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August 22 - September 30, 2017
Even during these short summer nights, the mandatory blackout, which in London in mid-May lasted from 10:30 P.M. to 5:22 A.M., was so intense that one writer found the city “profoundly dark, like a mental condition.”
GIs and streetwalkers often copulated standing up after wrapping themselves in a trench coat, a position known as “Marble Arch style.”
Behind him in the cockpit of the Model Room lay an immense plaster relief map of the Normandy coast where the river Seine spilled into the Atlantic. Thirty feet wide and set on a tilted platform visible from the back benches, this apparition depicted, in bright colors and on a scale of six inches to the mile, the rivers, villages, beaches, and uplands of what would become the world’s most famous battlefield. A brigadier wearing skid-proof socks and armed with a pointer stood at port arms, ready to indicate locales soon to achieve household notoriety: Cherbourg, St.-Lô, Caen, Omaha Beach.
“I consider it to be the duty of anyone who sees a flaw in the plan not to hesitate to say so,” Eisenhower said, his voice booming. “I have no sympathy with anyone, whatever his station, who will not brook criticism. We are here to get the best possible results.”
“War, I think, would tend to increase one’s eye for beauty, just as it should tend to make peace more endurable.”
Yet this day would be famous even before it dawned, in no small measure because of the gutful men who had come to war by air. Beset
Ahead lay the dark coastline where it was said that Norman pirates once paraded lanterns on the horns of oxen to imitate ships’ lights, pulling rings from the fingers of drowned passengers on vessels lured onto the reefs.
A pilot in a P-51 Mustang, peering down at the armada spread across the teeming sea, would recognize an ancient, filthy secret: “War in these conditions is, for a short span, magnificent.”
“Fear,” a Coast Guardsman on LCI-88 mused, “is a passion like any other passion.”
“Do not worry if you do not survive the assault, as we have plenty of backup troops who will just go in over you.”
Various deceptions also played out, including the deployment of three dozen balloons with radar reflectors to simulate invasion ships where none sailed. Near Calais, where a German radar site had deliberately been left functioning, Allied planes dumped metal confetti, known as Window, into the airstream to mimic the electronic signature of bomber formations sweeping toward northern France. West of Le Havre and Boulogne, planes flying meticulously calibrated oblong courses also scattered enough Window to simulate two large naval fleets, each covering two hundred square miles, steaming toward
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Low tide typically revealed four hundred yards of open strand, but six hours later that low-tide mark would lie more than twenty feet deep.
“How peaceful the world seems,” he had told his diary in late April, “yet what hatred there is against us.” If France proved “a conqueror’s paradise,” as one German general claimed, La Roche–Guyon was Rommel’s secluded corner of that heaven.
“We have come to the hour for which we were born,” a New York Times editorial declared on Wednesday morning. “We go forth to meet the supreme test of our arms and of our souls.”
Destiny had also sorted them, and would sort them again and again, until that hour for which they were born had passed.
When artillery rounds began to fall, he added, “You curl up into the fetal position except that your hands go down to protect your genitalia. This instinct to defend the place of generation against the forces of annihilation [is] universal.” For good measure he added: “Montgomery doesn’t protect his privates, but by Christ, I protect mine.”
at noon on June 9, a single Sherman Firefly destroyed five Panthers with five 17-pounder antitank rounds.
“The Germans thought we were fucking Russians. They did stupid things, and we killed those bastards in large numbers.”
De Gaulle reluctantly reboarded La Combattante, convinced that “France would live, for she was equal to her suffering,” while privately wondering, “How can one be expected to govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?”
Beset by rheumatism, an ailing heart, and what one general called “psychic resignation,” Rundstedt lived in the Parisian suburb of St.-Germain-en-Laye, where he slept late, read Karl May westerns, and addressed visitors in credible French or English.
Hitler waved away the proposal—“You must stay where you are”—then changed the subject. Great things were afoot, he said, magical things. New jet-propelled aircraft would soon dominate the skies. New sea mines, triggered by pressure waves from passing ships and almost impossible to sweep, had already holed a number of Allied ships. But the greatest secret weapon had just come into play. Until now, the Reich had no answer for the Anglo-American bombers devastating the Fatherland; a single German city might absorb more bombs in twenty-four hours than had fallen on Britain in all of 1943. That was
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Terror is broken by terror,” the Führer liked to say. “Everything else is nonsense.”
Mortar fragments caused 70 percent of the battle casualties among four U.S. infantry divisions in Normandy; radar that could backtrack the parabolic flight of rounds to the firing tubes would not be battle-ready for months.
“An order is but an aspiration, a hope that what has been directed will come true.”
Montgomery professed to spend one-third of his day “making sure I’m not sacked” and another third inspiriting the troops, which “leaves one-third of my time to defeat the enemy.”
When Eisenhower learned of the discussion he ended it—for the moment—with a tart note to Beetle Smith, his chief of staff: “I will not be party to so-called retaliation or use of gas. Let’s for God’s sake keep our eye on the ball and use some sense.”
The “little dots” fell and fell, and a few flaming aircraft fell too, but at length the formations made for home with what a Tommy called “a dreadful, unalterable dignity.”
Dawn, that pitiless revealer of exigencies,
Not least among the variables was a German reluctance to be annihilated.
Legend had it that upon returning from the hunt on a fateful morning in 1027, the seventeen-year-old heir to the Norman duchy, Robert the Magnificent, also known as Robert the Devil, spied a tanner’s beautiful daughter with her skirts hiked as she washed linen in a creek below the castle wall at Falaise. The subsequent assignation produced a son, William the Bastard, who survived various assassination plots to rule Normandy for more than half a century, to extend his reign into England in 1066, and to earn a new sobriquet.
Already this Mediterranean sojourn had revivified him, as the Middle Sea always did. Champagne lunches were followed by brandy, an hour’s nap, a bath, then a whiskey and soda, and more champagne and brandy at dinner before working until three A.M. (Churchill was no alcoholic, C. P. Snow once observed, because no alcoholic could drink that much.)
Truscott’s generalship stressed speed, vigor, violence, and clarity; staff papers that displeased him provoked the blunt, scrawled epithet “Bullshit.” Convinced that American soldiers were “hunters by instinct,” he urged his officers to “make every soldier go into every fight feeling like a hunter.”
“Arnhem was burning,” Frost later recalled. “It was as daylight in the streets, a terrible enameled, metallic daylight.… I never saw anything more beautiful than those burning buildings.”
“The infantryman considers this a bitter injustice.” One chaplain was reduced to suggesting that “sound mental health requires a satisfactory life-purpose and faith in a friendly universe.” On the battlefields of Europe in 1944, no such cosmology seemed likely.
“Sometimes I feel as if I’d never had a chance to live at all, but most of the time I feel as if I’d lived forever.”
In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school— Till our lives wore out.
“Nobody but an utter fool would do what I’m about to do,” he told subordinates. “That’s the reason why we’ll take them by surprise—they won’t be expecting us.” A staff officer close to Devers concluded, “He’s lonely as the devil.”
The defeat of Germany will leave Russia in a position of assured military dominance in eastern Europe and in the Middle East, [bringing] a world profoundly changed in respect to relative national military strengths, a change more comparable indeed with that occasioned by the fall of Rome than with any other change occurring during the succeeding fifteen hundred years.… The British Empire will emerge from the war having lost ground both economically and militarily.
“such canalized egotism, though maybe necessary to a successful general … makes a man an exacting companion.… Sometimes I wonder whether Monty’s undoubted genius does not occasionally bring him to the verge of mental unstability.”
Should 12th Army Group ever fall under Montgomery’s command, Bradley told Eisenhower, he would interpret the arrangement as “an indication that I had failed” and would ask to be relieved. Eisenhower’s confidant General Everett Hughes wrote his wife from Paris, “We are all so human that it is pitiful. We never grow up.”
“Genius is a will-o’-the-wisp if it lacks a solid foundation of perseverance and fanatical tenacity,” Hitler had recently told an aide.
“the easygoing manner of the young Americans incarnated liberty itself.”
“Everyone is a son-of-a-bitch to someone,” he told his staff by way of encouragement. “Be better sons-of-bitches than they are.”
“That’s the way he is, gay, loud, democratic, dynamic, thinking fast, acting fast, spreading confidence.”
Eisenhower thanked Montgomery for “your very fine telegram,” but the incessant friction with the field marshal kept him awake at night. “He’s just a little man,” he would say after the war. “He’s just as little inside as he is outside.”
“Imagine, asking us to withdraw our troops from Strasbourg. Could you believe it?” The contretemps, he said, revealed that “these Americans … equate politics with sentiment, the military art with logic.” As the happy news of salvation
The Battle of the Bulge had affirmed once again that war is never linear, but rather a chaotic, desultory enterprise of reversal and advance, blunder and élan, despair and elation.
Affixed to a wall in Montgomery’s caravan, amid the photos of Rommel and Rundstedt and the field marshal himself, was a copy of Sir Francis Drake’s meditation before his attack on Cádiz in 1587. “There must be a beginning of any great matter,” Drake had written, “but the continuing unto the end until it is thoroughly finished yields the true glory.” So too in this great matter, this struggle for civilization itself. The moment had come to seize the true glory. Part Four
Across the harbor, on the quarterdeck of H.M.S. Orion, another historical figure stood in a naval uniform, puffing a cigar and waving his yachtsman’s cap until the American president spotted Winston Churchill and waved back. An abrupt hush fell across the harbor. “It was one of those moments,” another witness wrote, “when all seems to stand still and one is conscious of a mark in history.”
Roosevelt said the United States now coveted nothing from postwar Germany. (U.S. officials privately estimated that whatever German assets survived the war would be worth at most $200 million.) Yet he also did not want Germans to have a higher living standard than the Soviet people. Churchill’s opposition was stouter; privately he considered Stalin’s reparations plan “madness.” Germany, like France, would be an important counterweight to Soviet power in Europe, and he was also reluctant to bankrupt a future trading partner.
