Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (22 page)

The ocean voyage was memorable, indeed unforgettable, for virtually all of them, though in quite different ways. Shipping remained an enormous problem for the Allies, and in recognition of that Churchill offered the use of “the Queens”—Britain’s large passenger steamers, including the
Queen Mary
and the
Queen Elizabeth
. These magnificent ships, one completed in 1936, the other in 1940, had been designed to carry two thousand passengers,
cosseted by a crew of just under a thousand, in hotel-style luxury. Refitted for war use, they carried far more men in far less comfort. On early trips they carried six thousand men per crossing. That was soon increased to ten thousand, and then to fifteen thousand, which meant that the accommodations were Spartan indeed. To make room for everyone, the crew drained the swimming pools and used it as deck space. The soldiers slept in canvas bunks attached to metal frames that were stacked four deep along the bulkheads. Worse, they were “double-bunked,” or what was sometimes called “hot bunking,” which meant that a soldier got possession of a sleeping space for a twelve-hour period, then had to give it up to another man for the next twelve hours. The officers got cabins, though instead of the four people the cabins had been designed to accommodate, each now housed sixteen to twenty. Often half of them slept in the cabin while the others made do in the passageways rolled up in blankets; the next night they switched places. The heat and the stale air led some to carry their blanket up to the forward deck to sleep in the chill weather topside. Others slept on the mess tables. In spite of that, those assigned to one of the “Queens” counted themselves lucky, because the ships were fast—at twenty-five knots, they were too fast for a German U-boat to track them. That meant they could sail singly, without escort, and cross the Atlantic in five days.
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Most Americans came over in much slower troop transports that had to sail as part of a convoy, moving at the speed of the slowest ship—generally at ten knots or less. That not only made them more vulnerable to the U-boats but also meant spending three weeks or more at sea. A typical troop convoy consisted of between twenty and thirty transport ships organized into eight, nine, or ten columns of three or four ships each, constituting a formation that might be five or six miles wide. The ships followed one another at relatively close intervals—a thousand yards or less. Even at such close quarters, it was difficult to maintain station blacked out at night or in the North Atlantic fog, when it became almost impossible for an officer of the deck to see the ship directly in front of him. Foghorns sounding from several directions at once provided an imperfect guide to officers who sought to stay in formation while avoiding a collision. In such circumstances, ships would deploy what was called a “sea sled,” a device towed
astern that had a scoop on the bottom and a spout at the top. The high plume of water it generated provided a visual guide to the officer of the deck on the next ship in column.
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Troop convoys sailed with an especially heavy escort, often consisting of a U.S. Navy cruiser as the escort flagship, plus six to eight destroyers. By 1943, many troop convoys also included an escort aircraft carrier, a relatively new type of vessel that was particularly effective against the U-boat threat. Even so, the convoys executed a zigzag course, periodically changing their heading all at once, a maneuver that inevitably produced temporary confusion and disorder until the skippers managed to regain their assigned positions in the convoy pattern. By now, the Allies had secured the upper hand in the U-boat war, due in part to the construction of more than 260 new American escort destroyers, as well as the highly secret (Ultra) decrypts of German radio messages that allowed the code breakers to give convoys advance notice of where danger lurked. That made the crossings much safer, if not necessarily more comfortable. In the whole of the war, though the Germans sank nearly twenty-eight hundred Allied ships, not one troopship escorted by U.S. Navy ships was ever lost.
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The troopships were crewed by civilians in the merchant marine. Only the gun crews who manned the 3- or 5-inch gun for use against submarines and the 20 mm anti-aircraft guns were in the U.S. Navy. It was tough duty. The soldiers had to endure only one crossing, but the ships’ crews remained on board for the round trip, and then repeated the journey again and again. Still, because the merchant sailors were paid more than either the soldiers or the Navy men, there was some inevitable grousing and petty rivalry. The Army ran the galley (kitchen) and the sick bay (hospital). For the soldiers, this was the worst of all possible worlds: despite being consigned to Neptune’s element, they never enjoyed the rumored ambrosia of Navy chow and had to make do with Army rations.

Food was a particular concern for those who sailed on British ships such as the “Queens.” Of course, the GIs complained about food as a matter of
habit, but on British ships they had more justification than usual. As a rule, they were served two meals a day in six sittings to accommodate the large numbers. Even then, they had to eat standing up, for there was not enough room for tables and chairs. Breakfast generally consisted of a bowl of sticky oatmeal, sometimes with prunes in it. When it wasn’t oatmeal, they might be served kippered herring or kidney stew. Such fare would have met with groans even ashore, but it was particularly discouraging at sea. As one GI asked rhetorically: “Can you imagine anything worse than kippered herring for breakfast after a rough night at sea?” Dinner was often stewed mutton and cabbage. It was edible, but endlessly repetitive. As a result, most of the men who made the crossing lost weight, some as much as twenty to thirty pounds.
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Men also wasted away due to seasickness. The slow convoys were especially likely to induce
mal de mer
, for the slow speed made the troopships liable to heavy rolling, and the zigzag course only added to the sense of instability. Not everyone suffered from seasickness, and those who were immune sometimes made fun of those who suffered. But it was no joke. Men who could get out to the open deck lined the rails shoulder to shoulder and threw up into the rolling and pitching sea. Those below deck threw up into their helmets if they could get to them in time, or, as one recalled, “they would hang over the side of their bunks and throw up onto everybody’s bunk below them.” It was more than annoying; many suffered so horribly they prayed for death. And some found it. On virtually every crossing, men who could stand it no longer threw themselves over the side or shot themselves with their own rifles. This became common enough that when a soldier became badly ill, his carbine was taken away. At least one man died of internal hemorrhaging from dry heaving for five days.
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The only “entertainment” on board consisted of occasional lectures about what to expect when they arrived, supplemented by a few pamphlets. A movie,
Welcome to Britain
, narrated by Burgess Meredith, consisted of lessons in what
not
to do. It portrayed a loud, noisy, drunken American soldier insulting British food and British valor, making fun of Scottish kilts, and, when invited into a British family’s home, eating up its entire rations for a month. A pamphlet carried a similar message. “Be
friendly but don’t intrude,” it advised. “Don’t make fun of British speech or accents.” One rule that the GIs found particularly hard to follow was “Don’t criticise the food, beer, or cigarettes.” A relatively easy one was “Never criticise the King or Queen.”
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The first Americans to arrive in the British Isles were those who had been sent to Ulster, the six counties of Northern Ireland, only weeks after Pearl Harbor. They stepped ashore in Belfast on January 26, 1942, to be welcomed by a crowd of dignitaries and a band from the Royal Ulster Rifles playing its version of “The Star Spangled Banner.” The government of the Republic of Ireland, however, was far less enthralled. Irish president Eamon de Valera portrayed the arrival of the Americans in Ulster as an “invasion” and their occupation as a violation of national self-determination. There were few serious incidents, however, and by the end of 1943 there were more than sixty-five thousand American GIs in Northern Ireland. By mid-1944 their numbers had grown to nearly seventy-four thousand.
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A far larger number of Americans—more than a million of them—arrived in England in the aftermath of the decisions at Washington and Quebec in 1943, most of them disembarking at various ports on the west coast of Britain between Bristol and Liverpool. For many of these new arrivals, the first reaction was how impossibly green everything was, which began to make sense when they realized how frequently it rained. For others, the dominant impression was the physical evidence of the consequences of war. Those who arrived in Liverpool could count the hulks of sunken ships littering the harbor. When his transport docked at Avonmouth, near Bristol, one GI recalled seeing his “first look at bomb damage,” all the more impressive because at least some of it was apparently quite recent. He and his fellow soldiers suddenly appreciated that death could come from the sky at any moment, and with that understanding, “fear ran through the ship like a shot.” Other GIs had a quite different reaction. Having read about the Blitz and seen movie newsreels depicting the damage it wrought, they had concluded that there were probably not two bricks still standing on top of each other in all of Britain. Yet here were whole streets that were perfectly intact, with pedestrians and cyclists (though few automobile drivers) going about their business.
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Those Americans who traveled in one of the slow convoys—which was most of them—were happy enough to set foot on solid ground again, though some found it surprisingly difficult. As they moved down the gangplank and stepped onto the soil of Britain, they “rolled and staggered” as if drunk, unable to readjust to walking on a platform that didn’t pitch and roll. After disembarking and being jostled into formation, they were marched off to the local train station. Many were astonished by the miniature (to American eyes) trains whose passenger coaches were divided into small closed compartments that ran down one side of the car. Some asked where the club car was, and were disappointed to be told that there was none. The GIs never knew where they were during their travel within England because all the identifying signs in the train stations had been removed to confuse the Germans in case of an invasion. Some GIs took the trains all the way south to the Channel coast, into Plymouth or Portsmouth, where the bomb damage was more extensive. On one train filled with newly arrived Americans, there had been a lot of joking and laughing during the trip south until the train slowed down to enter a city. The GIs then saw “row after row, street after street of gutted two-story houses,” and the entire train suddenly became completely silent.
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Other trains discharged their human cargo at anonymous campsites well away from the coast. Those who arrived in the summer of 1943 often found themselves assigned to vacated British barracks: two-story brick Victorianera cavalry barracks with one toilet per floor. One set of barracks even dated back to the Napoleonic era. After these were filled, GIs were more likely to be sent to newly constructed campsites on the Salisbury Plain in south-central England, best known to Americans as the site of Stonehenge. After the men piled out of the trucks, they were handed sandwiches and coffee and sent off to stow their gear. “We were given one horse blanket and a folding cot,” one veteran recalled, “and pointed to the sleeping quarters.”
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The man charged with supervising the logistical arrangements for this influx was Major General John Clifford Hodges Lee, who ran the Services of Supply (SOS) command. Lee was a humorless, self-centered, and uncompromising martinet who wore his Old Testament religiosity on his sleeve. Eisenhower called him a “modern Cromwell”; Patton, with less
restraint, called him “a pompous little son-of-a-bitch.” Lee was also a fawning admirer of the British aristocracy and enjoyed socializing with titled peers and traveling in high style with a private train and a fleet of cars. Before the war was over, Eisenhower would feel compelled to caution him about his extravagance lest it “give the impression of [a] disregard for public expenditures.” He was known by his initials as J. C. H. Lee, and many on his staff and others who worked for him whispered among themselves that the initials actually stood for “Jesus Christ Himself.”
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But he got things done. Lee and his staff crafted the orders that led to the construction of campsites, warehouses, airfields, and supply depots that made the American occupation of southern England possible. American equipment and supplies soon began filling up some twenty million square feet of warehouse space and then overflowed into another forty-three million square feet of open storage. The preparation of these facilities exposed one of several cultural differences between the two English-speaking societies. British work crews first ensured that all the paperwork was properly completed, that every level of the command had signed off on the work order, then prepared blueprints and carefully surveyed the ground before setting to work. The Americans, by contrast, stormed onto a site and immediately set the dirt flying. Witnessing these different approaches, Morgan later offered this example of a typical American response to being assigned a construction job: “Yes sir … 100 percent. You bet. As for your ‘skedule,’ it’s a cinch … This is right up our alley. Why, this little outfit of mine, when we were ‘way back in Texas’ …” and so on.
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In preparing quarters for the arriving GIs, both British and American work teams relied principally on what were known as Nissen huts: semi-cylindrical corrugated steel barns that were the British equivalent of Quonset huts, but much smaller. Thirty-six feet long (about the length of a Higgins boat), they housed eighteen to twenty GIs in Spartan discomfort, with no plumbing or electricity and only an iron stove at one end to provide heat. A camp designed to hold a thousand men required 123 such buildings, half of them barracks, plus office space, a guardhouse, garages, kitchen, and storage buildings. It took forty acres to accommodate such a camp, and simple arithmetic reveals that to house a million men occupied 40,000
acres of farmland or grazing land in a country where food was already scarce. Locals were astonished by the speed in which farmland was transformed into fully functioning camps. “One evening there had been empty fields,” a farmer recalled, “the next morning there were mushroom towns of bell-tents, lorry parks, jeep lines, and field kitchens.”
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