Read: D-Day
NORMANDY BEACHHEAD, June 16, 1944 – I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France.
It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever.
Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead.
The water
was full of squishy little jellyfish about the size of your hand.
Millions of them. In the center each of them had a green design exactly
like a four-leaf clover. The good-luck emblem. Sure. Hell yes.
I walked for a mile and a half along the water’s edge of our many-miled invasion beach.
You wanted to walk slowly, for the detail on that beach was infinite.
The wreckage
was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even
aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its
outstanding features to those who are in it. Anything and everything is
expendable.
And we did expend on our beachhead in Normandy during those first few hours.
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For a mile
out from the beach there were scores of tanks and trucks and boats that
you could no longer see, for they were at the bottom of the water –
swamped by overloading, or hit by shells, or sunk by mines. Most of
their crews were lost.
You could
see trucks tipped half over and swamped. You could see partly sunken
barges, and the angled-up corners of jeeps, and small landing craft half
submerged. And at low tide you could still see those vicious
six-pronged iron snares that helped snag and wreck them.
On the beach
itself, high and dry, were all kinds of wrecked vehicles. There were
tanks that had only just made the beach before being knocked out. There
were jeeps that had been burned to a dull gray. There were big derricks
on caterpillar treads that didn’t quite make it. There were half-tracks
carrying office equipment that had been made into a shambles by a single
shell hit, their interiors still holding their useless equipage of
smashed typewriters, telephones, office files.
There were
LCT’s (landing craft tanks) turned completely upside down, and lying on
their backs, and how they got that way I don’t know. There were boats
stacked on top of each other, their sides caved in, their suspension
doors knocked off.
In this
shoreline museum of carnage, there were abandoned rolls of barbed wire
and smashed bulldozers and big stacks of thrown-away lifebelts and piles
of shells still waiting to be moved.
In the water floated empty life rafts and soldiers’ packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges.
On the beach lay snarled rolls of telephone wire and big rolls of steel matting and stacks of broken, rusting rifles.
On the beach
lay, expended, sufficient men and mechanism for a small war. They were
gone forever now. And yet we could afford it.
We could
afford it because we were on, we had our toehold, and behind us there
were such enormous replacements for this wreckage on the beach that you
could hardly conceive of their sum total. Men and equipment were flowing
from England in such a gigantic stream that it made the waste on the
beachhead seem like nothing at all, really nothing at all.
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A few
hundred yards back on the beach is a high bluff. Up there we had a tent
hospital, and a barbed-wire enclosure for prisoners of war. From up
there you could see far up and down the beach, in a spectacular
crow’s-nest view, and far out to sea.
And standing
out there on the water beyond all this wreckage was the greatest armada
man has ever seen. You simply could not believe the gigantic collection
of ships that lay out there waiting to unload.
Looking from
the bluff, it lay thick and clear to the far horizon of the sea and
beyond, and it spread out to the sides and was miles wide. Its utter
enormity would move the hardest man.
As I stood
up there I noticed a group of freshly taken German prisoners standing
nearby. They had not yet been put in the prison cage. They were just
standing there, a couple of doughboys leisurely guarding them with tommy
guns.
The
prisoners too were looking out to sea – the same bit of sea that for
months and years had been so safely empty before their gaze. Now they
stood staring almost as if in a trance.
They didn’t
say a word to each other. They didn’t need to. The expression on their
faces was something forever unforgettable. In it was the final horrified
acceptance of their doom.
If only all
Germans could have had the rich experience of standing on the bluff and
looking out across the water and seeing what their compatriots saw.
War Correspondent
War Correspondent
London
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