Overlord (Pan Military Classics) Read Free

Europe: so also would a new spirit.
    The chance of war dictated that John Warner did not remainwith the 4th West Kents, which was fortunate for him, because the battalion was sent to Burma. If he had gone with it, he would probably have died, like so many others, on the tennis court at Kohima. Instead, he was posted to become second-in-command of 3rd Reconnaissance Regiment, earmarked with its division for north-west Europe. It was with 3rd Recce that in June 1944, Major Warner returned to the battlefield from which he and his comrades had been so ruthlessly ejected four years earlier. Along with a million and a half other Allied soldiers, he went to Normandy.

 
3 » TO THE FAR SHORE
     
    The overture
    Over the last few days of May and the first of June, vast columns of men and vehicles began to stream south into the assembly areas – the ‘sausages’, as they were known, because of their shapes on the map – where the invaders were briefed and equipped before being loaded aboard the fleet. The trucks and tanks rolled through towns and villages that, to the disappointment of some, paid little heed to their passing, so accustomed had the inhabitants become to mass military movements. Although the coastal areas had supposedly been sealed off to all but local residents, in reality so many exemptions had been granted for weddings, funerals and compassionate cases that the routine of life was very little changed.
    Whole divisions of the follow-up waves had been temporarily transferred from training to man the assembly areas, to feed and cosset the assault forces to the utmost extent that the circumstances allowed. The men, crowded into the tiered bunks in the huge tented camps, were issued with seasickness pills and lifejackets, new gas-protective battledress and ODs – which everybody detested because of their extra weight and smell. Each soldier was given a leaflet about getting on with French civilians which urged him to say nothing about 1940 and not to buy up everything in sight at extravagant prices: ‘Thanks to jokes about “Gay Paree” etc., there is a fairly widespread belief that the French are a gay, frivolous people with no morals and few convictions. This is especially not true at the present time.’ More pragmatically, in the‘sausages’ men were issued with their ammunition and grenades, satchel and pole charges. They worked obsessively to the very last minute upon the waterproofing of their vehicles, conscious of the horror of stalling with a flooded engine under fire in the surf. The plethora of food, fruit and American cigarettes that was thrust upon them made LAC Norman Phillips of the RAF advance party for Omaha feel ‘as if we were being fattened like Christmas turkeys’. Despite the stringent security precautions which kept the men confined once they had entered the assembly areas, many young British soldiers slipped under the wire for a last glimpse of the pub, the village or their own families. Corporal ‘Topper’ Brown of 5th RTR escaped from his camp near Felixstowe, stripped the unit flashes off his battledress, and travelled all the way home to Tonbridge in Kent.
    The tannoy systems in the camps were seldom silent by day or night as groups of men were mustered, loaded into trucks, and driven through meticulously signposted streets to numbered docks where they joined their transports. The concentration and loading operations rank high among the staff achievements of OVERLORD. For once there was little need to motivate men to attend to their tasks: they understood that their lives depended on doing so. Dock officers later commented adversely upon the casual behaviour of the follow-up waves in contrast to that of the troops who embarked for D-Day.
    Aboard the ships, each man sought to create his tiny island of privacy amid the mass of humanity crowded below decks. Officers struggled with last-minute loading problems. Lieutenant-Colonel Robin Hastings of the 6th Green Howards was enraged