Roosevelt (84 page)

Thus the GI lived and worked and fought and sometimes died in the culture of war. Cutting across it, both at home and abroad, was a curious subculture—scattered enclaves of black soldiers. The Army in 1944 was still segregated; the Navy was lily-white, except for messmen and a few others. Some Negro army outfits had white officers, some had black. Despite their resentment of segregation, Negroes had developed some pride in black combat air and ground units, only to become more indignant than ever in early 1944 when black combat-infantry troops—some of them from famous old Negro outfits—were used for labor service and black pilots were accused of poor combat performance. The Negro press protested; Representative Fish appealed to Stimson; William Hastie, who had resigned as civilian aide on Negro affairs because of despair over the continuing misuse of black troops, wrote to Stimson that the
Secretary had been misled by his own subordinates as to the conversion of Negro combat units into service units.

The White House rarely intervened in the services’ handling of Negro matters, but Eleanor Roosevelt passed along complaints, and the known concern of both the President and the First Lady was a brooding presence in Pentagon decisions. Annoyed by both the racists and the Negro “extremists,” Stimson believed that “we are suffering from the persistent legacy of the original crime of slavery”; he wanted equal opportunity for both races but not social intermixture. “We have got to use the colored race to help us in this fight and we have got to officer it with white men,” he wrote in his diary. “…better to do that than to have them massacred under incompetent officers.” For Stimson the issue was how best to win the war; but he would not face the question of the potential effectiveness of integrated units. Nor would Roosevelt.

“This war is an ideological war fought in defense of democracy,” wrote Gunnar Myrdal in
An American Dilemma,
which appeared in 1944. “In fighting fascism and nazism, America had to stand before the whole world in favor of racial toleration and cooperation and of racial equality.”

Roosevelt’s position was a mixture of concern, realism, and resignation. When the Negro publishers in their February meeting with him chided him on the treatment of black soldiers, the President answered:

“It is perfectly true, there is definite discrimination in the actual treatment of the colored engineer troops, and others. And you are up against it, as you know perfectly well. I have talked about it—I had the Secretary of War and the Assistant—everybody in on it. The trouble lies fundamentally in the attitude of certain white people—officers down the line who haven’t got much more education, many of them, than the colored troops and the Seabees and the engineers, for example. And well, you know the kind of person it is. We all do. We don’t have to do more than think of a great many people that we know. And it has become not a question of orders—they are repeated fairly often, I think, in all the camps of colored troops—it’s a question of the personality of the individual.

“And we are up against it, absolutely up against it….”

B
Y JUNE 4 ALL
seemed ready for
OVERLORD.
Landing ships built on Lake Michigan and floated down the Illinois River and the Mississippi were packed beam to beam in the ports of southern England. Long ugly LST’s constructed in California, their front ends gaping wide like hungry alligators, devoured tanks, trucks, bulldozers. Along pleasant English lanes, under blooming English elms, stood strange amphibious vessels, track to track; barrel-shaped metal containers of ammunition; stacks of bombs; enormous reels of cable; tires, wheels, wooden cases stacked twenty feet high. Rows of Mustang fighters, newly shorn of their protective grease, stood wing to wing on small fields behind the coast. Hundreds of new locomotives and thousands of freight and tanker cars lined the green valleys, waiting to be used in France.

In the dusk mile-long convoys moved down the English roads and disgorged men onto the quays. Soldiers in assault jackets bent under their loads: rifle, life preserver, gas mask, five grenades, a half-pound block of TNT with primacord fuse; and K rations and C rations stuffed into their packs and jackets. The men slowly filed onto the transports and took their positions near their assault craft. The first to land would be the section leader and five riflemen with M-1’s; then a wire-cutting team of four men, also with rifles; followed by four search-nose cutters, two Browning automatic rifle teams of two men each, carrying nine hundred pounds per gun; two bazooka teams of two men each; four sixty-millimeter mortarmen with fifteen to twenty rounds; a flame-thrower crew of two men; five demolition men with pole and pack charges of TNT; a medic and the assistant section leader.

The great attack, which had hung in the balance so many times as Roosevelt and Churchill forsook it for Africa, as American admirals drained sea power and landing craft into the Pacific, as Italy insistently sucked in troops, was now itemized and “finalized” and blueprinted on thousands of battle orders, landing schedules, and beach plans. For fifty miles along the Bay of the Seine stretching westward to the Cotentin Peninsula sections of beaches were
marked off and code-named—Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha, Utah. A million and a half Americans, another million British and Canadians, tens of thousands of Norwegians, Danish, French, Belgian, Czech, Polish, and other troops, waited on their landing craft in sealed-off sectors across the south of England, and in supporting areas behind. Nine hundred warships, ranging from PT boats to twenty-six battleships and heavy cruisers, 229 LST’s and 3,372 landing craft, and 163 air bases would mount and support the onslaught; 124,000 hospital beds were ready.

The top command post of this massed and balanced power lay in a hazel coppice a few miles north of Portsmouth dockyard, in a nondescript trailer remarkable only for a red telephone for scrambled calls to Washington and a green one for a direct line to 10 Downing Street. This was Eisenhower’s headquarters. A mile away was Southwick House, an old country mansion where formal conferences took place; nearby was the caravan of General Montgomery, ground commander of the assault phase. General Omar Bradley’s assault headquarters was established near Bristol.

On the far shores waited the Germans. They had long expected an attack across the Channel in the spring of 1944—just when and where they were not sure. Most of the Wehrmacht tactitians anticipated an onslaught between the Seine and the Scheldt; in a flash of intuition Hitler at one point predicted the Cotentin Peninsula as a likely target, but his intuition later flicked up other possibilities. The Führer and his generals had long argued over defense strategy. Demanding “fanatical energy,” Hitler had ordered the Atlantic Wall—almost a coastal Maginot Line—to be armed and concreted in order to prevent the invader from gaining a beachhead. He directed his western Commander in Chief, Gerd von Runstedt, to throw the enemy back into the sea by a quick and massive counterattack. Runstedt preferred to rely on the proved tactics of rapid maneuver behind the front, with mobile infantry and powerful armored units deployed to overwhelm the enemy beachheads. Sensing Runstedt’s doubts, Hitler had assigned Rommel to the Western Front, with special responsibilities for coastal defense. The old commander of the Afrika Korps would have liked a mobile defense in depth as well, but knowing the air power of the Allies and the poor quality of his troops, many of whom were either young and undertrained or battle weary from service in Russia, he concentrated on beach defenses. By June the Channel beaches were peppered with half a million steel piles, wooden stakes armed with mines, interlocked iron bars, and “Belgian gates,” huge slanting gates braced by girders, all connected with barbed wire.

The enemy assault must be liquidated within a few hours,
Hitler demanded. This would prevent the re-election of Roosevelt, who, “with luck, would finish up somewhere in jail.” Churchill, too, would be finished, and the Allies would never dare launch another invasion of France.

Only the weather was not ready. When Eisenhower met with his commanders early Sunday morning, June 4, forecasters warned of high winds and heavy cloud. Montgomery was ready to go ahead, but when the others demurred, Eisenhower ordered the operation postponed, even though some ships had to be called back. The prospects improved by evening. For a day or two the weather would be tolerable, though by no means ideal; then it would close in again. The airmen were dubious; Montgomery again said, “Go!” For long minutes Eisenhower agonized. Postponement would bring grave risks, too. How long, he wondered, could he leave the operation hanging on the end of a limb. “I’m quite positive we must give the order.…I don’t like it but there it is….” Then, “O.K. We’ll go.”

These words loosed the most formidable amphibious assault the world had ever known. After rendezvousing in a great circle south of the Isle of Wight, warships and transports, landing ships and smaller craft moved in orderly never-ending streams toward the south. Flanking the Utah-bound column was the graceful
Augusta,
with General Bradley in the skipper’s cabin occupied by Roosevelt at Argentia. Barrage balloons lofted above the ships on cables guarded the LCI’s against enemy air attack. Paratroopers, their faces blackened, sat shoulder to shoulder hugging their parachutes in the transport planes above the Channel. The roar of bombers going out, Edward R. Murrow broadcast from London, was so powerful and triumphant he imagined he heard the strains of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Soon after midnight the paratroopers were floating down in the dark over the low, flat pastures of the Cotentin Peninsula; assault waves were milling around in the launching area and moving toward Utah, Omaha, and the “British” beaches to the east. Warships poured shells and rockets onto beach targets. Boats roared toward the shore; tanks churned through heavy seas, some of them foundering; men waded for hundreds of yards toward the beaches. Some drowned; some were shot down and died in little paroxysms of red foam; some cowered behind obstacles at the water line; some were annihilated as they tried to sprint up the beach. But most made it and dug in under the heavy protection of low bluffs or sea walls, and many of these pressed on.

Roosevelt had spent the weekend with a small entourage at Pa Watson’s home near Charlottesville, Virginia. Watching him, Miss Tully felt that every movement of his face and hands betrayed his
tenseness. During the weekend he had perused his Book of Common Prayer for a D-day invocation. He returned to the White House Monday morning and that evening went on the air not to pray for the invaders but to salute the fall of Rome, the symbol of Christianity, of authority, and now of Allied victory. He dwelt at length on the degrading effects of fascism as compared to the greatness of the Italian people in both Italy and the United States. But his mind was on the military significance. “One up and two to go!”

And now D day was crowding hard on the event. Even while marking the fall of Rome, Roosevelt had known that ships and troops were streaming across the Channel. He stayed in touch with the Pentagon during the night. At four in the morning the White House operator began waking up staff members with the news. First reports were fragmentary and bewildering, but by the time of his regular press conference in the morning the President was relaxed and even gay. As the correspondents—almost two hundred strong—crowded in, he was joshing with his aides, and Fala was wriggling on his back on the couch.

“Well, I think this is a very happy conference today,” Roosevelt began. “Looking at the rows of you coming in, you have the same expression as the anonymous and silent people this side of the desk who came in just before you—all smiles!” He had little definite to report—only that the invasion was up to schedule, “and as the Prime Minister said, ‘That’s a mouthful.’ ”

How was the President feeling? “Fine—I’m a little sleepy!”

In the evening he led the nation in prayer. He prayed first for “our sons, pride of our Nation….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 he prayed also for the people at home, for stout hearts to wait out the long travail and to bear sorrows that might come. “Give us Faith in thee; Faith in our sons; Faith in each other; faith in our united crusade….”

Enough things went wrong on D day to lend suspense to the occasion and drama to the retelling. The paratroopers were badly scattered; scores of gliders were shot down or lost their way; on Omaha Beach the invaders ran into unexpected enemy strength and were slaughtered in the water and on the beach; heavy seas slowed operations along all the beaches. But in fact the invasion was not in jeopardy. The long wait until the Germans had been weakened in the east, the stupendous build-up, the elaborate
planning by Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military chiefs were now paying off. Strategy was now dominating tactics. By the end of D day, with almost continuous thickets of ships disgorging war power along miles and miles of coast, the immediate issue was all but resolved.

The Germans were not only overwhelmed; they also were deceived, outwitted, and caught flat-footed. Their radar had been so mercilessly shelled that only a handful of radar pieces were operating on the eve of D day, and most of them were foiled by devices that simulated a different landing. The weather that had worried Eisenhower seemed too rough to the enemy to permit amphibious operations. Rommel was not even near the front; he had left on June 5 to visit Hitler at Berchtesgaden. The Führer was so certain that the first landings were a feint that he delayed the dispatch of two Panzer divisions. But even if he had known the date of D day, he could not long have held off the Allies. He had inadequate sea power and air power to challenge the invaders on the Channel or over it. And in the face of massive Allied attacks on railroads, bridges, highways, and marshaling yards, he lacked enough maneuverability to deploy even the forces he had.