Inferno - Max Hastings [338]
The Americans seized Utah, at the elbow of the Cherbourg Peninsula, with only small loss. “You know, it sounds kind of dumb, but it was just like an exercise,” said a private soldier wonderingly. “We waded ashore like kids in a crocodile and up the beach. A couple of shells came over but nowhere near us. I think I even felt somehow disappointed, a little let down.” Farther east at Omaha Beach, however, Americans suffered the heaviest casualties of the day—more than 800 killed. The German defending unit, while not elite, was composed of better troops than those manning most of the Channel front, and sustained vigorous fire against the invaders. “No one was moving forward,” wrote the AP correspondent Don Whitehead. “Wounded men, drenched by cold water, lay in the gravel … ‘Oh God, lemme aboard the boat,’ whimpered a youth in semi-delirium. Near him a shivering boy dug with bare fingers into the sand. Shells were bursting on all sides of us, some so close that they threw black water and dirt over us in showers.”
A private soldier wrote: “There were men crying with fear, men defecating themselves. I lay there with some others, too petrified to move. No one was doing anything except lay there. It was like a mass paralysis. I couldn’t see an officer. At one point something hit me on the arm. I thought I’d taken a bullet. It was somebody’s hand, taken clean off by something. It was too much.” For half the morning, the Omaha Beach assault hung on the edge of failure; only after several hours of apparent stalemate on the sands did small groups of determined men, Rangers notable among them, work their way up the bluffs above the sea, gradually overwhelming the defenders.
When news of the invasion was broadcast, across the Allied nations churches filled with unaccustomed worshippers, joining prayers for the men of the armies. On U.S. radio channels commercial breaks were cancelled, as millions of anxious listeners hung on bulletins and live reports from the beachhead. Industrial strikes were abandoned and civilian blood donations soared. In Europe, millions of oppressed and threatened people experienced a thrill of emotion. As a Dresden Jew, Victor Klemperer had more cause than most to rejoice, but he had been rendered cautious by past disappointments. He compared his wife’s reaction with his own: “Eva was very excited, her knees were trembling. I myself remained quite cold, I am no longer or not yet able to hope … I can hardly imagine living to see the end of this torture, of these years of slavery.”
As for Hitler’s soldiers in France, “On the morning of 6 June, we saw the full might of the English and Americans,” one man wrote in a letter to his wife which was later found on his corpse. “At sea close inshore the fleet was drawn up, limitless ships small and great assembled as if for a parade, a grandiose spectacle. No one who did not see it could have believed it. The whistling of the shells and shattering explosions around us created the worst kind of music. Our unit has suffered terribly—you and the children will be glad I survived. Only a tiny, tiny handful of our company remains.” The Luftwaffe paratrooper lieutenant Martin Poppel, for so long an ardent Nazi and confident of victory, wrote on 6 June: “It turns out that this really is the Allies’ big day—which unfortunately means that it’s ours too.” Geyr von Schweppenburg, commanding Panzergroup West, was convinced that Rommel, who directed the deployments behind Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, was wrong to stake everything on a “forward defence.” Von Schweppenburg had urged that the armoured divisions should be held back and massed for a counterattack. Nonetheless, like most thoughtful German officers, he believed the outcome inevitable whatever deployments the defenders had made: “No landing or lodgement attempted by the Allies could ever have been defeated by us without an air force, and this we utterly lacked.”
Late in the afternoon of