AT THE END of May, as the loading began, Air Vice Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, who had doubted from the first the wisdom of dropping the two American airborne divisions into the Cotentin, came to Eisenhower at his headquarters in Southwick House (Admiral Ramsay’s HQ, taken over by SHAEF for its command post for the invasion), just north of Portsmouth, to protest once again. Intelligence had discovered that the Germans had put their 91st Division into the central Cotentin, exactly where the 82nd Airborne was scheduled to drop. The 82nd had moved its drop zone to the west to avoid the Germans, but Leigh-Mallory felt not far enough.
He told Eisenhower, “We must not carry out this airborne operation.” He predicted 70 percent losses in glider strength and at least 50 percent in paratroop strength even before the paratroopers hit the ground. He warned of a “futile slaughter” of two fine divisions, futile because the divisions would not be able to make any contribution to the battle. To send them into the Cotentin was “just plain sacrifice.”1
Eisenhower went to his trailer, about a mile from Southwick House, “and thought it over again. I had no need for experts at this late time.” He later described this as his most worrisome moment in the war, and wrote in his memoirs, “It would be difficult to conceive of a more soul-racking problem.”
He reviewed the entire operation in his mind, then concentrated on the American airborne. He knew that if he disregarded Leigh-Mallory’s warning and it proved accurate, “then I would carry to my grave the unbearable burden of a conscience justly accusing me of the stupid, blind sacrifice of thousands of the flower of our youth.”2 But he felt that if he canceled the airborne mission, he would have to cancel the landing at Utah Beach. If the paratroopers were not there to seize the causeway exits, the entire 4th Division would be endangered. But cancellation of Utah would so badly disarrange the elaborate plan as to endanger the whole Overlord operation. Further, Leigh-Mallory was only making a prediction, and the experience with airborne actions in Sicily and Italy (where Leigh-Mallory had not been present; Overlord was his first involvement with a paratroop operation), even though the airborne performance in 1943 had been flawed in many ways, by no means justified Leigh-Mallory’s extreme pessimism.
“So I felt we had to put those two airborne divisions in,” Eisenhower related, “and they had to take Ste.-Mère-Eglise and capture the causeway exits, and protect our flank.” He called Leigh-Mallory to tell him of his decision and followed the call up with a letter. He wrote Leigh-Mallory, “There is nothing for it” but to go, and ordered him to see to it that his own doubts and pessimism not be spread among the troops.3
• •
While Rommel was going to see Hitler to beg for more tanks and a tighter command structure, Eisenhower was visited by Churchill, who was coming to the supreme commander to beg a favor. He wanted to go along on the invasion, on HMS Belfast. (“Of course, no one likes to be shot at,” Eisenhower later remarked, “but I must say that more people wanted in than wanted out on this one.”) As Eisenhower related the story, “I told him he couldn’t do it. I was in command of this operation and I wasn’t going to risk losing him. He was worth too much to the Allied cause.
“He thought a moment and said, ‘You have the operational command of all forces, but you are not responsible administratively for the makeup of the crews.’
“And I said, ‘Yes, that’s right.’
“He said, ‘Well, then I can sign on as a member of the crew of one of His Majesty’s ships, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’
“I said, ‘That’s correct. But, Prime Minister, you will make my burden a lot heavier if you do it.’ ”
Churchill said he was going to do it anyway. Eisenhower had his chief of staff, General Smith, call King George VI to explain the problem. The king told Smith, “You boys leave Winston to me.” He called Churchill to say, “Well, as long as you feel that it is desirable to go along, I think it is my duty to go along with you.” Churchill gave up.4
• •
With De Gaulle, it was Eisenhower asking the favor. On June 3, Churchill brought De Gaulle to Southwick House, where Eisenhower gave him a briefing on Overlord. This was the first De Gaulle knew of the plan, and he subjected Eisenhower to an hour-long lecture on what he was doing wrong; Eisenhower replied that he wished he had benefited from De Gaulle’s generalship earlier but now it was too late. Then Eisenhower showed him a copy of a speech he would be making to the French people on D-Day, urging Frenchmen to “carry out my orders.”
He asked De Gaulle to make a follow-up broadcast urging his countrymen to accept the SHAEF-printed francs. De Gaulle said non. The French people should obey him, not SHAEF; only the French government, of which he was president, had the right to issue currency. Eisenhower pleaded with him, to no avail. The whole thing was, in Eisenhower’s words, “a rather sorry mess.”5
• •
When Churchill and De Gaulle left, Eisenhower wrote a memorandum for his diary, which he entitled “Worries of a Commander.” At the top of the list was De Gaulle, and he wrote three paragraphs on the difficulties of dealing with the French. Next came weather. He was about to go to a weather conference. “My tentative thought,” he wrote, “is that the desirability for getting started on the next favorable tide is so great and the uncertainty of the weather is such that we could never anticipate really perfect weather coincident with proper tidal conditions, that we must go unless there is a real and very serious deterioration in the weather.”6
Eisenhower, his principal subordinates, and all the officers and men of the AEF had spent months training, planning, preparing for this moment. “The mighty host,” in Eisenhower’s words, “was tense as a coiled spring,” ready for “the moment when its energy should be released and it would vault the English Channel.”7 He was determined to go if at all possible.
On the morning of June 3, the LCTs in the Dart River started moving out. Hundreds of British citizens lined the shore, waving good-bye and good luck. Ens. Edwin Gale on LCT 853, a part of Flotilla 17, was twenty years old, a “ninety-day wonder.” His skipper turned to Gale and said, “Edwin, you know we may not do anything as worthwhile as this again in our lives. It is a fine thing to be here.”8
Lt. Dean Rockwell, the former high-school football coach, commanded a flotilla of sixteen LCTs. Each LCT was carrying four DD tanks, scheduled to hit the beach in front of the first wave of infantry, so he was one of the first to move out into the Channel. His LCTs began departing Weymouth late on June 3. It was soon “pitch black, no lights, no nothing. And to say pandemonium reigned is an understatement, because we not only had LCTs but picket boats and escort craft and all kinds of ships trying to sort themselves out.” Radio silence prevailed, the ships could not use blinker lights, “we could not do anything but curse and swear until the whole thing got sorted out.”9
Around the landing ships and craft, the warships circled to form up their own convoys. Storekeeper 2/C Homer Carey on LCT 505 remembered the sight of two British cruisers “in the soft twilight, racing past us headed south for the coast of France. Their shapely bows cut the water and passed us as if we were standing still. Beautiful—like two greyhounds. It was a comfort to know that they were on our side.”10
The 2nd Battalion of the 116th Regiment was on the transport Thomas Jefferson. The men knew the ship well, having made two practice landings from her. Pvt. Harry Parley noted that this time, however, “humor was infrequent and forced. My thoughts were of home and family and, of course, what we were getting into. It saddened me to think of what would happen to some of my fellow GIs, whom I had grown to love.” His heart went out especially to Lieutenant Ferguson, who had initiated a discussion about philosophies of death with Parley. “I did not envy him his position,” Parley said. “He had come to know the men quite intimately as a result of having had to read and censor our outgoing mail. The loss of any of his men would be a twofold tragedy for him.”
Private Parley carried an eighty-four-pound flamethrower, plus a pistol, shovel, life belt, raincoat, canteen, a block of dynamite, rations, and three cartons of cigarettes. He was worried about keeping up with his assault team on the dash across the beach. He scared the hell out of his buddies by using a trick he had just learned. He could set off a small flame at the mouth of his flamethrower, which would produce the same hissing sound as when the weapon was actually being fired, without triggering the propelling mechanism. Standing on the deck of the Thomas Jefferson, he calmly used the flamethrower to light a cigarette, sending a score or more of men scurrying in every direction.11
Pvt. George Roach of Company A, 116th, was saying his rosary. He was worried about casualties too, “because we were going to be in the first wave and we figured the chances of our survival were very slim.” More than half the men in his company came from the same town, Bedford, Virginia. Most of the regiment came from southwestern Virginia.12
Sgt. Joe Pilck of the 16th Regiment, 1st Division, was on the transport Samuel P. Chase. “While we were riding around in the Channel,” he recalled, “we were glad that this was the real thing. Not that we wanted to do it, but we knew it had to be done so we wanted to get it over with.”13
• •
The weather, which had been beautiful—clear skies, little wind—for the first three days of June, began to deteriorate. Clouds formed and began to lower, the wind came up, there was a smell of rain in the air. On his LCT, Cpl. Robert Miller was miserable. It started to drizzle, it was cold. He was on the open deck without shelter. The waves kicked up and started rocking his LCT. The steel deck was too slippery to lie down on, so he tried to catch some sleep on the canvas covering atop the trucks, but the wind and rain and rocking increased, so he gave it up.14
Pvt. Henry Gerald of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles was also on an LCT. At daylight, June 4, as the craft moved out into the Channel, he joined his mates in the crew’s quarters for a briefing from his platoon leader. The LCT would “go up about twenty feet and then drop out from underneath us. Those who looked green yesterday were ghastly this morning.” The deck was awash in vomit. Gerald was congratulating himself on not getting seasick when “a chap across from me began to heave up into his puke bag. He had an upper plate that came out and disappeared into the bag as he was being sick. That wasn’t so bad until he reached into the bag, retrieved the plate, and popped it back into his mouth.” At that sight, Gerald lost his breakfast.15
In the Channel, the drizzle began to turn into a cold, penetrating rain. Most of the men on the LCIs and LCTs had no shelter. The decks were slippery, the craft rocking in the choppy water. Everyone was wet and miserable. Eisenhower smelled victory in the air, but to the men of the AEF whose transports and landing craft had left harbor, the smell in the air was vomit.
• •
During the first days of June, Eisenhower and his principal subordinates had held twice-daily meetings with the SHAEF Meteorologic Committee, at 0930 and 1600. Group Captain J. M. Stagg, twenty-eight years old and described by Eisenhower as a “dour but canny Scot,”16 made the weather predictions, then answered questions. Eisenhower had been privately meeting with Stagg for a month to hear his predictions so he could have some sense of the basis on which Stagg made them and how good he was—knowing that, as he said, “The weather in this country is practically unpredictable.”17
The final weather conference was scheduled for 0400, June 4, even as more ships sailed out of their harbors and those already at sea began to form up into convoys. Stagg had bad news. A high-pressure system was moving out, a low coming in. The weather on June 5 would be overcast and stormy, with a cloud base of 500 feet to 0 and Force-5 winds. Worse, the situation was deteriorating so rapidly that forecasting more than twenty-four hours in advance was highly undependable.
Eisenhower asked his subordinates for their views. Montgomery wanted to go. Tedder and Leigh-Mallory wanted a postponement. Ramsay said the navy could do its part but warned that the accuracy of the naval bombardment would be badly reduced by poor visibility and high seas and that the Higgins boats would be hard to control.
Eisenhower remarked that Overlord was being launched with ground forces that were not overwhelmingly powerful. The operation was feasible only because of Allied air superiority. Without that advantage, the invasion was too risky. He asked if anyone present disagreed. No one did. Eisenhower decided to postpone for at least one day, hoping for better conditions on June 6. At 0600 hours he gave his order to put everything on hold.
• •
At just about that moment, Rommel began his long journey east, away from the coast, to see his wife and his führer. As he departed, in a light drizzle, he remarked, “There’s not going to be an invasion. And if there is, then they won’t even get off the beaches!”18
The order to postpone went out to the Allied convoys, which were under strict radio silence, in a variety of ways. Lt. Benjamin Frans, USN, was gunnery officer on the destroyer Baldwin. The Baldwin was still in Portland when the word came down. She set sail at flank speed to catch up with the leading convoys. When she did, the executive officer called over a bullhorn to the skippers of the transports and landing craft, “The operation has been postponed. Return to base.” Baldwin caught up to the minesweeper in the van when it was within fifty kilometers of the French coast.19
Lieutenant Rockwell was headed toward his rendezvous point when a picket boat came alongside LCT 535 and handed him a message: “Post Mike One.” That meant turn around and go back to harbor. “So we all turn around. Hundreds and hundreds of ships of various sizes.” About midday, he got back to Weymouth.
For Rockwell, the postponement “was a blessing in disguise. There had been some collisions during the night. Delicate landing and launching gear was damaged, engines needed replacing or servicing.”20 Rockwell’s own LCT 535 needed a new engine. He managed to get it in place before nightfall.
Ens. Sam Grundfast commanded LCT 607. He got the order to abort by flag signal. “Imagine the confusion, those hundreds of landing craft trying to get into Portsmouth harbor. We were jammed in. You could walk across that vast harbor going from boat to boat.”21 Making the sight even more vivid, every craft and ship had a barrage balloon waving in the wind overhead. The balloons were connected to the vessels by steel cables. Their purpose was to keep the Luftwaffe from making low-level passes at the fleet.
• •
For the troops, June 4 was a terrible day. The men of the 4th Infantry Division spent it at sea—there was not time to go all the way back to Devonshire if Eisenhower decided on a June 6 landing. The transports and landing craft circled off the Isle of Wight. Waves broke over the sides, rain came down. The men were combat dressed with nowhere to go. No one wanted to play craps or poker or read a book or listen to another briefing. It was just misery.
In the harbors, or up the rivers, where the ships and craft could drop anchor or tie up to one another, the men were not allowed off their vessels. They sat, cursed, waited. “We bitched up a storm,” Private Branham of the 116th Regiment recalled, “because we wanted to go. We wanted to go. This sounds crazy, but we had come this far, we’d been sitting in England so long, we wanted to get this thing over with and get the hell home.”22
“The waiting for history to be made was most difficult,” Pvt. Clair Galdonik recalled. “I spent much time in prayer. Being cooped up made it worse. Like everyone else, I was seasick and the stench of vomit permeated our craft.”23
The airborne troops had their feet on solid ground and were under cover from the rain, but they too were unhappy. They had got ready, made their last weapons check, packed their equipment, when word came down that the mission was off. Major Howard wrote in his diary: “The weather’s broken—what cruel luck. I’m more downhearted than I dare show. Wind and rain, how long will it last? The longer it goes on, the more prepared the Huns will be, the greater the chance of obstacles on the L[anding]Z[one]. Please God it’ll clear up tomorrow.”24
Some of the enlisted men in Howard’s company went to the movies. They saw Stormy Weather with Lena Horne and Fats Waller. The officers gathered in Lt. David Wood’s room and polished off two bottles of whiskey. Twice Lt. Den Brotheridge, commanding the first platoon of D Company, fell into a depressed mood. Wood could hear him reciting a poem that began “If I should die. . . .”25
Pvt. Edward Jeziorski of the 507th PIR, 82nd Airborne, checked and rechecked his equipment. “Then, I remember vividly, I took my girlfriend’s picture out of my wallet and taped it inside of my helmet, thinking it would be much safer there.” When word of the cancellation came down, “some guys were relieved a little bit, but for most of us it was just a true misery to be held over. We were all anxious to make a move.”26
Sgt. Jerry Eades of the 62nd Armored Field Artillery Battalion, on an LCT, got back to Weymouth late on June 4. “Of course we didn’t know what was going on, but everybody was just cussing and raising Cain about another dry run. Here they had wasted another day.” Sergeant Eades was Regular Army. He knew the Army had its ways, that “hurry up and wait” was the lot of the soldier, so he told one of his privates, “What the hell, we have a lot of days to waste.”27
Lt. James Edward of the 115th Regiment got back to port in Plymouth that afternoon. “This presented a sight not to be forgotten, just wall-to-wall ships, tied up together for lack of space. What a target, if only the Germans had known.”28
Actually, there was one German raid that night. A squadron of four German bombers braved the storm and flew over Poole, also jammed with ships and craft. Lt. Eugene Bernstein, commanding an LCT(R), recalled that these improbable strays “were greeted by a bombardment from the ships that must have amazed them. The sky was ablaze with antiaircraft fire.”29
• •
Rommel spent the day on the road. He arrived in Herrlingen in time to go for a walk in the twilight with Lucie. She was trying out her new shoes, her husband’s birthday present. General Salmuth of the Fifteenth Army was hunting in the Ardennes. General Dollmann of the Seventh Army was on the road to Rennes, to get ready for the map exercise scheduled for June 6. General Feuchtinger of 21st Panzer Division, accompanied by his operations officer, was on his way to Paris to visit his girlfriend. The Germans had penetrated some of the Resistance groups in France and were picking up a few of the coded phrases being broadcast to the Resistance telling the groups to prepare to go into action, but there had been so many false alarms in May, the tides in the Strait of Dover were not right, and the weather was closing in so fast that they gave the messages no great credence. As one of Rundstedt’s intelligence officers put it, it would be absurd for the Allies to announce their invasion in advance over the BBC.30 Before leaving for Rennes, General Dollmann canceled a planned alert for the night, feeling that the weather precluded an invasion. On many previous nights in May, his troops had been on full alert.
• •
A part of the 2nd Ranger Battalion was on board an old Channel steamer, the Prince Charles (the ship had carried rangers into the Anzio beachhead in Italy in January). It spent the day circling off the Isle of Wight. The British skipper told Lieutenant Kerchner, “They’re gonna have to run this thing shortly, or we’ll have to go back. We’re running out of food and fuel.” According to Kerchner, “The British food wasn’t all that good, so that didn’t worry us too much, but the fuel did.”31
It worried Admiral Ramsay even more. When Eisenhower had decided to postpone, the admiral had warned the supreme commander that no second postponement could be made to the 7th because the fleet would have to refuel. That meant Overlord had to go on June 6 or Eisenhower would have to accept a fortnight’s postponement for the next favorable tide, on June 19.
That evening, June 4, Eisenhower met in the mess room at Southwick House with Montgomery, Tedder, Smith, Ramsay, Leigh-Mallory, Bradley, Gen. Kenneth Strong (SHAEF G-2), and various other high- ranking staff officers. The wind and rain rattled the windowpanes in the French doors in staccato sounds. The mess room was large, with a heavy table at one end and easy chairs at the other. Coffee was served and there was desultory conversation.
At 2130 Stagg came in with the latest weather report. He had good news; he said he anticipated a break in the storm. General Strong recalled that at Stagg’s prediction “A cheer went up. You never heard middle-aged men cheer like that!”32 The rain that was then pouring down, Stagg continued, would stop before daybreak. There would be thirty-six hours of more or less clear weather. Winds would moderate. The bombers and fighters ought to be able to operate on Monday night, June 5–6, although they would be hampered by scattered clouds.
When he heard that, Leigh-Mallory lost his enthusiasm. He urged postponement to June 19. Eisenhower began pacing the room, head down, chin on his chest, hands clasped behind his back.
Suddenly he shot his chin out at Smith. “What do you think?”
“It’s a helluva gamble but it’s the best possible gamble,” Smith replied.
Eisenhower nodded, paced some more, stopped, looked at Tedder and asked his opinion. Tedder thought it “chancy” and wanted to postpone. Again Eisenhower nodded, paced, stopped, turned to Montgomery and asked, “Do you see any reason for not going Tuesday?” Montgomery looked Eisenhower in the eye and replied, “I would say—Go!”
The high command of the AEF was split. Only Eisenhower could decide. Smith was struck by the “loneliness and isolation of a commander at a time when such a momentous decision was to be taken by him, with full knowledge that failure or success rests on his individual decision.” Eisenhower paced, chin tucked on his chest. He stopped and remarked, “The question is just how long can you hang this operation on the end of a limb and let it hang there?”
No one spoke up to answer that question. Eisenhower resumed pacing. The only sounds in the room were the rattling of the French doors and the rain. It hardly seemed possible that an amphibious attack could be launched in such weather. At 2145 hours, Eisenhower gave his decision: “I am quite positive that the order must be given.”33
Ramsay rushed out to give the order to the fleet. Eisenhower drove back to his trailer to catch some sleep. By 2300 hours every vessel in the fleet had received its order to resume sailing. D-Day would be June 6, 1944. By midnight, June 4/5, the convoys began forming up. Admiral Ramsay issued an order of the day to every officer and man in his fleet: “It is our privilege to take part in the greatest amphibious operation in history. . . .
“The hopes and prayers of the free world and of the enslaved people of Europe will be with us and we cannot fail them. . . .
“I count on every man to do his utmost to ensure the success of this great enterprise. . . . Good luck to you all and Godspeed.”34
• •
Eisenhower woke at 0330 hours, June 5. The wind was shaking his trailer. The rain seemed to be traveling in horizontal streaks. According to Stagg, the rain should have been letting up. He dressed and gloomily drove through a mile of mud to Southwick House for the last weather meeting. It was still not too late to call off the operation, to have the fleet return to safe harbor and try again on June 19—and if the storm continued, that would have to be done.
In the mess room, steaming hot coffee helped shake the gray mood and unsteady feeling, but as Eisenhower recalled, “The weather was terrible. Southwick House was shaking. Oh, it was really storming.”
Stagg came in and to Eisenhower’s delight “He had a little grin on his face. He never laughed very much. He was a fine man. And he said, ‘Well, I’ll give you some good news.’ ”
He was even more certain than he had been five hours earlier that the storm would break before dawn. But the bad news was that good weather was only likely through Tuesday; Wednesday could be rough again. That raised the danger that the first waves would get ashore but the follow-up units would not.
Eisenhower asked for opinions, again pacing, shooting out his chin. Montgomery still wanted to go, as did Smith. Ramsay was concerned about proper spotting for naval gunfire but thought the risk worth taking. Tedder was reluctant. Leigh-Mallory still thought air conditions were below the acceptable minimum.
The ships were sailing into the Channel. If they were to be called back, it had to be done now. The supreme commander was the only man who could do it.
He resumed pacing. Some of those in the room thought he paced for as long as five minutes. Eisenhower thought it was about forty-five seconds: “I’m sure it wasn’t five minutes,” he later said. “Five minutes under such conditions would seem like a year.” He reviewed in his mind the alternatives. If Stagg was wrong, at best the AEF would be landing seasick men without air cover or an accurate naval bombardment. But to postpone again would be agonizing and dangerous. The men had been briefed; they could not be held on their transports and landing craft for two weeks; the risk that the Germans would penetrate the secret of Overlord would be very high.
Typically, Eisenhower’s concern was with the men. “Don’t forget,” he said in an interview twenty years later, “some hundreds of thousands of men were down here around Portsmouth, and many of them had already been loaded for some time, particularly those who were going to make the initial assault. Those people in the ships and ready to go were in cages, you might say. You couldn’t call them anything else. They were fenced in. They were crowded up, and everybody was unhappy.”
Eisenhower went on, “Goodness knows, those fellows meant a lot to me. But these are the decisions that have to be made when you’re in a war. You say to yourself, I’m going to do something that will be to my country’s advantage for the least cost. You can’t say without any cost. You know you’re going to lose some of them, and it’s very, very difficult.”
He stopped pacing, faced his subordinates, then said quietly but clearly, “OK, let’s go.”35
And again, cheers rang through Southwick House.36 Then the commanders rushed from their chairs and dashed outside to get to their command posts. Within thirty seconds the mess room was empty, except for Eisenhower. His isolation was symbolic, for, having given the order, he was now powerless. As he put it, “That’s the most terrible time for a senior commander. He has done all that he can do, all the planning and so on. There’s nothing more that he can do.”37
Eisenhower fortified himself with coffee and breakfast, then went down to Portsmouth to watch the ships starting out and the loading process for the follow-up units. He walked up and down the wharves. Shortly after daylight, the rain stopped, the wind began to die down. At midday he returned to his trailer, where he played a game of checkers on a cracker box with his naval aide, Capt. Harry Butcher. Butcher was winning, two kings to one, when Eisenhower jumped one of his kings and got a draw. He thought that was a good omen.38
After lunch, Eisenhower sat at his portable table and scrawled by hand a press release on a pad of paper, to be used if necessary. “Our landings . . . have failed,” he began, “and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”39
• •
Rommel spent a quiet June 5 with Lucie. He gathered wild-flowers for a birthday bouquet. His chief of staff, Gen. Hans Speidel, prepared for a party at the chateau in La Roche-Guyon that evening. He called various friends to invite them, saying in one case, “The Old Man’s gone away.”40 General Dollmann was in Rennes, ready for the map exercise to begin early on Tuesday morning. General Feuchtinger was in Paris, where he intended to spend the night with his girlfriend before driving to Rennes the next day. Other division and regiment commanders of Seventh Army had farther to travel and began setting out in the afternoon for Rennes.
On June 5, General Marcks called Col. Frederick von der Heydte to his headquarters. He said he was too worried to leave his troops that night; he would set out for Rennes at first light and wanted Heydte to join him.41 Just outside Caen, Colonel Luck of 21st Panzer Division gave out orders for a night exercise for one of his companies, “in accordance with the plan of training every company in turn for night action.”42
(Over in the Cotentin, other companies were also preparing for night exercises. The rifles would be loaded with wooden “bullets.” GIs who later picked up clips of this “ammunition” were furious with the Germans. The GIs believed that the wooden bullets were designed to inflict horrible wounds and were a monstrous violation of the laws of warfare. Actually, the wood was soft balsa that would not penetrate a body but would indicate where the bullet hit.)
In Berchtesgaden, Hitler had a routine day. As Gen. Walter Warlimont, deputy chief of staff to General Jodl, later wrote, “On 5 June 1944 . . . German Supreme Headquarters had not the slightest idea that the decisive event of the war was upon them.”43
• •
On the afternoon of June 5, the Allied airborne troopers began dressing for battle. Each rifleman carried his M-l (either broken down in a padded case called a Griswold container or already assembled), 160 rounds of ammunition, two fragmentation hand grenades, a white phosphorus and an orange-colored smoke grenade, and a Gammon grenade (two pounds of plastic explosive, powerful enough to damage a tank). Most carried a pistol—the paratroopers’ greatest fear was getting shot out of the sky, next was being caught on the ground at the moment of landing, before they could put their rifles into operation—plus a knife and a bayonet. An unwelcome surprise was an order to carry a Mark IV antitank mine, weighing about ten pounds. The only place to fit it was in the musette bag, which led to considerable bitching and rearrangement of loads.
Machine gunners carried their weapons broken down, and extra belts of ammunition. Mortars, bazookas, and radios were rolled into A-5 equipment bundles with cargo chutes attached. Every man carried three days’ worth of field rations and, of course, two or three cartons of cigarettes. One sergeant carried along a baseball. He wrote on it “To hell with you, Hitler,” and said he intended to drop it when his plane got over France (he did).44 There were gas masks, an ideal place to carry an extra carton of cigarettes (Capt. Sam Gibbons of the 501st PIR stuck two cans of Schlitz beer in his).45 The men had first-aid kits with bandages, sulfa tablets, and two morphine Syrettes, “one for pain and two for eternity.” They were also handed a child’s toy cricket with the instructions that it could be used in lieu of the normal challenge and password. One click-click was to be answered with two click-clicks.
Pathfinders would go first to mark the drop zone with a gadget called the Eureka/Rebecca Radar Beacon System, which could send a signal up to the lead C-47 in each flight. Cpl. Frank Brumbaugh, a pathfinder with the 508th PIR, had not only the sixty-five-pound Eureka to carry, but two containers with carrier pigeons. After he set up his Eureka, he was supposed to make a note to that effect and put it in the capsule on the first pigeon’s leg, then turn it loose. He was told to release the second pigeon at 0630 with information on how things were going. But when he got to the marshaling area, he discovered he had no way to feed or water the pigeons, so he let them go. Stripped, Brumbaugh weighed 137 pounds. With all his equipment, including his main and reserve chutes, he weighed 315 pounds.46
Around 2000 hours, Axis Sally, the “Bitch of Berlin,” came on the radio. “Good evening, 82nd Airborne Division,” she said. “Tomorrow morning the blood from your guts will grease the bogey wheels on our tanks.” It bothered some of the men; others reassured them—she had been saying something similar for the previous ten days.47
Still, it made men think. Pvt. John Delury of the 508th PIR talked to his friend Frank Tremblay about their chances of coming through alive. “He thought he’d get a slight wound and survive. I thought I was going to be killed. That was the last time I saw him.”48
Pvt. Tom Porcella, also of the 508th, was torturing himself with thoughts of killing other human beings (this was common; the chaplains worked overtime assuring soldiers that to kill for their country was not a sin). “Kill or be killed,” Porcella said to himself. “Here I am, brought up as a good Christian, obey this and do that. The Ten Commandments say, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ There is something wrong with the Ten Commandments, or there is something wrong with the rules of the world today. They teach us the Ten Commandments and then they send us out to war. It just doesn’t make sense.”49
When every man was ready, the regiments gathered around their commanders for a last word. Most COs stuck to basics—assemble quickly was the main point—but one or two added a pep talk. The most famous was delivered by Col. Howard “Jumpy” Johnson, in command of the 501st PIR. Every man in the regiment remembered it vividly and could quote word for word his conclusion. As Lt. Carl Cartledge described Johnson’s talk, “He gave a great battle speech, saying victory and liberation and death to the enemy and some of us would die and peace cost a price and so on. Then he said, ‘I want to shake the hand of each one of you tonight, so line up.’ And with that, he reached down, pulled his knife from his boot and raised it high above his head, promising us in a battle cry: ‘Before the dawn of another day, I’ll sink this knife into the heart of the foulest bastard in Nazi land!’ A resounding yell burst forth from all 2,000 of us as we raised our knives in response.”50
After the regimental meetings, the companies grouped around their COs and platoon leaders for a final word. The officers gave out the challenge, password, and response: “Flash,” “Thunder,” and “Welcome.” “Welcome” was chosen because the Germans would pronounce it “Velcom.” When Capt. Charles Shettle of the 506th PIR gave out the signals, Dr. Samuel Feiler, the regimental dental officer who had volunteered to accompany the assault echelon, approached him. Feiler was a German Jew who had escaped Berlin in 1938. “Captain Shettle,” Feiler asked, “Vat do I do?”
“Doc,” Shettle replied, “when you land, don’t open your mouth. Take along some extra crickets and if challenged, snap twice.” Later, as Shettle was inspecting each planeload prior to takeoff, he found Feiler with crickets strapped to both arms, both legs, and an extra supply in his pockets.51
• •
At about 1900 hours, General Eisenhower paid a visit to the 101st Airborne Division at Greenham Common. He circulated among the men, ostensibly to boost their morale, but as Lt. Wallace Strobel of the 502nd PIR noted, “I honestly think it was his morale that was improved by being with us.” Eisenhower told Capt. L. “Legs” Johnson, “I’ve done all I can, now it is up to you.”52 He told a group of enlisted men not to worry, that they had the best equipment and leaders in the world, with a vast force coming in behind them. A sergeant from Texas piped up, “Hell, we ain’t worried, General. It’s the Krauts that ought to be worrying now.”53
With one group, Eisenhower asked, “Is there anyone here from Kansas?” Pvt. Sherman Oyler of Topeka replied, “I’m from Kansas, sir.”
“What’s your name, son?”
Oyler was so stricken by being addressed directly by the supreme commander that he froze up and forgot his name. After an embarrassing pause, his buddies shouted, “Tell him your name, Oyler.”54 Eisenhower gave him a thumbs up and said, “Go get ’em, Kansas.”
The supreme commander turned to Lieutenant Strobel, who had a sign hanging around his neck with the number 23 on it, indicating that he was jumpmaster for plane number 23, and asked his name and where he was from.
“Strobel, sir. Michigan.”
“Oh yes, Michigan. Great fishing there. I like it.” Eisenhower then asked Strobel if he was ready. Strobel replied that they had all been well prepared, well briefed, and were ready. He added that he thought it wouldn’t be too much of a problem. Someone called out, “Now quit worrying, General, we’ll take care of this thing for you.”55
At approximately 2200 hours, as the daylight began to fade, the order rang out, “Chute up.” Each man began the tedious task of buckling on his parachutes and trying to find an empty place to hang or tie on the small mountain of equipment he was carrying into combat. With everything strapped into place, many men found it impossible to take a last-minute pee. They marched to their planes and got their first look at the C-47s’ “war paint,” three bands of white painted around the fuselage and wings. (Every Allied plane involved in D-Day had been thus painted in the previous two days, using up all the white paint in England. The purpose was recognition; in Sicily, Allied ships and troops had fired on their own planes.)
Pvt. John Richards of the 508th looked at his C-47 and noted that it had a picture of a devil holding a girl in a bathing suit sitting on a tray, with an inscription saying “Heaven can wait.” He thought to himself, Let’s hope so.56
“Dutch” Schultz of the 505th, who had managed to gamble away his $2,500 in winnings, still had Jerry Columbi’s watch, which he had taken in collateral for a $25 loan. It was Columbi’s high-school graduation present with an inscription on the back from his parents. Columbi was in another stick. Schultz went over to him to hand back the watch, saying, “Here’s your watch back, Jerry. You owe me some money and don’t you forget to pay me.”57
The 505th was at Spanhoe airfield. As Schultz was lining up to be helped into his C-47 (the men were too heavily loaded to make it into the plane on their own), he heard an explosion. A Gammon grenade carried by one of the men of Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, had gone off. It set fire to the plane and killed three men, wounding ten others. Two unhurt survivors were assigned to another plane; they both died in combat before dawn.
A bit shaken, Schultz found his place on the plane, “and the first thing I did was reach for my rosary, having been raised a Catholic boy I had great faith in the efficacy of prayers to the Blessed Mother. And I proceeded to say one rosary after another, promising the Blessed Mother that I would never, never violate the Sixth Commandment again.”58
As the twilight turned to darkness, the last men got on board their planes. Eisenhower was out on the runway, calling out “Good luck!” He noticed a short private, in Eisenhower’s words “more equipment than soldier,” who snapped him a salute. Eisenhower returned it. Then the private turned to the east and called out, “Look out, Hitler. Here we come!”59
The pilots started their engines. A giant cacophony of sound engulfed the airfield as each C-47 in its turn lurched into line on the taxi strip. At the head of the runway, the pilots locked the brakes and ran up the engines until they screamed. Then, at ten-second intervals, they released the brakes and started down the runway, slowly at first, gathering speed, so overloaded that they barely made it into the sky.
When the last plane roared off, Eisenhower turned to his driver, Kay Summersby. She saw tears in his eyes. He began to walk slowly toward his car. “Well,” he said quietly, “it’s on.”60
• •
Before going to bed, Admiral Ramsay made a final entry in his handwritten diary: “Monday, June 5, 1944. Thus has been made the vital & crucial decision to stage the great enterprise which [shall?], I hope, be the immediate means of bringing about the downfall of Germany’s fighting power & Nazi oppression & an early cessation of hostilities.
“I am not under [any] delusions as to the risks involved in this most difficult of all operations. . . . Success will be in the balance. We must trust in our invisible assets to tip the balance in our favor.
“We shall require all the help that God can give us & I cannot believe that this will not be forthcoming.”61
Tired as he must have been, Ramsay caught the spirit and soul of the great undertaking perfectly, especially in his hope for what the results would be for occupied Europe and the world, his recognition that the enterprise was fraught with peril, and his confidence that God was blessing this cause.