Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (12 page)

The mobile formations behind the coast exercised with varying degrees of intensity, their movements watched with deep apprehension by Allied intelligence. The Germans were carrying out their own deception operations, circulating maps showing false positions for their formations through such sources as the Japanese Ambassador to Vichy. In the face of Ultra and incessant reconnaissance, they enjoyed little success. Almost every German formation was accurately plotted on Allied maps. There were only a handful of critical uncertainties. Brigadier Williams suspected that the 352nd Division had been moved forward to the area below the elbow of the American beaches, although the evidence that he circulated proved too uncertain to disturb the American planners. When a maze of tank tracks was photographed in the coastal area of Caen, there were acute fears that 21st Panzer had been moved forward within immediate range of the beaches. In reality, after an exercise, the armour withdrew to its leaguers between Caen and Falaise.

On the afternoon of 5 June, Corporal Werner Kortenhaus, a wireless operator in the division’s Panzer Regiment, took his crew’s laundry to the local Frenchwoman who had been doing their washing for weeks. Sergeant Heinz Hickmann of the Luftwaffe Parachute Division, stationed outside Nevers, left his base for a relaxed evening in the local army canteen. Colonel Kauffmann of Panzer Lehr was on honeymoon near Stuttgart. Captain Wagemann of 21st Panzer was standing in as duty officer at headquarters in the absence of the division’s senior staff officer in Paris, and of the divisional commander on what was believed to be private business with a female friend. Most of Seventh Army’s senior officers were attending war games in Rennes. Sepp Dietrich of 1st SS Panzer Corps was in Brussels. And Rommel had retired to Germany to celebrate his wife’s birthday and to importune Hitler for a more realistic attitude to the defence of the Atlantic Wall.

The overture

Over the last few days of May and the first of June, vast columns of men and vehicles began to stream south into the assembly areas – the ‘sausages’, as they were known, because of their shapes on the map – where the invaders were briefed and equipped before being loaded aboard the fleet. The trucks and tanks rolled through towns and villages that, to the disappointment of some, paid little heed to their passing, so accustomed had the inhabitants become to mass military movements. Although the coastal areas had supposedly been sealed off to all but local residents, in reality so many exemptions had been granted for weddings, funerals and compassionate cases that the routine of life was very little changed.

Whole divisions of the follow-up waves had been temporarily transferred from training to man the assembly areas, to feed and cosset the assault forces to the utmost extent that the circumstances allowed. The men, crowded into the tiered bunks in the huge tented camps, were issued with seasickness pills and lifejackets, new gas-protective battledress and ODs – which everybody detested because of their extra weight and smell. Each soldier was given a leaflet about getting on with French civilians which urged him to say nothing about 1940 and not to buy up everything in sight at extravagant prices: ‘Thanks to jokes about “Gay Paree” etc., there is a fairly widespread belief that the French are a gay, frivolous people with no morals and few convictions. This is especially not true at the present time.’ More pragmatically, in the
‘sausages’ men were issued with their ammunition and grenades, satchel and pole charges. They worked obsessively to the very last minute upon the waterproofing of their vehicles, conscious of the horror of stalling with a flooded engine under fire in the surf. The plethora of food, fruit and American cigarettes that was thrust upon them made LAC Norman Phillips of the RAF advance party for Omaha feel ‘as if we were being fattened like Christmas turkeys’. Despite the stringent security precautions which kept the men confined once they had entered the assembly areas, many young British soldiers slipped under the wire for a last glimpse of the pub, the village or their own families. Corporal ‘Topper’ Brown of 5th RTR escaped from his camp near Felixstowe, stripped the unit flashes off his battledress, and travelled all the way home to Tonbridge in Kent.

The tannoy systems in the camps were seldom silent by day or night as groups of men were mustered, loaded into trucks, and driven through meticulously signposted streets to numbered docks where they joined their transports. The concentration and loading operations rank high among the staff achievements of OVERLORD. For once there was little need to motivate men to attend to their tasks: they understood that their lives depended on doing so. Dock officers later commented adversely upon the casual behaviour of the follow-up waves in contrast to that of the troops who embarked for D-Day.

Aboard the ships, each man sought to create his tiny island of privacy amid the mass of humanity crowded below decks. Officers struggled with last-minute loading problems. Lieutenant-Colonel Robin Hastings of the 6th Green Howards was enraged when an officious trade union official counted the lifeboats on his battalion’s transport, declared that there were insufficient, and insisted that one vital landing craft should be left behind to make room for an extra lifeboat. The unit’s chaplain, Captain Henry Lovegrove, conducted a service from the ship’s bridge which men crowded onto the foc’sle to hear. Lovegrove was uncommonly respected as a padre, but he had lost some credibility during a
rehearsal at sea off Hayling Island several weeks earlier, when he took as his text for morning service ‘The hour is now come . . .’, which many men took to mean that the padre had been chosen to break it to them that they were on their way to France. In the vast anchorages off the south coast in the first days of June, many ships looked curiously unmilitary, with sailors’ drying laundry draped along the rails and strung among the upperworks. A REME driver, passionately proud of his vehicle, expostulated furiously with an East End crane driver swinging his workshop’s trucks into the hold of a transport, crushing wings and fenders against the hatch. ‘You’ll be f---ing lucky if that’s the worst that happens to your lot over there!’ said the docker succinctly, continuing as before.

One of Montgomery’s few undoubted errors of judgement during the mounting of OVERLORD was his support for a landing on 5 June despite the adverse weather forecast. Given the difficulties much less severe weather caused on the 6th, there is little doubt that a landing on the previous day would have found itself in deep trouble. For all the scorn that Montgomery later heaped upon Eisenhower’s qualities as a military commander, at no single period did the Supreme Commander distinguish himself more than by his judgement and decision during the D-Day launching conferences of 3–4 June. Having unhesitatingly overridden Montgomery to postpone for the 5th, at 9.45 p.m. on the 4th Eisenhower equally firmly brushed aside Leigh-Mallory and ignored Tedder’s uncertainty to confirm the decision to go for the 6th: ‘I’m quite positive we must give the order,’ he said, ‘I don’t like it, but there it is . . . I don’t see how we can possibly do anything else.’
¹

The postponement much increased the mental strain and physical pressure on the men crowded in the ships. They played cards incessantly, chatted quietly, in many cases simply lay silent on their bunks, gazing up at the bulkheads. Private James Gimbert and a cluster of other RAOC men of 50th Division brewed up on a little primus stove perched atop the vast stack of ammunition
cases loaded on their LST. Brigadier-General Norman ‘Dutch’ Cota assembled his staff of the advanced headquarters group of 29th Division, of which he was deputy commander, in the aft wardroom of the USS
Carroll
. An officer of legendary forcefulness, somewhat old for his rank at 51, Cota could claim exceptional expertise in amphibious operations. He had taken part in the TORCH landings and subsequently served with Lord Mountbatten’s Combined Operations HQ. Now, he addressed his team for the last time:

Cota and his men were to land on Omaha. On all the ships, officers and NCOs pored over the maps and photographs of their landing areas that they had at last been ordered to strip from the sealed packages: it remains one of the minor miracles of OVERLORD that although hundreds of men and women had been involved in making and printing them, there was no security leak. On every ship, some or most passengers were seasick. Apart from the assault troops, there was an extraordinary ragbag of men from all manner of units aboard the invasion fleet. On many of the transports crewed by the merchant navy, there were spcially-trained civilian aircraft recognition teams from the Royal Observer Corps. The Sicilian landings had been marred by the alarming quantity of Allied aircraft shot down by reckless ships’ gun crews. Now, at the AA positions, men stood in their helmets and flash capes drinking interminable mugs of ‘kye’ – cocoa – and peering out fascinated at the shadowy shapes of the great fleet around them in the darkness.
While the soldiers below were more sombrely preoccupied by the task that awaited them on the morrow, most of the sailors felt a strong, conscious sense of pride that they were taking part in the greatest amphibious operation of all time.

One of the most curious spectators of the great invasion fleet’s movement to France was an airman named Eric Crofts, seated in a caravan mounted on a turntable on a clifftop in south Devon. Crofts manned one of the RAF’s centimetric radar posts, and all spring he and his colleagues had intently scanned the progress of the invasion rehearsals on their screen. Now he arrived on watch a little before midnight on 5 June to find the duty crew clustered round the set: ‘Large convoys of ships were creeping southward to the top of the radar screen, and small groups were coming from left to right to join the tail. Off to the east, beyond Portland, other convoys were on the move. Desperate for the relief of seeing everything pass from our range, our interest was seized later that long night by aircraft away to the east, circling but moving slowly away from us. Each dot was in a hazy cloud. We guessed, as others joined or left the group, that they were dropping metal strips of “Window” to simulate an invasion fleet heading for the Pas de Calais. It was an anti-climax at last to see our tube empty, yet sobering to know that so many men in the ships were heading for a hell ahead of them.’
³
The Germans, partly as a result of their own failures of technology, but chiefly because of damage caused by Allied bombing, possessed no sets on the Channel coast capable of showing such an accurate picture that night.

On the later afternoon of 5 June, when the men of the seaborne assault divisions had already been at sea for many hours – in some cases for days – Private Fayette Richardson of the 82nd Airborne Division was still in camp in England. He was lying on his bunk with his hands clasped behind his head, gazing up at the whitewashed ceiling and trying to exorcize from his mind the nagging beat of Tommy Dorsey’s
What Is This Thing Called Love?
that had
echoed out of the recreation hut every evening for weeks as the men walked to chow. A short, wiry 20-year-old from a small town near Buffalo, New York, Richardson had left home at 17 to drive an old jalopy to the west coast. He was in Seattle when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and enlisted at once ‘because everybody else was’.
⁴
Like so many others, he wanted to be a pilot and was dismayed to be rejected for poor eyesight. Instead, he joined the Airborne and shipped to Northern Ireland with the 508th Regiment. There he volunteered to become a pathfinder, a decision he did not regret, because his group lived a far more independent and relaxed life than the rifle companies, spared KP and guard duties, free to come and go pretty much as they pleased after completing their special training in handling the Eureka beacon. Now, in his hut in Nottinghamshire, he stood among the rest of the team joking self-consciously with each other as they struggled to stow a mountain of personal equipment about their bodies. A 32-pound radar set was strapped below the reserve parachute on his stomach; fragmentation grenades were hooked on his harness; gammon bombs and a phosphorus grenade, chocolate D rations, fighting knife, water-bottle, anti-tank mine, a morphia syrette and an armed forces paperback edition of
Oliver Twist
were stowed about his body. Richardson, as platoon guinea pig for a morphia demonstration a few weeks earlier, had plunged the tiny needle into his leg and fallen promptly asleep, to dream in brilliant colours of sailing boats against a sunset sky, green tropical islands, flowers, rainbows.

On top of all the kit, the New Yorker was expected to carry a rifle. He decided to leave this and make do with a .45 pistol strapped to his high paratroop boot, where he could reach it easily. The pressure of the pistol belt, the tightly laced boots and equipment made him feel oddly secure, as if he was wearing armour. When the trucks came for them, the paratroopers tottered forward, floundering like men in diving suits, boosted aboard by the cooks and maintenance men who were being left behind. When the shouted messages of good luck faded away, the men in the
back of the truck sat silent, scarcely able to recognize each other beneath the layer of burnt cork on their faces. Then they lay beside the fuselage of an olive-drab Dakota in the summer evening silence for almost an hour, drinking coffee and posing for an army photographer. Richardson found himself wanting to stay close to his own friends, reluctant to be alone. They were no longer excited, merely tense and thoughtful. Soon after darkness fell, they were airborne.