Those Who Fought

The Normandy poppies were pale with dust. The Normandy sky was heavy with smoke. Land and sky rumbled and trembled with battle.

On the Beaches. In the fair fields where the tide had rolled, the ground was littered with the debris of battle-- tanks, jeeps, rifles, ration tins, bulldozers, first-aid kits, canteens. Everywhere lay the dead--weltering in the waves along the shore, lying heaped in ditches, sprawling on the beaches. Here & there in trees hung the shattered body of a paratrooper. In field hospitals, the wounded lay. The smell of ether mingled with the smell of earth. Probably no one yet knew the price that had been paid for the first week in Normandy.

The Airborne. That first day the paratroopers had landed near midnight--six hours before H-hour--to prepare the way for the glider-borne divisions which had swooped like hell's witches into the area behind the German lines.

A paratroop lieutenant survived to return and tell how the Germans "were machine-gunning us all the way down."

One officer told of seeing German tracers ripping through other men's parachutes as they descended. In one plane nine soldiers had dived through the plane's door; the tenth, laden with his 90 pounds of equipment, got momentarily stuck. A 20-mm. shell hit him in the belly. Fuse caps in his pockets began to go off. Part of the wounded man's load was TNT. Before this human bomb could explode, his mates behind him pushed him out. The last they saw of him, his parachute had opened and he was drifting to earth in a shroud of bursting flame. Some of the airborne divisions were identified: the U.S. 82nd, tough veterans of Sicily and Salerno; the U.S. 101st, in its first battle; the British 6th. They captured gun positions, pillboxes, road junctions, destroyed bridges. Some of them made contact later with ground troops. Some of them, the Germans claimed, were annihilated. The Old Ladies. It was at 5:35 a.m. that morning that the Allied armada had begun to pour its fire onto the French coast, where brightly colored German ack-ack was streaking the morning sky. In the fleet were old ladies like the Arkansas, belching with twelve 12-in. guns, the Texas and the Nevada, each with ten 14-inchers; the British Warspite, veteran of Jutland, the new British Black Prince, the British monitor Erebus. Closer in shore stood the cruisers and, even closer, the destroyers -- the whole great armada, spread out from horizon to horizon, try ing to batter down the Atlantic Wall. Overhead were 8,000 planes of the R.A.F. and the U.S. Eighth and Ninth Air Forces, adding their big and little bombs to the destruction. Grey-black clouds puffed up from the land to shroud the sun rising over Normandy. he Wreckers. Under the fiery canopy the engineers and Army & Navy demolition units had crawled ashore. Hidden by the sea at high tide were concrete piers, pointed steel and wooden stakes. At low tide, they were visible. On the beach itself were great tripods of steel rails, braced steel fences, all of them ingeniously mined. The demolition units went to work clearing paths while German shells fell among them and German machine gunners hidden in tunnels and six-foot-thick concrete pillboxes raked them. An assault engineer said: "We had to work with water up to our necks, some times higher. Then there were snipers. They were nipping us off. As I was work ing with two blokes on a tough bit of element, I suddenly found myself working alone. My two pals just gurgled and dis appeared under the water." In those early hours Rangers had gone ashore in LCTs under cover of darkness. At one point, atop a 200-ft. cliff, were six 155-mm. guns which could sweep the sea approaches. The Rangers shot a grappling hook to the top of the cliff. One of them climbed a rope hand over hand, carrying rope ladders which he made se cure. Up swarmed the Rangers; took the gun positions, knocked them out with TNT. Infantry. On the heels of the demolition units went the infantry. It was not announced which divisions were in the first wave, but two U.S. divisions were identified as taking part in the invasion: the storied ist, once predominantly a Brooklyn outfit, now a rainbow division of men from many states, veterans of the North African campaign; the 29th, a National Guard outfit whose ranks were originally filled with men from Maryland and Virginia.

Beside them fought the Canadian 3rd Division and the tough little men of England's 50th Northumbrians, who had fought in France and Flanders four years before, had covered the evacuation of Dunkirk, had chased the Nazis across North Africa, across Sicily and up Italy.

On the Left. The British and Canadians were on the eastern water flank, which was churned by a brisk wind across the Bay of the Seine. Some small landing craft were swamped or impaled on the water barriers, or bobbed helplessly offshore, targets for German 88s and 1553 which had survived the bombardment.

Bert Brandt, an Acme photographer, later reported: "Boats were burning and a pall of smoke hung over the beach. I saw some bodies of soldiers who had been killed in the first landings floating in the water. . . . There were tremendous rafts floating offshore, jammed with trucks, tanks, ambulances."

As the ramps went down and khaki-clad men plunged shorewards, German fire mowed them down. Others ran over them. The living lay beside the dead and fought with flamethrowers, grenades, bazookas and bangalore torpedoes, which blasted holes in barbed-wire entanglements. From the sea the naval guns did their best to pin down Nazi emplacements. The ancient Texas laid her guns on a 155-mm. battery, blew it up. New waves of men poured ashore like waves of the Channel.

"Get Those Mortars." Mortar fire from the cliffs fell like rain on one beach. Over the radio came a pleading voice to R.A.F. Spitfire pilots wheeling overhead: "For God's sake get those mortars quick. Dig them out, boys, they are right down our necks." The Spitfires dipped down and dug the Nazis out.

Not until late afternoon of D-day were some of the beaches secured. All night, while the naval guns boomed in the roadstead and explosions flashed along the embattled coast, the drenched wounded lay in the sand, some whimpering in delirium. Then the invasion rolled on--beyond the dreadful jetsam on the beaches.

The Bridge. On the third day, the wind moderated, and the great fleet of ships from England worked mightily to make up for the delays caused by weather and rough water. Standing on the flanks, the warships guarded the great marine bridge which the Allies had thrown across the Channel.

At week's end LSTs were crawling steadily back to English ports. Negro stretcher bearers lifted out the men whose upended feet were dusty with the sands of France. Medical Corpsmen moved among them, looking at their wound tags. Some of the wounded were smoking. *A homesick U.S. soldier said wryly: "Is that really England? I never thought I wanted to see the goddam country again but now it looks like heaven." Some of the men had their eyes closed. Over the faces of some, blankets had been drawn. As the wounded and the dead came back, other soldiers, with flowers stuck in the camouflage netting of their tin hats, marched past them through the streets of the English town. They avoided looking at the returning troops. Now it was their turn.

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