The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (7 page)

With his staff and with his troops, with his superiors and with his subordinates, as with foreign governments, Eisenhower did what he said he was going to do. His reward was the trust they placed in him. Because of that trust, and because of the qualities he possessed that brought it about, he was a brilliant choice as Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, quite possibly the best appointment Roosevelt ever made.  The buildup in Britain for Overlord was on a vast scale. Troops of all kinds were coming to Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and England from the United States and Canada, along with refugees from occupied Europe who were forming their own regiments, divisions, and naval and air units, including Poles, Frenchmen, Norwegians, Belgians, and Dutchmen. Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, ultimately more than three million of them. Most of all, American infantry, armored, and airborne divisions. The 29th Infantry Division arrived first. It was a National Guard division from Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland, nicknamed the “Blue and Gray.”

The 29th Division sailed for England in September 1942 aboard theQueen Mary, converted from luxury liner to troop transport. TheQueen Mary sailed alone, depending on her speed to avoid submarines. At five hundred miles out from the Continent, and thus within range of the Luftwaffe, an escort of British warships appeared. A cruiser, HMSCuraçao, cut across the bow of the 83,000-tonQueen Mary.  The Queen knifed into the 4,290-ton cruiser and cut her in half, killing 332 members of her crew. It was not an auspicious beginning to the great Allied invasion.

The division took over Tidworth Barracks, near Salisbury. These were the best barracks in England but woefully short of what GIs had become accustomed to in the training camps in the States. For men who had trained in the American South, the English weather was miserable. Pvt. John R. Slaughter of D Company, 116th Regiment, recalled, “Morale was not good during those first few months in the British Isles. Homesickness, dreary weather, long weeks of training without pause caused many of us to grumble.”

In September 1943, Easy Company, 501st PIR, 101st Airborne, shipped over to England, where it took up barracks in the village of Aldbourne. The training that ensued was intense. The airborne officers, like their counterparts in the infantry and armored divisions, had been imbued with the spirit Eisenhower had insisted on ever since the American army had discovered, at Kasserine Pass, that it wasn’t anywhere near as tough as it thought it was. The company did practice jumps, night exercises, on its own and with infantry, artillery, and tanks. Men learned how to jump at night, how to anticipate the ground coming up, how to stay in a foxhole while a tank ran over it, how to distinguish various German weapons by their sound, and most of all that most basic lesson for combat infantry, how to love the ground, how to read it, how to dig in it, how to survive. They went at the training so hard that every man in the company was convinced “combat can’t be worse than this.”

But it wasn’t all misery. Weekend passes and the excellent British rail service gave the men a break from the tension. England in the late fall and early winter was a wonderland for the boys from the States. Most of the British boys their age were off in Italy or in training camps far from their homes, so there were lonely, bored, unattached young women everywhere. The American soldiers were well paid, much better than the British, and the paratroopers had that extra $50 per month. Beer was cheap and plentiful, once out of Aldbourne all restraints were removed, they were getting ready to kill or be killed, and they were for the most part twenty or twenty-one years old.

Pvt. David Kenyon Webster described the result in an October 23 diary entry:

“Although I do not enjoy the army, most of the men in this outfit find it a vacation. Boys who had been working steadily at home enter the army and are relieved of all responsibilities. It is unanimously agreed that they never pitched such glorious drunks back home.”

The excitement of the time, the kaleidoscope of impressions that were continually thrust upon them, the desperate need to escape the rigors of training, the thought of upcoming combat and Captain Sobel’s chickenshit, combined to make this an unforgettable time and impel most of the men to make the most of it. “London to me was a magic carpet,” Pvt. Gordon Carson wrote.  “Walk down any of its streets and every uniform of the Free World was to be seen. Their youth and vigor vibrated in every park and pub. To Piccadilly, Hyde Park, Leicester Square, Trafalgar Square, Victoria they came. The uniform of the Canadians, South Africans, Australians, New Zealanders, the Free French, Polish, Belgians, Dutch, and of course the English and Americans were everywhere.  “Those days were not lost on me because even at twenty years of age, I knew I was seeing and being a part of something that was never to be again. Wartime London was its own world.”

There was an excess of drinking, whoring, fighting. Older British observers complained, “The trouble with you Yanks is that you are overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” (To which the Yanks would reply, “The trouble with you Limeys is that you are underpaid, undersexed, and under Eisenhower.”) The U.S. 2nd and 5th Ranger Battalions were composed of volunteers. Others referred to them as “suicide squads,” but Lt. James Eikner of the 2nd Rangers disagreed: “We were simply spirited young people who took the view that if you are going to be a combat soldier, you may as well be one of the very best; also we were anxious to get on with the war so as to bring things to a close and get home to our loved ones as soon as possible.”

Naturally, such fine troops had a special mission, to capture the German battery at Pointe-du-Hoc. As this would require scaling a 200-meter-high cliff, the rangers got into superb physical condition. In March they went to the Highlands of Scotland, where Brigadier Lord Lovat’s No. 4 Commando put them through grueling speed marches (averaging twenty-five miles a day, culminating in a thirty-seven-mile march) across what was reputedly the toughest obstacle course in the world. They climbed mountains, scaled cliffs, practiced unarmed combat.  They learned stealth, how to conduct quick-hitting strikes. In ten days of such training, one private’s weight dropped from 205 to 170 pounds.  Next they practiced amphibious landing operations on the Scottish coast, hitting beaches specially prepared with barbed wire, beach obstacles, and every type of anti-assault landing device that Rommel had waiting for them. In April the rangers went to the Assault Training Center. In early May it was off to Swanage for special training in cliff scaling with ropes, using grappling hooks trailing ropes propelled to the top of the cliff by rockets, and with extension ladders donated by the London Fire Department and carried in DUKWs (amphibious vehicles).

Lt. Walter Sidlowski, an engineer, marveled at the rangers. “My guys had always felt we were in good shape physically,” he remembered, “but watching the rangers using most of their time double-timing, with and without arms and equipment, push-ups and various other physical exercise whenever they were not doing something else, was cause for wonder.”

“I can assure you,” Lieutenant Eikner of the 2nd Ranger Battalion commented, “that when we went into battle after all this training there was no shaking of the knees or weeping or praying; we knew what we were getting into; we knew every one of us had volunteered for extra hazardous duty; we went into battle confident; of course we were tense when under fire, but we were intent on getting the job done. We were actually looking forward to accomplishing our mission.”

There were many other special units, including underwater demolition teams, midget-submarine crews to guide the incoming landing craft, tiny one-man airplanes with folded wings that could be brought in on rhino ferries (42-by-176-foot flat-bottomed pontoon barges with a capacity of forty vehicles, towed across the Channel by LSTs-landing ship, tanks-powered for the run into the beach by large outboard motors), put into operation on the beach, and used for naval gunfire spotting. The 743rd Tank Battalion, like the other DD tankers,* spent months learning how to maneuver their tanks in the Channel. The 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion (Colored) practiced setting up their balloons on the beach. The Cherokee code talkers (forty in all, twenty for Utah, twenty for Omaha) worked on their radios-they could speak in their own language, confident the Germans would never be able to translate.

Swimming tanks, called DD for Direct Drive

Overlord was planned as a direct frontal assault against a prepared enemy position. The German line, or Atlantic Wall, was continuous, so there was no possibility of outflanking it. The Germans had a manpower advantage and the benefit of land lines of communication, so Eisenhower’s forces could not hope to overwhelm them. Eisenhower’s advantages were control of the air and of the sea, which meant that Allied bombers and ships could pound the enemy emplacements and trenches on a scale even larger than the World War I artillery barrages. In addition, he was on the offensive, which meant that he knew where and when the battle would be fought. Even better, he had no defensive lines to maintain, so he could concentrate all his resources on a relatively narrow front in Normandy, while the Germans had to spread their resources along the coast.  The Allied bombers would play a key role. There was no dispute about this point; all agreed that on the eve of D-Day every bomber that could fly would participate in the attack on the Normandy coastal defenses. There was, however, intense debate over the role of the bombers in the two months preceding the invasion. Eisenhower persisted in his demand that the bombers come under SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) control, and that they then be used to implement the so-called Transportation Plan, designed to destroy the French railway system and thus hamper German mobility.  On March 6, Patton came to visit Eisenhower at his headquarters. His was shown into Eisenhower’s office while Eisenhower was on the telephone with British Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, his deputy supreme commander.  “Now, listen, Arthur,” Eisenhower was saying, “I am tired of dealing with a lot of prima donnas. By God, you tell that bunch that if they can’t get together and stop quarreling like children, I will tell the Prime Minister to get someone else to run this damn war. I’ll quit.” Patton took careful note of the tone of command in his voice; Eisenhower was obviously taking charge, and Patton could not help being impressed.

Marshall supported Eisenhower in the dispute; Churchill supported Air Vice Marshal Arthur Harris and Gen. Tooey Spaatz, who wanted to bomb industrial targets inside Germany, not bridges and railroads in France. Eisenhower then told Churchill that if his bosses refused to make anything less than a full commitment to Overlord by holding back the bombers, he would “simply have to go home.”

This extreme threat brought Churchill around. Tedder then prepared a list of more than seventy railroad targets in France and Belgium. The bombers went to work on the French railway system. By D-Day the Allies had dropped seventy-six thousand tons of bombs on rail centers, bridges, and open lines. The Seine River bridges west of Paris were virtually destroyed. Based on an index of 100 for January and February 1944, railway traffic dropped from 69 in mid-May to 38 by D-Day.

Eisenhower had dozens of major and hundreds of minor disagreements with Churchill and the CCS during the war, but the only occasion on which he threatened to resign was over the issue of command of the strategic air forces.  He was certain at the time that he was right, and he never saw any reason to question that belief. In 1968, in one of his last interviews, he told this author that he felt the greatest single contribution he personally made to the success of Overlord was his insistence on the Transportation Plan.  There were many aspects to Overlord in which Eisenhower’s role was more supervisory than direct, including such items as the artificial harbors, the specially designed tanks, assault techniques, the deception plan, the logistical problems involved in getting the men and equipment to the southern English ports, transporting them across the Channel, and supplying them in Normandy.  Overlord was the greatest amphibious assault in history, with the largest air and sea armadas ever assembled. It required, and got, painstakingly detailed planning, with thousands of men involved. SHAEF alone had a total strength of 16,312, of whom 2,829 were officers (1,600 Americans, 1,229 British). There were in addition the staffs of the U.S. and British armies, corps, and divisions, all devoting their entire energy to Overlord.

These vast bureaucracies did very well what they were created to do, but their limitations were obvious. They could suggest, plan, advise, investigate, but they could not act. Nor could any single member of the bureaucracies see the problem whole. Every individual involved had a specific given role to play and could concentrate on one set of problems; each staff officer was an expert struggling with his specialty. The officers could study and analyze a problem and make recommendations, but they could not decide and order.  Someone had to give the bureaucracies direction; someone had to be able to take all the information they gathered, make sense out of it, and impose order on it; someone had to make certain that each part meshed into the whole; someone had to decide; someone had to take the responsibility and act.  It all came down to Eisenhower. He was the funnel through which everything passed. Only his worries were infinite, only he carried the awesome burden of command. This position put enormous pressure on him, pressure that increased geometrically with each day that passed.

“Ike looks worn and tired,” Eisenhower aide Capt. Harry Butcher, USN, noted on May 12. “The strain is telling on him. He looks older now than at any time since I have been with him.” It would get worse as D-Day got closer and innumerable problems came up each day, many unsolved and some unsolvable. Still, Butcher felt that all would turn out all right, that Eisenhower could take it.  “Fortunately he has the happy faculty of bouncing back after a night of good sleep.”

Unfortunately, such nights were rare. Eisenhower’s tension and tiredness began to show in his face, especially when he was inspecting training exercises, watching the boys he would be sending against Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. The anxieties also showed in his letters to Mamie. Almost without exception, every letter he wrote her in the pre-Overlord period had a fantasy about his retirement plans when the war was over. The emphasis was on loafing in a warm climate.