NO MATTER how brilliant the plan, no matter how effective the deception, no matter how intense the preinvasion sea and air bombardment, Overlord would fail if the assault squads did not advance. To make sure that they did, the Allies put a tremendous effort into training.
The Americans thought that they had emphasized training in 1942—indeed, that they were putting their divisions through as tough a training regimen as any in the world. In February 1943, at Kasserine Pass, they discovered that their training was woefully inadequate to the rigors of modern warfare. Men had run, commanders had panicked. Men who thought they were in top physical condition found out they weren’t. “Our people from the very highest to the very lowest have learned that this is not a child’s game and are ready and eager to get down to the fundamental[s],” Eisenhower wrote Marshall. “From now on I am going to make it a fixed rule that no unit from the time it reaches this theater until this war is won will ever stop training.”1 As supreme commander, he enforced that rule.
The point of the training was to get ashore. Everything was geared to the D-Day assault. The AEF later paid a price for this obsession. Nothing was done to train for hedgerow fighting; techniques suitable to offensive action in Normandy had to be learned on the spot. But of course there would be no hedgerow fighting if the AEF did not get ashore.
For some divisions the assault training had begun in the States. The airborne divisions had been formed in 1941–42 for the purpose of landing behind the Atlantic Wall, and their training reflected that goal. After jump school, the airborne troops had carried out jump, assembly, and attack maneuvers throughout the middle South.
• •
Col. James Van Fleet took command of the 8th Infantry Regiment of the 4th Division on July 21, 1941. The 8th had been activated a year earlier for the express purpose of developing tactics to contain a blitzkrieg offensive, but when Van Fleet took over the situation had changed and he trained the 8th “as an assault unit, the American force that would make the first landings.” He explained, “The initial thrust of our training was how to storm and seize enemy strong points such as pillboxes. By the time Allied forces reached Europe, the enemy would have had years to construct concrete emplacements, to shield artillery and heavy weapons. We spent long months practicing how to assault these positions, beginning with squads, and working up through the company and battalion level.”
The 8th had a good mix of people, thoroughly American. As Van Fleet noted, it had historically been a Southern regiment, made up of country boys from Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. He called them his “squirrel shooters.” They could find their way through the woods at night without being afraid and knew how to shoot a rifle. When the draftees began coming in, many of them were from New York and other Eastern cities. They knew nothing about weapons or woods, but they had skills the Southern boys lacked, such as motors and communications. “The marriage of North and South was a happy one,” Van Fleet commented.
In training the 8th for an assault, Van Fleet emphasized coordination and firepower. If two men were attacking a pillbox, one would put continuous fire on the embrasure while the other crept up on it from the other side. When the advancing man drew fire, he went to the ground and began firing back while his partner crept closer to the objective. Eventually one crept close enough to toss a grenade into the pillbox. “This sort of attack requires bravery, confidence in your partner, and patience,” Van Fleet observed. “We enacted this scenario countless hundreds of times from 1941 through 1943, often with live ammunition.”2
Two years was a long time to be training. Men got impatient. One of Van Fleet’s most aggressive lieutenants, George L. Mabry, wanted to get into the real war. He applied for a transfer to the Army Air Force. Van Fleet called him in for a chat. Knowing his commander would be upset, Mabry was shaking “like a leaf” when he reported.
“You are applying for the Air Force?” Van Fleet asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“You ever been up in an airplane?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, you better get over and withdraw that application. You might get sick in an airplane.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mabry stayed with Van Fleet. He became one of the best officers in the 4th Division.I
• •
The 29th Division sailed for England in September 1942 aboard the Queen Mary, converted from luxury liner to troop transport. The Queen Mary sailed alone, depending on her speed to avoid submarines. At 500 miles out from the Continent, and thus within range of the Luftwaffe, an escort of British warships appeared. A cruiser, HMS Curacao, cut across the bow of the 83,000-ton Queen Mary. The Queen knifed into the 4,290-ton cruiser and cut her in half, killing 332 members of her crew. It was not an auspicious beginning to the great Allied invasion.
The division took over Tidworth Barracks, near Salisbury. These were the best barracks in England but woefully short of what GIs had become accustomed to in the training camps in the States. For men who had trained in the American South, the English weather was miserable. Pvt. John R. Slaughter of Company D, 116th Regiment, recalled, “Morale was not good during those first few months in the British Isles. Homesickness, dreary weather, long weeks of training without pause caused many of us to grumble.”3
It didn’t help that the 29th necessarily became an experimental outfit. It was the only large American combat unit in the United Kingdom. It had no specific mission for the first year it was there. Instead, it carried out training exercises that were, in effect, experiments in the development of doctrine, procedures, and techniques in amphibious assaults. In short, the men saw themselves as guinea pigs.
Making things worse, the food was awful. Britain had been at war for more than two years; there were no fresh eggs, little fresh meat, too many brussels sprouts. Lt. Robert Walker of Headquarters Company, 116th Regiment, remembered that on field problems “we were issued sack lunches. These consisted of two sandwiches made of dry brown bread; one had a glob of jelly in the middle, the other a slice of pork luncheon meat. We called them Spam and jam lunches.”4 Any American tourist who has ever purchased one of those sandwiches at a London shop knows just how bad they are.
Weekend passes to Salisbury or, even better, to London were hard to come by and highly prized. As the Yanks were paid more than double what the Tommies received, and had much better-looking uniforms, they attracted the girls. This caused considerable resentment. There was also friction between black GIs, mainly in the Services of Supply (SOS), and the white soldiers. When they mixed in a pub there was almost sure to be a fight, too often culminating in a shooting. The Army took to segregating the pubs—one night for blacks, another for whites. Overall, however, considering that by D-Day there were some 2 million Yanks on an island only slightly larger than the state of Colorado, the American “occupation” of Britain was carried out with remarkable success. It helped beyond measure that everyone had the same ultimate objective.
It helped, too, that the Americans tightened their standard of discipline. Col. Charles Canham commanded the 116th Regiment. Canham was a West Pointer, class of 1926. Pvt. Felix Branham characterized him as “a fiery old guy who spit fire and brimstone.” The colonel “was so tough that we used to call ourselves ‘Colonel Canham’s Concentration Camp.’ ” If a man was a few minutes late from a pass, he was fined $30 and confined to camp for thirty days. One day Branham overheard a conversation between Canham and the CO of the 29th Division, Maj. Gen. Charles Gerhardt. Gerhardt told Canham, “You’re too hard on the men.”
“Goddamn it, Charles,” Canham shot back, “this is my regiment and I am the one commanding it.”
“You know,” Gerhardt replied, “the men don’t mind that $30 but they hate that thirty days.” Canham eased up, but only a bit. “I tell you, we trained,” Branham declared. “We started out on various types of landing craft. We got on LSTs, LCVPs, we got on LCIs, on LCMs, we landed from British ships, we landed from American ships. You name it, our training was there. We threw various types of hand grenades. We learned to use enemy weapons.”5
Gerhardt was a West Pointer, an old cavalryman and polo player, flamboyant in his dress, gung ho in his attitude. He did everything by the book and insisted that his men dress just right, always appear clean-shaven, even keep their jeeps spotless. He also wanted enthusiasm; one way he got it was to have the men chant their battle cry as they marched over the dunes, “Twenty-nine, let’s go!” When an old-timer from the 1st Division, a combat veteran of North Africa and Sicily, heard that he yelled back, “Go ahead, twenty-nine, we’ll be right behind you!”6
The 29th marched all over southwestern England. The men spent nights in the field, sleeping in foxholes. They learned the basic lesson infantrymen must learn, to love the ground, how to use it to their advantage, how it dictates a plan of battle, above all how to live in it for days at a time without impairment of physical efficiency. They were taught to see folds in the terrain that no civilian would notice. They attacked towns, hills, woods. They dug countless foxholes. They had fire problems, attacking with artillery, mortars, machine guns, crashing into their objectives. They concentrated single-mindedly on offensive tactics.
A member of the 29th Division recalled “loading and unloading landing craft, exiting, peeling off, quickly moving forward, crawling under barbed wire with live machine-gun fire just inches overhead and live explosions, strategically placed, detonated all around. We were schooled in the use of explosives: satchel charges and bangalore torpedoes were excellent for blowing holes in barbed wire and neutralizing fortified bunkers. Bayonets were used to probe for hidden mines. Poison-gas drills, first aid, airplane and tank identification, use and detection of booby traps and more gave us the confidence that we were ready. I believe our division was as competent to fight as any green outfit in history.”7
• •
They spent countless hours on the firing range. Sgt. Weldon Kratzer, Company C, 116th, remembered the day Eisenhower, accompanied by Montgomery and other big shots, came by to watch. After a bit, Eisenhower called to Kratzer. “Sergeant, I was observing your firing,” he said, “and I must compliment you.” He went on, “I used to be a good shot, do you mind if I use your rifle?”
“It would be an honor, sir.”
Eisenhower took the prone position, adjusted the sling, aimed, tried to pull the trigger, and nothing happened.
“Sir, your rifle is on safety,” Kratzer said.
“I don’t blame you for taking precautions,” Eisenhower replied, blushing and taking off the safety. He blasted away at a target 600 meters off. “He wasn’t bad,” Kratzer reported. “Most of his shots were four or five o’clock.” When Eisenhower had a total miss and Maggie’s drawers went up, he called out “And the same to you, old girl.”
After Eisenhower had fired a full clip, Kratzer offered to reload for him. Eisenhower said no, thanks, “You fellows need the practice more than I do.” As he was leaving, Eisenhower told Kratzer, “Sergeant, I’m impressed with your marksmanship, you sure know your Kentucky windage.”
“General Eisenhower,” Kratzer replied, “I’m from Virginia. I use Virginia windage.”
“I’ll be damned,” said the general. “I think we’d all be better off if we used Virginia windage.”8
Eisenhower spent a great deal of his time in the field, inspecting, watching training exercises. He wanted to see as many men as possible and let them see him. He managed to talk to hundreds personally. In the four months from February 1 to June 1, he visited twenty-six divisions, twenty-four airfields, five ships of war, and countless depots, shops, hospitals, and other installations.
To the graduating class at Sandhurst, in the spring of 1944, Eisenhower delivered an impromptu address in which he spoke of the great issues involved. He made each graduate aware that his own chances for a happy, decent life were directly tied up in the success of Overlord. He reminded them of the great traditions of Sandhurst. He told the newly commissioned officers that they must be like fathers to their men, even when the men were twice their age, that they must keep the men out of trouble and stand up for them when they committed a transgression. Their companies must be like a big family and they must be the head of the family, ensuring that the unit was cohesive, tough, well trained, well equipped, ready to go. The response of the Sandhurst graduates, according to Thor Smith, a public-relations officer at SHAEF, was “electric. They just loved him.”9
• •
Beyond weapons training, physical conditioning, and getting familiar with the various landing craft, the men went through assault exercises. Everything possible was done to make them realistic, from climbing down the rope nets into the Higgins boats in a high sea to the buildings and terrain on the shore. Sgt. Tom Plumb of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, 3rd Canadian Division, discovered when he hit the shore on D-Day near Bernières-sur-Mer (Juno Beach) that “it was identical to the beach we had been training on in Inverness, Scotland, right down to the exact locations of pillboxes.”10
Lt. Col. Paul Thompson commanded the U.S. Assault Training Center at Woolacombe. He established training areas at suitable beaches, of which the most extensive was Slapton Sands in Devonshire on the south coast. Nearly 3,000 residents were moved out of their homes in the villages and farms in the area. At Slapton Sands the geography was a nigh replica of the Cotentin coastline. The beach of coarse gravel led inland to shallow lagoons.
Thompson, a 1929 graduate of West Point, was an outstanding engineer, an imaginative creator of realistic training exercises, and dedicated to his job, which was to develop doctrines and techniques to assault a heavily defended shore. His initial task was to train demonstration troops and put them through practice exercises for various high-ranking observers. Once his superiors approved his ideas, he became responsible for training all assault troops for the invasion.11
In August 1943, Thompson went to work. At Slapton Sands and eight other locations he oversaw the erection of a hedgehog area for battalion training, an assault range for company training, a beach range for firing artillery and mortars against a hostile shore from the landing craft, an artillery range, a wire-cutting range for training in the use of bangalore torpedoes and other devices for breaching wire, an infantry demolition range for training in using satchel charges against pillboxes and the breaching of underwater and land obstacles, an obstacle-course area, and a multiple-purpose range for practice in the use of flamethrowers, rockets, and grenades. Thompson also set up a training facility for engineers.
After many experiments, Thompson and his people concluded that the first waves, which would go ashore in Higgins boats with a capacity of thirty men to a boat, should be broken down into rifle-assault platoons consisting of a five-man rifle team, a four-man bangalore and wire-cutting team, a four-man rocket-launcher team, a two-man flamethrower team, a four-man BAR team, a four-man 60mm mortar team, a five-man demolition team, and two officers.
Thompson broke the training down into four phases. First, individual training on the obstacle course. Second, team training for the wire cutters and demolition men. Third, company exercises. Fourth, battalion exercises. Umpires were present to judge, criticize, and suggest. The training was hard and realistic. Live ammunition was often used and accidents happened. In mid-December a short artillery round killed four men and injured six; a couple of days later three landing craft capsized and fourteen men drowned.
The 29th Division was the first to go through the school. General Gerhardt praised the “superb training facilities,” which he said made his division “capable of a successful landing on the shore of Fortress Europe.”12
In the winter and spring of 1944, thousands of troops went through exercises every week. As they did so, observers noted what worked and what didn’t and made adjustments in the plans as required. For example, the exercises indicated that the use of smoke for cover tended to confuse the assault troops as badly as it did the defenders, that smoke could not be sufficiently controlled, and that it interfered with observed fire from the warships. So smoke was out.
Experiment further convinced the planners that the best use of tanks was not as an armored force but as close-support artillery. Giving up armor’s characteristics of shock and mobility, the planners decided that instead of using tanks to lead the drive through the fortifications they would instead fire from hull down in the water, giving support from behind rather than breaking through at the front.
None of these lessons, somewhat surprisingly, came from previous American experience in the Pacific. There was some correspondence between the 1st Engineer Special Brigade in Europe and the 2nd Brigade in the Pacific, and a few officers were brought from the Pacific to the United Kingdom, but for the most part there was no interchange. After North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, the commanders in Europe did not feel a need to ask their counterparts in the Pacific about their experiences.
In April and early May, assault exercises that amounted to dress rehearsals took place all over England. They included marshaling, embarkation and sailing, approach and assault, setting up the beach organization. The rehearsals brought together the units that would go to France as a team: assault forces O (for Omaha), G (Gold), U (Utah), J (Juno), and S (Sword). The Army got to know the Navy, and vice versa.
The air forces were also involved: as Leigh-Mallory’s headquarters put it, “It is important that the pilots of all aircraft should see a large concentration of assault forces at sea. . . . Conversely, it is of importance that personnel in assault forces should obtain an idea of the degree of air cover and support which they might expect.”13
• •
Thirty-two-year-old Lt. Dean Rockwell was in charge of the training for the LCT crews. He had been a professional wrestler and high-school coach in Detroit before the war. Although he had never been on salt water, he joined the Navy after hearing a recruiting pitch from former heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. The Navy made him an instructor in physical education, but Rockwell did not approve of the Navy’s PE program and said so. He voiced his criticisms so often and so loudly that he got a reputation as a “Bolshie.” As a punishment he was posted to landing craft, which his senior officers regarded as a suicide squad.
Regular Navy officers thought that landing craft were ugly and unseamanlike; Rockwell loved them, and he became exceptionally clever at handling them and understanding their often strange behavior. He began with LCVPs and LCMs, got promoted to petty officer, and went to England. He was so good at his job that he got a spot promotion to lieutenant (jg), then to full lieutenant, and in March 1944 was put in command of the training program for LCTs.
Lt. Eugene Bernstein, USNR, commanding an LCT(R), remembered the training exercises as “very realistic. We would rendezvous all ships in specific convoys, load troops, tanks, ammo, and supplies of all sorts and head out. At around midnight we would open a set of orders to find that we were to go to Slapton Sands, or wherever, and go through the entire landing procedure. We would turn 180 degrees, make for Slapton Sands, fire our rockets on designated targets [if the LCT(R) was moving ahead at flank speed of ten knots when all 1,060 rockets were fired, the recoil was such that the craft was thrust backward at three knots], unload attack transports into small boats, and assault the beach. These were full scale operations with aircraft cover, major-ship bombardment, the works. Then we would go home. Soon we would be at it again. We and the British did this practice operation eleven times. So passed the spring of 1944.” When it came time for the real thing, Bernstein added, “We weighed anchor and calmly got under way as though it were another practice exercise.”14
Maj. R. Younger, who commanded an assault squadron of British tanks in the Royal Engineers, recalled that “most of the early exercises were pretty catastrophic. All sorts of things went wrong, but we were learning. . . . Vehicles broke down. Coming off a landing craft in a tank, when the sea is rough, isn’t particularly easy, and sometimes we’d get a vehicle broken down on the ramp of the LCT and it had to be towed off and so on.
“We certainly needed training. Wireless, for example. You can’t talk to any of your subordinate tanks without wireless and we’d never used that, and we were very verbose initially in our use of the wireless, but as we got more confident in it we got far quicker—people recognize your voice and you cut everything down, so that in the end conversations are just click click click and you know exactly what the men meant. The trouble with being verbose on the air is that somebody else has got something much more important to say and he can’t get on the air because it is blocked by those long-winded statements.”15
• •
The joint exercises revealed flaws. In the rehearsal for the VII Corps at Utah, Operation Tiger, held on the night of April 27–28 at Slapton Sands, there were some missed schedules resulting in traffic jams and some naval craft arriving late at embarkation points. Much worse, German E-boats slipped through the British destroyer screen and sank two LSTs and damaged six others. Over 749 men were killed and 300 wounded in the explosions or drowned afterward.
Lessons were learned that saved lives on D-Day. There had been no rescue craft in the Tiger formation. Naval commanders realized that they would be needed. The men had not been taught how to use their life preservers. After Tiger, they were. It turned out that the British were operating on different radio wavelengths than the Americans, which contributed to the disaster. That was fixed.
What could not be so easily fixed was the weather. Visibility had been poor on April 27–28 and the American fighter airplanes had not shown up.
Operation Tiger was not the only training maneuver to produce casualties. The use of live ammunition led to many wounds and some deaths, as did the night jumps for the paratroopers. Maj. David Thomas was regimental surgeon of the 508th Parachute Infantry. On one training jump, a trooper’s chute failed to open. “It took us three days to find him,” Thomas recalled, “and when we did I took his gloves and laundered them carefully three or four times to get the sweet odor of death out of them. I’m not superstitious but I figured that those gloves couldn’t be unlucky twice.” He wore them on D-Day.16
No one had yet told the GIs and Tommies where or when they were going to attack, but the exercises made it clear to the men in such divisions as the 29th and 4th that they would be leading the way, wherever it was. Confidence was high, but there was no doubt that casualties would be taken. Rifle companies were being reinforced to the point that they were overstrength, especially in junior officers and noncoms.
Pvt. Harry Parley joined Company E, 116th, in early 1944. He never forgot the moment of his arrival: “The CO walked in, said his name was Capt. Lawrence Madill, that our company was to be first wave in the invasion, that 30-percent casualties were expected, and that we were them!” Parley commented, “It saddened me to think of what would happen to some of my fellow GIs.”17
• •
The U.S. 1st, 4th, and 29th Infantry divisions, the British 50th and 3rd Infantry divisions, and the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division would make the assault, supported on the flanks by the British 6th Airborne and the U.S. 82nd and 101st. The 1st and 82nd had been in combat in the Mediterranean; for the others, D-Day would be the baptism of fire (as also for the many replacements who joined the 1st Division in England). As Geoffrey Perret writes, “Overlord was the supreme task for which the wartime Army had been created. If the division-making machine really worked, it should be possible to take untried divisions such as the 4th, the 29th and 101st Airborne, put them into a battle against experienced German troops and see them emerge victorious.”18
The infantry divisions were composed, overwhelmingly, of conscripts. The airborne divisions were all volunteer (except for the gliderborne units) and thus by definition elite. The paratroopers’ motivation, in the words of Pvt. Robert Rader of the 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, was “a desire to be better than the other guy.”19 The $50 a month extra jump pay was also an attraction. They thought of themselves as special, and they were right, but they discovered in the campaign in northwest Europe in 1944–45 that the gliderborne troops and outfits like the 1st, 4th, and 29th were almost as good as they were—a tribute to the training of the conscripts.
Still, it was true that the airborne troops underwent even tougher training than the infantry. Back in Georgia in late 1942, for example, the 506th had made a three-day forced march, carrying full equipment, of 136 miles. When the regiment got to England in September 1943, training intensified. There were numerous three-day field exercises, beginning with a jump. The regimental scrap-book described the march back to barracks: “Glancing down the line you were of the opinion that everyone had that combat expression, an unshaven face showing extreme weariness and disgust, caked mud from head to foot, and every jump suit looking as tho it had come out second best in the ordeal of the fences. You finally dragged your weary body those last few torturous kilometers, and throwing yourself across the bunk you said—’Combat can’t be that rough!’ ”20
The objective of all the training, whether infantry or armored or engineers or airborne, was to make the men believe that combat could not possibly be worse than what they were undergoing, so that they would look forward to their release from training and their commitment to battle.
“But of course,” Sgt. D. Zane Schlemmer of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment commented, “you never get enough training, I’ve found. Once you get into combat, you’ve never had enough training for combat. It is a total impossibility.”21
• •
Some units had highly specialized training. Major Howard of D Company of the Ox and Bucks asked the topographical people to search the map of Britain and find him some place where a river and a canal ran closely together and were crossed by bridges on the same road, as on the Orne waterways. They found such a spot outside Exeter. Howard moved his company down there and for six days, by day and by night, attacked those Exeter bridges, practicing every conceivable condition—if only one of his six gliders, each carrying a platoon, made it to the objective, that platoon knew what to do to complete the mission alone.
To make as certain as possible that the gliders did land near the bridges, the pilots (all sergeants, all members of the Glider Pilot Regiment; there were sixteen of them, two for each of the six gliders scheduled to go in on D-Day plus four reserves) went through Operation Deadstick. Col. George Chatterton, commander of the GPR, made the exercise hellishly difficult. He had the pilots land beside a small L-shaped wood, three gliders going up the L and three on the blind side. In daylight, on a straight-in run, it was relatively easy. But then Chatterton started having them release from their tug planes at 7,000 feet and fly by times and courses, using a stopwatch, making two or three full turns before coming over the wood. That was not too bad, either, because, as Jim Wallwork, pilot of no. 1 glider, explained, “In broad daylight you can always cheat a little.”
Next Chatterton put colored glasses in their flying goggles to turn day into night, and warned his pilots, “It is silly of you to cheat on this because you’ve got to do it right when the time comes.” Wallwork would nevertheless whip the goggles off if he thought he was overshooting, “but we began to play it fairly square.” By early May they were flying by moonlight, casting off at 6,000 feet, eight miles from the wood. They flew regardless of weather. They twisted and turned around the sky, all by stopwatch. They did forty-three training flights in Deadstick altogether, more than half of them at night. They got ready.22
• •
The U.S. 2nd and 5th Ranger battalions were composed of volunteers. Others referred to them as “suicide squads,” but Lt. James Eikner of the 2nd Rangers disagreed: “We were simply spirited young people who took the view that if you are going to be a combat soldier, you may as well be one of the very best; also we were anxious to get on with the war so as to bring things to a close and get home to our loved ones as soon as possible.”23
Naturally, such fine troops had a special mission, to capture the battery at Pointe-du-Hoc. As this would require scaling the cliff, the Rangers got into superb physical condition. In March, they went to the Highlands of Scotland, where Lord Lovat’s No. 4 Commando put them through grueling speed marches (averaging twenty-five miles a day, culminating in a thirty-seven-mile march) across what was reputedly the toughest obstacle course in the world. They climbed mountains, scaled cliffs, practiced unarmed combat. They learned stealth, how to conduct quick-hitting strikes. In ten days of such training, one private’s weight dropped from 205 pounds to 170 pounds.24
Next they practiced amphibious landing operations on the Scottish coast, hitting beaches specially prepared with barbed wire, beach obstacles, and every type of antiassault landing device that Rommel had waiting for them. In April, the rangers went to the Assault Training Center. In early May, it was off to Swanage for special training in cliff scaling with ropes, using grappling hooks trailing ropes propelled to the top of the cliff by rockets, and with extension ladders donated by the London Fire Department and carried in DUKWs.25
Lt. Walter Sidlowski, an engineer, marveled at the rangers. “My guys had always felt we were in good shape physically,” he remembered, “but watching the rangers using most of their time double-timing, with and without arms and equipment, push-ups and various other physical exercise whenever they were not doing something else, was cause for wonder.”26
“I can assure you,” Lieutenant Eikner of the 2nd Ranger Battalion commented, “that when we went into battle after all this training there was no shaking of the knees or weeping or praying; we knew what we were getting into; we knew everyone of us had volunteered for extra hazardous duty; we went into battle confident; of course we were tense when under fire, but we were intent on getting the job done. We were actually looking forward to accomplishing our mission.”27
• •
The combat engineers had the most complex job. They were organized into three brigades of three battalions each; the 6th Engineer Special Brigade was attached to the 116th Regiment on the right flank at Omaha; the 5th ESB was scheduled to go in with the 16th Regiment on the left at Omaha; the 1st ESB joined the 4th Division at Utah.
Almost one-quarter of the American troops going in on the morning of D-Day would be engineers. Their tasks, more or less in this order, were to: demolish beach obstacles, blow up mines on the beach, erect signs to guide incoming landing craft through cleared channels, set up panels to bring in the troops and equipment (the color of the panel told the ships offshore which supplies to send in), clear access roads from the beach, blow gaps in the antitank wall, establish supply dumps, and act as beachmasters (traffic cops).
There were all sorts of units attached to the ESBs. Naval beach battalions had semaphores and heliographs in addition to radios in order to communicate between the beach and the fleet. A chemical battalion was ready to decontaminate anything hit by poison gas and to deal with radioactive materials (there was a fear that the Germans were far enough along in their atomic research to use such poisons). There were medical battalions, ordnance battalions, grave-registration companies, MPs to handle prisoners, DUKW battalions, signal companies to lay telephone wire—sixteen specialized units in all, organized into special companies and battalions. As Lieutenant Colonel Thompson, who took command of the 6th ESB after the work of the Assault Training Center was completed, remarked, “Was there ever a unit so meticulously put together, so precisely engineered for a specific mission as this?”28
The ESBs went through the Assault Training Center at Slapton Sands. Sgt. Barnett Hoffner of the 6th ESB participated in Operation Tiger, the April 27–28 exercise in which the LSTs were lost. “I was on the beach at the time with my squad. We were practicing taking up mines when we saw the bodies come floating in. I had never seen dead men before. We started down to the water’s edge to get the bodies when I heard a voice yell, ‘Sergeant! Get your men out of there!’ I looked up and saw two stars on the shoulders and recognized that it was Major General Heubner. I got my squad out of there fast. You don’t question anything a general says.”29
The point was that everyone had a job. General Heubner wanted Sergeant Hoffner to concentrate on his. There were grave-registration crews to take care of the dead. On D-Day, the basic principle was that no one should stop to help the wounded, much less bury the dead—leave those tasks to the medics and grave-registration crews, and get on with your task.
• •
There were many other special units, including underwater demolition teams, midget-submarine crews to guide the incoming landing craft, tiny one-man airplanes with folded wings that could be brought in on Rhino ferries (42-by-176-foot flat-bottomed pontoon barges with a capacity of forty vehicles, towed across the Channel by LSTs, powered for the run into the beach by large outboard motors), put into operation on the beach and used for naval gunfire spotting. The 743rd Tank Battalion, like the other DD tankers, spent months learning how to maneuver their tanks in the Channel. The 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion (Colored) practiced setting up their balloons on the beach. The Cherokee code talkers (forty in all, twenty for Utah, twenty for Omaha) worked on their radios—they could speak in their own language, confident the Germans would never be able to translate.
All the commando units were special, but some a bit more so than others. The 1st and 8th troops of No. 10 Commandos were French; Pvt. Robert Piauge was a member of 1st Troop. Piauge was born in Ouistreham, at the mouth of the Orne River, in 1920, his father already dead as a result of a World War I wound. He joined the French army in 1939, over his mother’s tearful protests, and managed to get to England in June 1940, where he rallied to De Gaulle’s call to arms. He joined the French commandos, which were part of the French navy but equipped, trained, and attached to the British commandos. That the French were eager to get back was obvious, Piauge especially so after he learned he would be landing at Ouistreham, where his mother still lived.30
The No. 10 Commandos came from all over Europe. The various troops in No. 10 were Polish, Dutch, Norwegian, and Belgian. Like the French commandos, they were eager to get going. Like all commandos, U.S. rangers, airborne troops, and the other specialists, they trained to the absolute limit.
The men in 3 Troop, No. 10 Commando, needed no motivating. They were young European Jews who had somehow managed to make it to England. From the moment they arrived, whether from Germany or Austria or Czechoslovakia or Hungary, they pleaded for a chance to fight. Adm. Lord Louis Mountbatten, commander of Combined Operations, sent them to the commandos, where they were organized into 3 Troop, with the thought that they would go through regular commando training, then be made into specialists in patrolling and intelligence matters. The key was their language ability. If challenged on a patrol, they could answer in good German; they could also conduct instant interrogation of prisoners. They were trained in all matters pertaining to the Wehrmacht—organization, documents, weapons, and methodology.
Cpl. Peter Masters was a member of 3 Troop. Born in Vienna in 1922, he was there when the Germans marched into Austria on March 12, 1938, “so I lived under the Nazis for six months, which was quite sufficient to turn me from a kid that had been brought up as a pacifist to a volunteer eager to get into the action.” In August 1938 he managed to get to London; soon he joined the commandos.
“Can you shoot?” he was asked by the recruiting officer. “Can you handle a boat? What do you know about radio?” Masters said he had once shot a BB gun, that he had rowed a boat but never sailed, and that he knew nothing about radios. He was so enthusiastic that the commandos took him anyway.
Told to take a new name so as to avoid German retribution if captured, but only given a couple of minutes to think about it, he chose “Masters.” He got a dog tag with “Peter Masters” on it, plus “Church of England.” He and all the others in 3 Troop had to invent stories to explain why they spoke English with an accent. Masters’s story was that his parents traveled extensively and he had been raised by a German-speaking nanny who didn’t have much English.31
Harry Nomburg was also a member of 3 Troop. “I was born in Germany,” he related, “and at the age of fifteen was sent by my parents to England to escape Nazi persecution. I left Berlin on May 21, 1939. It happened to be a Sunday, Mother’s Day. I never saw my parents again. At the age of eighteen, I joined the British army and in early 1943 volunteered for the commandos. Together with my green beret I was also given a brand-new name.” He chose “Harry Drew,” but went back to Nomburg after the war; Masters retained his English name.32
(There was a former member of the Hitler Youth among the American paratroopers. Fred Patheiger was born in December 1919 in Rastatt, Germany. As a teenager he joined the Hitler Youth. His aunt wanted to get married; a Nazi Party investigation revealed that his great-grandfather had been Jewish; he was kicked out of the Hitler Youth. His mother contacted relatives in Chicago; in April 1938 Patheiger immigrated to the United States. His parents, aunt, and other relatives died in the concentration camps. When he attempted to enlist in 1940, he was classified “Not Acceptable—Enemy Alien.” He wrote J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI to protest, saying he wanted to fight Nazis, not Germans. Shortly thereafter he was classified “Acceptable” and joined up. He became a corporal in the 101st Airborne.33
The men of 3 Troop were broken up for D-Day into five-man groups, each assigned to a different commando brigade. Masters went with a bicycle troop. They had cheap collapsible bicycles with baskets on the fronts to carry their rucksacks. The bikes had no mudguards, no pedals, just stems, and Masters found them damnable, But he soldiered on, overjoyed to be of service. The Nazis, who lived by hate, had built up a lot of hatred in Europe in the past five years. From Piauge, Masters, Nomburg, Patheiger, and other young refugees, the Nazis were about to get some of their own back.
Racism was at the heart of the Nazi philosophy. Racism was also present in the American army. In 1937 senior officers at the U.S. Army War College had done a study to assess the strengths and weaknesses of black soldiers. Their conclusion was that “as an individual the negro is docile, tractable, lighthearted, care free and good natured. If unjustly treated he is likely to become surly and stubborn, though this is usually a temporary phase. He is careless, shiftless, irresponsible and secretive. He resents censure and is best handled with praise and by ridicule. He is unmoral, untruthful and his sense of right doing is relatively inferior.”
As to strengths, “the negro is cheerful, loyal and usually uncomplaining if reasonably well fed. He has a musical nature and a marked sense of rhythm. His art is primitive. He is religious. With proper direction in mass, negroes are industrious. They are emotional and can be stirred to a high state of enthusiasm.”
In World War I, two black U.S. divisions had fought in France. One, serving with the French army, did well; it won many medals and a request from the French for more black troops. The other, serving with the American army, with white Southerners as officers and woefully inadequate training and equipment, did poorly. The War College officers in 1937 concentrated on the failure and ignored the success, which led them to conclude that blacks were not capable of combat service. Consequently, although three black infantry divisions were organized for World War II, only one, the 92nd Infantry, saw combat.
By March 1944, there were about 150,000 black American soldiers in the United Kingdom. Most of them were in Services of Supply, mainly working at the ports unloading ships or driving trucks. They were strictly segregated. In the mythology of the time, this did not mean they were objects of discrimination. Separate but equal was the law of the land back home, and in Britain.
General Eisenhower issued a circular letter to senior American commanders that ordered, “Discrimination against Negro troops must be sedulously avoided.” But, he acknowledged, in London and other cities “where both Negro and White soldiers will come on pass and furlough, it will be a practical impossibility to arrange for segregation so far as welfare and recreation facilities are concerned.” When the Red Cross could not provide separate clubs for blacks, Eisenhower insisted that the blacks be given equal access to all Red Cross clubs. But he went on to tell local commanders to use “their own best judgment in avoiding discrimination due to race, at the same time minimizing causes of friction through rotation of pass privileges.” In other words, where there was only one Red Cross club in an area, or only a few pubs, the black soldiers would have passes one night, the whites on another.35
The Red Cross built twenty-seven separate clubs for black troops, but they were not enough. There was some mixing of races in white clubs, and even more in the pubs. Some ugly scenes resulted. Fist fights almost always broke out when black and white GIs were drinking in the same pub. There were some shootings, most by whites against blacks (Maj. Gen. Ira Eaker, commander of the Eighth Air Force, declared that white troops were responsible for 90 percent of the trouble), and a few killings—all covered up by the Army.
Eisenhower sent out another circular letter. He told his senior officers that in the interests of military efficiency “the spreading of derogatory statements concerning the character of any group of U.S. troops, either white or colored, must be considered as conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline and offenders must be promptly punished. . . . It is my desire that this be brought to the attention of every officer in this theater. To that end, I suggest that you personally talk this over with your next senior commander and instruct them to follow up the subject through command channels.”
Lt. Gen. J. C. H. Lee, commanding Services of Supply and thus the man with the most at stake, ordered every one of his officers to read Eisenhower’s letter to their immediate subordinates and warned that “General Eisenhower means exactly what he says.”
The order had little effect. The racial incidents continued. Eisenhower ordered a survey done on soldiers’ mail; officers censoring the enlisted men’s letters reported that most white troops commented, with varying degrees of amazement, on the absence of segregation in Britain. They were indignant about the association of British women with black soldiers. They expressed fears about what effect the experience American blacks had in Britain would lead to back home after the war. Black soldiers, meanwhile, expressed pleasure with the English and delight at the absence of a color line. One officer, after analyzing censorship reports for several weeks, reported toward the end of May 1944, that “the predominant note is that if the invasion doesn’t occur soon, trouble will.”36
The best way to avoid trouble was to keep the troops, of whatever color, hard at work. Eisenhower ordered that “troops must train together, work together and live together in order to attain successful teamwork in [the coming] campaign.”37 As the white infantrymen practiced going ashore from their Higgins boats, the black soldiers loaded and unloaded LSTs and other vessels. The training was intense and seemed never to end.
• •
The Germans in France hardly trained at all. Instead, they put more poles in the ground, more obstacles on the beach, working through April and May as construction battalions rather than going through field maneuvers. An exception was the 21st Panzer Division. Colonel Luck, commanding the 125th Regiment, put his tankers through regular night exercises. He emphasized assembly points, various routes to the coast or to the bridges over the Orne River and Canal, fire and movement, speed and dash. On May 30, Rommel inspected the division. He was enthusiastic about a demonstration with live ammunition of the so-called Stalin Organ, a rocket launcher with forty-eight barrels. That evening, Rommel told the officers of the 21st to be extremely vigilant. He closed with these words, “You shouldn’t count on the enemy coming in fine weather and by day.”
Staying vigilant was not easy. As Luck records, “For a panzer division, which in the campaigns so far had been accustomed to a war of movement, the inactivity was wearisome and dangerous. Vigilance was easily relaxed, especially after the enjoyment of Calvados and cider, both typical drinks of the region. There was, in addition, the uncertainty as to whether the landing would take place at all in our sector.”38
In other words, even the elite of the Wehrmacht in Normandy had grown soft enjoying the cushy life of occupiers in the land of fat cattle and fine apples. For the ordinary Wehrmacht soldier, whether a teenager from Berlin or a forty-year-old Pole or Russian in an Ost battalion, life consisted of boring work during the day, enjoyment at night, waiting and praying that the invasion would come elsewhere—anything but getting ready for the fight of their lives.
The long occupation of France made for special problems. There was an increasing incidence of German soldiers divorcing their German wives in order to marry French women. Further, there was a danger that individuals and even units might surrender wholesale at the first opportunity. Obviously, this was so with the Ost battalions, but it also existed with German-born troops who, according to a December 1943 secret high command report, had “the illusion of a confrontation with an adversary who acts humanely.” As Dr. Detlef Vogel of the Militargeschichtliches Forschungsamt put it, “As a result, hardly anyone was too much afraid of becoming a POW of the Allies. This was not exactly a favorable condition for endurability and steadfastness, as constantly demanded by the military commanders.”
Dr. Goebbels put his propaganda machine to work to convince the German soldiers in the West that they faced a “life-and-death struggle, an all-out conflict.” Shortly before the landing, General Jodl tried to bolster spirits by arguing, “We shall see who fights better and who dies more easily, the German soldier faced with the destruction of his homeland or the Americans and British, who don’t even know what they are fighting for in Europe.”
Rommel could not count on it. As Dr. Vogel writes, on the eve of the invasion “It remained quite doubtful whether the German troops in the West would resist in the same death-defying manner as they were frequently doing against the Red Army, for the often assumed motive of the German soldier defending his homeland certainly did not have the same significance to the soldiers in the West as to their brothers-in-arms on the Eastern Front.”39
To counter such defeatism, the commanders lied to their troops. Peter Masters discovered in his interrogations of POWs on D-Day and after that the men had been told, “We will easily push them back into the sea. Stukas will dive bomb them; U-boats will surface behind their fleet and shell and torpedo them; bombers will sink their landing craft; panzers will rout them on the beaches.”40
How many, if any, believed such fantasies is open to question. The truth is that the Wehrmacht was full of doubts, which were best expressed by Rommel’s insistence that more concrete be poured, more poles stuck in the ground, rather than training for quick movement and lightning strikes. On the other side of the Channel, meanwhile, the men of the AEF were putting in nearly all their time getting ready.
I. Mabry stayed in the infantry. He was awarded the Medal of Honor and retired a major general.