There's something very compelling about May and June, 1944. England was an armed fortress. The streets of London were populated by young men in uniform from all over the world. American Airborne soldiers were so primed that men of the 82 and 101st Airborne could not drink in the same bar without a fight breaking out.
General Dwight Eisenhower, a mid-level general at the Pentagon before the war, was plucked from obscurity by George Marshall, Chief of Staff of t US Army. Ike was selected to be the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in part because he got along with the British, and President Roosevelt didn't want Marhsall leaving Washington.
Marshall in Washington; Eisenhower in Europe; General Douglas McArthur in the Pacific; Admirals Halsey and King and Kincaid in the Pacific, and slowly, very slowly the US was awakening as a force for freedom.
As May ended, the weather in Europe deteriorated. There were only a few days every month when the moon and tide would be in alignment sufficient to allow the invasion of France to proceed. On June 4, the day before the invasion was scheduled, as nearly three million men were pulled taught like a bow, the weather got worse, and Ike called for a 24-hour delay. That decision was momentous. Eisenhower literally had the weight of the world on his shoulders. On June 5 Ike was told there would be a break in the weather on June 6 to allow the invasion to proceed under the minimally accepted conditions. Saying that a further delay was too biter to contemplate, Ike gave the go-ahead.
18 and 19 year old boys, members of the 82 and 101 Airborne divisions, their bodies hard from a year of training, many of them with shaved heads and mohawks, trudged on to planes with a hundred pounds of equipment. They were told they needed to give three days of fighting and then they would be relieved. It ended up being close to a month.
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| Ike and the Airborne on D-Day -1 |
Some of those men looked outside the planes they were on and saw a sight never before seen in history and never to be repeated. Hundreds of ships with hundreds of thousands of men steaming towards five beaches in Normandy, France.
On Omaha Beach, later called "Bloody Omaha" because the first, second, and third waves of troops were pinned down, mostly by one well positioned German 75mm gun with machine gun support, thousands of men- men who had spent three hours in small landing crafts and then were dumped into the surf seasick and scared, were slaughtered. Those that made it ashore were pinned down.
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| Omaha Beach June 6, 1944 |
In stepped a man -perhaps the oldest man on Omah Beach that morning. Not as famous as Ike or Patton or Bradley, Brigadier General Norman "Dutch" Cota, 51, leading the 29th Infantry division, was not surprised by what he saw. He knew invasions rarely went as planned and he instructed his staff on what to expect. Cota made it to the seawall and saw men being slaughtered. But he knew great generals lead from the front, so he stood up, bullets flying around him- he later admitted he was scared to death- and he began yelling at the men- urging them to go over the wall and fight inland. Cota came upon a squadron of Rangers and bellowed "I know you Rangers won't let me down. If Rangers lead the way then start fucking leading..." A Ranger captain, angered by Cota, jumped up, told Cota he would lead his men, and off they went.
Check out our D-Day post on General Cota four years ago, here.
Slowly, very slowly, men up and down Omaha Beach began to move inland. Yards at a time, the full history of their bravery will never be truly known. But one by one, American boys, from farms and cities the year before, began to fight as citizen soldiers against the best professional army in the world.
And they won.
D-Day fascinates us. The decisions facing Eisenhower; the individual bravery of the Airborne, scattered across Normandy, they did what Americans do best- they improvised, and then they fought and accomplished their mission. And then there were the boys on the ships, many of whom died in the surf and at the water's edge.
These American boys invaded France, seeking only to free Europe and then go home. The ones who made it home, like Captain Dick Winters of the 506 PIR of the 101st Airborne, (made famous from the book and show Band of Brothers) raised families and lived successful lives.
This the 79th Anniversary of D-Day. If there is nothing else we can do, then hopefully we can do this and pause on June 6 and remember their sacrifice. And hopefully on the 80th and 90th and 100th anniversary of D-day the world will pause just a moment and remember a time when people joined together to fight for a just cause.
Good post. The day before D Day is often overlooked in popular history. A few points:
ReplyDelete1. The casualies were much less than predicted. Omaha Beach was, literally, a bloodbath. The other invsation points confronted very litlel resistance.
2. The soldiers were not soldiers. They were boys, most near 18 and plucked every run of the mill American town and city. They became soldiers very fast but not after a lot of gross negligence by the miitary in not preparing them. A good book on this is The Boys' Crusade by Paul Fussell. The battle was won by the courage and grit of these young men and not by the bumbling bureaucrats who planned it. And Eisenhower would be the first to tell people this fact.
3. Your phrase "mid-level general" is very telling. Even in pre war America, the military was a sprawling bureaucracy. As is today, titles and medals were thrown around like breadcrumbs to pigeons. Every night there is a "lieutenant colonel", "brigadier general." "rear admiral," on cable TV pontificating about something they really know little about. And then there are the military witnesses who testify before Congress with about a hundred pounds of metal hanging from their chests. Most of them probably never saw a second of compbat but ass kissed their way to the top. I wonder what Ike would think of them.
Great post as usual Rump. Because you're a history buff I'm wondering if you've read the new biography of Judge Irving Kaufman. Also wondering if you think he sentenced an innocent woman to die.
ReplyDeleteI believe some documents recovered from KGB archives after the fall of the USSR showed both the Rosenbergs were involved in the Communist spy ring that sent atomic secrets to the USSR. There is also quite a large amount of evidence that Judge Kaufman and Trump mentor Roy Cohn engaged in ex parte meetings during the Rosenberg trial and the proverbial "fix was in" whatever the evidence in Court showed.
ReplyDeleteI saw that our dumbest judge ( at least since Rosemary Usher Jones and MaryAnn McKenzie) got reversed in her first appeal to the 3d. El Aponte, the least qualified ever to sit on the bench reversed in B/W v. Dept. of Children and Family, 3DD21-2409. Can she be put somewhere where she cant issue any rulings?
ReplyDeleteKind of amazing that a post about one of the most significant events in American history and about which 99% of people agree upon get only two comments. Sometimes I wonder if half the lawyers in town even know what the Holocaust is.
ReplyDeleteCan FACDL-MIAMI do something about not allowing attorneys to bring any papers inside the jails? Denied at TGK today. They cited an issue that happened at Pre Trial last week and the Fed's.
ReplyDelete@108. I don't think you understand how commenting and discussion in general work. If, as you say, "99% of people agree upon" the subject of the post, then what is there to say in the comments? What is there to add? Or to disagree upon or hash out? And it's not like the events of D-Day are breaking news for all of us to react to. This is literally old news. There is nothing more to say.
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