Overlord (Pan Military Classics) Read Free Page B

that although hundreds of men and women had been involved in making and printing them, there was no security leak. On every ship, some or most passengers were seasick. Apart from the assault troops, there was an extraordinary ragbag of men from all manner of units aboard the invasion fleet. On many of the transports crewed by the merchant navy, there were spcially-trained civilian aircraft recognition teams from the Royal Observer Corps. The Sicilian landings had been marred by the alarming quantity of Allied aircraft shot down by reckless ships’ gun crews. Now, at the AA positions, men stood in their helmets and flash capes drinking interminable mugs of ‘kye’ – cocoa – and peering out fascinated at the shadowy shapes of the great fleet around them in the darkness.While the soldiers below were more sombrely preoccupied by the task that awaited them on the morrow, most of the sailors felt a strong, conscious sense of pride that they were taking part in the greatest amphibious operation of all time.
    One of the most curious spectators of the great invasion fleet’s movement to France was an airman named Eric Crofts, seated in a caravan mounted on a turntable on a clifftop in south Devon. Crofts manned one of the RAF’s centimetric radar posts, and all spring he and his colleagues had intently scanned the progress of the invasion rehearsals on their screen. Now he arrived on watch a little before midnight on 5 June to find the duty crew clustered round the set: ‘Large convoys of ships were creeping southward to the top of the radar screen, and small groups were coming from left to right to join the tail. Off to the east, beyond Portland, other convoys were on the move. Desperate for the relief of seeing everything pass from our range, our interest was seized later that long night by aircraft away to the east, circling but moving slowly away from us. Each dot was in a hazy cloud. We guessed, as others joined or left the group, that they were dropping metal strips of “Window” to simulate an invasion fleet heading for the Pas de Calais. It was an anti-climax at last to see our tube empty, yet sobering to know that so many men in the ships were heading for a hell ahead of them.’ 3 The Germans, partly as a result of their own failures of technology, but chiefly because of damage caused by Allied bombing, possessed no sets on the Channel coast capable of showing such an accurate picture that night.
    On the later afternoon of 5 June, when the men of the seaborne assault divisions had already been at sea for many hours – in some cases for days – Private Fayette Richardson of the 82nd Airborne Division was still in camp in England. He was lying on his bunk with his hands clasped behind his head, gazing up at the whitewashed ceiling and trying to exorcize from his mind the nagging beat of Tommy Dorsey’s What Is This Thing Called Love? that hadechoed out of the recreation hut every evening for weeks as the men walked to chow. A short, wiry 20-year-old from a small town near Buffalo, New York, Richardson had left home at 17 to drive an old jalopy to the west coast. He was in Seattle when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and enlisted at once ‘because everybody else was’. 4 Like so many others, he wanted to be a pilot and was dismayed to be rejected for poor eyesight. Instead, he joined the Airborne and shipped to Northern Ireland with the 508th Regiment. There he volunteered to become a pathfinder, a decision he did not regret, because his group lived a far more independent and relaxed life than the rifle companies, spared KP and guard duties, free to come and go pretty much as they pleased after completing their special training in handling the Eureka beacon. Now, in his hut in Nottinghamshire, he stood among the rest of the team joking self-consciously with each other as they struggled to stow a mountain of personal equipment about their bodies. A 32-pound radar set was strapped below the reserve parachute on his