The D-Day Warriors Who Led The Way to Victory in World War II

By Alex Kershaw

Stagg left the library and its cloud of pipe and cigarette smoke. There was an intense silence; each man knew how immense this moment was in history. The stakes could not be higher. There was no plan B. Nazism and its attendant evils – barbarism, unprecedented genocide, the enslavement of tens of millions of Europeans-might yet prevail. The one man in the room whom Eisenhower genuinely liked, Omar Bradley, believed that Overlord was Hitler’s “greatest danger and his greatest opportunity. If the Overlord forces could be repulsed and trounced decisively on the beaches, Hitler knew it would be a very long time indeed before the Allies tried again – if ever.”

(Kershaw 2019, 6-7)

The plan for Operation Deadstick, rehearsed a total of forty-three times in the previous few months, had been approved on high, but it was essentially Howard’s own design. He’d assured Montgomery that it would succeed, but of course there was no way of knowing. In war, as the famous Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke had once declared, and as Montgomery himself had learnt in North Africa, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

(Kershaw 2019, 14)

Lord Lovat stood on the deck of his LSI, surveying the waters around him. In the bow was a twenty-one-year-old bagpiper called Bill Millin, who held the distinction of being the only man among the Allied invasion’s 150,000 soldiers to wear a kilt the same Cameron tartan his father, a Glasgow policeman, had worn in the trenches of World War I. Lovat had selected Millin to be his personal piper, having breezily dismissed the young man’s concerns about the army regulation that forbade pipers from being in the front lines: “Ah, but that’s the English War Office, Millin. You and I are both Scottish so that doesn’t apply.”

Lovat had assured Millin he would be a part of the “greatest invasion in the history of warfare.” And there was no way in hell that he, Lord Lovat, the twenty-fourth chieftain of Clan Fraser, was going to wade ashore without the whining skirl of bagpipes. They were essential to men’s morale, as impactful as any weapon Millin might otherwise carry.

(Kershaw 2019, 22-23)

There was a problem.

Howard’s Horsa was overweight. Too many men, packets of English cigarettes stuffed down their elasticized sleeves, had brought along too many phosphorus grenades and bandoliers of .303 ammo, too many Hawkins anti-tank mines. “The German is like a June bride,” they’d been told of the enemy. “He knows he is going to get it, but he doesn’t know how big it is going to be.” If Howard’s lads had their way, it would be very big indeed.

Howard looked at his troops, many still teenagers.

“One of you has got to drop out… I need one volunteer.”

No one answered his call, and so it was decided that some equipment would be jettisoned instead. Finally, the doors to the gliders were shut and the pilots of the Halifax bombers, which would tow them to Normandy, prepared to take off. Before long, some of Howard’s men began to feel euphoric. “Germany hadn’t a chance,” one remembered. Then someone said, “We’re off.” The towrope took the strain and Howard’s glider began to shift. Then men felt the glider leave the ground and Howard checked his watch they were on schedule, in the air “right on the dot” at 10:56 P. M. Now he and his men “were cut off from the rest of the world,” he recalled, “except for Jim Wallwork’s ability to talk to the Halifax. Through the portholes we could see lots of other bombers, and we knew they must have been going to bomb the invasion front.”

(Kershaw 2019, 32-33)

Major John Howard looked through a small round window of his Horsa glider. The Channel below was dotted with boats, their arrowhead wakes all pointed toward the white, gently arcing shore of Nazi-occupied France. The gray seas were rough and choppy. Howard’s thoughts turned to the seaborne soldiers in the first wave, packed into hundreds of landing craft. What a terrible crossing. They must be puking their guts up, what with the fear, the nerves, and the high seas. Poor devils.

Better to go to war this way-an hour’s flight, a good old sing-along, and then smack bang into the enemy’s lap. A fast, clean entry into battle, with little time to dwell on dark thoughts, to be afraid, unlike with those poor buggers far below.

(Kershaw 2019, 44)

Schroeder considered several of his fellow officers to be close friends, having served with them in the 4th Infantry “Ivy” Division since 1942. He had memorized the names of all 219 men in F Company, which he led, and could recognize each man in the dark by the sound of his voice. Many were from the South and were described by a fellow officer as “country boys from Florida, Alabama and Georgia . . . squirrel-shooters who weren’t afraid of the dark, who could find their way home in woods and feel at home.”

(Kershaw 2019, 66-67)

Before long, 448 B-24 bombers arrived over Omaha Beach. Unable to see through the dense cloud cover, under orders to avoid killing American troops arriving in the first wave, the bombardiers delayed their release by vital seconds. As a result, none of their thirteen thousand bombs actually exploded on the six-mile-long beach or on any of thirteen Widerstandsnester – strongpoints comprising concrete bunkers and machine gun nests-but they did kill plenty of cows, as well as French civilians as far as three miles inland.

Another German manning his gun at Widerstandsnest 62 (WN62) prayed as bombs rained down and the earth shook as if he were at the epicenter of an earthquake. Stunned, he looked out of a slit in his strongpoint and spotted the invasion fleet.

“They’ve got more boats than we’ve got soldiers.”

(Kershaw 2019, 125-126)

Hitler did not believe, however, that the landings in Normandy were anything but a diversion. “This is not the real invasion yet,” he insisted. The major assault was still to come, at the Pas-de-Calais, where the English Channel was at its narrowest and where there were key ports, such as Calais and Boulogne.

Luckily for the Allies, the general entrusted with repelling the invasion in Normandy, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, was now nowhere near the landing beaches but instead hundreds of miles away, dressed in a red-striped dressing gown, at his home in Herrlingen, having decided to visit his wife to celebrate her fiftieth birthday. Not long after Hitler learned of the invasion, Rommel, too, was informed. “How stupid of me.”

If only he had stayed in Normandy. He would not have hesitated, as others had, to deploy all the forces that could be mustered. The one division that could have quickly inflicted serious damage, easily mopping up Otway’s meager force and stopping Lord Lovat in his tracks, was the 21st Panzer Division, based around Caen. It had finally been released, but far too late. It would be midafternoon before the division moved in strength against British forces north of Caen, losing seventy out of 124 tanks but nonetheless preventing the seizure of the city, a vital Allied objective on D-Day.”

Dressed in a dark leather coat, Rommel was soon racing back to Normandy in a black Horch.

“Do you know,” he told an aide, “if I was commander of the Allied forces right now, I could finish off the war in fourteen days.”

(Kershaw 2019, 195-196)

By 10:30 A. M., Captain Leonard Schroeder, leading F Company, had moved off Utah Beach and seized a group of farm buildings labeled LA GRANDE DUNE on his map, seven hundred yards from where he had landed, encountering occasional sniper fire. Farther inland, a group of Germans surrendered to Schroeder and his men. “They were armed to the hilt,” recalled Schroeder, “so I pulled out my trench knife and proceeded to cut all their web equipment from their bodies. One German soldier hit the panic button and ran toward the beach. I suppose half of the company put bullets into him, thinking he was trying to get away.”

Meanwhile, one of Schroeder’s fellow officers, twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George Mabry, led the battalion’s advance. As he neared a bridge rigged with demolition charges, gunfire rang out, and Mabry spotted around a dozen German paratroopers running toward him. He and his men opened fire, hitting several of the enemy soldiers as they neared the bridge. As it turned out, the Germans had been fleeing the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne, and now, realizing they were trapped between two American forces, they quickly surrendered. Mabry pulled out an orange flag-to avoid incidents of friendly fire, the army had provided the flags to be waved if a unit’s identity was in doubt. Mabry lifted the orange flag, attached to a stick, over his head. An orange flag appeared in response. Then a 101st Airborne paratrooper jumped into his path, pointing his M1 rifle at Mabry.

Realizing they were on the same side, the pair shook hands. The paratrooper told Mabry that General Maxwell Taylor, the commander of the 101st Airborne, was not far away. A few minutes later, forty-two-year-old Taylor, the first Allied general officer to land in France on D-Day, crawled out of a hedgerow. Mabry saluted and shook hands with Taylor, a tall, ramrod-straight West Point graduate fluent in several languages. It was a momentous encounter, “an historic moment,” according to Taylor, “the long-planned junction of the air and seaborne assaults on Hitler’s fortress Europe.”

(Kershaw 2019, 205-206)

Later that afternoon, the commander of E Company, Captain Wozenski, did a head count and was stunned when he saw how few soldiers had survived the twelve hours since landing in the first wave. Of the men in E Company who had stormed the beach with him, only sixty remained to fight. “Sixty of us left!” he shouted. “Where are my men? … What did they promise us?” E Company had in fact suffered more than any other 1st Division unit, with forty men killed, forty missing, and thirty-seven wounded.

They had been told it would be a cakewalk. The air force was supposed to have bombed the entire beach, but nothing had been touched. It had been as flat as a pancake, with not a single crater to offer the promised protection. Indeed, not one bomb “was dropped on Omaha Beach by our airplanes,” recalled a naval commander.

Wozenski and E Company, like so many others in the Big Red One, had deserved far better. They had done their duty in North Africa and Sicily, only to be sent like so many cattle to the slaughter. It had been a damn waste of good soldiers, warriors who should by rights have long since been sent home. So many had been cut down before even firing a shot.

(Kershaw 2019, 223-224)

Pyle tried his best to convey the price of D-Day to his millions of readers in the United States, but words, he knew, could never adequately convey the extent of the devastation, human and material: “The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it. Anything and everything is expendable.”

(Kershaw 2019, 250)

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References

Kershaw, Alex. 2019. The First Wave: The D-Day Warriors who Led the Way to Victory in World War II. N.p.: Dutton Caliber.

ISBN 978-0-451-49005-6