D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [12]
‘Gentlemen,’ said Stagg, ‘since I presented the forecast last evening some rapid and unexpected developments have occurred over the north Atlantic.’ There would be a brief improvement from Monday afternoon. The weather would not be ideal, was the gist of his message, but it would do. Searching questions followed and an earnest discussion began.
‘Let’s be clear about one thing,’ Admiral Ramsay broke in. ‘If Overlord is to proceed on Tuesday I must issue provisional warning to my forces within the next half-hour. But if they do restart and have to be recalled again, there can be no question of continuing on Wednesday.’
Leigh-Mallory again expressed concern about sufficient visibility for his bombers, but Eisenhower turned to Montgomery, who was wearing his unconventional uniform of a fawn pullover and baggy corduroys.
‘Do you see any reason why we should not go on Tuesday?’
‘No,’ replied Montgomery emphatically in his nasal voice. ‘I would say - Go.’
Outside in the hall, staff officers were waiting with sheaves of orders ready to be signed by their chiefs. Two sets had been prepared to cover both alternatives.
In the early hours of Monday, 5 June, further data came in to confirm the break in the weather. At the morning conference, Stagg was able to face his intimidating audience with much greater confidence. The tension eased and ‘the Supreme Commander and his colleagues became as new men’, he wrote afterwards. Eisenhower’s grin returned. Further details were discussed, but everyone was impatient to leave and the room emptied rapidly. There was much to be done to get the 5,000 ships from nearly a dozen different nations back to sea and on course down pre-established shipping lanes. A small fleet of minesweepers in line abreast would then proceed in front of them to clear a broad channel all the way to the beaches. Admiral Ramsay was particularly concerned for the crews of these vulnerable craft. They expected very heavy casualties.
Now that the great decision had been taken, Eisenhower went to South Parade Pier in Portsmouth to see the last troops embarking. ‘He always gets a lift from talking with soldiers,’ his aide, Harry Butcher, noted in his diary. At lunchtime, they returned to Eisenhower’s trailer at Southwick Park and played ‘Hounds and Fox’ and then checkers. Butcher had already arranged for the supreme commander, accompanied by journalists, to go to the airfield at Greenham Common that evening to visit the American 101st Airborne Division. They were due to take off at 23.00 hours for the mission which Leigh-Mallory had predicted would be a disaster.
Unlike the infantry and other arms, who had been enclosed in the barbed-wire ‘sausages’, the airborne troops had been driven directly to the airfields from where they were to take off. The 82nd Airborne Division had been based around Nottingham, while the 101st was spread around the Home Counties west of London. For five days they had been quartered in aircraft hangars and provided with rows of cots with aisles in between. There, they stripped and oiled their personal weapons time and again, or sharpened their bayonets. Some had bought commando knives in London, and several had equipped themselves with cut-throat razors. They had been instructed how to kill a man silently by slicing through the jugular and the voice box. Their airborne training had not only been physically rigorous. Some of them had been forced ‘to crawl through the entrails and blood of hogs as part of getting toughened up’.
To take their minds off the oppressive wait extended by the postponement, officers provided gramophones which played songs such as ‘I’ll Walk Alone’ and ‘That Old Black Magic’. They also organized projectors