D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (28 page)

"He thought a moment and said, 'You have the operational command of all forces, but you are not responsible administratively for the makeup of the crews.'

"And I said, 'Yes, that's right.'

"He said, 'Well, then I can sign on as a member of the crew of one of His Majesty's ships, and there's nothing you can do about it.'

"I said, 'That's correct. But, Prime Minister, you will make my burden a lot heavier if you do it.' "

Churchill said he was going to do it anyway. Eisenhower had his chief of staff, General Smith, call King George VI to explain the problem. The king told Smith, "You boys leave Winston to me." He called Churchill to say, "Well, as long as you feel that it is desirable to go along, I think it is my duty to go along with you." Churchill gave up.
⁴

With De Gaulle, it was Eisenhower asking the favor. On June 3, Churchill brought De Gaulle to Southwick House, where Eisenhower gave him a briefing on Overlord. This was the first De Gaulle knew of the plan, and he subjected Eisenhower to an hour-long lecture on what he was doing wrong; Eisenhower replied that he wished he had benefited from De Gaulle's generalship earlier but now it was too late. Then Eisenhower showed him a copy of a speech he would be making to the French people on D-Day, urging Frenchmen to "carry out my orders."

He asked De Gaulle to make a follow-up broadcast urging his countrymen to accept the SHAEF-printed francs. De Gaulle said
non.
The French people should obey him, not SHAEF; only the French government, of which he was president, had the right to issue currency. Eisenhower pleaded with him, to no avail. The whole thing was, in Eisenhower's words, "a rather sorry mess."
⁵

When Churchill and De Gaulle left, Eisenhower wrote a memorandum for his diary, which he entitled "Worries of a Commander." At the top of the list was De Gaulle, and he wrote three paragraphs on the difficulties of dealing with the French. Next came weather. He was about to go to a weather conference. "My tentative thought," he wrote, "is that the desirability for getting started on the next favorable tide is so great and the uncertainty of the weather is such that we could never anticipate really perfect weather coincident with proper tidal conditions, that we must go unless there is a real and verv serious deterioration in the weather."

Eisenhower, his principal subordinates, and all the officers and men of the AEF had spent months training, planning, preparing for this moment. "The mighty host," in Eisenhower's words, "was tense as a coiled spring," ready for "the moment when its energy should be released and it would vault the English Channel."
⁷
He was determined to go if at all possible.

On the morning of June 3, the LCTs in the Dart River started moving out. Hundreds of British citizens lined the shore, waving good-bye and good luck. Ens. Edwin Gale on LCT 853, a part of Flotilla 17, was twenty years old, a "ninety-day wonder." His skipper turned to Gale and said, "Edwin, you know we may not do anything as worthwhile as this again in our lives. It is a fine thing to be here."
⁸

Lt. Dean Rockwell, the former high-school football coach, commanded a flotilla of sixteen LCTs. Each LCT was carrying four DD tanks, scheduled to hit the beach in front of the first wave of infantry, so he was one of the first to move out into the Channel. His LCTs began departing Weymouth late on June 3. It was soon "pitch black, no lights, no nothing. And to say pandemonium reigned is an understatement, because we not only had LCTs but picket boats and escort craft and all kinds of ships trying to sort themselves out." Radio silence prevailed, the ships could not use blinker lights, "we could not do anything but curse and swear until the whole thing got sorted out."
⁹

Around the landing ships and craft, the warships circled to form up their own convoys. Storekeeper 2/C Homer Carey on LCT 505 remembered the sight of two British cruisers "in the soft twilight, racing past us headed south for the coast of France. Their shapely bows cut the water and passed us as if we were standing still. Beautiful—like two greyhounds. It was a comfort to know that they were on our side."
¹

The 2nd Battalion of the 116th Regiment was on the transport
Thomas Jefferson.
The men knew the ship well, having made two practice landings from her. Pvt. Harry Parley noted that this time, however, "humor was infrequent and forced. My thoughts were of home and family and, of course, what we were getting into. It saddened me to think of what would happen to some of my fellow GIs, whom I had grown to love." His heart went out especially to Lieutenant Ferguson, who had initiated a discussion about philosophies of death with Parley. "I did not envy him his position," Parley said. "He had come to know the men quite intimately as a result of having had to read and censor our outgoing mail. The loss of any of his men would be a twofold tragedy for him."

Private Parley carried an eighty-four-pound flamethrower, plus a pistol, shovel, life belt, raincoat, canteen, a block of dynamite, rations, and three cartons of cigarettes. He was worried about

keeping up with his assault team on the dash across the beach. He scared the hell out of his buddies by using a trick he had just learned. He could set off a small flame at the mouth of his flamethrower, which would produce the same hissing sound as when the weapon was actually being fired, without triggering the propelling mechanism. Standing on the deck of the
Thomas Jefferson,
he calmly used the flamethrower to light a cigarette, sending a score or more of men scurrying in every direction.
ⁿ

Pvt. George Roach of Company A, 116th, was saying his rosary. He was worried about casualties too, "because we were going to be in the first wave and we figured the chances of our survival were very slim." More than half the men in his company came from the same town, Bedford, Virginia. Most of the regiment came from southwestern Virginia.
¹²

Sgt. Joe Pilck of the 16th Regiment, 1st Division, was on the transport
Samuel P. Chase.
"While we were riding around in the Channel," he recalled, "we were glad that this was the real thing. Not that we wanted to do it, but we knew it had to be done so we wanted to get it over with."
¹³

The weather, which had been beautiful—clear skies, little wind—for the first three days of June, began to deteriorate. Clouds formed and began to lower, the wind came up, there was a smell of rain in the air. On his LCT, Cpl. Robert Miller was miserable. It started to drizzle, it was cold. He was on the open deck without shelter. The waves kicked up and started rocking his LCT. The steel deck was too slippery to lie down on, so he tried to catch some sleep on the canvas covering atop the trucks, but the wind and rain and rocking increased, so he gave it up.
¹⁴

Pvt. Henry Gerald of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles was also on an LCT. At daylight, June 4, as the craft moved out into the Channel, he joined his mates in the crew's quarters for a briefing from his platoon leader. The LCT would "go up about twenty feet and then drop out from underneath us. Those who looked green yesterday were ghastly this morning." The deck was awash in vomit. Gerald was congratulating himself on not getting seasick when "a chap across from me began to heave up into his puke bag. He had an upper plate that came out and disappeared into the bag as he was being sick. That wasn't so bad until he reached into the bag, retrieved the plate, and popped it back into his mouth." At that sight, Gerald lost his breakfast.
¹⁵

In the Channel, the drizzle began to turn into a cold, penetrating rain. Most of the men on the LCIs and LCTs had no shelter. The decks were slippery, the craft rocking in the choppy water. Everyone was wet and miserable. Eisenhower smelled victory in the air, but to the men of the AEF whose transports and landing craft had left harbor, the smell in the air was vomit.

During the first days of June, Eisenhower and his principal subordinates had held twice-daily meetings with the SHAEF Me-teorologic Committee, at 0930 and 1600. Group Captain J. M. Stagg, twenty-eight years old and described by Eisenhower as a "dour but canny Scot,"
¹⁶
made the weather predictions, then answered questions. Eisenhower had been privately meeting with Stagg for a month to hear his predictions so he could have some sense of the basis on which Stagg made them and how good he was—knowing that, as he said, "The weather in this country is practically unpredictable."
¹⁷

The final weather conference was scheduled for 0400, June 4, even as more ships sailed out of their harbors and those already at sea began to form up into convoys. Stagg had bad news. A high-pressure system was moving out, a low coming in. The weather on June 5 would be overcast and stormy, with a cloud base of 500 feet to 0 and Force-5 winds. Worse, the situation was deteriorating so rapidly that forecasting more than twenty-four hours in advance was highly undependable.

Eisenhower asked his subordinates for their views. Montgomery wanted to go. Tedder and Leigh-Mallory wanted a postponement. Ramsay said the navy could do its part but warned that the accuracy of the naval bombardment would be badly reduced by poor visibility and high seas and that the Higgins boats would be hard to control.

Eisenhower remarked that Overlord was being launched with ground forces that were not overwhelmingly powerful. The operation was feasible only because of Allied air superiority. Without that advantage, the invasion was too risky. He asked if anyone present disagreed. No one did. Eisenhower decided to postpone for at least one day, hoping for better conditions on June 6. At 0600 hours he gave his order to put everything on hold.

At just about that moment, Rommel began his long journey east, away from the coast, to see his wife and his fuhrer. As

he departed, in a light drizzle, he remarked, "There's not going to
be
an invasion. And if there is, then they won't even get off the beaches!"
¹⁸

The order to postpone went out to the Allied convoys, which were under strict radio silence, in a variety of ways. Lt. Benjamin Frans, USN, was gunnery officer on the destroyer
Baldwin.
The
Baldwin
was still in Portland when the word came down. She set sail at flank speed to catch up with the leading convoys. When she did, the executive officer called over a bullhorn to the skippers of the transports and landing craft, "The operation has been postponed. Return to base."
Baldwin
caught up to the minesweeper in the van when it was within fifty kilometers of the French coast.
¹⁹

Lieutenant Rockwell was headed toward his rendezvous point when a picket boat came alongside LCT 535 and handed him a message: "Post Mike One." That meant turn around and go back to harbor. "So we all turn around. Hundreds and hundreds of ships of various sizes." About midday, he got back to Weymouth.

For Rockwell, the postponement "was a blessing in disguise. There had been some collisions during the night. Delicate landing and launching gear was damaged, engines needed replacing or servicing."
²⁰
Rockwell's own LCT 535 needed a new engine. He managed to get it in place before nightfall.

Ens. Sam Grundfast commanded LCT 607. He got the order to abort by flag signal. "Imagine the confusion, those hundreds of landing craft trying to get into Portsmouth harbor. We were jammed in. You could walk across that vast harbor going from boat to boat."
²¹
Making the sight even more vivid, every craft and ship had a barrage balloon waving in the wind overhead. The balloons were connected to the vessels by steel cables. Their purpose was to keep the Luftwaffe from making low-level passes at the fleet.

For the troops, June 4 was a terrible day. The men of the 4th Infantry Division spent it at sea—there was not time to go all the way back to Devonshire if Eisenhower decided on a June 6 landing. The transports and landing craft circled off the Isle of Wight. Waves broke over the sides, rain came down. The men were combat dressed with nowhere to go. No one wanted to play craps or poker or read a book or listen to another briefing. It was just misery.

In the harbors, or up the rivers, where the ships and craft

could drop anchor or tie up to one another, the men were not allowed off their vessels. They sat, cursed, waited. "We bitched up a storm," Private Branham of the 116th Regiment recalled, "because we wanted to go. We wanted to go. This sounds crazy, but we had come this far, we'd been sitting in England so long, we wanted to get this thing over with and get the hell home."
²²

"The waiting for history to be made was most difficult," Pvt. Clair Galdonik recalled. "I spent much time in prayer. Being cooped up made it worse. Like everyone else, I was seasick and the stench of vomit permeated our craft."
²³

The airborne troops had their feet on solid ground and were under cover from the rain, but they too were unhappy. They had got ready, made their last weapons check, packed their equipment, when word came down that the mission was off. Major Howard wrote in his diary: "The weather's broken—what cruel luck. I'm more downhearted than I dare show. Wind and rain, how long will it last? The longer it goes on, the more prepared the Huns will be, the greater the chance of obstacles on the L[anding]Z[one]. Please God it'll clear up tomorrow."
²⁴

Some of the enlisted men in Howard's company went to the movies. They saw
Stormy Weather
with Lena Home and Fats Waller. The officers gathered in Lt. David Wood's room and polished off two bottles of whiskey. Twice Lt. Den Brotheridge, commanding the first platoon of D Company, fell into a depressed mood. Wood could hear him reciting a poem that began "If I should die. . . ,"
²⁵