorted out. It was a sort of cooling down, I suppose … They – the war years – were happy days for me. I was among men. In a way I miss those days.
Nevin F. Price, USAAF 39th Bomb Group
If we hadn’t invaded Normandy, we’d all be speaking German now.
Alfred Leonard, Merchant Navy
Cordite. I can remember vividly the smell of cordite. It stays with you, and when you get a smell which is near it it can sort of trigger off the memories. It’s a very difficult smell to describe … I’ve smelt it a little bit with electrics, if you get a short and there’s a metallic smell. That smells more or less like it.
It was a very short time in my life, a very hectic time, and I was trying to take it all in.
Sergeant Richard W. Herklotz, US 29th Division
It was not an heroic operation. I don’t think of it as heroic. There was a cause that the nation wanted us to do, and we did it. And those who survived can thank their lucky stars that they did.
Gravestone epitaphs from British Commonwealth Cemeteries, Ryes and Bayeux:
Private A. Richards, Hampshire Regiment
I wonder why you had to die without a chance to say goodbye. Eileen and family.
Private F.A. Kelly, Devonshire Regiment
Beloved / Your Duty Bravely Done / Rest in Peace / Mum.
Trooper A.J. Cole, 61st Regiment, Reece Corps, RAC
The Dearest daddy and Husband in the World. We will love you for Ever, Darling.