D-Day, H-Hour

The Allied landings on the coast of Normandy on June 6, 1944, have assumed legendary status in the annals of World War II. But in overly romanticizing D-Day, Olivier Wieviorka argues, we have lost sight of the full picture. Normandy: The Landings to the Liberation of Paris offers a balanced, complete account that reveals the successes and weaknesses of the titanic enterprise. D-Day, Wieviorka notes, was a striking accomplishment, but it was war, violent and cruel. Errors, desertions, rivalries, psychological trauma, self-serving motives, thefts, and rapes were all part of the story. Rather than diminishing the Allied achievement, this candid book underscores the price of victory and acknowledges the British, American, and Canadian soldiers who dashed onto the Normandy beaches not as demigods, but as young men. Here is a brief excerpt from the book looking at when the soldiers embarked for the beaches of Normandy.

While the Germans became lost in conjecture, the Allies were busy refining their plans. On 8 May 1944 Eisenhower pushed. back the date of the assault, set for 1 June, four days, to 5 June. The preparations for the landing now entered their final phase.

By early June, thirty-nine divisions were stationed in the United Kingdom. Although only a fraction of this force would take part in the first two days of the operation, the number of troops needing to be ferried across the Channel was nonetheless considerable. The systematic loading of equipment and supplies had begun the first week of May. Ports were assigned specific tasks: Fowey handled munitions, Talbot gasoline. By the evening of 10 May, 128 coasters and other ships had already been loaded. More important, matériel had reached its various destinations in Great Britain on time and in good condition. The movement of troops began concurrently in three phases: assembly, buildup, and embarkation. The men were directed first toward marshaling areas. In the southwest of England, Torquay received 29,200 men and 4,325 vehicles, and Brixham 11,450 and 1,718.3 Many of the people in the towns along the assembly route turned out to wish the soldiers well. “The convoys of fresh troops rattled down the streets of the outer suburbs of London, and when they stopped at appointed places, women and girls rushed up with jugs, even pails of tea, thrust packets of cigarettes into the boys’ hands, joked a while, and cheered as they drew away; a Dunkirk in reverse.” Others were less demonstrative: “Once the invasion troops had departed for Normandy, there was consternation among the prostitutes. The pubs where they used to meet clients were suddenly empty. The George, a pub near the BBC which American officers had made their own, ever after was referred to as The Whore’s Lament.”

Once the soldiers had arrived in the marshaling area, their equipment was checked and double-checked, particular care being taken to ensure that everything was waterproof. The men were then issued a forty-eight hours’ supply of rations, two hundred francs, ten seasickness pills, and water purification tablets. The ever-farsighted quartermasters, resigned to human frailty, did not omit to equip the men with condoms, despite having been solemnly instructed to make “unremitting efforts to control prostitution.” Evidently venereal disease was more dreaded than epidemic infections arising from combat injury.

To boost morale, the troops’ regular diet was supplemented with white bread, fresh meat, fruit cocktail, even ice cream in some cases. Discipline was relaxed, and certain units were granted the privilege of skipping breakfast in order to get more sleep. Psychiatrists were assigned to each marshaling area in case men broke under the strain of waiting; few did, however, and the underemployed specialists had time to instruct their fellow physicians in the rudiments of their art. Sensibly enough, the soldiers were confined to quarters, but some went over the wall to see loved ones one last time — among them Corporal “Topper” Brown of the Fifth Royal Tank Regiment, who escaped his camp near Felixstowe to visit family in Tonbridge, Kent, 120 miles away.

After a few days of this preferential treatment, the troops were distributed among the various assault formations, organized according to assigned points of departure. They then converged on nineteen boarding stations, where they were herded into the more comfortable LSTs first, then onto the other ships (in a second phase, two or three hours before going ashore, they were to be transferred to smaller landing boats). Once the men were aboard, officers briefed them about their mission, without revealing the secret of either the day or the place of the attack. For the British, this first phase began on 26 May. The Americans followed, on 30 May for Force “U” (Utah), 31 May for Force “O” (Omaha), and 1 June for Force “B” (reinforcements for Omaha). By 3 June the boarding process was complete.

The troops then began to ponder what lay ahead. Although the food was still good, physical conditions were difficult, owing to overcrowding on the ships’ decks and the pestilential odor of diesel fuel mixed with the stench of vomit, many of the men having gotten a head start on seasickness. Most of all, the level of tension had been ratcheted up several notches. “We were very, very cold,” recalled the American officer Ralph Ingersoll, waiting to set off for Utah, “and I could not tell whether the cold came from within or without. We had been on the landing craft for three days and two nights and fear came in so many different forms we were very bored with it and not even curious about the symptoms now.” Some drew strength from religious faith — prayer services were particularly well attended. Others found escape in reading or playing cards, sometimes for money. Officers turned a blind eye.

In the case of the airborne divisions, the three stages of assembly, buildup, and embarkation were collapsed into one. Units stationed in barracks stayed put, cut off from the world after 30 May; troops that had been lodged in private local homes were recalled to temporary camps set up on the airfields from which they would be leaving. Some officers sought to calm their nerves by screening old films; others, like Lieutenant Colonel Wolverton of the U.S. 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and Colonel Howard Johnson of the 501st, preferred to urge their men on with impassioned speeches. Many of the paratroopers shaved their heads in the manner of Iroquois warriors and covered themselves with red and white war paint. For everyone, it was a trying time of seemingly endless waiting.

The weather conditions worsened, leading the commanders on 4 June to consider delaying the operation scheduled for the next day. “Admiral Ramsay thought that the mechanics of landing could be handled, but agreed with the estimate of the difficulty in adjusting gunfire. His position was mainly neutral. General Montgomery, properly concerned with the great disadvantages of delay, believed that we should go. Tedder disagreed.” After having weighed the pros and cons, Eisenhower decided, at 4:15 on the morning of the fourth, to call off the landing. Supreme Headquarters hastily summoned home the convoys heading for Utah and dispatched two destroyers and a Walrus seaplane to call back 139 ships — most of them transporting tanks — that had not responded to the order.

Later that day, the chief meteorologist, Group Captain James Martin Stagg, announced that a lull of thirty-six hours was probable. Should they take a chance and go ahead? The tide table was such that if they canceled the operation, they would have to wait until 19 June — a delay that would in turn require them either to keep the men on board their ships for another two weeks or to go through boarding procedures all over again. Eisenhower was inclined to risk everything rather than wait any longer. The burden on his shoulders can scarcely be imagined. After receiving confirmation of Stagg’s forecast on the morning of 5 June and considering the matter in silence for several minutes, he finally made up his mind at 4:30 a.m.: “O.K., let’s go.” “No one present disagreed,” Eisenhower later recalled, “and there was a definite brightening of faces as, without a further word, each went off to his respective post of duty to flash out to his command the messages that would set the whole host in motion.” Before the great departure, the Allied supreme commander visited British troops near his advance headquarters at Portsmouth and then after dinner went to Welford to bid farewell to the men of the 101st Airborne Division before they took off for the Cotentin. He remained at the base until the last plane took off, then went back to headquarters well after midnight to get a few hours’ rest.