Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (59 page)

Don Moon got orders to the Mediterranean to command the invasion force for the attack on southern France, initially code-named Anvil but now renamed Dragoon, supposedly because Churchill claimed that he had been dragooned into it. Arriving in Naples in July, Moon reported to Kent Hewitt, the overall commander of Dragoon, who had been his math professor at the Naval Academy and a kind of mentor. Moon was uneasy about the short interval he had to absorb all the various elements of this new operation. He urged Hewitt to postpone the landings. Hewitt turned him down. The invasion had been postponed once before, Hewitt reminded him, and too many factors, political as well as logistical, were involved.
⁵

Moon had been working fifteen-hour days, seven days a week for months and now suffered from a physical tiredness that bordered on exhaustion. Much of that was due to his work ethic. Throughout the planning period for Neptune, then during the crisis of Exercise Tiger, and all through the invasion
itself, he had worked fifteen-hour days, seven days a week. Reluctant to delegate even the smallest detail to his subordinates, he sought to manage everything personally. Commander Frank Lowe, the medical officer on the
Bayfield
, had told him repeatedly that he needed to get more rest and exercise, warning him that, “no individual can work those long hours over an indefinite period and stand up under the work.” Lowe insisted that Moon meet with the Eighth Fleet medical officer, Captain Frederick Greaves.
⁶

To Greaves, Moon acknowledged that he was working hard, but, he insisted, “it was necessary for him to work too many hours a day.” Greaves later testified that during their interview, Moon was clear and focused and betrayed no evidence of mental confusion or uncertainty. Nevertheless, every man has a breaking point, and by August 5, 1944, Rear Admiral Don Pardee Moon had reached his.
⁷

At 7:00 a.m., Moon sat down at the desk in his cabin on the
Bayfield
. “The mind is gone,” he wrote in a clear steady hand. “With the mind stalled & crazy … things once easy are not in sight.” The fact that he was still in his underwear and that he wrote in uncharacteristically jumbled syntax evidenced that he was struggling with a severe mental crisis he could not control. “Command is wrong under such a condition…. Overwork thru the years—I have given the Navy everything I had—too much—it has broken me.” “My country,” he wrote, “what am I doing to you. My wife & dear children … I am sick, so sick.” He signed with his initials, then, meticulous as always, he wrapped his .45 caliber sidearm in a towel to minimize the mess, put the gun to his head, and pulled the trigger.
⁸

The war went on without him. Ten days later, Operation Dragoon took place as scheduled when three divisions of Lucian Truscott’s VI Corps went ashore on the French Riviera against what turned out to be light opposition. Ten days after that, on August 25, the Allies entered Paris, led by the French 2nd Armored Division, which was accorded pride of place in the liberation of the city. A week later, elements of the American Third Army crossed the Meuse, and on September 3, the British Second Army liberated Brussels.

For a moment, it seemed the war might end soon—perhaps before winter. But the moment passed. There would be many more battles before the end, including the sanguinary Battle of the Bulge in December, when
Hitler sought to turn the war around with a desperate ground offensive into the Ardennes Forest. When the Germans began that counteroffensive, Ramsay decided to fly from his headquarters northwest of Paris to Montgomery’s headquarters in Brussels to talk face-to-face about the defense of Antwerp. In soggy weather, his small two-engine plane took off successfully, then suddenly plummeted to the ground and exploded. Along with his chief of staff and his flag lieutenant, Ramsay died instantly.

The surprise assault in the Ardennes allowed the Germans to seize a broad salient in the front line—the famous “bulge”—but their offensive stalled after only a week, and the British and Americans counterattacked. By Christmas the German gambit had failed, and it was clear to all, or at least to everyone except Hitler, that the end of the war was only a matter of time. By spring, the Anglo-Americans were just 250 miles west of Berlin, and the Russians were in the outskirts of the city. Though many more men would die while Hitler clung to power for a few more days, the Allied triumph in Europe was now inevitable. The war in the Pacific continued until August, terminated at last by the deus ex machina of the atomic bombs.

Franklin Roosevelt
did not live to see it. In spite of the good news from the various fighting fronts, the president was worn down from his exertions. On January 20, 1945, he took the oath of office for a fourth term, and in February he left for yet another conference, this one at Yalta in the Russian Crimea. There he sought to play the role of mediator between Churchill and Stalin, a delicate and trying balancing act that left him even more exhausted. His skin, unnaturally gray, sagged on his once robust frame, and though he still occasionally flashed his famous smile for the cameras, it was too often the rictus of a game but obviously very ill man.

At the end of March, Roosevelt traveled south to Warm Springs, Georgia, where he often went for the sake of his crippled legs to swim in what he was convinced were the healing waters of the local spring. He had agreed to have his portrait painted while he was there, and he was posing for it early on the afternoon of April 12, when he told the artist, “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.” Then he slumped in his chair. He never regained consciousness, and within hours he was pronounced dead of a cerebral hemorrhage. Having
restored American optimism during the Depression, sustained Britain in its darkest days, and shepherded the anti-fascist alliance through four years of war, his work was finally at an end. He was sixty-three years old.

George Marshall
was promoted to the rank of General of the Army (five stars) in December 1944 even as the Battle of the Bulge was raging in the Ardennes, although he never exercised the field command that he coveted and which many of his colleagues felt was his due. After the war, he resigned as chief of staff, though because his new rank was a life tenure, he technically remained on active duty. In 1947, he accepted President Harry Truman’s invitation to serve as secretary of state, in which capacity he made what was arguably his greatest contribution to history by sponsoring the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan. In recognition of that, he was awarded the 1953 Nobel Peace Prize. Though Marshall resigned as secretary of state in 1949, he was called back to service a year later as secretary of defense upon the outbreak of the Korean War. He was disappointed and very likely hurt during the 1952 presidential campaign when Eisenhower, his former protégé, publicly supported those who criticized Marshall’s tenure of leadership in both cabinet positions. True to his character, however, Marshall never responded to those charges or spoke an unkind word about Eisenhower or any of his other wartime associates. He died in Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington on October 16, 1959, at the age of seventy-eight.

Alan Brooke
outlived Marshall by four years. After retirement, Brooke became the First Viscount Alanbrooke and indulged his passion for bird watching, becoming vice president of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and president of the Zoological Society of London. He held several ceremonial positions, including Lord Lieutenant of the County of London. As Constable of England, he played a key role in the ceremonies surrounding the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II, an event also attended by his former counterpart, George Marshall. Four years later, in 1957, there was a flurry of public interest and titillation upon the publication of his edited, though still quite candid, diaries that contained sharp criticisms of Churchill, Marshall, Eisenhower, and others. Alanbrooke suffered a fatal heart attack in June 1963, a month short of his eightieth birthday.

Winston Churchill
outlived all of them. A month after Roosevelt’s death, he was the featured speaker at a huge outdoor rally in London to celebrate the German surrender, which was announced on May 8, 1945. Churchill told the crowd, “This is your victory,” and almost to a man they shouted back: “No, it is yours.” In many ways, that was true enough, for it was Churchill more than anyone who had held the beleaguered nation together in those dark days during 1940 and 1941. Ironically, however, the very strengths that made him an unrivaled wartime leader—his unconquerable will, his love of king and country, and his reverence for the old Empire—did not resonate in the same way in the postwar era. By 1945, Britons were tired of “blood, tears, toil, and sweat,” and despite their gratitude for all that he had done for them, they voted his party out of office in the first postwar election later that year. Churchill felt the blow keenly and resigned at once, but he was never one to withdraw quietly into the shadows, and he remained an active and voluble member of Parliament. As ever, he was also a prolific author, producing his magisterial six-volume history,
The Second World War
, which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, the same year that George Marshall won the Nobel Peace Prize. Churchill returned to office in 1951, but poor health, including a severe stroke, convinced him to resign again in 1955, at the age of eighty. Despite lifelong habits of heavy drinking, heavy smoking, and absurdly late hours, he lived to the age of ninety and died at his home in Hyde Park Gate, London, in January 1965.

Dwight Eisenhower
returned to the United States in November 1945 to succeed his mentor George Marshall as Army chief of staff. In 1948, he declined offers from both political parties to run for president of the United States and instead became president of Columbia University in New York City. Two years later he became Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces, and in 1952 he accepted the Republican nomination for president. Elected twice by wide margins, he presided over a period of relative stability both at home and abroad, and stepped down in 1961 a much-beloved national figure. He retired to his farm near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he had spent much of World War I, and indulged his interest in golf. Having suffered from heart disease for much of his later life, he succumbed to a
massive heart attack in March 1969, dying at Walter Reed Army Hospital on March 28, at the age of seventy-eight.

Bernard Montgomery
proved nearly as resilient as Churchill. He had insisted to all who would listen that after the Normandy landings he would spearhead a drive into the heart of Germany and win the war before winter set in. Instead his forces bogged down almost at once. The city of Caen, which was supposed to have fallen on D-Day, held out for more than two months. Monty’s attempt to atone for this disappointment, a thrust into the lowlands code-named Operation Market Garden, also went awry. Because he was Monty, however, none of this dampened his hearty self-confidence, and he was at his best in responding to the emergency of the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he succeeded Brooke (now Viscount Alanbrooke) as chief of the Imperial General Staff, though he was out of his depth in dealing with the political and strategic elements of the job, and it was not a successful tour. He retired from the Army in 1958 at age seventy-one, was made Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, and wrote his memoirs. An ardent Tory, he supported and defended apartheid in South Africa, and campaigned against the decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain. As abstemious in his personal habits as Churchill was self-indulgent, he nevertheless did not quite match Churchill’s longevity, dying in 1976 at the age of eighty-nine.

AS FOR THE REST
, those thousands of largely anonymous junior officers and enlisted men who took part in Operation Neptune from its conception in the spring of 1943 to its culmination in the summer of 1944, nearly all of them were changed by their experience. The British returned to a nation where the scars of war lingered for many years. They would rebuild, but shortages—including food shortages—continued for nearly a decade. The Americans returned to a country with few visible scars. They were reluctant to talk about the war, at least with their families. Many tried to behave as if the war had not happened at all. They went back to school on the GI Bill, or they got jobs building houses, refrigerators, and automobiles. They got married, bought homes, had children, mowed the grass, and built America.