Citizen Soldiers_ The U.S. Army from the - Stephen E. Ambrose [9]
He was amazed to discover how small he could make his body. If you get caught in the open in a shelling, he advised, "the best thing to do is drop to the ground and crawl into your steel helmet. One's body tends to shrink a great deal when shells come in. I am sure I have gotten as much as eighty per cent of my body under my helmet when caught under shellfire."
About themselves, the most important thing a majority of the GIs discovered was that they were not cowards. They hadn't thought so, they had fervently hoped it would not be so, but they couldn't be sure until tested.
After a few days in combat most of them knew they were good soldiers. They had neither run away nor collapsed into a pathetic mass of quivering jelly (their worst fear, even greater than the fear of being afraid).
They were learning about others. A common experience: the guy who talked toughest, bragged most, excelled in manoeuvres, everyone's pick to be the top soldier in the company, was the first to break, while the soft-talking kid who was hardly noticed in camp was the standout in combat. These are the cliches of war novels precisely because they are true. They also learned that while combat brought out the best in some men, it unleashed the worst in others-and the distinction wasn't always clear.
On June 9 Sergeant Arthur "Dutch" Schultz of the 82nd Airborne was outside Montebourg. That morning he was part of an attack on the town. "I ran by a wounded German soldier lying alongside of a hedgerow. He was obviously in a great deal of pain and crying for help. I stopped running and turned around. A close friend of mine put the muzzle of his rifle between the German's still crying eyes and pulled the trigger. There was no change in my friend's facial expression. I don't believe he even blinked an eye."
Schultz was simultaneously appalled and awed by what he had seen.
"There was a part of me that wanted to be just as ruthless as my friend," he commented. Later Schultz came to realize that "there but for the grace of God go I."
ALLIED FIGHTER pilots owned the skies over Normandy. On June 7
Eisenhower crossed the Channel by plane to visit Bayeux. Every aeroplane in the sky was American or British.
Thanks to air supremacy the Americans were flying little single-seat planes, Piper Cubs, about 300 metres back from the front lines and some 300 metres high. German riflemen fired at them ineffectively. When the Cubs appeared, however, German mortar and artillery firing stopped. As Sergeant Sampson described it, "They didn't dare give their positions away, knowing if they fired our pilot would call in and artillery would be coming in on them, pinpoint."
Air supremacy also freed Allied fighter-bombers, principally P-47
Thunderbolts, to strafe and bomb German convoys and concentrations. From D-Day plus one onward, whenever the weather was suitable for flying, the P-47s forced nighttime movement only on the Germans. During the day the Allied Jabos (from the German Jager bomber, or hunter bomber) would get them. Fifty years later, in talking about the Jabos, German veterans still have awe in their voices and glance up over their shoulders as they recall the terror of having one come right at them, all guns blazing. "The Jabos were a burden on our souls," Corporal Helmut Hesse said.
The B-26 Marauders, two-engine bombers, continued their all-out assault on choke points in the German transportation system, principally bridges and highway junctions. Lieutenant James Delong was a Marauder pilot with the Ninth Air Force who had flown in low and hard on D-Day over Utah Beach. On June 7 it was a bridge at Rennes. "We were being met with plenty of flak from enemy 88s," Delong recalled.
"That whomp! whomp! sound just outside with black smoke puffs filling the air was still scary as hell, damaging, and deadly." But there were no Luftwaffe fighters. Most German pilots were on the far