Cox executed by firing squad
Slayer of five meets death with silent defiance
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Two earthquakes hit Los Angeles
Shocks yesterday were strongest since those of 1933
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150 injured as trains sideswipe each other
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German Red Cross cars suspicious
An Allied airstrip, France (AP) –
U.S. fighter pilots grew suspicious today of the relatively large number of vehicles behind German lines bearing Red Cross markings.
Pilots said the Germans either have an abundance of wounded or are traveling under false colors.
Lt. David Fuller of Warehouse Point, Connecticut, said:
About eight out of every ten vehicles we sighted had a big Red Cross on them. That seems an unusually high percentage to me.
Pilots meticulously avoid firing on automobiles with Red Cross insignia. The only way they can make sure they are genuine is to drop low while flying 300 miles an hour or more. This is dangerous with flak batteries around.
Yank-held beach becomes France’s busiest seaport
On a U.S.-held beach in Normandy, France (AP) –
This has suddenly become France’s busiest port.
More shipping was landed here Sunday and sent into U.S. lines then passed through Cherbourg during an entire month of normal operations.
And still it is pouring in. Liberty ships, LSTs (Landing Ships, Tanks) and converted ocean liners lie offshore by the scores with their umbrella of barrage balloons.
Their cargo bears a simple stenciled codeword for their destination. To thousands of sailors and soldiers who toil here day and night this beach is their temporary hometown. All it needs is a Chamber of Commerce.
There are no houses – just tents and foxholes.
The foxholes with boards and dirt thrown over the top are more desirable residences. The canvas G.I. tents aren’t flak-proof. Jerry comes over as soon as it gets dark and trigger-happy gun crews on the ships offshore join with the anti-aircraft lads on the beach in an ack-ack show rivaling London’s.
“There have been more killed and hurt from falling flak than from bombs,” said Lt. Col. William Hunnel of Buffalo, New York, director of operations for the Army transportation outfit at headquarters here.
One raider came in too low last night.
“He must be bucking for a sergeant or something,” said Pvt. A. M. Pollock of Brooklyn, New York, as the German plane flew threw a field of tracer fire.
A minute later, the flaming plane started a long drive into the sea.
German fortifications attract the most interest. Elaborate oil paintings on the walls of a tunnel alongside a gun show the beach and landmarks with the exact range noted alongside. The gunners didn’t have to be able to read to operate an 88mm gun.
Inside the tunnel under about 40 feet of earth are thousands of rounds of 88mm ammunition. The big shells were stored like bottles of wine. They are 1943 vintage. Four Germans still lie sprawled in front where the U.S. Rangers killed them on D-Day.
The signs of fierce battles on the beach are rapidly disappearing.
Twenty bulldozers are busy clearing roads. A detail of prisoners is collecting stray pieces of clothing, helmets, and canteens, and sorting them into huge piles. Trucks haul them away for salvage.
Road signs have gone up. Yank MPs keep the traffic moving on the right side of the road, instead of the left.
Essary: Recalls agony of peacetime Channel crossing
Getting past French columns ordeal for veteran travelers
By Helen Essary, Central Press columnist
Washington –
The weather and the Channel tides timed the invasion of France, Allied chiefs explain. Crossing the English Channel is regarded by many people as the most disagreeable experience any traveler can have, said President Roosevelt the other day. The sea moves fast there. The waves roll high and the winds blow strong. There were tens of thousands of men to be got across the water and landed on enemy territory on the shores near Cherbourg, Le Havre and Calais, Mr. Roosevelt added.
I used to think I was landing on enemy territory even in those jolly old pre-war touring days when I tottered off the Channel boat at Cherbourg, Calais or Le Havre. Those fierce able-bodied French females who pushed me around the customs office – especially at Calais – made me feel unwanted on French territory (this is definitely an understatement).
There was no Parisian chic about these ladies. They wore no stays to bind their physical proportions. Their smacked back “cheveux” were not done according to the “dernier cri” of the Rue de Rivoli. Their broad denim aprons had not been created by Paguin nor any other couturière.
But how those women could wave their arms and yell and shove. I suspected them of being descendants of Madama La Farge, whom Charles Dickens pictured knitting in a Paris square as Le Guillotine lopped off the heads of the aristocrats.
When the news of the Nazi invasion of France startled the world four years ago, I wondered how Hitler’s warriors could have got past those custom house grenadier-esses. Bucking the French customs with their assistance was a trial to break the stiffest backbone. You always knew you were going to lose your luggage.
You knew the train on which you had a compartment (suspicious word) would leave without you because you were certain to be the last to escape from this landing madhouse.
You went stumbling up and down steps, across cobblestones – there always seemed to be so many cobblestones – across railroad tracks at the heels of strange, foreign characters. These characters fought over your bags and suspected you of concealed American cigarettes and typewriters, whose shouts you could not understand regardless of the opened Phrase Book for Travelers you held in one hand. With the other hand, you clutched an umbrella, a “lightweight” coat, a paper parcel of silver spoons you had “picked up, my dear, at one of those adorable, open-air markets in London,” a mile of colored tickets, your passport, your landing card, your pound note for which you were sure you were not going to be paid your francs’ worth at the ”exchange” wicket, and your Paris-Herald without which, if you were a true American, you never traveled for fear you would not know the “rate of exchange.”
The heavy fear of the things you had to have in order to land in France was sometimes more than an uncultured American could cope with. Especially if the wind over the Channel was blowing extra strong, I once saw a harried nervous lady tourist drop her purse and her passport over the side of the boat into the sea. The French authorities would not let her off the boat without identification. She may be there yet for all I know.
Those Channel tides were exciting and fun if you were not rocking about on their uncanny crests, so to speak. I spent a season at a small and elegant Channel resort – “Bexhill-on-Sea.”
Near Boulogne, where many of our soldiers landed on the French side, many of the beaches were sandy.
I spent one night at a spot where the swimmers, Gertrude Ederle and others, were in training. After a dinner of langouste (lobsters without the big claw), I had taken myself to bed in a many-windowed room facing the Channel.
All night long, a towering lighthouse twirled its beams across my poor face. When I had finally got to sleep, I was awakened by the noise of the tide rushing in. At low tide the beach had stretched out as wide as two blocks, it seemed to me, but now I could hear the sea charging about under the foundations of the inn. And I thought how sad it would be if I were washed out to sea in this unknown land without a friend to identify “body of drowned woman washed up on shore” like the captain’s little daughter in “The Wreck of the Hesperus.”
Bill to increase veteran benefits
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Editorial: The prize
Cherbourg Peninsula assumes historic importance in this greatest of military enterprises. Allied generals saw that its possession would send the war far forward because it would mean the difference between landing men and armor on the beaches, often in rough seas, and disembarking in the security of a safe harbor.
German estimates, which may or may not be accurate, are that a half million Allied troops have been out ashore in Normandy. The landing of an army of this size, with all necessary supplies and equipment, is a miracle of human endeavor. It must not be forgotten that this task was accomplished with severe losses – losses in men, in shipping, equipment, as the littered beaches and the debris in the wash of the waves prove.
Cherbourg today is a wrecked city and a ruined port. Installations were greatly damaged by Allied attacks from the air, and the Germans completed the work of demolition. Restoration of the port to usability will not be a lengthy job, however, and possession of the city will make possible an uninterrupted flow of supplies from Britain to France as the invasion expands to ever greater proportions.
Cherbourg becomes the first great objective of Allied armies because it was assigned the role of serving as the keystone of the invasion, the source of power for steady, devastating blows which will carry the forces of liberation toward their final objective.
B-29 production effort gigantic
Program started while bomber was only a drawing
By James J. Strebig, Associated Press aviation editor
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The Pittsburgh Press (June 19, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Normandy beachhead, France –
When I went ashore on the soil of France, the first thing I wanted to do was hunt up the other correspondents I had said goodbye to a few days previously in England, and see how they fared. Before the day of invasion, we had accepted it as a fact that not everybody would come through alive.
Correspondents sort of gang together. They know the ins and outs of war, and they all work at it in much the same manner. So, I knew about where to look, and I didn’t have much trouble finding them.
It was early in the morning, before the boys had started out on their day’s round of covering the war. I found them in foxholes dug into the rear slope of a grassy hill about a half-mile from the beach.
I picked them out from a distance, because I could spot Jack Thompson’s beard. He was sitting on the edge of a foxhole lacing his paratrooper boots. About a dozen correspondents were there, among them three especially good friends of mine – Thompson, Don Whitehead and Tex O’Reilly.
First of all, we checked with each other on what we had heard about other correspondents. Most of them were OK. One had been killed, and one was supposed to have been lost on a sunken ship, but we didn’t know who. One or two had been wounded. Three of our best friends had not been heard from at all, and it looked bad, but they have since turned up safe.
The boys were unshaven, and they eyes were red. Their muscles were stiff and their bodies ached. They had carried ashore only their typewriters and some K rations. They had gone two days without sleep, and then had slept on the ground without blankets, in wet clothes.
But none of that mattered too much after what they had been through. They were in a sort of daze from the exhaustion and mental turmoil of battle. When you asked a question, it would take them a few seconds to focus their thoughts and give you an answer.
Two of them in particular had been through all the frightful nightmare that the assault troops had experienced – because they had come ashore with them.
Don Whitehead hit the beach with one regiment just an hour after H-Hour, Thompson at the same time with another regiment. They were on the beaches for more than four hours under the hideous cloudburst of shells and bullets.
Jack Thompson said:
You’ve never seen a beach like it before. Dead and wounded men were lying so thick you could hardly take a step. One officer was killed only two feet away from me.
Whitehead was still asleep when I went to his foxhole. I said, “Get up, you lazy so-and-so.” He started grinning without even opening his eyes, for he knew who it was.
It was hard for him to wake up. He had been unable to sleep, from sheer exhaustion, and had taken a sleeping tablet.
Don has managed to steal one blanket on the beach and had that wrapped around him. He had taken off his shoes for the first time in two days. His feet were so sore from walking in wet shoes and socks that he had to give them some air.
Finally, he began to get himself up. He said:
I don’t know why I’m alive at all. It was really awful. For hours there on the beach, the shells were so close they were throwing mud and rocks all over you. It was so bad that after a while you didn’t care whether you got hit or not.
Don fished in a cardboard ration box for some cigarettes. He pulled out an envelope and threw it into the bushes. “They ain’t worth a damn,” he said. The envelope contained his anti-seasickness tablets.
He said:
I was sicker than hell while we were circling around in our landing craft to come ashore. Everybody was sick. Soldiers were lying on the floor of the LCVP sick as dogs.
Tex O’Reilly rode around in a boat for six hours waiting to get ashore. Everybody was wet and cold and seasick and scared. War is so romantic – if you’re far away from it.
Whitehead has probably been in more amphibious landings than any other correspondents over here. I know of six he has made, four of them murderously tough. And he said:
I think I have gone on one too many of these things. Not because of what might happen to me personally, but I’ve lost my perspective. It’s like dreaming the same nightmare over and over again, and when you try to write you feel that you have written it all before. You can’t think of any new or different words to say it with.
I know only too well what he means.
It is an ironic thing about corresp0ndents who go in on the first few days of an invasion story. They are the only correspondents capable of telling the full and intimate drama and horror of the thing. And yet they are the ones who can’t get their copy out to the world. By the time they do get it out, events have swirled on and the world doesn’t care anymore.
There that morning in their foxholes on the slope of the hill those correspondents were mainly worried about the communications situation. Forty-eight hours after H-Hour, correspondents who had landed with the first wave felt sure that none of their copy had ever reached America. And even I, a day behind then, feel no assurance that these feeble essays of mine will ever see the light of day. But in philosophical moments, I can think of greater catastrophes than that.
LIFE (June 19, 1944)
Invasion surgeon
Gen. Hawley provides quick care for wounded
By Mary Welsh
London, England –
There are thousands of American fighting men slogging through the invasion who, next year or some year soon after, will be home again, living their lives peacefully without any dog tags. In any previous war, these same men would never go home. Their post-war identification would be a fixed cross with their name, rank and serial number.
These returning thousands will be composed of the men hospitalized for battle wounds who this time will not die. The Army Medical Corps has reduced the death rate of hospitalized wounded from 8% in World War I to 3% in World War II. There are many more casualties who, if injured in 1918, would have been long invalided. In 1944, these wounded will recover quickly and completely.
The man who, more than any other, is responsible for pushing back these margins of pain, disability and death on the second front is a solid, freckle-faced surgeon named Paul Ramsey Hawley, who is a major general in the U.S. Army. Gen. Hawley comes from College Corner, Ohio, a town he likes. He also likes precision in speech, medicine and manners, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, his job. He came to England from Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Barracks in September 1941 to study English medical methods under the Blitz. After Pearl Harbor, Hawley stayed on to become chief U.S. Army surgeon in the European Theater. As head ETO surgeon, Gen. Hawley has assembled in one vast organization some of the top U.S. talent in surgery. He has also assembled medicine and huge stores of blood plasma, sulfa drugs, penicillin and new anesthetics like sodium pentathol which can go to forward-zone hospitals because its use does not require elaborate equipment. But Gen. Hawley and his chief surgical consultant, inexhaustible Col. Elliott Cutler of Harvard’s Medical School, put only a portion of their faith in medicine alone. They know how necessary good surgery is in treating battle casualties.
Gen. Hawley has keyed his entire organization to the principle that the earlier the surgery on many types of wounds, the better the soldier’s chance of full recovery. His watchword is: “Get the surgeon to the patient, not the patient to the surgeon.” The invasion wounded will not have to undergo unnecessary feats of endurance, for Gen. Hawley has worked out a “chain of evacuation” system to insure them speedy medical treatment and surgery. His gentle-handed legions of first-aid men, litter bearers, ambulance drivers, hospital train and aircraft crews are skilled in moving casualties quickly and with expert precision. His doctors’ system of sorting wounds quickly routes soldiers in need of immediate surgery to completely equipped hospitals only a few miles behind the front.
In Gen. Hawley’s “chain of evacuation,” there are 10 halting places. In every one of them, and en route between, men may be treated according to their needs. Most wounded will bypass several of them.
The Hawley chain is composed of: 1) first-aid men, 2) litter bearers, 3) battalion aid stations, 1,000 yards or less from the front, 4) division clearing stations, about eight miles back, 5) evacuation hospitals, 15 to 30 miles behind the lines, 6) field hospitals, paralleling the evacuation hospitals, 7) hospital trains and ships, 8) station and general hospitals in secure areas where patients may remain six months if necessary, 9) convalescent hospitals, 10) the United States of America.
First-aid men, one for each platoon of infantry, move onto the battlefield just behind the fighters. In paratroop outfits they jump with the soldiers. Under shells, bombs and mortar fire, they give instant aid to the wounded. If a casualty can walk, he goes with temporary dressing to the battalion aid station by himself. If he can’t walk, the first-aid man makes him comfortable, with morphine if necessary, then directs litter bearers to him.
At battalion aid stations, doctors, working in tents or available buildings, give treatment for shock, control hemorrhage, relieve pain, administer transfusions, immobilize fractures. These numerous small units do not attempt major surgery. They simply prepare the wounded for traveling in the greatest possible comfort.
The first real wound-sorting nation in the evacuation chain is the division clearing station, whose functions are similar to those of an emergency room in big city hospitals. Here experts in wound-diagnosis decide which men need priority in travel and treatment, which can more safely wait. Meanwhile, they change dressings, check tourniquets, prevent infection, relieve pain. Most soldiers hit by ordinary bullets feel little pain for the first couple of hours.
From division clearing stations, all but the most lightly wounded move back in ambulances to evacuation hospitals, two or three hours behind the front. Here doctors are equipped to do major surgery, but since evacuation hospitals must be ready to move with the troops, they take in only men they expect to recover quickly. Annexed to each evacuation hospital is a field hospital which stays stationary longer. To these field hospitals go urgent chest and abdominal cases who will not be moved until they are out of danger.
From either evacuation or field hospitals the way back from the front is comparatively smooth. Shining, clean hospital trains and ships heavily staffed by nurses and doctors take casualties to big station and general hospitals in England where there are experts in every type of medicine and surgery, either on staff or on call. Many of these large U.S. hospitals, now quartered in Nissen huts in England, complete with their own kitchens, laundries and electric power plants, are scheduled to follow the invasion across the channel.
To save travel, the rule of the chain of evacuation is that the patient must be evacuated no farther to the rear than his condition warrants. But sulfa drugs, penicillin and other new methods of treatment now make it safe and virtually painless for many men to travel far distances before they get definitive treatment. For instance, brain wounds may cause no pain at all, since no sensory nerves are in the brain. Thus, if they are not otherwise hurt and if sulfa has been administered early, men with shrapnel in their heads may now travel straight back to the big hospital.
Gen. Hawley’s statistical staff has figured out from its African and Italian experiences, just how many of what kind of patients invasion doctors may expect and what the hazards of their injuries are. They have learned that high explosives – bombs, shells, mines and mortar – cause 82% of all wounds, small arms only 18%, and that the soldier is most apt to be hit in the arms or legs. They know, too, that 15% of all combat casualties receive abdominal, pelvic and chest wounds and that these are the cases which must be most quickly attended. In the last war, the AEF mortality rate from abdominal and pelvic wounds was 43%. During three months of hard fighting in Africa last year, the U.S. Army Medical Corps managed to hold the rate to 21%. With his mobile, forward-zone field hospitals, Gen. Hawley hopes to reduce this percentage even further. On the second front, soldiers with serious abdominal and chest wounds will reach the operating tables of these field hospitals a scant two or three hours after they are hit.
Without the strictest adherence to military precisions and what the Army calls SOP (Standard Operational Procedure), Gen. Hawley’s complex organization could never work. Except in big hospitals, a patient may never be attended by the same doctor twice. The nurse who puts on a bandage may be 50 miles away when it is taken off. To ensure that the treatment of any type of injury or illness “be continuous and conform to one plan rather than altered with each change of medical officers.” Hawley and his staff compiled a Manual of Therapy which standardizes every medical treatment and surgical operation down to the kinds of anesthetics to be given, the exact amount of drugs, types of bandages, kinds of stitches, sixes of shrapnel to be removed.
The manual recommends surgical techniques which a few years ago were considered revolutionary. Proof that these practices are correct is provided by corps of experts in toxicology, pathology, bacteriology, serology, parasitology and entomology. They deal with problems too complicated for average hospital laboratories, hunting down every evidence of unusual diseases, rare germs, worms, bugs. They are the Army’s insurance against outbreaks of food-poisoning or amebic dysentery, typhoid, dozens of other epidemics.
Some of Gen. Hawley’s specialists are searching for the cause of otitis, an inflammation of the ear which grounds a high percentage of fliers and sometimes makes them deaf. Another expert is studying the behavior of typhus virus, imported from Naples. Typhus has been reported in eastern Germany and Gen. Hawley wants all possible answers on how to treat it and the other diseases which may develop in starved, overcrowded Europe.
Just before D-Day, Gen. Hawley said of this great medical machine which he has spent two years in perfecting:
It’s like a beautiful ship, ready on the ways for launching. Let’s hope it doesn’t go aground or capsize.
As D-Day came and went and the wounded eddied quickly back from the first invasion wave to beachhead battalion aid stations and to floating hospitals completely equipped with clamped-down operating tables, it was apparent that Gen. Hawley’s “beautiful ship” was doing a beautiful job indeed on its crucial first run.
Beachheads of Normandy
The fateful battle for Europe is joined by sea and air
Americans crawl ashore through gun and artillery fire onto a French beach. Many were knocked down by the waves, lost their guns and ammunition.
The weather was not good for invasion last week along the coast of Normandy. Rain soaked the streets of the lovely old city of Caen, capital of the Norman Empire, and splashed against the gray walls of the cathedral at Bayeux. Along the beaches from Cherbourg to Le Havre fog blew in with the west wind.
But in spite of the heavy surf, troops and supplies came in by sea as paratroops and glider-borne infantry came by air to drop inland. Whenever the skies cleared, if only for an hour, Allied planes attacked the German airfields, railroads and troop concentrations. By the end of the week, the American beachhead at the mouth of the Vire had been consolidated with the British beachhead to the west of the Orne, Bayeux and Isigny had been captured and there was heavy fighting near Caen. Within four days after the first landings, U.S. Thunderbolts and RAF Spitfires were flying from airfields in France.
By week’s end, too, the first strategic objectives of the campaign had emerged. The Allies were trying to take Cherbourg as fast as possible. According to the Germans, from whom most news of the actual fighting was still coming, the Allies had made three new tank landings and had dropped paratroops near Lessay in an attempt to sever the Cherbourg Peninsula. Meanwhile, also according to the Germans, who threatened to stop giving out news unless the Allies gave out more news, the Allies were fighting east of Montebourg, less than 15 miles could be crossed, the Allies would have one of France’s best ports – used extensively by Americans in the last war – where supplies could be landed and whence an attack on Paris could be mounted.
While the weather was still had, the whole attack, supplies and all, moved slowly. Gen. Montgomery, field commander for the U.S., British and Canadian armies, moved his headquarters to France. Gen. Eisenhower called a council of war on a battleship off the French coast. By prearrangement, Gen. Marshall, Gen. Arnold and Adm. King turned up in London to get a closer look at what was going on. The fighting grew more desperate, the tempo of thrust and counterthrust more furious. Caen held out stubbornly against British attacks. The success of the invasion was still not certain. The Germans had 50 divisions at their disposal in France and their Luftwaffe had still not thrown in its strength, whatever its strength might be. The Allies had other armies to throw into the battle for Cherbourg or into landings on other beaches along the invasion coast.
The pictures were taken by LIFE photographer Robert Capa who went in with the first wave of troops. Although the first reports of landings indicated little opposition, his pictures show how violent the battle was and how strong the German defenses. His best pictures were made when he photographed the floundering American doughboys advancing through the deadly hail of enemy fire to goals on the beaches of Normandy.
The first wave of U.S. assault troops race through boiling surf to the beach. From the higher ground tapping machine guns have brought down several men in the water. This landing was one of the U.S. seaborne attacks made on June 6 between Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue and Isigny.
Troops crouch behind shallow-water obstacles installed by Germans. Tanks out of camera field to the right move up to silence German fire. These men waited for second wave of boats, then followed the tanks up the beach. Two landing craft may be dimly seen at left.
Crawling through the water, U.S. soldier edges toward the beach. Immense excitement of moment made photographer Capa move his camera and blur picture. The Germans were still pouring machine-gun and shellfire down on the beach, apparently from concrete pillboxes.
Men in the second wave also take cover until all their boats have come in. Behind them men are jumping into water to their necks. Their heads can be seen just above surface. Combat engineers cleared lanes through obstacles farther offshore so that boats could get in.
Thin black line of invasion force assembles on the beach for push against German positions on heights, obscured by haze and battle smoke. Men pause on beach to get water out of their equipment and to make sure that another wave is following so they will not be cut off.
Loaded with four vehicles, a U.S. LCT cruises easily toward shore. Plume of white smoke drifting across beach is from smoke shells laid down by naval guns to screen landing forces outlined against the smoke at right is an LCT (Landing Craft, Infantry).
The scene of battle was overhung by dark, heavy clouds, dirty weather, which hampered Allied air cover, whipped up six-foot waves in the Channel. During the crossing, many of the men became violently ill. But despite their illness, they were quietly and effectively heroic. The ships shown in this picture are only the forward fringe of enormous armada which carried the landing force to France. Larger craft offshore were unloaded by smaller boats. Some were unloaded by giant “rhino” rafts made of rectangular steel chambers bolted together.
Casualties
Ships bring back wounded and dead
In Coast Guard LCT, medical officer, wearing two bars on his big Navy-type helmet, prepares to give transfusion to crewman hit by German shell fragments.
After photographer Capa made the acutely real landing pictures which appear on the preceding five pages, he left the hazardous beach in a Coast Guard LCT which was evacuating the wounded and dead to a hospital ship standing offshore. As he waded out to get aboard, his cameras were thoroughly soaked. By some miracle, one of them was not too badly damaged and he was able to keep making pictures. The excitement was not over by a long shot.
As Capa’s LCT pulled away from the beach, it was hit three times by shells from German shore batteries. Several of the Coast Guard crew were killed and others seriously wounded. The boat began to list badly, but it managed to get back to the hospital ship. There, most of the wounded were taken off, despite the list and heavy seas. One man, however, was too seriously hurt to be moved, and it was necessary for a medical officer to give him a plasma transfusion on the spot. As he prepared to do this, Capa snapped the picture shown above. The next picture, showing a few of the first men to fall in the invasion of Europe, was made by Capa after he had boarded the hospital ship.
The first dead of the invasion, shrouded in white bags, are laid in neat rows on the deck of a U.S. hospital ship, which takes them back to English graves.
Although the extent of the U.S. casualties in the Normandy landings has not yet been announced, they were generally lighter than expected. The wounded have received magnificent care. The evacuation chain set up by Maj. Gen. Paul R. Hawley, head ETO surgeon, appeared to be working smoothly. Invasion reporters who never got to France at all found a minor epic in the return of the wounded to English ports on the day after the first assault. Some of them walked off the ships, with their uniforms torn and their bandages hastily applied, but swiftly and safely carried out of the battle zone. Others came on stretchers carried by Negro litter bearers, their personal belongings piled beside them. some carried their boots, with French sand still clinging to the soles, on their litters. Many spoke of fine work done by medical men on the beaches. Said one man, “They’re right in there, giving morphine and bandaging wounds while the bullets whiz past their ears.” Another report told of a difficult abdominal operation performed in a pitching LST under improvised lights.
Three wounded Canadians chose an unorthodox but astonishingly simple method of getting themselves to a hospital in England. According to a dispatch to the New York Times, they walked out of a dockyard to which they had been brought and hailed a taxi. Their leader, Lt. C. R. Bond of the Royal Canadian Navy, said to hospital attendants, “We’re back from France.”
The big days
Sudden storms and sudden death shook history’s greatest armada
By Charles Christian Wertenbaker
From air, the landings looked like scale model with LCTs (left and top), smaller LCTs (upper right), ducks (center). Tanks, vehicles are mounting road at right. Bottom object seems to be armored truck with raised apparatus for bridging barbed wire. A pillbox is on fire at bottom.
By cable from U.S. Force HQ ship in the English Channel –
D-Day minus three was a clear, mild day with a fresh breeze blowing in the Channel from the west. Aboard this ship, the USS Acamar (a false name), there were quiet, intense preparations for directing the battle ahead. AA and machine-gun crews were briefed; there was a general-quarters drill during the afternoon. Ship’s officers collected signatures on brand-new 100-franc notes which, with luck, would be their mementos of the invasion.
Every half hour or so, tank landing ships and infantry landing craft would appear around the headland to the east and glide toward us. The boats joined a swarm of similar craft. Each boat fitted closely against the next, as if for security, so that in the mass they lost all identity and became a floating island of men and metal. Only the movement of a hand or face showed that it was not all metal.
Late in the afternoon, the mass began to break apart; each boat became a boat again, and each man a creature with arms, body and head, and a brain to keep all together. The boats, hundreds of them in single file, moved to anchor. It would not be long. In all the ports, boats were moving, gathering, and along the coast, caressing the shore, one convoy of a thousand big and little ships was already on its way to a beach in Normandy.
At midnight, Gen. Eisenhower and his staff were studying the weather reports. For some days, they had known that a low-pressure area was moving eastward in the Atlantic but the weather experts had expected it to turn north before it reached the Channel. Instead, the gale had come straight on, with another slighter blow behind it. This was probably the hardest decision Gen. Eisenhower ever had to make. Perhaps he remembered the Spanish Armada and the disaster that overtook it. At any rate, sometime before dawn he chose the cautious course. At 5:45, the Acamar’s radio buzzed: “Stand by for important message.” Just before 6:00, the message came: The invasion is postponed for a minimum of 24 hours.
The landing boats scurried back. A brace of destroyers went barking after the thousand-ship convoy that was bearing toward Normandy with its radio sealed. All around the coast of England, ships, big and little, on missions, big and little, had to slow up or turn around, the greatest armada in history broke up before it was assembled.
D-Day minus two
Sunday, June 4, was a day of decisions perhaps more difficult to make than the one that had delayed the start by 24 hours. Because of the tides, there were only three days in early June when the invasion could begin. They were the 5th, 6th and 7th. The 5th had been picked for D-Day because on this day at 6:00, the tide would have been a little more than halfway between ebb and flood – that is, high enough to land fairly well up the beaches and on sand instead of mud, and low enough to land before the first series of beach obstacles were reached. Not for two more weeks, until June 19, 20 and 21, would a similar series of conditions again prevail. And so, on this Sunday, the decision to be made was whether to invade on Tuesday or Wednesday or whether to postpone the invasion for a fortnight.
All day Sunday, it blew a gale, churning up the water even where the Acamar and the command ship of Adm. Alan G. Kirk and Lt. Gen. Omar Nelson Bradley were sheltered. At 1:30 that afternoon, Gen. Bradley visited his headquarters ship to check reports and plans. The naval officers at the meeting wanted 48 hours to reassemble their forces. Gen. Bradley was in a hurry. Finally, Adm. Kirk agreed that he could be ready for Tuesday. The British were also ready. H-Hour was moved back by half an hour in the new tentative plan. Gen. Eisenhower promised a tentative decision by evening, a final, decision by 6:00 in the morning.
By evening, the new plans were worked out. By evening it was pouring rain. The wind whipped spray over the open boats and the rain blotted out the faces of the men in them. Some of them were ending their fifth day in the boats. “They’re pretty tough by now,” said an officer watching them through glasses, “but I’ll bet they’ll be glad to hit the beach.” “The poor sons of bitches,” said another, “they’re lucky to be where they are.”
Around 9:00, the gale had blown itself out and the smaller one following it was not so much feared. The forecast: clear Tuesday morning, with weather closing in by evening. That would be good for the airborne landings, for the air bombardment, for observation for the naval bombardment.
D-Day minus one
Monday morning at 6:00, the final confirmation came. The day was cloudy and cold. The staff officers looked at the sky, shrugged and put their trust in the weatherman. A sleepy colonel said, “Win, lose or draw – and there ain’t no draw – they can’t call it off now, thank God.”
By late afternoon, the command ship was gone. The small boats were gone. One by one the destroyers left the harbor. At 10:00, when the clouds broke and the low sun shone across the water, the harbor was almost empty. Then, gathering her flock of small boats around her ad with two destroyers shepherding the flock, the Acamar, last big ship to leave, set out under full steam for the invasion of France.
Two ducks and two halftracks towing 37mm anti-tank guns are already on beach, as men carrying Springfield rifles prepare to debark from LCVP.
Some seriously hurt wait to be evacuated. Foreground, an emergency first-aid kit and a Mae West.
Dead Americans end their adventure on a cobble-stoned beach of Normandy, probably toward the end of the peninsula. The worst casualties were taken in first half hour on beaches. German casualties included a surprising number of prisoners, few of them of first-line quality.
In the tall grass behind the beach, Americans seek cover while in the background tanks advance on a shelled house that was probably a Nazi strongpoint.
Truck moves over road completed by U.S. engineers and covered with mat while ahead the engineers detonate mines.
D-Day
Tuesday, June 6, the invasion began almost exactly on schedule at 30 minutes past midnight. That was the time when airborne troops began landing by parachute at six hours before H-Hour, the actual moment of land attack. At the instant, the first parachutist lowered his head and fell toward the earth of Normandy, U.S., British and Canadian Armies had afloat or in the air some thousands of men and thousands of vehicles.
Landing on the western beach in the target area went well; by 7:30 a.m., one hour and a half after the sixth hour of the sixth day of the sixth month of the year 1944, two regiments of infantry and some tanks were ashore. On the eastern beach, waves were higher, obstacles more stubborn and the enemy prepared; a fresh division had been rushed there a few hours earlier. On this beach all tanks were swamped. The entire beach was under enemy fire and on most parts of it boats could not unload. Not until early afternoon did the first waves get off the beach and begin to spread out in the high ground beyond the bluffs.
From the sea, most of the larger warships were moving toward the beach that needed support. Dense smoke rose where the B-17s had taken care of the enemy battery, firing straight down the length of the western beach. But off the eastern beach there was a steady thunder of heavy naval guns firing, and on shore smoke rising from the beach and the bluffs behind. Beyond a dim church steeple stretched the gray beach spotted with boats and vehicles, and beyond that green fields and towns.
At two places where landing parties had found exits from the beaches, destroyers standing in close to the shore were pouring fire into the valleys beyond the exits and enemy guns were firing in the valleys themselves. On either side of the valley heavier ships crashed broadsides deep into the interior. Their guns spat orange flame. The air seemed to tremble as they fired.
On into the night destroyers stood inshore firing intermittently. From the enemy also came sporadic shelling while the engineers on the beach worked to clear some of the wreckage. On the beach, fires flared and died down. Out beyond the line of destroyers hundreds of ships lying at anchor were dark and silent under a cloudy sky. At 11:30 that night, enemy raiders came and the night was lit with bomb bursts and with tracers firing into the clouds. One ship, hit, flared brilliantly for no more than five minutes, lighting the whole eastern sky, then suddenly went out. Shortly after midnight, three raiders fell slowly flaming into the sea.
D-Day plus one
After less than five hours of sheer night, lighter streaks low in the sky showed where the moon was. The horizon appeared again and by ones and twos and dozens and scores the great flotilla appeared. Warships made black silhouettes like those printed in Jane’s Fighting Ships, and the smaller craft were at first mere blobs of black. Then all became clearly visible, down to the guns of the warships and the men aboard the landing craft nearby waiting for the moment of landing. The first Flying Fortresses appeared and, as the light grew, the obstacles on the beaches stood out sharply in the queer pre-dawn pink that make dark things darker. From the shore still came the sounds of shelling and of rifle and machine-gun fire as the first 24 hours of the invasion ended.
In the full light of day, you could look down from a bluff through the opening of the river valley at the beach spread out below. It looked like a great junkyard. Fro, the water’s edge at low tide to the high-water mark were landing craft, some impaled on obstacles, blown by mines, shattered by shellfire and stranded by the ebbing of the tide. Among them, following a narrow path from the water to the valley’s edge, moved a line of sound vehicles and a company of men just landed. As they passed, some of the men turned to look at the wreckage through which they moved: there was a bulldozer with its guts spattered over the sand, and another with its occupants spattered, an arm here, a leg there, a piece of pulp over yonder. There were discarded things all over the beach: lifebelts, cartridge clips, canteens, pistol belts, bayonets, K-rations. Behind the beach, across a wide, deep tank ditch half full of water was the casemated German 88 that had caused much of the wreckage. A clean shell hole through the steel shield of its narrow opening showed how it had been put out of action.
Echoes of World War I speak in pictures of Americans in France passing dead Germans…
…and stopping in a town (below) beside a Romanesque church. But these are paratroopers, a spectacular innovation of World War II. At right below is a Shell gasoline station.
By the afternoon of D-Day plus one, the battle of this beachhead was already the most desperate of the invasion. The Germans had set up machine-gun positions atop the bluffs; and these, with ingeniously concealed batteries, had raked landing parties. Casualties of some of the assault forces had been high. Now most of the beach was still under shellfire. The intermittent hammer of machine guns made another sector untenable and only in two places could forces be brought ashore. They were needed quickly – especially artillery and artillery observation planes – for it was inland from here that Rommel was expected to make his first counterattack.
From the bluff you could see beyond the beach almost 12 miles to sea, and all this expanse of water was filled with boats. There were, by a quick rough count, 665 vessels lying offshore, from the large transports on the horizon to the small landing craft near the beach. About five miles out lay the cruisers and battleships. Pumping salvos of high explosive into the enemy batteries inland. Yet in spite of their noise, and sharper sounds of enemy shells and our demolition charges on the beach, in spite of the wreckage and movement of men and machines across the beach, you could not fail to see the beauty of the scene to seaward. The Channel was as blue as the Mediterranean, and as still. In the blue, cloudless sky above it floated hundreds of silver barrage balloons, twinkling in the sunlight.
A narrow, dusty road twisted up from the beach to the bluff. Up it wound a column of men and vehicles. They moved slowly over the steel road and past signs saying “Achtung, Minen,” keeping to the road, to the top. There, overlooking the beautiful seascape with its twinkling balloons, was a cluster of large mass graves, and near them were men digging fresh ones. Beside the road, a single soldier lay full-length on his face, his arms stretched above his head in an attitude of repose, a bullet hole through the top of his steel helmet. Behind the bluff to the right was a field hospital, where the slightly wounded were lying on the ground before the tents. The smell of ether crossed the road. There were several French women working in the hospital, but they were too busy to talk.
The poppies were bright
There were bright red poppies and some yellow flowers in the field near the hospital but dust was beginning to cover them over. Behind the hospital was a barbed-wire enclosure already packed with prisoners of war. Nearly 500 had come in by Wednesday afternoon, and more were on their way down from the forward units. Most of them were under 20 or over 40; they were well-fed, well-shod and fairly well-clothed; and all wanted water. A captain explained to a guard that they had been drinking local water for two or three years and they saw no reason to wait for the chlorinated water the Americans drank. The guard gave the captain a drink. Many of the men were not Germans, but Poles and Balts and Russians who had been put there to die in the first assault while the crack German divisions assembled farther behind. But the officers were German. All of them looked stolid and resigned, and even the youngest ones seemed to have lived longer than their captors.
Along the road inland from the bluff, columns moved forward in the dust. Above a mile and a half inland was a regimental command post, on a road at the edge of a thicket. This regiment had come ashore at 2:00 of the previous afternoon, D-Day, and so far, had seen only light fighting. The worst things were snipers and mines, said the regiment’s colonel. Those machine guns which had moved up to the bluff just before the attack had slipped back into the thickets and into farmhouses and were sniping at the roads. There were also many concealed riflemen, and another officer said he had fund snipers in a house all dressed like Frenchmen and speaking French. Mines were small antipersonnel mines that blew off a leg, and they were everywhere. The colonel wanted to know if there was any news from the Russians and looked disappointed when there was not.
There were some French people on the road, going back whence they had been evacuated when we took the village. They were very old, or children. One old man was swathed in bandages from the waist up. They all shook hands when they were spoken to in French, but none of them would stop to talk when they might be getting home again, and all of them cared more about getting home than about anything else.
Late in the afternoon, a regiment that had been resting beside the road moved up to attack with the rest of its division. But the battle of this beachhead was still being fought on the beach itself, and the battle was now as much against time as it was against the Germans. Troops and tanks and artillery moved ashore slowly through the wreckage and mines and shelling, and for miles offshore landing craft were waiting to get into the beach. Just before sunset, warships increased the tempo of their shelling and bombers dropped load after load on the places where the enemy artillery was thought to be, but still the enemy shells found their targets. Engineers fought all night against time and by dawn had cleared two more exits from the beach. More forces moved ashore. Whether they would be in time to meet the expected counterattack, no one knew.
The western coast of Europe offered many landing places. Cherbourg Peninsula, riven by the valley of the Vire, was chosen because it commands the two best harbors – Cherbourg and Le Havre – between Brest and Rotterdam. The arrows show five Allied beach landings plus the raids, reported only by the Germans, on Guernsey and Jersey Islands and on the Calais district. Left arrows are mainly American; the right three mainly British. The Germans had long advertised that they expected invasion here. Hilly terrain is broken by small rivers cutting sharply through wooded farmland. Invasion has followed Vire and Orne rivers so far. The Seine still protects Le Havre, which will later become an objective if Cherbourg is cut off and taken.
The beachhead, as reported at week’s end, is shown in white on north coast of Normandy. The sea landings are indicated. Plane arrows show where the paratroopers and gliders are supposed to have landed in the continuing airborne campaign, by far the biggest such in the history of warfare. The main railway lines are shown. Allies had repeatedly cut line to Cherbourg at Bayeux, Carentan, and Sainte-Mère-Église. Germans claimed 20 Allied divisions opposed 10 German of the 7th and 15th Armies. Allied bombings pounded 25 German airfields in a 150-mile circle around the beachhead. Germans claimed to have identified 1st, 4th and 29th U.S., 7th and 9th British Armored, 50th British and 2nd and 3rd Canadian Divisions.
“Elsie” fleet (nicknamed from LC, or Landing Craft) sets out. In foreground is a box pontoon barge propelled by outboard motors. Pontoons can be fitted together to make dock. They bridge the water from ships to shore.
Men play cards on their way to France. They had each been given 200 francs to spend, but many lost the money before arrival. Said one, “I’ll borrow from Hitler.” One heavily armed soldier had a sign on his back, “Danger – Mine field.”
Protected by its own barrage balloons, invasion armada speeds along. In it were 4,000 ships, plus thousands of smaller craft. There were battleships, torpedo boats, submarines, minesweepers, cruisers, carriers and all kinds of landing ships. More of them were British than American.
The men listen to landing instructions. Before sailing, each soldier was given chewing gum, boxes of matches, a box of body insecticide, pipe, cigarette and chewing tobacco, water purification tablets, 12 seasickness pills and two vomit bags.
A box-pontoon barge is loaded down with trucks, tractor cranes, command cars and troops. Each vehicle has a name – Filthy Flora, Axis Doom, No Cum Chum, Adolph’s Answer, Ten Shilling Annie, For Ladies Only.
Under blankets two soldiers crawl to get out of the spray. As it usually does, the Channel made most of them queasy. Accordingly, they lost the meal of pork chops and plum pudding they had eaten on top of bacon and eggs before embarking.
Editorial: The fall of Rome
When Americans entered the Eternal City, was it ‘just another changing of the guard’?
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