AT THE CASABLANCA CONFERENCE OF JANUARY 14 – 24, 1943, while Palm was preparing his men for war, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to seek the “unconditional surrender” of the Axis powers and nothing less. They laid plans for the invasion of Italy and Sicily. That summer, the British chiefs of staff received details for Operation Overlord, the code name for the fifty-mile-long invasion of northwestern France across the English Channel.
Near the end of the year, General Dwight D. Eisenhower assumed the post of Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force and a month later American soldiers and sailors began practicing landings along the shores of Chesapeake Bay. Endless convoys of ships transporting troops, tanks, artillery, munitions, trucks, and other weapons of war continued to make their way to England. Troops practiced landings on the British coast, and U.S. Rangers repeatedly scaled cliffs along the coast as well as inland.
Beginning in 1940, Radio London, broadcasting from a studio at the British Broadcasting Corporation, sent numerous messages from Free French Forces to the French Resistance in France. In early June 1944, many messages broadcast were meaningless, but some were not. On June 1 and June 5, an announcer said, “Blessent mon cœur d’une langeur monotone.” The phrase, translated as “Wound my heart with a monotonous languor,” came from Paul Verlaine’s poem “The Song of Autumn” and signaled that the Allies were preparing to attack.
At 9:15 p.m. on June 5, 1944, Radio London aired several more messages that, to the casual listener, seemed nonsensical: “The carrots are cooked. The dice have been thrown.”
But to resistance forces, these were exciting words because they signaled an invasion of France. The following day, June 6 — D-Day — Eisenhower sent a message to the troops:
Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world. Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well-equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.
But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940 – 41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our home fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory! Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.
On the evening of June 5, under the protection of eleven thousand Allied bombers and fighter planes, more than five thousand vessels began plowing toward the French coast and Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, a system of coastal fortifications that stretched from the Pyrenees north across the length of Norway.
Shortly before midnight, more than eight hundred C-47 transport planes, some carrying American, British, and Canadian paratroopers, and some towing gliders filled with assault troops, began to fill the skies over the English Channel. Over French soil, paratroopers by the thousands began the perilous descent. Many were killed in the sky and floated lifelessly to the ground. Others died in firefights almost immediately after landing. Some assault soldiers were killed when their gliders crashed. Still, a significant number of men survived.
While Teen waited in England, the invasion began in the predawn darkness. At 5:30 a.m., battleships began a ferocious shelling of the French coast. From 6:30 to 7:55 a.m., thousands of men climbed down rope ladders hanging on the sides of transport ships miles off the coast. They clambered into landing crafts to begin the journey toward land. The winds and waves were much more powerful than expected. Some crafts foundered in the roiling sea. Others were blown apart by German artillery or struck undersea obstacles and sank. Some managed to get through unscathed, but when their front doors were lowered, the first rows of soldiers who charged were slaughtered by machine-gun fire. Some soldiers, overweighted by their equipment, drowned when they stepped into water over their heads. On the beach, soldiers faced artillery and mortar blasts. Some men confronted the extremely difficult task of scaling sheer cliffs towering one hundred to one hundred fifty feet above them.
The cost was high — of the more than one hundred fifty-six thousand men deployed on D-Day, some nine to ten thousand were killed, wounded, or missing in action. The following morning, June 7, the largest flotilla of ships in history filled the horizon off the beaches of the Normandy coast, awaiting their turn to deposit thousands more men and tons of guns and supplies on that newly acquired sliver of land.
That the nearly thirty-five thousand men of the 1st and 29th U.S. Infantry Divisions had established a beachhead at Omaha Beach seemed nothing less than a miracle. The seasoned German 352nd Infantry Division, manning carefully engineered fortifications and tunnels, outnumbered the initial American assault waves by a ratio of four to three. German guns at the tops of bluffs had been fortified so that the weapons suffered relatively little damage in the furious aerial and naval bombardments that preceded the invasion. German artillery and machine guns raked the beaches in a murderous crossfire. Several hundred yards inland from the ocean’s waterline ran a fifteen-foot-deep ditch packed with landmines and covered with a thicket of barbed-wire entrapments. Soldiers who survived the crossing of the beach to reach the ditch were exposed to continuous machine-gun fire.
Underneath the waters off-shore, six-pronged “spiders,” made of crossed iron railroad rails and ties, along with large sharpened logs, ripped open and impaled the hulls of landing craft. Some of the spiders protruded high over the water line. Czech Hedgehogs (three metal girders or sections of rail welded together at the middle) blocked entrance to the shore. Floating mines tore apart landing craft and soldiers alike in sudden fiery blasts. Strong currents pulled some landing crafts away from their assigned destinations.
For five miles along the crescent shoreline of Omaha Beach, bodies were strewn among the wreckage of half tracks, flipped landing crafts, blasted tanks, crippled bulldozers, tangled barbed wire and telephone lines. Underneath the sea, extending for a mile and beyond from the shore, lay sunken landing crafts — some with their soldiers silently entombed within them — as well as boats bearing tanks and trucks and their crews.
Strewn across the sand was the detritus of soldiers’ packs: diaries, Bibles, snapshots of loved ones, cherished letters from home, toothbrushes, and lifebelts. Fallen soldiers lay crumpled on the beach as if sleeping. Bodies of those who died in the water rolled limply toward shore in the tide and then were drawn back into the ocean. Soldiers assigned to collect the dead lined the bodies in rows and draped them with covers so that only their boots were visible.
The assault on Omaha Beach constituted only one element of Operation Overlord. Some one hundred fifty-six thousand troops participated in the invasion, seventy-three thousand in the American sector of Utah Beach and Omaha Beach, and eighty-three thousand in the British and Canadian sector of Gold Beach, Juno Beach, and Sword Beach. Other nations — Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Holland, New Zealand, Norway, and Poland — also contributed troops to the invasion forces.
As night fell in America on D-Day, President Roosevelt delivered a radio message, asking the nation to join him in prayer:
Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.
They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.
They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest — until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men’s souls will be shaken with the violences of war. For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people.
That night, as he did every night, Teen, who was waiting in England to be deployed in the D-Day follow-up waves, composed a letter to Helen:
Dearest Sweetheart:
Well, it finally happened and I know the eyes of the world are focused on us over here. I guess this day will be a big memory in all our lives as it means the beginning of the end for Hitler.
I am still shivering, though, as the weather is cold. We all could get along a lot nicer if we had a little stove in here. I guess I am selfish as there are a lot of boys on the beach head tonight in the invasion that would think this little tent was a cozy home. We all had a service and prayed for all of them that this war may end soon and that the suffering would not be too great out there.
Once the Normandy coast was secured, reinforcement troops accompanied by huge amounts of war equipment landed on Allied beachheads and began fighting their way into the interior of France.
By June 13, a third wave of Allied forces had hit the beaches of France, bringing Allied troop strength to more than three hundred and fifty thousand. Teen wrote a letter to his sister, Gladys, telling her that he was ready to go into battle. He made no reference to the horrible casualties inflicted during the D-Day invasion:
Dear Glad:
I am still located in the same place and have nothing but favorable reports to give. The boys in France are doing a swell job and we are right behind them waiting to go in and do our share. We have been playing a lot of chess with the officers here. I’m still the champ, but don’t know how long it will last.
We played the officers from another company last night in touch football but got trounced 30 – 0. Still cold and rainy here and still stays light until 11:30 pm.
Love and kisses
By mid-July, following fierce fighting, U.S. troops had taken control of Saint-Lo, a key crossroad city in Normandy. British and Canadian troops were pushing toward Caen, which was forty miles to the east. But the forces were battling to break out of Normandy.
By then, some of the troops involved in the D-Day invasion were being sent back to England. Their descriptions of the carnage and of their survival instilled an even greater urgency among those still waiting for assignment. They wanted to shoulder their share of the burden.
Teen was moved by the stories he heard, as he related in a letter to his mother:
Dearest Mother:
I have talked to a lot of men who were in the invasion and it really gives you a new slant on things. I hope to be able to get in a combat outfit soon so I can get to the front and do my share.
An officer in my tent has been alerted and is packing to go to France. I guess when the day comes for me to go, I will be sending a lot of stuff home. I believe in traveling light as I want to have most of my load consisting of firearms, knife and ammunition with a few pockets left for my C rations. I am getting anxious to get up there. I hate to come this far with all my training not to get into the fight.
Teen was anxious, his nights filled with dreams of battle. He described one to Helen, a particularly vivid and disturbing dream he had about a high school classmate who had been sent to fight in North Africa. Teen was concerned that his dream meant that his friend was killed:
It seems that we were in a school room again and he had on his uniform with a lot of ribbons including a Purple Heart. In our dream we embraced each other and talked about combat. It gave me a funny feeling as I have written to him without ever getting a reply. Ever since that dream, I have been wanting to go into a combat outfit up in France as I feel it is the real place for me right now. I know the Lord will take care of me up there under fire and I am not afraid of anything. I just feel that I am not doing my part by staying in England when all the boys need all the help they can get up there in the line. I feel like I am wearing lace on my breeches instead of wearing my combat uniform with boots, pistol belt and carbine rifle.
Teen was working as a special services officer, organizing mail call, overseeing mess hall, and arranging for entertainment for the troops. He supervised construction of an amphitheater with electricity to show movies and one evening got a glimpse of war up close. “We had a film showing all the war pictures on the invasion of France,” he wrote Helen. “I don’t see how the photographers were able to get in so close without getting the camera blown to bits. Some of them did get killed.”
Though Hitler had ordered that Paris “must not fall into the enemy’s hand except lying in complete debris” and that it was to be leveled by bombing, the German surrender of the French capital to Allied forces took place without such devastation on August 25, 1944. Deliriously happy crowds welcomed Charles de Gaulle into Paris as remaining German snipers were systematically tracked down and suppressed. Teen wrote to Helen, saying he was hopeful he would be able to go home soon:
I am really looking west toward home and hope one of these months to take that return trip.
If you can, listen to Frank Sinatra’s recording of “My Shining Hour.” It’s beautiful and I think of you every time I play it. It reminds me of you, darling, and how I dream of you all the time. Listen to it if you can as I dedicate it to you as a sequel to our other song, “I’ll Get By,” for when I get home we will take our usual evening rides again and I’ll sing it for you.
Home had to wait. In September, Teen crossed the English Channel in a landing craft and waded ashore on Omaha Beach. He was astonished by the devastation: the shattered fortifications and wrecked pill boxes, craters made by artillery shells, and foxholes built for protection.
The men pitched their tents and awaited orders. They lived on C rations with three variations of the main course — meat and beans, meat and potato hash, or meat and vegetable — as well as four hardtack biscuits and three gum drops. They took cold-water sponge baths. They bartered with French citizens for bread and eggs.
As he marched through the French towns of Vire, Flers, Argentan, and Alençon, and headed toward Paris, he was awed by the destruction. He wrote Helen:
The towns are all in rubble with few houses left standing. The people are worse off than the British and this makes all the British ruins look like child’s play. I have seen people returning to their ruined towns with all of their possessions piled on the horse-drawn two-wheeled carts.
Along the roads, I have seen crashed Nazi planes, and tanks and armored cars blown up or burned out. I have seen some of ours, too. I saw a lot of graves in twos and fours and sixes. I mean our boys. They were buried near the French farmhouses where they fell with crosses made of wood and their helmets on the head of the grave. I have seen enough now to make this war real to me and close at hand. I don’t mind doing the things I have to do like bathing in streams and living in my pup tent as there are boys up front who can’t even do these things.
One of his first encounters with the enemy came one morning when, as he related to Helen:
We had a German about sixteen years of age give himself up to us. He had been hiding out in the woods hoping for a counterattack that never came. He looked very weak and said he had not eaten for four days. He wanted us to take him prisoner, which, of course, we did.
War is such a folly when you see things like that. But the German people must be taught a lesson this time that they never will forget. I hope we can do that job within the next year.