Home : World War II : Great Crusade :D-Day, June 6, 1944
What you're going to do today will be a prayer in itself. With those words, Lt. Joseph Lacy, chaplain to the 2nd and 5th U.S. Ranger Battalions, told his men that he would take over the praying as the units waited to go ashore on D-Day. It wasn't a sure thing. The German defenses meant the Allied landing troops would have that much more open beach to cover, exposed to German fire. Also, some of Eisenhower's advisers had warned him that the paratroopers probably would be slaughtered. Ike felt their mission was vital, but privately he was worried sick. At the time, with so much at stake, the Allies refused to think about failure. They went into Normandy with no plans for getting back out if things went wrong. But ever since, military historians have dabbled in speculation about a D-Day gone awry. The pessimists say a disaster would have maimed the Allied cause. Certainly, a failure would have scuttled the war in the West for 1944. Putting together a second invasion would have taken too much time. The demoralized British would have shied from another attempt in '45. They say the Soviets would suddenly have faced German divisions rushed from the West. They also say a setback would have given the Germans time to perfect their wonder weapons: rockets to bombard the British, a new generation of submarines to keep the Americans at home. Allies - especially the Americans, with their seemingly limitless resources - would have attacked again and again until they got it right. They say the Soviets would have held out, no matter what, because they had no choice. In the end, they say, the war would have ended the way it actually did - with Germany in ruins. One of the more pungent notes comes from Stephen E. Ambrose in a new book, "D-Day: June 6, 1944." He states an obvious but often overlooked point: Even if the Germans had repulsed the Allies on D-Day, the atomic bomb would have soon squared the account. The German army had one of its rare bad days. Key commanders were absent. Rommel had gone to Germany for his wife's birthday, and others were far away at a map exercise. Somebody at Omaha reported up the chain of command that the Americans there had been repulsed. So the Germans sent their tanks elsewhere, rather than rolling them at this most fragile link in the chain of Allied beaches. Hitler was sleeping in, and nobody else could release the armored reserves. So much for German efficiency. The alarms from the beaches lost their edge of urgency as they worked their way up the chain of command. No German was sure this was The Real Thing. The Allies had outfoxed the Germans with phantom armies and phony plans. In Scotland, a handful of radio operators had duplicated the broadcast traffic of many divisions; in England, Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. had paraded about, posing as the commander of a group of fictitious field armies. The Germans bought it. On June 6, and for more than a month afterward, they concluded that Normandy was just a prelude to something bigger - a landing in the Pas de Calais. By the time the Germans finally woke up, their hour had passed. Before D-Day, the 8th Air Force helped isolate German coastal forces by pounding the French railroad system. U.S. Mustang fighters shot down so many German planes that the Luftwaffe in France could do almost nothing to oppose the landings. The C-47s, military versions of the DC-3 airliner, carried the paratroopers. The Wacogliders, some built in St. Louis, also carried troops but were a disappointment. Many soldiers perished in crash-landings and accidents. The black-and-white "invasion stripes” were recognition symbols, so nervous Allied troops wouldn't shoot down their own aircraft. In the five weeks leading up to D-Day, Allied intelligence stumbled onto a nightmare. A crossword puzzle in London's Daily Telegraph was leaking invasion secrets to the enemy - or so it seemed. Over the five weeks, those who finished the puzzles penciled in five highly secret code names. Allied security officials thought this was too much coincidence. The clues, the answers and the military meaning were:
Scotland Yard detectives finally determined that the code-word answers had, in fact, been a coincidence, however unlikely. Some of D-Day's famous photos show GIs pinned down underfire behind German obstacles off Omaha Beach, trying to avoid becoming casualties. Curiously, the photos themselves almost become casualties. The photographer was Robert Capa of Life magazine, who went into Omaha with the first wave. Under mortar and machine gunfire, he snapped off 106 frames, then jumped aboard a landing craft heading back to the fleet. Capa got back to England that day and handed his film to a lab technician. The technician, eager to see the pictures, turned up the heat to speed the drying of the negatives. He turned it up so much that the emulsion melted on all but eight of the frames. Still, those eight blurry and grainy frames conveyed to the American people the hellishness of D-Day on Omaha Beach. Richard Todd went through D-Day three times - once as a soldier and twice more as an actor. Todd jumped into Normandy on June 6, 1944, as a 24 year old lieutenant with the British Army’s 5th Parachute Brigade. Twelve years later, he played a fictitious British officer in "D-Day, the Sixth of June.” And in 1961, he signed up again for "The Longest Day," the best known of the D-Day movies. In "The Longest Day," Todd played the real-life British Maj. John Howard, whose gliderborne infantry company seized a key bridge shortly after midnight. They held it until relieved early in the afternoon. One of D-Day's best-known soldiers is buried today in his hometown of Metropolis, Ill. But a bit of him remains behind in Normandy - hanging from a church steeple. The soldier was John Steele, who jumped into Normandy as an airborne infantryman with the 82nd Airborne Division. His unit's objective was the village of Ste.-Mere-Eglise - and Steele, then 21, jumped right into the middle of a firefight. As he twisted his chute to avoid a burning building, his parachute snagged on the steeple of the village church. Unable to free himself, he played possom until the fighting ebbed. Those who have seen the movie "The Longest Day" may recall Steele as the character played by Red Buttons. After the war Steele became an accountant and first settled in Indianapolis. In 1958, he moved to North Carolina. There, on May 21, 1964, cancer took his life at the Veterans Administration hospital in Fayetteville - just outside the gates of Fort Bragg, the home of his beloved 82nd Airborne. Steele went back home to Metropolis for burial at Masonic Cemetery on North Avenue. But to this day, the church in Ste.- Mere-Eglise has a mannequin dressed like the GI Steele, hanging from a snagged parachute on its steeple of gray stone. If you're a veteran of D-Day, your story can become a part of the big historical picture. As military historian Stephen E Ambrose notes in his new book, "D-Day: June 6, 1944," the Eisenhower Center in New Orleans is collecting "oral histories and written memoirs, artifacts and wartime letters, from the men of D-Day, from all services and nations, so long as there are survivors." They will be stored in the archives of the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans. | ||||||||||
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