Overlord (Pan Military Classics) Read Free Page A

when an officious trade union official counted the lifeboats on his battalion’s transport, declared that there were insufficient, and insisted that one vital landing craft should be left behind to make room for an extra lifeboat. The unit’s chaplain, Captain Henry Lovegrove, conducted a service from the ship’s bridge which men crowded onto the foc’sle to hear. Lovegrove was uncommonly respected as a padre, but he had lost some credibility during arehearsal at sea off Hayling Island several weeks earlier, when he took as his text for morning service ‘The hour is now come . . .’, which many men took to mean that the padre had been chosen to break it to them that they were on their way to France. In the vast anchorages off the south coast in the first days of June, many ships looked curiously unmilitary, with sailors’ drying laundry draped along the rails and strung among the upperworks. A REME driver, passionately proud of his vehicle, expostulated furiously with an East End crane driver swinging his workshop’s trucks into the hold of a transport, crushing wings and fenders against the hatch. ‘You’ll be f---ing lucky if that’s the worst that happens to your lot over there!’ said the docker succinctly, continuing as before.
    One of Montgomery’s few undoubted errors of judgement during the mounting of OVERLORD was his support for a landing on 5 June despite the adverse weather forecast. Given the difficulties much less severe weather caused on the 6th, there is little doubt that a landing on the previous day would have found itself in deep trouble. For all the scorn that Montgomery later heaped upon Eisenhower’s qualities as a military commander, at no single period did the Supreme Commander distinguish himself more than by his judgement and decision during the D-Day launching conferences of 3–4 June. Having unhesitatingly overridden Montgomery to postpone for the 5th, at 9.45 p.m. on the 4th Eisenhower equally firmly brushed aside Leigh-Mallory and ignored Tedder’s uncertainty to confirm the decision to go for the 6th: ‘I’m quite positive we must give the order,’ he said, ‘I don’t like it, but there it is . . . I don’t see how we can possibly do anything else.’ 1
    The postponement much increased the mental strain and physical pressure on the men crowded in the ships. They played cards incessantly, chatted quietly, in many cases simply lay silent on their bunks, gazing up at the bulkheads. Private James Gimbert and a cluster of other RAOC men of 50th Division brewed up on a little primus stove perched atop the vast stack of ammunitioncases loaded on their LST. Brigadier-General Norman ‘Dutch’ Cota assembled his staff of the advanced headquarters group of 29th Division, of which he was deputy commander, in the aft wardroom of the USS Carroll . An officer of legendary forcefulness, somewhat old for his rank at 51, Cota could claim exceptional expertise in amphibious operations. He had taken part in the TORCH landings and subsequently served with Lord Mountbatten’s Combined Operations HQ. Now, he addressed his team for the last time:
    This is different from any other exercises that you’ve had so far. The little discrepancies that we tried to correct on Slapton Sands are going to be magnified and are going to give way to incidents that you might at first view as chaotic. The air and naval bombardment are reassuring. But you’re going to find confusion. The landing craft aren’t going in on schedule, and people are going to be landed in the wrong place. Some won’t be landed at all. The enemy will try, and will have some success, in preventing our gaining ‘lodgement’. But we must improvise, carry on, not lose our heads. 2
    Cota and his men were to land on Omaha. On all the ships, officers and NCOs pored over the maps and photographs of their landing areas that they had at last been ordered to strip from the sealed packages: it remains one of the minor miracles of OVERLORD