The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (24 page)

Amid all the carnage, exploding shells, smoke, and noise on Sword Beach, some of the chaps with Pvt. Harold Pickersgill claimed that they saw a most remarkable sight, an absolutely stunningly beautiful eighteen-year-old French girl who was wearing a Red Cross armband and who had ridden her bicycle down to the beaches to help with the wounded.

Pickersgill himself met a French girl inland later that day; she had high school English, he had high school French; they took one look at each other and fell in love; they were married at the end of the war and are still together today, living in the little village of Matheiu, midway between the Channel and Caen.  But he never believed the story of the Red Cross girl on the beach.  “Oh, you’re just hallucinating,” he protested to his buddies. “That just can’t be, the Germans wouldn’t have allowed civilians to come through their lines and we didn’t want any civilians messing about. It just didn’t happen.” But in 1964, when he was working as a shipping agent in Ouistreham for a British steamship line, Pickersgill met John Thornton, who introduced him to his wife, Jacqueline. Her maiden name was Noel; she had met Thornton on D plus four; they fell in love and married after the war; he too worked as a shipping agent in Ouistreham. It was Jacqueline who had been on the beach, and the story was true.  Pickersgill arranged an interview for me with Jacqueline for this book. “Well,” she said, “I was on the beach for a silly reason. My twin sister had been killed in an air raid a fortnight before in Caen, and she had given me a bathing costume for my birthday, and I had left it on the beach, because we were allowed about once a week to remove the fences so we could pass to go swimming, and I had left the costume in a small hut on the beach, and I just wanted to go and pick it up. I didn’t want anybody to take it.

“So I got on my bicycle and rode to the beach.”

I asked, “Didn’t the Germans try to stop you?”

“No, my Red Cross armband evidently made them think it was OK.” “There was quite a bit of activity,” she went on in a grand understatement, “and I saw a few dead bodies. And of course once I got to the beach I couldn’t go back, the English wouldn’t let me. They were whistling at me, you know. But mostly they were surprised to see me. I mean, it was a ridiculous thing to do.  So I stayed on the beach to help with the wounded. I didn’t go back to the house until two days after. There was a lot to do.” She changed bandages, helped haul wounded and dead out of the water, and otherwise made herself useful.  “I remember one thing horrible which made me realize how stupid I was. I was on top of the dune and there was a trunk, completely bare, no head on it. I never knew if it was a German or an Englishman. Just burned completely.” When asked what her most vivid lingering memory of D-Day was, she replied, “The sea with all the boats on it. All the boats and planes. It was something which you just can’t imagine if you have not seen it. It was boats, boats, boats and more boats, boats everywhere. If I had been a German, I would have looked at this, put my weapon down, and said, ‘That’s it. Finished.’ “ The British had put 29,000 men ashore at Sword. They had taken 630 casualties, inflicted far more, and had many prisoners in cages. Lovett’s Commandos had linked up with Howard’s Ox and Bucks. At no point had the British reached their far-too-optimistic D-Day objectives-they were still five kilometers short of the outskirts of Caen-but they had an enormous follow-up force waiting in the transport area in the Channel to come in as reinforcements on D plus one. The 21st Panzer Division had lost its best opportunity to hurl them into the sea, and the bulk of the German armor in France was still in place in the pas-de-Calais area, waiting for the real invasion.  Toward dusk Commander Curtis had his LCI make a run along the coast. “We set off on a westerly course parallel to the shore,” he later reported, “and we now had a grandstand view of the invasion beaches for which many would have paid thousands. Past Luc-sur-Mer, St.-Aubin, Bernieres, and Courseulles in the Canadian sector, past La Riviere lighthouse and Le Hamel and so to Arromanches.  It was all an unforgettable sight. Through the smoke and haze I could see craft after craft which had been driven onto the beach with relentless determination in order to give the troops as dry a landing as possible. Many of these craft were now helplessly stranded on obstacles and I could not help feeling a sense of pride at the spirit which their officers and crews had shown.  “We anchored off Arromanches and stood by for air attack that night. Already parts of the prefabricated Mulberry harbors were under tow from England to be placed in position off Arromanches and St.-Laurent. It was clear that the battle for the foot-hold in the British and Canadian sectors had gone well enough.”

10 -    The End of the Day

GENERAL EISENHOWER had been scheduled to give the graduation address at Kelly Field in Texas on December 12, 1941, but, as noted, he had been ordered to report to the War Department and left by train for Washington that morning. He had prepared his speech, but never got to deliver it. His first and second drafts are at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas.  The speech stands the test of time, and is especially appropriate when thinking of the junior officers on D-Day. The exemplary manner in which they had seized their opportunity, their dash, oldness, initiative, teamwork, and tactical skills were outstanding beyond praise. These were exactly the qualities the army had hoped for-and spent two years training its civilians-turned-soldiers to achieve.

Here is what Eisenhower intended to say:

You are ready, now, to take your places as efficient lieutenants in the Army of the United States and what we need-now-is efficient lieutenants.  The lieutenant is the commissioned officer closest to the enlisted man. The lieutenant is the only officer charged with direct training of the individual fighting man, all other officers are charged, normally, with training junior officers. On the lieutenant falls the burden of producing the small fighting units that, in the main, make up the army, no matter how large.  It is the lieutenant’s privilege to live close to his men, to be their example in conduct, in courage, and in devotion to duty. He is in position to learn them intimately, to help them when in trouble, often to keep them out of trouble. No matter how young he may be nor how old and hard boiled his men he must become their counsellor, their leader, their friend, their old-man. This opportunity-that of becoming a real leader of fighting men-is one that you are yet to master. It is the part of soldiering that challenges the best that’s in the officer, and it’s the one part in which he must not fail! To gain the respect, the esteem, the affection, the readiness to follow into danger, the unswerving and undying loyalty of the American enlisted man. That is the privilege and the opportunity of the lieutenant, and it is his high and almost divine duty. It is the challenge to his talents, his patriotism, his very soul!

In an earlier draft of this speech, Eisenhower had spoken to a broader theme:

In military dictatorships the required unity of effort is always insured by the authority resting in one man’s hands. Every individual must conform to the dictator’s orders, the alternative is the firing squad. So, from the beginning, the necessary mechanical coordination is automatic.  In democracy this result is achieved more slowly. The overwhelming majority of its citizens must first come to realize that a common danger threatens, that collective and individual self-preservation demands the submission of self-interest to the nation’s welfare. Because this realization and this unification come about so slowly, often only after disaster and loss of battles have rudely awakened a population, democracy is frequently condemned by unthinking critics as the least efficient form of government. Such criticism deals with the obvious factors only, it fails to throw into the balance the moral fibre, the staying qualities of a population. A Democracy resorts to war only when the vast majority of its people become convinced that there is no other way out. The crisis they have entered is of their own choosing, and in the long, cruel ordeal of war this difference is likely to become decisive. The unification and coordination achieved in this way is lasting. The people work together because they have a common belief in the justice of their cause and a common readiness to sacrifice for attainment of national success. It was in appreciation of the great strength arising from this truth that Woodrow Wilson said “The highest form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of a free people.”

How right Wilson was the Allies demonstrated on D-Day. The Germans’ tactical and strategic mistakes were serious, but their political blunders were the greatest of all. Their occupation policies in Poland and Russia precluded any enthusiasm whatsoever by theirOst battalions for their cause-even though nearly every one of the conscriptedOst troops hated the communists. Although German behavior in France was immeasurably better than in Poland and Russia, even in France the Germans failed to generate enthusiasm for their cause, and thus the Germans were unable to profit from the great potential of conquered France. What should have been an asset for Germany, the young men of France, became an asset for the Allies, either as saboteurs in the factories or as members of the Resistance.  What Hitler regarded as the greatest German assets-the leadership principle in the Third Reich, the unquestioning obedience expected of Wehrmacht personnel from field marshal down to private-all worked against the Germans on D-Day.  The truth is that despite individual acts of great bravery and the fanaticism of some Wehrmacht troops, the performance of the Wehrmacht’s high command, middle-ranking officers, and junior officers was just pathetic. The cause is simply put: They were afraid to take the initiative. They allowed themselves to be paralyzed by stupid orders coming from far away that bore no relation to the situation on the battlefield. Tank commanders who knew where the enemy was and how and when he should be attacked sat in their headquarters through the day, waiting for the high command in Berchtesgaden to tell them what to do.  In adjusting and reacting to unexpected situations, the contrast between men like Generals Roosevelt and Cota, Colonels Canham and Otway, Major Howard, Captain Dawson, Lieutenants Spaulding and Winters, and their German counterparts could not have been greater. The men fighting for democracy were able to make quick, on-site decisions and act on them; the men fighting for the totalitarian regime were not. Except for a captain here, a lieutenant there, not one German officer reacted appropriately to the challenge of D-Day.  As for the Allies, Pvt. Carl Weast of the rangers has an answer to the question of how they did it. In his oral history he related a story about his company commander, Capt. George Whittington.

“He was a hell of a man,” Weast said. “He led people. I recall the time a week or so after D-Day when we shot a cow and cut off some beef and were cooking it over a fire on sticks. Captain Whittington came up and threw a German boot next to the fire and said, ‘I’ll bet some son of a bitch misses that.’ We looked at the boot. The German’s leg was still inside of it. I’ll bet by God he did miss it.”

That same day Weast heard the executive officer of the 5th Ranger Battalion, Maj. Richard Sullivan, criticizing Captain Whittington for unnecessarily exposing himself.

“Whittington said to Sully, ‘You saw it happen back on that goddamn beach. Now you tell me how the hell you lead men from behind.’ “ Weast’s introduction to combat came on D-Day. He fought with the rangers through the next eleven months. He concluded that the Allied high command had been right to insist that “there be practically no experienced troops in the initial waves that hit that beach, because an experienced infantryman is a terrified infantryman, and they wanted guys like me who were more amazed than they were frozen with fear, because the longer you fight a war the more you figure your number’s coming up tomorrow, and it really gets to be God-awful.” Weast made a final point: “In war, the best rank is either private or colonel or better, but those ranks in between, hey, those people have got to be leaders.” At Omaha Beach they were.

At the end of the day Lt. John Reville of F Company, 5th Ranger Battalion, was on top of the bluff at Omaha. As the light faded he called his runner, Pvt. Rex Low, pointed out to the six thousand vessels in the Channel, and said, “Rex, take a look at this. You’ll never see a sight like this again in your life.” Pvt. Robert Zafft, a twenty-year-old infantryman in the 115th Regiment, 29th Division, Omaha Beach, put his feelings and experience this way: “I made it up the hill, I made it all the way to where the Germans had stopped us for the night, and I guess I made it up the hill of manhood.” Pvt. Felix Branham was a member of K Company, 116th Infantry, the regiment that took the heaviest casualties of all the Allied regiments on D-Day. “I have gone through lots of tragedies since D-Day,” he concluded his oral history. “But to me, D-Day will live with me till the day I die, and I’ll take it to heaven with me. It was the longest, most miserable, horrible day that I or anyone else ever went through.

“I would not take a million dollars for my experiences, but I surely wouldn’t want to go through that again for a million dollars.” Sgt. John Ellery, 16th Regiment, 1st Division, Easy Red sector of Omaha, recalled: “The first night in France I spent in a ditch beside a hedgerow wrapped in a damp shelter-half and thoroughly exhausted. But I felt elated. It had been the greatest experience of my life. I was ten feet tall. No matter what happened, I had made it off the beach and reached the high ground. I was king of the hill, at least in my own mind, for a moment. My contribution to the heroic tradition of the United States Army might have been the smallest achievement in the history of courage, but at least, for a time, I had walked in the company of very brave men.”

Adm. Bertram Ramsay ended his June 6 diary with this entry: “We have still to establish ourselves on land. The navy has done its part well. News continued satisfactory throughout the day from E.T.F. [Eastern Task Force, the British beaches] and good progress was made. Very little news was rec[eived] from W.T.F.  [Western Task Forces, the American beaches] & anxiety exists as to the position on shore.