D-Day 6 June 1945

 

D-Day

 

On this date, June 6, 1944, beginning with bombing shortly after midnight, and then at one thirty in the morning, about 160,000 American, United Kingdom, and Canadian troops hit the beaches at Normandy, composed of  five American Divisions, five UK divisions, and one Canadian division, plus various other support troops. And it wasn’t just men, but tanks and trucks and so much more.  A huge operation?  No, it was gigantic, the result of long term planning that began a year earlier in 1943, and postposed several times by weather.

 

The Germans knew the allied forces were coming.  They just didn’t know when or where.  The allies had gone to extreme measures to keep the enemy guessing in the dark.

 

In southern England, General George Patton created a false army, complete with mock aircraft and tanks and flurries of faux messages meant to be intercepted.  You may also have heard of corpses being dressed in allied uniforms, provided with false orders and ‘secret’ documents, then allowed to wash up on beaches where the Germans would find them.  The subterfuge worked its magic, but the Germans were not just sitting and waiting. Guessing, yes, but preparing.

 

They thought the invasion would come at Calais, France only twenty-seven miles from the English port of Dover.   But, still, they provided significant forces and preparations all along the coast, including Normandy.   And if the Germans were fooled about the where, they were not so foolish as to think there were not other possibilities besides Calais. They spent months preparing over 2400 miles of defenses. To give you a comparison, our border with Mexico is 1,933 miles.

 

During the D-Day landings, the allies suffered at least 10,000 casualties, with over 4,000 dead. Our dead lay scattered on the beaches.  And the Germans also paid a steep price, with casualty estimates ranging from 4,000 to 9,000.

 

Nor was victory on the beaches a certainty.  Over 6,900 vessels delivered and protected allied troops in the landing, with over 4,000 being landing ships and landing craft. Even so, the landing stood a good chance of being turned back, defeated. After all, the Normandy area was notorious for vicious, unpredictable tides and weather.  And the weather did its worst, causing troops to land far from planned locations.  Of 29 amphibious tanks, only two made it to shore.

 

But to my mind, statistics are only numbers on paper, disregarding the real terror and frightfulness of war.

 

Here are some quotes from those on the beach.

 

“They’re murdering us here. Lets get inland and get murdered.

--- Colonel Charles D. Canham, 116^th Infantry Regiment Commander on Omaha beach

 

“You get your ass on the beach.  I’ll be there waiting for you and I’ll tell you what to do. There ain’t anything in this plan that is going to go right.”

---Colonel Paul R. Goode, in a pre-attack briefing to the 175^th Infantry Regiment, 29^th Infantry Division. 

 

“I took chances on D-Day that I would never have taken later in the war.”

---First Sergeant C. Carwood Lipton, 506^th Parachute Regiment, 101^st Airborne Division.

 

And from one of our United Kingdom brothers in arms: David Teacher, 71 Royal Air Force Beach Unit.

 

“Jerry (Germans) started to shell the beach at about 9am.  Suddenly, all hell broke loose.

 

The beach was under fire from shells, mortars, and machine guns; we dived for cover.

 

The sea was covered with blood and vomit and flies began to arrive by the thousands, which created another nightmare.

 

We continued all night and into the following day without a break.  Slowly, slowly we overcame all the nightmares…there was no lack of humor.

 

A soldier coming ashore asked, “Is this a private beach? I was promised a private beach. If not, I’m not staying.”  And we heard, “My mother told me not to travel by air. She thought it was much safer by sea.”

 

An Army officer coming ashore and instead of getting his men off the beach quickly, he stopped to consult his map.

 

“Sir, you’ve got to get off the beach now!”

 

“And WHO are you?” he asked.

 

“Sorry, no time for introductions!”

 

Perhaps you don’t realize that less than 4% of World War II veterans are still alive. The history of our wars and the sacrifices suffered by our men and women, on the battlefield and at home is slowly drifting into the dusty past and soon will be only slightly remembered by the younger generation and coming generations.

 

It is so important to keep history alive, not as a series of facts to be learned in school, but to remember the importance of days and nights and sacrifices, not just on D-Day, but on other days and other wars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

D-Day Through German Eyes by Holger Eckhertz

D-Day Through German Eyes by Holger Eckhertz

War is brutal, unforgiving destruction, formed by grand strategies, over which the men and women who fight the war have little control, and their efforts are mostly forgotten.  The personal experiences of those who fight and die is seldom in the history books, and not at all in the high school classroom.

Yes, Wellington beat Napoleon at Waterloo.  MacArthur and Nimitz followed different strategies in the Pacific.  Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander in Europe.  Patton was a great commander,who slapped a soldier.

But, what of the man in the trench, with dust in his eyes, while the man beside him has skin burned away and dies in the horrifying hell of being burned alive by white phosphorous?  How about irrational hate for an enemy whose bullets ripped your friend apart and left a bloody mess of what used to be a man?

We see old newsreels of the storming of the beaches at Normandy. We’re shocked at bodies floating in the waves and slumped in the sand.  But, it’s long ago and not personal.  You never knew your dad’s brother or your aunt’s husband.  They died in the war. The fullness of their lives limited to a bland statement.

I don’t blame the teachers or the writers of history books, who have compressed time and pages to make a good summation.  Even movies like ‘Saving Private Ryan’ or books like ‘Band of Brothers’, must of necessity leave out details in favor of painting with a broad brush and keeping the plot moving.

Sometimes an author gets it right, but often the work is fiction, like Norman Mailer’s ‘The Naked and the Dead’.  Another is ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ by Steven Crane, and a third is ‘Killer Angels’ by Michael Shaara.  And while novels pick up the flavor of men in battle, they are the voices of those men portrayed by fictional characters and created by the authors.  I’m not belittling these books and have enjoyed all three immensely.  But, Holger Eckhertz’s book is the real thing, unvarnished, with the smell of cordite and blood and the feel of truth.

To me, real history is personal and for the common soldier, sailor, Marine, or aviator, war is as personal as it gets.  But even more rare than personal history is personal history seen from the other side.  In D-Day: Through German Eyes, Holger Eckhertz shares interviews with German solders, both officers and other ranks, of what they saw and felt, their fears and tragedies.   He puts a human face on an implacable enemy, not to vilify, but to trace commonalities of fighting men, no matter the style and color of their uniforms.

“We crouched down there (in the chamber under the German bunker) and looked up at the roof over us, as the English up there began to set off explosions and smash our equipment…It was extremely hot and smoky in the chamber, and sweat ran down my face as I crouched there, wrapping a bandage around my wounded arm and looking (up) at the trap door….

…the thought of those incendiary grenades coming down into our confined space was horrifying.  Some of my men began praying, while others kept up a stream of muttered obscenities directed at the enemy, vowing a dreadful revenge for this humiliation.”

“…why would they (the English) want to burn us alive when we were protecting Europe?  What was the origin of this hatred?  I had no answer to such questions.”

Eckhertz takes us into the mind of the enemy, near the beaches, in the bunkers further back, into hand-to-hand combat and best of all into the mind of the German soldier, his thoughts, his fears, his sudden realization that this is it.  Not just a feint, not just a commando raid.  He looks though the heavy cement bunker’s machine gun slits and sees the sea alive with more ships and landing craft than he could ever imagine.  Unimaginable power.

This book is alive with emotion, dread, realizations, and all the personal horrors of war.  If you want a glimpse of D-Day as you’ve never seen it, D-Day: Through German Eyes is a book you can’t and won’t stop reading. This is the story of the German soldier, not another caricature of the hated Nazi, but a personal glimpse of men at war.