S-Day: A Memoir of the Invasion of England

MAP

10

Researching this manuscript, I tried to find the first person in all of England who knew with certainty the invasion had begun. After the long, gnashing months of waiting, who received the dubious honor of knowing first?

It was Henry Hathaway, a dairyman and widower, who was asleep in the bedroom of his cottage that morning. “Double Summer Time was wicked on us dairy farmers, and we always need our sleep,” he told me after the war. “I didn’t get a right proper amount that night, I should tell you.”

Hathaway awoke to a tearing sound coming from his garden. He bolted upright in bed, clutched the blanket to his chest, and leaned forward to peer out his window toward the pasture. It was too dark to see, but the commotion swiftly closed, a peculiar, muted rasping and splintering. “I had this sudden, dotty fear my milk cows were coming for me, to pay me back for my cold hands all those mornings.”

The splintering grew to a roar, and then Hathaway’s bedroom buckled inward. Stones and plaster flew in at the dairyman, bowling over his chest of drawers and coat rack, shattering his wash stand and its mirror, and sending a framed, yellowed print of Queen Victoria soaring across the room. The roof beams near the wall collapsed, showering Hathaway with dust and bits of wood. The dairyman’s August Junghans pendulum clock dropped to the floor, stopping at 2:32.

“Quite on their own, my legs began working,” Hathaway remembered, “and they pushed me up the headboard almost to standing, as an enormous metal nose slid through the rubble and into the room.”

It was the prow of a Gigant glider, which, by the time it entered Henry Hathaway’s sleeping quarters, was badly mangled. Sheets of the fuselage were twisted and bent, the windshield was ripped out, and the forward airframe was bent into sharp angles. The pilot and copilot were crushed against the cockpit bulkhead, and their legs dangled over Hathaway’s bed, their controls and instruments a tangled knot in front of them.

“It’s fortunate my wife Elizabeth was long dead, because this would have killed her.”

An anti-landing post in the pasture had already ripped off the Gigant’s starboard wing, and Hathaway’s raspberries, eight rows of old woody vines, had slowed the glider, saving him. Hathaway squinted through the dust and darkness. A German commando, “the most frightening rotter I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said, “with his face painted black, coal scuttle helmet, stick grenades in his belt, and carrying a machine pistol,” climbed out the aircraft’s nose, crossed the room, and disappeared through the door. “He didn’t even look at me.”

Other German soldiers followed, clambering through the glider’s wreckage, stepping over several stilled comrades who were pinned in the wreckage. Hathaway heard moaning from inside the glider, then heard shouted commands. The Gigant held over a hundred solders, and they poured out the midships hatch, carrying mortars and machine guns, filling the dairyman’s garden. More pushed their way through the damaged prow and quickly left the bedroom.

“I raised my hands to surrender, but nobody was interested,” Hathaway told me. “Hurt my feelings a bit, I don’t mind telling you.”

Moments later the glider was empty of the living. Wrapping his blanket around himself, Hathaway tumbled off his bed and stepped over the rubble to look through the gap in his wall along the glider’s fuselage. He narrowed his eyes, trying to see through the night. Wehrmacht troops were gathering at the edge of the pasture. One other Gigant had landed safely, but the third had slammed into a post head on, cleaving the glider lengthwise almost to its rudder. Only a few Germans were emerging from the metal carcass.

“They took off at a trot, the lot of them, leaving the wounded and their aircraft behind.”

Using a crowbar and wire cutters, Hathaway spent the rest of the night freeing two injured Germans from the Gigant. He hauled them as carefully as he could out of the glider and lay them on his bed. One seemed grateful for the water and headache powder the dairyman gave him. The other was dead by the time Hathaway offered him the cup.

The dairyman recalled, “Only at dawn did I have time to wonder about the rest of England and what was to become of us all.”

Or perhaps the first person to know England’s hour had come was Jane Ridgeway, who early that morning was walking along the river near her farm, picking her way in the darkness along the path, knowing that in only five hours she would be trudging the opposite direction, along the same route, returning to her cows.

The work on the farm was endless, and she was a city girl, not accustomed to the hours or the toil. And worse, she had volunteered for it. She sighed, hitching the handles of her shoulder bag higher. She brushed her rough hands together. In moments of self-pity, she seized on the calluses that had grown across her hands in a broad array. Calluses on calluses. They would never go away, she thought angrily. She had always been proud of her graceful hands, with their slim fingers and long nails.

She laughed bitterly as she remembered all the time she had spent practicing her gestures in front of a mirror, trying to imitate Vivien Leigh, whom she had seen in Gone With the Wind three times at the Empire Cinema in London. Now her fingers looked little better than the tines of a manure fork.

Jane stumbled over a stone on the path and quickly righted herself, once again adjusting the hand bag. To her left was an embankment, spotted with bushes and a few trees, which led down to the river. When the clouds parted for a moment, she could see yellow, fleeting ripples on the silent water. She walked along in the darkness and did not look toward the clouds when she heard the airplanes. They were always overhead, the RAF or the Luftwaffe. She hadn’t been swept up in the plane-spotting rage early in the war and had never been able to tell the difference.

Jane Ridgeway was a member of the Women’s Land Army. She had volunteered out of a sense of duty, unlike many girls on her assigned farm, who had joined to escape the textile mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and she received no little satisfaction from that fact. She had been given four weeks’ training and was paid twenty-eight shillings a week, from which were deducted room and board, leaving her almost nothing. All day, from darkness to darkness, she milked cows and pitched hay, cleaned stalls and lifted milk tins. One of the few rewards of her service was her uniform: khaki breeches, a green jumper, and a hat with a broad brim. She was in livery, which was more than many of the girls at home could say.

She and six other Landgirls were billeted in a nearby cottage, and she was only a hundred yards from the house when she heard a distant splash, then another and another, reminding her of waves breaking against the shore, a sound she had grown to love during her family’s holidays in Brighton before the war. She turned to the river and held her hand to her eyes as if shading them from sunlight. She saw nothing but the emptiness of night.

Again the splash came, and in the darkness she saw a gray haze hovering between banks of the river. She heard a man’s cry.

Another rent in the clouds allowed the moonlight through. The haze took form as a parachute, and it plunged into the river. Four others already dappled the black water, spread over the surface like stains. An unseen man still struggled below one of them, turning and twisting the fabric, but soon was still. The moonlight held, and the sky soon was filled with parachutes, descending along the waterway.

Another soldier hit the water and quickly sank from sight, the parachute floating on the water, marking his end. Then another, who disappeared just as quickly. The paratroopers’ heavy packs and weaponry acted as anchors. Perhaps a few saw their fate in the sudden break of moonlight, because they furiously yanked at their lines. It was too late. One by one, they followed each other into the river, which allowed little struggle before taking them.

Jane Ridgeway counted twelve paratroopers, all drowned, before she started to run. Other soldiers may have landed in the field on the other side of the river, but she could not be sure because the night had closed in again. Breathless and holding her hands in front of her to ward off branches, she ran toward the cottage.

Or Elizabeth Cooper may have been the first to know. Early that morning she was nursing her three-month-old, John. She walked to and fro in her home, cooing to him and rocking him, kissing his bald head. John, she suspected, needed none of this affection. Food was his only concern. God, he was an eater. Because he regularly drained her and bawled for more, she kept an extra ration of milk in the cooler. Ten pounds, two ounces at birth, and he had been slapping on the weight since. Eat and sleep, give her a grin once in a while. He did little else. She loved him for it.

Mrs. Cooper knew of the danger that night, of the invasion alert. She had been preparing her home for it: hiding her mother’s silver tea service under a floorboard in the barn; disabling her automobile by removing the rotor arm; storing a string of sausages—containing so little meat the British called them “breadcrumbs in battle dress”—in the Anderson shelter. Even little John had been swept up in the war. Instead of the Marmet pram he deserved, he had to make do with the government’s utility pram, a fragile box perched on hard tires, with no springs or padding. She had paid ten pounds for the pram, and thought it utterly worthless, until a neighbor offered her fifteen. John would have to make do until his father, an RN officer stationed at Folkestone, could return on leave to improvise a proper one.

Mrs. Cooper told me after the war that she had no reason to walk to her parlor window, other than to move John about. She turned off the table lamp, then pulled aside the blackout curtain. She leaned an elbow against the middle pane for support. She gazed out, seeing nothing in the darkness, aware only of the warm comfort of the baby’s sucking.

The room flashed white and just as abruptly returned to darkness, as if from a photographer’s bulb. The light was followed by a sharp report that rattled the window against her elbow. She yanked the baby away from the glass and covered his face with her hand. A second blast illuminated the road in front of her home, followed by a series of other detonations.

She saw a telephone pole begin to topple, lit by flashes that made the falling pole appear jerky, like an old cinema. Other poles followed like dominoes, filling the road with wire. Five or six explosions, she could not be sure, and then it was over except for the ringing in her ears. John did not seem to notice and continued to empty his mother.

Mrs. Cooper rushed out of the room and grabbed a few blankets from the hall chest with her free hand. She pushed aside the blackout cloth, wrestled with the knob, then nudged the back door open with her hip. She quickly crossed the yard.

The Anderson shelter was a corrugated steel shell, six-by-six-by-four, buried to a depth of four feet in the yard behind the house and covered with two feet of soil. She shuddered when she stooped to enter the shelter, a seeping, insect-ridden tomb. Her slippers splashed in the mud. She hesitantly settled onto the plank seat, then draped the blankets over herself and the baby. The dank shelter smelled of earth and sausage.

She glanced again at her baby, still at her breast. A tear slid down her cheek, but she caught it before it dropped on John. Maybe the war would spare him. So far it had. In all the excitement, he hadn’t missed a swallow.

Archibald Fair argued he was the first to know the invasion had begun. “And I came close to being the first dead, too.”

Fair was a Home Guardsman, a pharmacist—“Chemist,” he corrected me—who was assigned to guard a VP, a vulnerable point, a two-lane bridge near his home. XII Corps of the Home Guard—by then officially called the Local Defence Volunteers—had posted an entire platoon, over forty men, at the bridge. That early morning Fair was some fifty yards downstream from the bridge. It was an antiquated stone structure, but the Ministry of Works had determined it capable of the heaviest loads, and the span had endured many Allied armored convoys.

He had served his time in the Great War and still limped from a bullet that shot off much of his heel. He had doubted the Home Guard would take him. But the Guard’s only requirement was that the volunteer “be capable of free movement.” That he was, even if he hobbled.

Fair was stationed in tall grass and among bushes along the brook. The night was as black as he ever remembered a night, and he could not see the bridge, much less the fellow Guardsman he knew was a few paces up the stream.

An Invasion Alert No. 2. The Germans could come tonight, his lieutenant had warned. Judging from the drone of airplanes overhead, which had begun in earnest about midnight, the lieutenant might be right for once. Fair stroked the stock of his rifle, but was not reassured. The weapon dated from the Indian Mutiny, a relic removed from a display cabinet at the Imperial War Museum. German propaganda called the Home Guard franc tireur, a murder band, but at times like these, late on a lonely night, he felt more a member of a Broomstick Army, another German sobriquet.

He soothed himself by repeating over and over, “Those wretched rats are wrong and not soothing,” the phrase he had been told any suspected German spy attempting to pass himself off as English would mangle in an interrogation.

Archibald Fair heard nothing but the planes. No movement in the grass, no tossing of branches, not even the whisper of the passing water. He had thought during the Great War that he developed a sixth sense for imminent danger. It failed him that night.

A hand reached out of the darkness from behind Fair, cupped his chin, and yanked his head back. A knife blade slashed across his neck, and Fair toppled into the grass. Heavy boots stepped across him and disappeared along the embankment.

“The Lord pulled my number that night,” he said after the war. “But the German commando bungled it.”

Fair told me the German must have been holding the knife backward, so the blunt edge of the blade creased his neck.

I replied this was unlikely, given the probable caliber of the commando.

He then said perhaps the blade didn’t touch him at all, but only the blade guard did.

Implausible, I said.

He replied with force, “Then you tell me how it happened.” He added, “Cheeky colonials,” under his breath.

I had no better explanation.

Fair was in the grass only a few seconds. He rose to his knees, lifted his weapon, said a short prayer to the saint of antique rifles, and squeezed the trigger. The German blew down and stayed down. Screaming an alarm, Fair dashed toward the bridge, almost tumbling over the commando’s body.

A yellow flare was instantly launched from the east side of the span, and gunfire erupted from all directions. Fair fell again, this time with a bullet in his hip. He could recall only the beginning of the fierce firefight for his bridge, a fight the Home Guard lost, but for which his unit received the first LDV battle honor of the war.

Richard Richman had been called away from his vicarage after evensong to attend to a parishioner, Agnes Smathers, who had been dying, on and off, for much of the year. This had been another false alarm, but the old woman hadn’t come around until after one in the morning, gasping and fanning herself with her hand and begging the vicar’s pardon again. The vicar wondered whether the Church of England maintained records on which of its faithful had received the greatest number of last offices before finally expiring. Richman wanted to nominate Mrs. Smathers. The road to her small home was well worn by his Austin Twelve.

The war had not touched Richman yet, and he preferred it that way. He was sixty-four years old, a peaceable man, seldom driven to anger, always forgiving. He had been too old for the Great War, and he remembered being glad of it. Let the others do the fighting. He had not been engulfed by war fever then or now. He might even have called himself a pacifist, but not to anyone else.

He shifted the Austin into a lower gear and crested a small rise. He drove slowly, unable to see much beyond the auto’s bonnet. The headlights had been covered with the official pattern mask, resembling a black coffee tin with three slits in the end.

His church had not sustained bomb damage, but his ministry had suffered nonetheless. The bells in the tower had been silenced, to be used only as alarms. And because his church hall was the largest room in the village, it had become a wet canteen, serving beer to servicemen, of all the shocking sacrileges. But he had forgiven the military authorities for that outrage, just as he would forgive the Germans once they came. Absolution was his business. And he would meet the German invaders with the dignity and forgiveness required by his station.

The Austin rounded a corner, paralleling a stone fence overgrown with ivy. He should have been able to see the church, another fifty yards along the road, had the windows not been covered. All of them were papered over, except his beloved rose window, the only stained glass in the chapel, which allowed little light through, and, as he told me, “God would have struck me dead had I covered it.” Looking for the church, seeking comfort in its solid, familiar lines, he saw instead a German soldier jump from the fence to the road.

A German, no question, even when seen in the meager light of the Austin’s lamps. Long-necked helmet, stick grenades, and a vicious little machine pistol. The commando may have been as surprised as the vicar, because the German tried to do two things at once, raise his weapon and reclimb the stone fence.

“I had given myself over to God decades before,” Richman told me, “and I think at that instant God gave me back. I have utterly no other explanation for the sudden fury that gripped me.”

The vicar stamped on the accelerator. The Austin surged forward. Richman twisted the steering wheel, sending the auto toward the wall. The German managed to take two strides before the fender rammed him, bowling him against the wall. The Austin glanced the stones.

The good vicar, apparently as fearless as he was peaceable, craned his neck out the window to see the commando attempting to rise. The Schmeisser was on the ground, as were two grenades. His helmet was in the middle of the road, upside down and still spinning. Richman slapped the gearshift into reverse.

“I think it was the only time in all the years I owned that Austin Twelve that I actually kicked up gravel.”

The car roared backward, again plowing into the German, who bounced away and collapsed at the foot of the stone fence.

“I was simply in a rage, a demonic fury at that German for daring to enter my parish.”

I asked the vicar if it occurred to him that night that the German might not be traveling alone.

“Not until the next moment.”

The next moment muzzle flashes lit the entire road. They came from atop the stone fence.

“My poor Austin,” the vicar sighed.

A machine gun—from the results, I suspect it was a Spandau, which has a startling rate of fire of 1,200 rounds a minute—sliced the Vicar’s auto cleanly in half, the boot from the bonnet.

“I may be old, but I’m not slow,” Richman told me. He scrambled out the door and crawled to the trees opposite the fence. The Spandau roared again, peeling the top off the Austin. “That machine gunner was a bit upset, I could tell,” the vicar told me. “I hate to think what would have happened had he seen me.”

Richman hid for two hours, crawling deeper and deeper into the woods. Just before dawn he found his way to his vicarage. By then it was too late to ring the church’s bells in warning.

Or Kenneth Wright may have been the first to know. Wright was a farmer, but he also ran a stable for Sir Harvey Lacewell, who rented Wright’s barn. Sir Harvey had run horses at St. Leger and Oaks a few times, but his success had been limited. When he was in one of his moods after a loss, Sir Harvey would decry the common knowledge that every thoroughbred in the world was a direct descendant of Old Bald Peg, born about 1659 and the first mare listed in the General Stud Book. His horses, somehow, had missed their genetic inheritance.

Wright made the balance of his living from cattle and a few goats on his eighty acres. That night he awoke several times to airplanes overhead. Nothing unusual in that. He had always been a sound sleeper, and he quickly returned to sleep. But Wright was attuned to his land and the animals, and when frightened neighing came from the stables, his feet were on the floor before he was fully awake.

Grabbing his coat from the back of a chair, Wright sprinted through the blackout curtain and back door, ducked the clothes line, and dodged the ancient well. He smelled the pungent odor of burning hay, and turned toward his barn, where fire was curling through the plank siding. He heard the crack of a horse kicking against its stable gate.

“I was running as fast as my legs would carry me, and I didn’t look left or right and saw nothing but the fire.”

No, he affirmed to me after the war, he certainly did not see the company of Wehrmacht paratroopers that had landed in his pasture. The soldiers were of the 7th Parachute, under Luftflotte 2, whose mission was to clear Wright’s pasture of anti-landing posts before gliders of 22nd Air Landing Division appeared out of the black sky. The paratroopers were gathering the equipment from parachute harnesses and forming up. A shot kicked up dirt at Wright’s feet.

Backlit by the growing fire were half a dozen German soldiers, all pointing their weapons at him. Wright obediently raised his hands, but did not break step. He was barefoot and barelegged, and his coat flapped around his bare buttocks. The Germans saw little threat from him, at least so he supposed after the war.

Ludicrously calling aloud, “Give me a moment, just a moment,” he dashed through the paratroopers and into his barn. Their muzzles followed him.

Wright told me after the war that the fire was started by a bundle of signal flares that had crashed through the roof of his barn onto a stack of hay. One of them must have ignited accidentally. Fed by dry hay in the loft, the barn roof was rolling with fire, as was the north side of the building. Wright threw the latch on the first stable, rushed in alongside the bucking horse and slapped the animal’s shoulder, backing it out of the pen. The thoroughbred left the stable, but then frantically danced in a circle, too frightened and disoriented to escape the conflagration.

Wright released the other gates, pushing and cajoling the frenzied horses from their stalls. But when he tried to pull them out of the barn to safety, they balked, bucking away from him, their eyes wide and wild. “I felt like sobbing, all those horses. And it was too hot for me to stay any longer. They would die where they were.”

Wright heard a sharp whistle and turned to the barn door. Standing there was one of the paratroopers, waving excitedly at him. The German was wearing a rimless helmet and a camouflaged smock kilted up for jumping. A submachine gun hung across his stomach.

“And the blighter was holding one of my goats by the nape of its neck.”

Wright had no idea what the German had in mind. The paratrooper dragged the bleating goat into the barn. Wright made way for him. The commando then whistled again several times, perhaps to alert the horses. He released the goat, which instantly sprinted out of the barn and away from the fire.

The horses followed, every one of them.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Wright remembered. “The horses were crazed with fear, entirely confused in the smoke and flames. But when that goat bolted, they charged right after it. I later learned it’s an old trick, to get a goat to lead horses from a burning barn, but I sure didn’t know it then.”

The paratrooper smiled and touched his hand to his helmet, then rejoined his comrades. The barn burned to the ground, lighting the pasture for the 22nd’s ten gliders that used it that night.

“It was all for nought, though,” Wright said. “My horses were pressed into the German army two days later, used as draft animals. Last I saw them, they were straining in harnesses, hauling a Wehrmacht howitzer. I doubt those beautiful creatures lasted long doing that.”

Wright never saw the thoroughbreds again. Neither did Sir Harvey, who has never forgiven him for their loss.

Or Captain Richard Swarthmore may have been the first to know the invasion was at hand. The meteorologist admitted to me after the war, “It was nothing but intuition. I simply figured that the Germans, whose luck had held throughout their early adventures, would be lucky again.”

Dr. Swarthmore had briefed the Defense Committee that a depression had formed between Newfoundland and Ireland, and that it might deepen and move east, leading to rising wind and water on the channel.

“In my office at Dunstable,” he said, “I heard reports in the early morning of S-Day from Iceland and Ireland and from one of our weather boats that a low pressure zone was indeed deepening and moving toward us.”

“So how did you know the Germans had arrived?” I asked.

“I didn’t know, I just presumed. I figured it would be just their luck to beat the weather system here. And, sure enough, channel waves started churning, but the Wehrmacht was already on our soil.”

Bertram Selwyn may have been the first to know. “If you don’t count my cat,” he added, “I was first.”

Selwyn was an orchardist, mostly apples. He had woken to a distant explosion. He got out of bed, wiped his eyes, and ambled over to his window in time to see a bomber fall from the sky in flames. “I’d seen it before,” he told me after the war. “This one was going down in spirals, leaving a pretty path of fire and sparks behind it.”

Overhead was the murmur of airplanes. The local AA battery had opened up, their tracers bending across the black sky. Selwyn supposed this time the Germans were really coming. His wife, Sarah, was still sound asleep, and he saw no need to wake her, not until he knew for sure. Then she would expect him to know what to do. He didn’t have a clue.

He heard a bell ringing near his tool shed, then a sound, perhaps a pruning saw falling from its hooks, and another sound, this time maybe his entire rack of tools crashing to the ground. He pulled on his pants and cursed the cat, who wore a bell on his collar and was endless trouble. If Selwyn had his way, the tom would be taken to the veterinarian to surgically remove a little of its rambunctiousness, but Sarah wouldn’t think of it. “How would you like it if I took you to the veterinarian instead?” was her standard response, to which Selwyn had not found a rebuttal.

He heard the bell again as he made his way along a row of firewood behind his cottage. He paused when the ringing came again, this time from behind a pile of branch-bracing poles. That cat is faster than he looks, he thought. The orchardist changed direction, stepping off the path and along a row of apple trees toward the braces. Then the chiming came from yet another direction, the road in front of his cottage. He turned, but turned again when the bell sounded once more from the toolshed.

Selwyn thought maybe one of his neighbors had also belled a cat. He returned to the path. He could see nothing, not even the outline of his toolshed, but his feet knew the route well enough. He had been born on the orchard and had lived all his forty-six years there, save two in a trench in France.

He came to the shed. As he suspected, the door had been pried open by the cat.

He called its name, “Willard.”

He was answered by the soft sound of the bell.

“Willard?”

He stepped inside, reached blindly, moved his hand along a shelf—which, to his surprise was still in place on the back wall—until his fingers found the fur of the cat.

The feline instantly began to purr, as it always did. He lifted Willard into his arms, scolded him a moment, and gently shook the cat’s bell, ringing it, as if that might teach it a lesson. He chuckled, then, stepped out of the shed, and was met with the tinkling of a bell—a second bell—a few inches from his face.

A rifle barrel cracked against his teeth, chipping one of them. A German commando stepped out of the darkness close enough for Selwyn to see him, which was also close enough to smell his breath. “They really do eat sauerkraut,” he told me. With his other hand, the German rang his bell. He said something in German, which Selwyn thinks might have been, “You sure as hell aren’t my sergeant.”

The paratroopers of the 7th Parachute had been given tin Christmas bells to identify themselves in the dark.

A second paratrooper appeared, then a third, cautiously ringing their bells. The crowd of German soldiers grew by the moment. Several tied Selwyn’s hands behind his back, then his feet together. They lowered him to the floor of the toolshed. They ignored Willard, who watched dispassionately. Selwyn was joined shortly by Sarah, who must have struggled, because she was trussed at her ankles and knees, and her hands were bound to a cord around her waist.

Increasingly hungry and thirsty, the Selwyns remained on the shed floor for twenty hours, long after the paratroopers had left. Willard stayed with them much of the time, but left frequently to journey to his food bowl near the back door of the cottage. The tom always came back, licking his whiskers and making the Selwyns even hungrier, happily rubbing against their tethered ankles. Using a hoe blade, the orchardist finally severed the cord around his wrists. He patted the cat a long moment before untying his wife, which did nothing for her mood.

As Sarah struggled to stand, she snapped, “That cat goes to the veterinarian after all.”

11

Even on the eve of battle, General Clay could sleep like a stone, a trait he shared with Alexander, Wellington, and Grant. I hammered on the caravan’s door several times and called out his name, then waited a moment, using the time to tuck in my uniform shirt. The general had been in bed less than two hours. Tiny red glows from the cigarettes of two sentries rose and fell near the rose garden.

The Germans lost the First World War in part because their vast military bureaucracy reduced them to fighting der Papierkrieg, the paper war, rather than the Allies. Clay insisted on a lean command, with many officers having direct access to him. One exception was that I always decided whether he should be woken. He trusted my judgment on that.

I beat on the door again and finally heard him switch on his lamp, my cue to enter. I found him sitting on his bed, already tying his boot laces.

A prelude would have been cut short. My voice rose uncontrollably. “Sir, General Lorenzo reports Wehrmacht paratrooper sightings near Battle, inland from Hastings. Others have been seen near Lewes, on the river Ouse, five miles north of Brighton, and more near Peasemarsh, near Rye.”

The general stood and quickly buttoned his uniform blouse. He did not look at me and appeared absorbed in dressing. His fingers, working the buttons, did not tremble.

I went on. “German gliders have landed near Stanford, just inland from Folkestone, near the roadway to Ashford. Another glider sighting has come from the town of Sellindge, two miles further inland.”

I wanted to shout that Sellindge was less than ten miles from where I was standing, watching the general calmly place his cap on his head. He pushed it into its distinctive angle.

He lifted his spectacles from the table and dropped them into his blouse pocket. “All in our sector, then?”

“Yes, sir, so far.”

He thrust out his chest. His head swiveled to me, so much like a tank turret in its steadiness and purpose that I thought I heard the hydraulics. His eyes were startlingly green even in the dim lamp light. “Is this the invasion, Jack?”

That question, that instant, looms large in my memory of all that was to follow. I dearly wish I would have answered simply yes or no, an outright guess. A fifty-fifty chance of being entirely prescient, of being to General Clay as Adam Cardonnel was to Marlborough, or Eichel was to Frederick II, the indispensible, shrewd, knowing aide.

And I wouldn’t have had to record myself here as a stammering bumbler. “Well, sir, I… I didn’t really have time to ask around. I was awakened just few minutes ago, too, and—”

General Clay brushed by me and left the trailer. I didn’t catch up until he rounded the rose garden. We ran along the veranda toward the French doors. From a hillock north across the pasture, a three-light searchlight section probed the sky, accompanied by a yellow crescent of tracer bullets from its companion M2 machine gun. When Clay reached the doors, he slowed to a measured walk before passing into the room.

At the time of Blenheim, a general acted as his own chief of staff, intelligence officer, and quartermaster, a solitary ordeal. In the subsequent two hundred years, the headquarters staff had evolved to a complex organization. Members of General Clay’s staff poured into the billiard room, quickly filling it.

David Lorenzo appeared not to have slept that night. His uniform was rumpled, his dark hair unkempt, and his eyebrows wilder than usual. He was leaning over a map on the billiard table. His deputy stood next to him, as did Captain Richard Branch, AFEHQ’s signal officer. In front of situation maps pinned to walls were General Girard and Clay’s chief of staff, Major General Jay Pinkney. One of Clay’s stenographers ran into the room, holding up his pants with one hand, his belt in the other. Lieutenant Mohandas Gupta hurried in. Gupta was a British Army signal officer from Calcutta, posted to AEFHQ, with whom I had eaten dinner a few times. Others rushed in, some donning articles of their uniforms as they ran.

Clay met General Girard at the signal station near my desk. Although most of Captain Branch’s equipment was in an outbuilding surrounded by sandbags, a teletypewriter we called a TWX, two wireless radios, and several telephones in leather cases were in carrels, manned by the AEFHQ Signal Company.

When we reached the signal station, General Hargrave was hovering over a carrel, demanding of the wireless operator, “Anything from Jones yet, Corporal?”

“No, sir.” The signalman’s desk was covered with message logs and two code books.

“When was your last message from his 2nd Infantry?”

“Forty minutes ago, sir. Lieutenant Barkley of the 2nd HQ Company reported planes overhead. Haven’t been able to get through to them since.”

Hargrave stabbed his pipe at the corporal, “Try the radio.”

“Sir, our security requirements—”

“To hell with that. Raise them over the air. And what about Singleman?”

“Last report from the 4th Motorized was at 0310, twenty-five minutes ago, and I’ve got nothing now but a dead line.”

When agitated, Hargrave set his face in cement and gave away nothing. His lips barely moved as he said in a candied tone, “Tell me, Corporal, can you reach any of my divisional HQs?”

“Yes, sir.” The signalman lifted another receiver and passed it to Hargrave. “Here’s Colonel Sellers, 1st Armored’s G2.”

Hargrave spoke with the intelligence officer a moment, then was switched to Major General Franks, the 1st’s CO. Hargrave put a finger in an ear to shut out the noise as more headquarters personnel flowed into the room and the TWX started to rattle. Clay and Girard waited nearby, discussing something I could not hear. Outside, an AA gun began its rolling peal, then another, nearer and more insistent. I stepped closer to Clay’s circle.

Hargrave slipped the telephone into its case. “Franks says little is going on in his area. Luftwaffe fly-overs, nothing else reported.”

“General Hargrave, I’ve got 2nd Infantry HQ on the radio, an unsecured line.” The corporal reached for a pencil and a one-time pad.

Hargrave waved the signalman’s encoding effort away. He again stopped his free ear. He said into the transmitter, “What’s going on, Burt?” He was speaking with General Jones, commander of the 2nd Infantry. Hargrave frowned. He listened for a full minute without interrupting.

General Girard crossed the room, followed by his G2, Colonel George Dayton. They also gathered around the communications carrels, demanding connections from other signalmen. More radiomen from the HQ signal company sprinted through the French doors and manned their posts. Lorenzo joined them, a map trailing behind him. The hubbub around the carrels grew.

Clay stepped away from the signal station. He wandered back to his desk, his hands clasped behind him. I followed. He scanned the room, then pulled a Pall Mall from the pack in his pocket. He tapped the cigarette against his thumbnail before lighting the other end. He appeared disengaged from the growing commotion at his command.

I ventured, “You don’t seem concerned, sir.”

He exhaled a cloud of smoke. “The higher the rank, the less an officer should have to do, Jack. Remember that.”

“Well—”

“And Darius’s defeat at Gaugamela was at least partly due to his inability to delegate. Remember that, too.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I tell you, Jack, this ceaseless grooming of you for higher rank can be tiring.”

I was impressed. This could have been the invasion—on the south coast of England, proving that the Defense Committee had been disastrously wrong—and General Clay had the time and inclination to be sarcastic with his aide.

We made our way slowly to his desk in the center of the billiard room. His secretary and two stenographers stood by, glancing anxiously at him. Clay stubbed out his cigarette in his ashtray, a cut-down howitzer shell. The AA battery fell silent.

His corps commanders soon joined us. General Hargrave began, “There is occurring in East Sussex an attempt to disrupt our communications. Lines are down between the 2nd and the 4th’s headquarters, although we can raise by radio a number of their units—the 8th and 12th regiments—and we’re working on others. There have also been a number of firefights tonight in my sector prompted by more dummy paratroopers.”

“Anything at all from those divisional HQs?” Clay asked. “Are you in contact with them?”

Hargrave shook his head. “And several bridges over the River Ouse, a few miles inland from Newhaven on the channel, have been seized by Wehrmacht paratroopers. Firefighters are reported at other bridges, and the road between Hastings and Battle apparently has been disrupted, held by enemy troops at least at one point. But much of the reported small arms fire has turned out to be firecrackers again. The 8th Regiment has suffered six casualties, all inflicted by its own troops, startled by the noisemakers.”

Clay turned to Gene Girard, who reported, “We don’t know much yet. There have been several sightings—we think legitimate sightings—of paratroopers in Romney Marsh, behind Dymchurch on the channel. But there have also been reports of paratrooper scarecrows, like last month.”

Girard was interrupted by Colonel Dayton who pushed a report into his hand. The general glanced at it. “And we’ve got more sightings by the moment. Wehrmacht paratroopers, they think.”

“Who else would they be?” Hargrave asked testily.

Girard smiled tightly. “There’s a lot of night out there, Alex, and it’s hard to tell whom you’re fighting when the only light is from the enemy’s muzzle flashes.”

Dayton handed Girard another sheet of paper. After a moment Girard said, “The 134th Infantry Regiment behind Folkestone is engaged in a firefight with Wehrmacht paratroopers.”

David Lorenzo joined us. “A Home Guard unit at Tenterden, fifteen miles west of here, reports that a telephone exchange in the city has been destroyed. Another exchange in Canterbury has also been knocked out. Ground action in both cases, not air strikes. Telephone communications in Kent and East Sussex are scrambled.”

General Clay turned to a stenographer. “Order Captain Branch to dispense with first level security to corps and divisional units. Notify all divisional signal headquarters not to waste time trying to patch through over telephone lines. Use wireless. Eliminate radio codes until 0500.”

I made notes along with the stenographer. One of my duties was to push orders down the line. Apparently Clay believed it more important to rapidly determine the situation in southern England than to have units take the additional time to code and encode messages.

Twenty minutes elapsed. Clay stood at his desk with Hargrave and Girard. General Pinkney and AEFHQ’s deputy commander, Lieutenant General Patrick Neil, gathered around Clay. It had taken Neil a while to get to the manor, because Clay insisted that his deputy not live in the same building, nor ever travel in the same plane or jeep. Neil was billeted in a farmhouse a mile north.

Ninety-nine percent of incoming information about a battle disappears without a trace. The commanders sifted through the messages reaching Eastwell, searching for patterns, digging for clues, trying to wave aside the smokescreens they knew were being laid.

General Clay was immensely calm, issuing orders dispassionately. Those who did not know him well may not have noticed that his hand was bunched in his trousers’ pocket, the only indication he was doing anything other than chatting idly about the weather for a picnic. He had once referred me to Corinthians 1:14: “If the trumpet produces an uncertain sound, who will prepare himself for battle?”

At four in the morning, Clay polled his corps commanders, his deputy, and his G2. There was agreement only on what they did not know. The green phone was out, so he and I walked to the signal carrels. He said to the corporal, “Put me through to the prime minister.”

Lieutenant Gupta quickly joined us. Clay received the handset from the corporal and passed it to Gupta. Sixty seconds later, Gupta said, “I have Lieutenant Handi, sir. The prime minister is standing next to him.”

General Clay ordered, “Jack, take down every word the lieutenant here says, as a matter of courtesy.”

Courtesy was a polite phrase for protecting the record and guarding one’s place in history. Churchill would be doing the same, and both men knew it. I brought up my trusty notebook.

Clay said to Lieutenant Gupta, “Give the prime minister my greetings in as short a manner as your incomprehensible Hindu customs will allow.”

The lieutenant said a few words into the telephone.

The general went on, “Tell Mr. Churchill that apparently extensive German glider and paratrooper operations have begun in East Sussex and in Kent, but that much of the activity also appears to be with mock units and equipment, as in the false alarms in days past.”

Gupta relayed these words in Hindustani. The prime minister had reserved this protection against German radio interceptors for this moment, and this was Gupta’s first official act as translator. At Churchill’s insistence, Indian translators had recently been posted to all Allied forward headquarters.

There was a short wait while the Hindu at Churchill’s end did his work. Then Gupta said, “The prime minister says, and I quote, ‘I want to know one thing. Is this the invasion or simply another German stratagem.’”

Clay responded, “It is too early to know. However, the German rarely used complex ruses in the Great War.”

More translating. His eyes politely averted, Gupta said, “The prime minister wishes to remind you the Germans successfully baited an elaborate trap for the Russians at Tannenberg in 1914.”

Clay said in a choleric tone, “I already knew that.”

The lieutenant said, “The prime minister wishes to know your estimate of the disposition of Rommel’s Army Group C.”

AACCS commanders, including General Clay, as recently as twelve hours before had agreed that Army Group C was leading the invasion from embarkation points in Holland and other points north.

“Mr. Prime Minister, I still believe Rommel’s army group is poised for the invasion across the North Sea,” Clay answered, as if speaking directly to Churchill. “I have seen nothing to indicate otherwise.”

The Indian spoke into the receiver, listened, then asked, “Is there anything we can be certain of at this time?”

“I am afraid not.”

The Indian waited, then spoke again, “Mr. Churchill says that no Briton or American will think it wrong of him if he proclaims to you, General Clay, that to have the United States at Great Britain’s side is to him a source of great joy and comfort.”

“Thank you.”

“The prime minister says that he cannot foretell the course of events and does not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of those arrayed against us, but England will live, Britain will live, the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire will live.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” General Clay said, making a small circle with his fingers, indicating he wanted Churchill to hurry.

Lieutenant Gupta looked helplessly at the general, but continued bravely, “The prime minister says that once again in our long island history we shall emerge, however mauled and mutilated, safe and victorious.”

Clay said in an aside to me, “Winnie has a maudlin streak in him, doesn’t he?”

A faithful recorder, I report here General Clay’s impudence with the greatest reluctance.

Gupta concluded, “The prime minister asks that you call him again in one hour.”

“Of course.”

The Indian placed the handset in the cradle. General Clay surveyed his headquarters. The intelligence officers and corps commanders were still huddled around Clay’s desk. Several dozen more maps had been hastily posted on walls, leaving little of the wood paneling showing. Colored pins were quickly appearing on the maps. General Clay walked across the room to the French doors. I followed and held aside the blackout curtain for him.

As we stepped onto the veranda, the antiaircraft gun across the pasture erupted again. The yellow beams of the nearby searchlights swept grandly across the night sky. The lights changed directions quickly, guided by a radar control called “Elsie,” searching for Luftwaffe planes.

General Clay breathed the cool air deeply. “You think I was indecisive in there, not calling this the invasion?”

“No, sir.”

“I simply don’t have enough intelligence yet.”

“I fully realize that, sir.” I also realized he was arguing with himself, not me.

“You know what happens to uncertain generals, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“They become laughingstocks.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Because of his indecision and lack of resolve during the Boer War, the British public began calling General Sir Redvers Buller a new name, Sir Reverse. I know dozens of other examples of this from history.” He looked at me and pointed to his skull. “Every disgraced general in recorded history, committed to my memory.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hell, the press will start calling me General Clay Feet.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Or General Clay Pigeon, a target to be shot at.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m going to tell Churchill in one hour whether this is the invasion. Tell him without equivocation. I’ll know by then. The only uncertainty will be how well the Germans froze us.”

He stared at the somber sky for a moment. “It’s easy to be strong during the day, Jack. At night, it’s more difficult.” He looked at me. “Don’t put that in your journal. Don’t even remember it.”

“Yes, sir.”

At that moment, one of the searchlight beams fell out of the sky like a toppled tree. The light was a sixty-incher. It rested a moment, the beacon lying over the top of the ground. Then the beam swept madly across the pasture, spotting for fleeting instants a nearby farmhouse, then a grove of trees, then several small outbuildings and a cottage, sweeping toward us like the raging crest of a wave.

We learned later that the Elsie had malfunctioned due to a burned out tube. But at that moment it seemed like the sun had risen and was searching us out. When the beam reached us, it suddenly ceased its travels, and we were ablaze with light so intense and white I thought it must be entering my eye sockets and boring out the back of my head to continue on its journey.

I raised my hand to ward it off, to no effect. The light seemed to have weight, pushing me back on the veranda. With difficulty, I turned toward the general. He stood with his hands at his side, the light soaring over and around him as if it were flowing water. The blast of light seemed to set off sparks from his clothes and hair that slipped away toward the manor. And it reduced him to two dimensions, to a facade. I could see nothing behind his shimmering face and chest but black. All else was lost in the contrast.

General Clay seemed unaware of the searchlight. He turned to walk back into the billiard room. Behind me, the manor was illuminated as if it were midday. Then, abruptly, the light was gone, and the night suffocated us under total blackness.

As he walked by me, he said, “The fog of war covers the enemy, too, Jack. Remember that.”

Since the war ended, I have been besieged by historians and journalists demanding information about the general. Some of them have impressed me more as assassins than accurate chroniclers of the war, yearning to validate hostile rumors, anxious to print innuendo as fact, inquiring of the general’s record according to their own predispositions.

I want to set certain things straight while I have the chance, a preemptive strike before the ruinous hearsay gains its own momentum. In light of General Clay’s actions following the invasion, I view this as my obligation to history.

One of the most damaging and persistent falsifications about General Clay was that he was callous about casualties. One might even expect such from a commander who witnessed many battles. Clausewitz said that an officer becomes indifferent to all suffering around him after thirty minutes. To the contrary, Clay spoke with me evening after evening about the tragedy of the losses. He felt deeply for his soldiers, and perhaps even for the enemy, for the injuries and loss of life, and he felt for the grieving in the homes of those soldiers whose families would learn of their fate, for the heartache of those parents whose sons would simply disappear forever in the chaos of battle.

He said once that the only reason he regretted leaving artillery to become an infantry commander was that the infantry reaps most of the combat agony. It is flatly untrue, as reported by Time, that the general ever said, “Death in war is incidental to victory.”

In fact, as odd as it sounds for a man in his profession, General Clay was revolted by the sight of blood. Whether it was an atrocious battlefield injury or the drawing of his own blood during an examination by his physician, he always lost several shades of color at the sight of it.

Another rumor, this one grotesque, was that the general suffered a deathwish, that he pursued with single-minded dedication a glorious demise. This slander was a complete inversion of the simple truth that Clay was fearless. Maurice de Saxe wrote, “The first of all qualities is courage.” General Clay went beyond this, with the indifference to danger of a man who disbelieved his own mortality.

Clay scoffed at the Great War’s chateau generals, and at Napoleon and Caesar, noted for their aversion to exposure in battle. Rather, he revered Washington, who rode within thirty yards of the British line at the Battle of Princeton, and Seigneur de Bayard (whom history has labeled le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, the knight without fear or blame), who had three horses killed under him at the Battle of Garigliano in 1503. When I once offered that a hero is a coward who got cornered, Clay’s scowl would have felled a lesser man.

Perhaps the general’s bravest moment was his flight at dawn of S-Day in Captain Norman’s plane, which I’ll describe later. But the act of daring for which Clay was best known among his troops was his evening at the 7th Engineering Battalion’s bivouac near Dover, ten days before S-Day. A rumor had swept the 5th Infantry Division, assigned to defend England’s southeast corner, that the German SS had planted an assassin at one of the division’s units, the 7th Engineers. The supposed assassin spoke perfect American English, had been sent to the United States to join the army, and had been ordered to lay in wait, looking for the first chance to murder the AEF’s commander, a suicide mission.

It was an absurd, laughable story but it refused to go away, despite the best efforts of 5th’s General Carson and the 7th Engineering Battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Johnson. Neither Axis Sally nor Lord Haw Haw discussed the assassin on their radio programs, which confirmed the rumor as fact for many of the soldiers. The tale was creating tension in the ranks.

So General Clay flew to Dover. He ordered all officers and men of the 7th, about 650 of them, to line up outside a tent. Inside, Clay sat with his back to a table. He told me to place my .45 pistol on the table, then leave. One by one, the men of the 7th Engineers were ordered to enter the tent. There, alone with the general, each soldier was given the opportunity to murder him. Three hours later, after the last of the men left the tent, General Clay emerged to thunderous applause.

On the flight back to headquarters, Clay said, “There better not have been bullets in that pistol, Jack.”

Another odd theory that has gained some currency of late is that the soldiers’ devotion to General Clay was largely due to his appearance. This disparages the general, because it is a backhanded way of saying that nothing else Clay did could possibly have generated this adoration. Clay approached being handsome, with his red-gray hair, even teeth, and pronounced cheekbones. His eyes could be glacial or warmly avuncular, often switching instantly from one to the other, depending on the news he was receiving. With his Irishman’s red complexion, his face looked as if all the capillaries were trying to surface. He had a powerful physique, with a strong, corded neck and sloped shoulders. The Pall Malls had colored his teeth, and he once told me he would have tried Broadway if his nose hadn’t resembled Wallace Beery’s, with freckles on it to boot. Clay did nothing to trade on his appearance.

One commentator has even gone so far as to say that General Clay’s rapid rise in rank and his soldiers’ willingness to follow him depended solely on his appealing appearance and that history shows homely men do not become generals. Malarkey. Prince Eugene of Savoy, with his pockmarked face, short stature, and slouching manner, and Frederick, who was stooped and sway-backed, were worshipped by their soldiers. No, to understand the soldiers’ love of General Clay, look to his actions as a commander. Even today, after all that has passed, after all the controversy regarding his conduct in the battle for England, AEF veterans still honor the man.

I defend the general, but he did have his peculiarities. I’ll list a few here.

I rarely saw him angry, but he would later fume to me when an American at the dinner table ate with an upside-down fork. He called it an elitist affectation. If an Englishman did it, he’d later say, “What can you expect?”

He ate rice at least once a day and would go to extraordinary lengths to procure it, once sending Captain Norman in his plane to Glasgow. His commanders knew of this predilection and would have their kitchens prepare elaborate rice dishes: Risotto alla Milanese, jambalaya, pilaf, and others. For months, I ate what the general ate. I’ll never eat rice again in any form.

Clay had, to my mind, an inordinate affection for cats. He occasionally lobbied Churchill to repeal the wartime law forbidding feeding them fresh milk. The prime minister would blame his intransigent parliament and deftly change the subject.

The general loathed hunting and found the British practice of running a fox to ground with a dog pack particularly abhorrent. Despite enjoying fish at a meal, he was not a fisherman, and I once asked him why not. He replied, “I let someone else kill my fish.”

Also—and this I found truly peculiar—rather than swat at flies buzzing in his caravan, he would trap them with a glass and a piece of paper, then release them out the door.

He disliked French toast, French dressing, French perfume, French cuffs, and the French themselves, “though they’re hellish fighters, if you give them some rifles and are tolerant enough to train them.” Charles DeGaulle wore on Clay like a hair shirt. Clay had picked up President Roosevelt’s habit of calling DeGaulle “Joan of Arc.”

He had other peeves.

Bagpipes set him off: “They sound too much like my last root canal.”

Know-it-alls upset him: “I don’t like them interrupting me.”

Use the term “kill two birds with one stone,” and your request would be denied, whatever it was.

The general’s quick mind and memory are legendary. He never forgot a face or a name. I saw him recognize a fellow, an artillery sergeant, he drank one beer with in Paris twenty-four years before and had not seen before or since. Another time, when he ran into one of his soldiers from the Great War, an army lifer he had not seen in all the intervening years, Clay asked out of the blue, “And how’s your wife Emily?” The general claimed to know by name every unit commander above a company, meaning he knew every lieutenant colonel and up in the AEF. I believed him.

I once saw him do the Observer crossword puzzle in eleven minutes. Putting the newspaper down, he said, “I could’ve done it faster, but there were a dozen of those pissant British words we Americans kicked out of our language centuries ago.”

He also told me he was cursed with never forgetting a phone number. I laughed aloud. He turned his gunsight eyes on me and demanded, “Ask me.” I thought for a moment, then said, “Tell me the telephone number of your high school in Davenport.” He immediately gave me a number. I wrote it down. After the war I checked it and was astonished that Clay had remembered it.

He took ten dollars off me one day when he said he could remember, in order, all the cards I dealt from a shuffled deck. I was quick to make the wager, and I lay down the cards, one by one on top of each other as fast as I could deal them. I turned the deck over to check him. He recited them in order, all fifty-two, and I gave him the money, accompanied by a particularly grating laugh from him.

The general needed all his mental prowess for his arguments with the prime minister. They seldom quarreled over anything of substance, as they generally agreed on the conduct of the war. Instead, they would burn their combined intellectual gifts squabbling about trifles, like an old couple that has lived together for sixty years. Churchill once snorted when Clay used the word “sick” to mean something other than nausea. They argued over the word for an hour and a half. They debated Churchill’s plan to move British clocks ahead fifteen minutes after the war, so England would have its own time and to spite the French in the bargain. They argued over whether the steering wheel should be on the left or right side of an automobile. They argued over modifications of the rules for rat-baiting, should that sport ever come back into vogue.

I listened to these discussions, dismayed at the genius abused, the wit wasted, and the time these great men consumed. Such was the caliber of the intellects being squandered and such was the inanity of the subjects that these discussions can fairly be compared to bringing in two bulldozers to remove a dandelion from a lawn.

General Clay never got the best of the prime minister, so he always editorialized to me later, “Winnie can be a bonehead, Jack, which you’ve just seen for yourself,” or, “Who does the prime minister think he is, anyway?” I’ve said this before, but I think the two truly enjoyed each other.

Another fabrication cherished by the general’s detractors is that he became wealthy during his tenure as AEF commander. The truth is that Clay’s game was high-stakes poker, and he was good at it. Once a week he organized a game. I may sound like a prig, but, along with his picayune arguments with the prime minister, cards were the other profligate waste of Clay’s intellectual might. He was a consistent winner, scooping up the chips and leaving the table with most of the money. I credit applied brilliance to his success.

Clay’s poker table was a hot ticket, and he allowed anyone to join the game “as long as he can pay the freight.” Not many soldiers could afford the ten-dollar ante and the raises that put five hundred dollars in the pot many times a night. But few could resist the challenge. So AEF battalions would pool money and send their best poker player to Clay’s table. A typical game would include a sergeant major who ran a brigade motor pool, a corporal from a rifle company, an AA loader, a nobleman from one of the nearby manors, a surgeon from a divisional HQ, a major general from an AEF division, and Clay. The guests usually left the table at three or four in the morning, baffled and broke.

I wish I could report that Clay did something virtuous with his winnings, donated it to some good cause. Instead, he wired it to his wife in the States. By my estimate, the general was sending home a thousand dollars a week before the invasion.

I have had a good chuckle at the military historians’ attempt to determine the origin of a peculiar battle flag shared by two AEF battalions. They were white pennants with an ace of spades embroidered on them, carried as a sort of armorial banner by the 81st Reconnaissance and the 5th Quartermaster battalions. Another of the pennants flew over Breathed Manor near Deal, placed there in triumph by Sir Robert Squires. The pennant was created by the 81st when its player became the first to beat General Clay at poker. Clay learned of the flag, and allowed it, although he claimed that Sir Robert was undoubtedly a ringer, brought in by his enemies. “They found some cardsharp from Chicago and taught him a British accent.” The ace of spades pennants were highly prized, and when Clay inspected the 81st and 5th, they were exhibited prominently and tauntingly.

I have recently read another calumnious story about the general, the writer trying to draw broad personality conclusions from it. The story dates from Clay’s days at West Point. I doubt it is true. During hazing, Clay and five other plebes were assigned by senior cadets to capture the Naval Academy’s mascot, a goat named Captain. The team was to return by midnight the following day. Kidnap attempts were regularly made on the goat, which was well guarded by midshipmen. On those few occasions the goat was successfully stolen, it was returned after a week, dressed in a tailored West Point cadet’s uniform

Clay’s team, minus Clay, appeared at the appointed hour before the senior cadets. They had failed, and their dressing-down was well underway when Wilson Clay appeared in the hall, dressed as a farmer and rolling a manure-filled wheelbarrow in front of him. He dug his hand into the wheelbarrow and pulled out Captain, its eyes rolled back in the sockets and its throat cut.

General Hargrave scoffed at this story. He said that he was on Clay’s plebe team, that Clay was also duly berated for having failed, and that Clay did nothing of the kind. But Jerome Carleigh, Clay’s quartermaster general, told me he saw Clay that night driving through West Point in a pick-up truck with a wheelbarrow in the back. I’ve mentioned Clay’s aversion to blood, so the story is unlikely. Yet gardening was not taught at the academy, so I don’t know why Clay would have had a wheelbarrow that night.

I return here to Lady Anne Percival, perhaps confirming some rumors and, with luck, killing others. Hargrave once called me Clay’s chaperone. I argued that I acted instinctively, like a grizzly sensing danger to her cub. He laughed uproariously and said, “Jack, you were an old maid, clucking and fretting and patrolling, as if guarding the virginity of your young ward.”

I should have been offended, were there not some truth to Hargrave’s comment. Lady Anne was a raptor, making me want to protect General Clay. I did so without much subtlety, I’m afraid.

One evening at Haldon House, long after the earl had retired, I wearied of amusing conversation and excused myself. Lady Anne and the general didn’t hear me. I walked through the long hallway, then through the massive door and passed a yew hedge. I wandered over to the two bodyguards in the jeep behind the general’s. They were riflemen happy for this soft assignment.

One of the bodyguards was slumped back in the seat with a knee across the steering wheel. His Ml was on the passenger seat. He spoke with a street accent. “I got a look at the lady. Quite a looker, heh, Colonel?” He gestured vulgarly with his hands, approximating a woman’s bosom.

“You will do both of us a favor, Corporal, if you keep your comments to yourself.”

He raised an eyebrow at the other guard, a private standing near a rear wheel well and leaning on the two-way. The private grinned knowingly.

“Yes, sir,” the corporal answered. “I mean, I thought all English babes were skinny. But the general’s girlfriend has a body that would sweat paint off a Chevrolet.”

“Corporal, did I not make myself clear?”

The private straightened and renewed his smile. “Looks like the general is doing pretty well for an old guy, don’t it? Take a look.”

I turned to the house. I didn’t notice anything amiss.

The private said, “Someone just turned off the light in that room there.” He pointed to the windows of the reception room off the main hallway. Where there once had been a slice of light below the blackout curtain, there was now only darkness.

The corporal said, “I remember the first time I tried that with my girl back home. Snuck my arm around her shoulder and switched off the lamp. She was ready for that kiss, I’ll tell you. She almost sucked my lips off.”

The library blackout curtain had a number of pinholes in it, through which lights glinted. These suddenly went out. I held up my hand for silence, but sexual drivel, like smallpox, is hard to contain once loosed.

“Yeah?” the private asked. “My girlfriend back in North Chicago, first time I kissed her, she stuck her tongue so far down my throat I gagged. Christ, it was like an eel loose between my teeth. I coughed and spit, pretty much killing the mood. Then I learned she’d been going out with one sailor after another from the Great Lakes navy training center before she met me.”

The hall light was visible through a slight gap in the circular window above the doorway. It was extinguished. I said, “Please, quiet.”

“Milt, goddamn it,” the corporal lectured, “no tongue that’s ever been in a sailor’s mouth will ever go into mine, I’ll tell you that much. You got to have some standards in this life.”

In the south wing, a light was turned off. The ground floor of the manor was now black. I was seized with alarm. Lady Anne Percival was going to work her will on the unsuspecting and, compared to her, innocent general.

I turned to the private. “I want you to call 16th Engineers and tell them General Clay’s temporary HQ has lost power.”

We were in the 1st Armored’s sector, and the 16th was its engineer battalion.

“What, sir?”

“Do it now, Private, or you’ll be dredging latrines for the duration.”

The corporal brought his knee off the wheel. “Hell, Colonel Royce, the general deserves a little nookie more than most folks in this war.”

I pointed at the private. “Get on the phone.”

He shrugged and lifted the handset. I peered up at the second floor. Slits of light could be seen below the blackout cloths. One room abruptly went dark. The private spoke into the phone.

Alex Hargrave laughed when I told him this story. “Jack, you were having a jealous fit.”

I only knew my general needed help.

Another light was doused. I ordered the private, “Tell them this is a priority one. If a company of engineers isn’t here within five minutes, General Clay will have their asses.”

“Yes, sir,” the private answered uncertainly. He plugged an ear with a finger and continued talking into the phone.

I waited anxiously, drumming the jeep’s hood, glancing at my wristwatch, and watching the second floor lights go out one by one. Finally the enormous house was dark. Wilson Clay of Davenport, Washington, was in a darkened mansion with a diabolical European seductress. I was not thinking like an adult, I concede.

The 16th Engineers must have gotten my message, because eight minutes later half a dozen four-ton GM trucks roared out of the night and screeched to a stop near our jeeps. A captain leaped down from the passenger seat of the lead vehicle and ran up to me.

“Colonel, we got here as soon as we could. Tell me the problem.”

Other soldiers spilled out of the trucks, many carrying tool boxes and spools of wire.

“We’ve had a power failure here. General Clay wants it fixed right now. I don’t know exactly what the problem is.”

All soldiers in the AEF were eager to be of personal service to the general. The captain said, “We’ll find it, don’t worry.”

He issued orders. The soldiers quickly spread out. Some pushed open the manor house’s door and rushed inside. Others circled the building. Still others pointed flashlight beams up at the power lines. One engineer donned climbing spurs and started toward a power pole.

A room at a time, lights came on. I could hear the engineers’ heavy boots on the hardwood floors. Instructions and questions were called out. Their commotion was gratifying.

The corporal said from his jeep, “Colonel, I don’t really want to be here when General Clay comes out of that house.”

I replied, “Neither do I.”

It didn’t take long.

Clay appeared at the door, backlit by the hall light. The house was now ablaze in light. He walked toward the jeep. His uniform was rumpled. His face might have been smudged with lipstick, but it was too dark near the jeep to tell.

“Jack, do you know anything about this?” His voice was bitter with lost opportunity. Or perhaps he tried to make it sound that way for the benefit of his young bodyguards.

“Sir?”

“Do you know why the goddamn 16th Engineers would show up at Earl Selden’s home just now, crashing into the house, running up and down the stairs, barging into rooms, pointing their goddamn flashlights into every corner, hollering and carrying on?”

“The 16th Engineers?” I’m not too good at thinking on my feet.

He climbed into the jeep. “Jack, I want you to investigate this and hang whoever did it. And if it was you, you hang yourself, and do it so you suffer.”

“Yes, sir.”

This was indeed a mild reproach for my brazen and juvenile act. The reason was found in Clay’s voice. His tone was of relief. He never mentioned this little episode again, but I suspect he viewed it as a narrow escape.

I started the jeep’s engine, and we pulled away from Haldon House. I heard Lady Anne’s voice. It was several octaves above the level that passes as polite in English society. She was gutting the 16th’s captain. I pitied him.

Lady Anne’s pekinese was burdened with the registered name Wallingford Warmspring’s Lady, but went by the nickname Wee Wee. To see the elegant, haughty daughter of an earl, dressed in silk and diamonds, wander through her manor house calling out, “Wee Wee, Wee Wee, here Wee Wee,” almost made the war worthwhile for me. A higher-strung and more worthless cur cannot be imagined. The peke, not Lady Anne.

One afternoon during a session with Earl Selden, General Clay approached me. “Jack, Lady Anne’s goddamn dog has been missing since yesterday.”

“Sir?”

“I want to do her a favor and find it.”

I waited, not picking up my cue. Finally, I said, “Go ahead, sir.”

“Jack, a four star general in the United States Army doesn’t have time to look for a useless pekinese.”

“No, sir.”

“But a lieutenant colonel does.”

“Aw, goddamn it, sir.”

“You go find that flea bag and give it to me so I can hand it over to Lady Anne. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

It seemed to me that the more eyes that searched for Wee Wee, the more quickly it would be found. I telephoned Lieutenant Colonel Al Fantine of the 19th Ordnance Battalion.

I said into the telephone, “Al, this is Jack Royce, General Clay’s ADC.”

“Sure, Jack. What’s going on?”

General Clay’s name always pricked up ears. I seldom used the authority of his name, but this time I did. I knew, however, that while no battalion commander would order his men to scour the land looking for an English noblewoman’s dog, they would cheerfully search for the AEF commander’s animal.

I lied, “General Clay’s dog is missing. Your battalion is posted near Haldon House.”

“You bet,” Colonel Fantine said. “We’re right down the lane. I’m looking at the mansion right now.”

“Well, could you have your men look for it?”

“Of course. Only too happy to oblige General Clay. I’ll send six hundred men into the field two minutes from right now. What are we looking for?”

My voice was steady. “A pekinese named Wee Wee.”

A long pause. “General Clay has a pekinese named Wee Wee?”

“Bring it over to Haldon House as soon as you find it, will you, Al?”

“A pekinese named Wee Wee?”

I lowered the phone back to its cradle. Colonel Fantine’s entire battalion put aside their ammo boxes and belts, abandoned their trucks and tractors, and began a stone to stone, bush to bush search for the dog. They found it less than an hour later, locked in a grain bin near one of the earl’s wheat fields. One of the farmhands had not looked around before locking up.

Colonel Fantine and twelve of his men drove to Haldon House in a flatbed. I notified General Clay, who hurried out to the road, thanked the colonel, and grabbed the dog.

A master sergeant who must have weighed 250 pounds, with none of it fat, called from the bed of the truck, “General, I hope you didn’t miss Wee Wee too bad.”

They tried, but the soldiers couldn’t keep it in. Their laughter rocked the truck. Colonel Fantine tried to wave them to silence, but his men were buckled over with laughter.

Master sergeants can get away with almost anything. This one knew it. He said, “General, you’d better follow Wee Wee next time she goes out for a pee pee.”

The laughter might have been heard as far away as London.

General Clay held this panting bundle of hair with as much dignity as the situation would allow, which was almost none.

He said between clenched teeth. “Colonel Royce, may I speak with you a moment?”

I followed him inside the manor, our departure hailed with another round of convulsions. Safely inside the hallway, he turned to me and said, “George Patton owns a bull terrier named Willie, as rough-and-tumble a dog as exists. Patton is famous for it. And now, Christ on a crutch, every one of my soldiers is going to think I’ve got a pekinese named Wee Wee.”

“Perhaps I didn’t think this through sufficiently, sir.”

“Jack, just as soon as you can push through the paperwork, I want you to bust yourself down to about private first class, and assign yourself the worst duty in the AEF.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t mean just KP. I mean something truly awful. Maybe bomb disposal.”

“Yes, sir.”

He walked into the library to present Wee Wee to Lady Anne.

The general must have been forgetful, because I reappeared at AEFHQ the following morning still wearing my silver oak leaves and carrying my notebook, and he did not say anything about it.

General Clay had bigger things on his mind, the defense of England. We return now to the beaches.

12

Private Ray Chase had been dozing about twenty minutes, lying across his pack with his feet on a box of rations, when a blast dropped a lump of cement and a yard of dirt into his trench. He leaped up, coughing against the dust and trying to swat it away with his hands. Immediately another explosion tumbled the earth above him, rippling the walls of the trench and shaking Chase’s insides.

He sank to his pack, spitting sand and dirt, hearing his sergeant call over the ringing in his ears. Chase yelled out, “I’m OK, Sarge.”

The concrete had smashed a canister of M2 HB machine gun ammunition. Bullets in their belts covered the duckboards on the trench floor. Chase thought of repacking them, but then another round screamed into the ground above, and more debris dropped on him. He would sit right there.

More rounds, each seemingly closer than the last. The trench filled with dust. The earthen wall vibrated against the private’s back, pushing him off balance. He righted himself. He tried to look skyward, to his post at the machine gun, but pebbles rained on him. The sound was of the sky splitting and the earth opening. He wanted only to burrow deeper into his hole.

He held his hand to his helmet lid and peered to his right. Tom Osborne was crouched there, gripping his Ml, his head buried in his chest and his eyes squeezed tightly closed.

“You with us, Tom?” Chase bellowed. He could not hear his own voice above the bombardment. He tried again. Still not a distinguishable sound. There were half a dozen other soldiers along his portion of the trench, but it was a traversed system, a zigzag designed to prevent an enemy who jumped into it from shooting its entire length and to contain explosive bursts. So he could see only a few of his fellows. Chase slumped lower, wishing the trench were fifty feet deep instead of twelve.

His dugout was just off the beach and had been on the receiving end of explosives before, but nothing like this. The private did not know if these were lobbed by German ships or dropped by planes. The sound alone crushed him inward, sucking the air out of his lungs. He lowered his helmet to the bridge of his nose. He drew his legs closer, so his knees were against his chin.

Good Christ, he wanted out of the trench. There was a time a week or so ago when he considered going SIW, self-inflicted wound, a comfortable one in his leg or foot. He once read somewhere that nineteenth-century Russian serfs knocked out their own front teeth so they would not be able to bite a musket cartridge and thus avoid conscription. He laughed at the serfs’ cowardice at the time. Not now.

He opened his eyes to a slit, and they found his new green stripe below his chevrons. All Allied combat troops—British, Canadians, Americans, Poles, Free French, the lot, but only combat forces—had been awarded the stripe two days before. It didn’t make him feel better.

It should not have been possible, but the roar of bombs escalated, bucking the walls of the trench and dropping football-size dirt clods on him. Ray Chase was frightened to his core, not so much of the bombardment, but of the silence that would come momentarily if this were the invasion. The last bomb would hit. The walking barrage up the beach would end. For a moment, serenity would come to the FEBA (another acronym from the staff college dolts, short for forward edge of battle area).

This deadly calm would begin the race to the parapets, the fortified top edge of the trench. If the German invaders rushing up the beach behind the barrage arrived first, Chase and his friends would die. If Chase got there first, the Germans would be obliterated. His machine gun would see to that.

Chase thought he heard his sergeant again. He brought his head up. Instead it was the corpsman, waving at him. A blanket of sand fell between them, but the medic appeared again, still waving. Cursing, the machine gunner rose to his knees and crawled north on the planks. The din was unceasing.

The corpsman yelled into Chase’s ear, “I need your help. Some wounded ahead.”

The private followed him around a bend in the trench. Sitting on the planks, motionless as if asleep, were three of his buddies, their legs ranged out in front of them and their rifles across their laps. Their eyes were open.

The corpsman bent over them, taking pulses, shining his flashlight into their eyes. He turned to Chase. “I won’t need your help after all. They’re dead.”

“Dead?” Chase yelled above the storm of bombs retorts. “They’re not dead. Just look at them.”

The corpsman didn’t have the time. He moved along the trench. Chase knelt to his friends. They were still and unseeing. And dead. “Jesus.”

Chase could not have known, but a bomb blast above them had created an instant vacuum in his friends’ body organs, hemorrhaging their brains and spinal cords. Otherwise, they were untouched.

Chase crawled back around the corner to his post under his weapon. He sat on his pack and clutched his legs, forming himself into a ball. He shuddered under the crack and thunder of the explosives.

God, he wanted out of the trench. He closed his eyes so tightly they hurt. Anywhere, God, anywhere in the world but here.

William Barber’s grandfather had once told him the Barber family came from a long and distinguished line of poachers, so William came by his disregard of warnings honestly. He had been advised to move inland, but he had claimed, rightfully, that he was an essential worker. He had also been warned to stay on shore this early morning, but, truth be told, the American sentries had not seemed too concerned about his casting off. One of them had growled, “It’s your ass, pal.”

Too much profit to be made to stay on shore. The mongers had never paid so much for fresh fish, not in his life. Thank the war for that. Barber and his three brothers owned two beach-luggers, clinker-built boats, thirty and thirty-five feet long. The boats had wide beams, and their shallow bilge keels limited their heel when they were winched onto the beach over baulks of timber. Lately their beach moorage had been hemmed by land mines.

The four Barber brothers fished for anything they could get: cod, skate, hake, conger eels, mackerel. That morning they were out for dogfish. Harold and Timothy were in the longer lugger, fishing a half mile west of William and Arthur. It was an hour before the first glints of dawn. The brothers had already spent an hour rigging their lines, each of which had several hundred hooks and would be left in the water for hours. William had quickly lost sight of the other boat.

William and Arthur were two miles out, but could not be sure precisely how far because there were no shore lights. Planes were overhead, as always. William had seen so many fighters and bombers over the past weeks that he had lost interest in whose they were. An unusually patchy fog had settled over the water, a haze that tasted slightly of smoke. Fog covered the channel one day in five this time of year, but the Barbers were accomplished boatmen.

Just as they began to lower their lines, a burst of fire erupted on the beach. The explosion was made soft by the haze and distance. Another ball of flame shot up, then a series of them. The sound of marshaled airplanes grew above the shoreline. Then more explosions, which quickly grew to a steady knell. The fog hid the land from Barber, so it seemed the bomb flashes were suspended at eye-level in the distance. Soon the entire length of the shoreline was speckled with red bursts. So many bombs were hitting the beach that the night sky above glowed orange, as if from the lights of a distant city.

William turned to his brother. “We might have taken one too many chances, eh, Arthur? I mean, we were told they might be coming this morning, and here we are anyway, eh?”

His brother, a taciturn man good with lines and nets and pots, quickly hauled in his gear, not taking his eyes from the roaring shore.

“Where we going to winch out, I wonder?” William asked.

A moment passed, then his brother deigned to say, “I would argue you are a dunce.”

“We fished during last month’s Alert Number Two,” William protested, “and you didn’t mind our fifty quid profit.” He lifted his line hand over hand. “And, besides, this may be just more German dodgery.”

Arthur exclaimed, “God, William.” His voice constricted. “Look.”

A form congealed out of the black haze, first just an indistinct smudge emerging from the fog like a spirit, black on black, then gaining size and shape as it closed. It was a Räumboote, a motor minesweeper, and it bore down on the brothers, its prow pushing aside a white wash.

“Take us astern,” William yelled.

Arthur scrambled for the rudder, but it would have been too late, had not the minesweeper’s helmsman spotted them. The R-boat changed course only a few degrees, brushing by the beach lugger. The R-boat was 140 feet long, cruising at seventeen knots. Added to its complement of thirty-four crewmen were fifty engineers.

“I’ll never forget them,” William remembered after the war. “They were lining the rail, all in black rubber suits, with burnt cork on their faces, masks raised to their foreheads, many readying rafts to lower over the side. Each of them must have been carrying a forty-pound pack.”

The R-boat was ferrying engineers to the surf, and the packs contained explosives. The ship’s armament was limited to 20mm and 37mm AA guns, and, installed for this mission, MG 34s on AA mountings on the foredeck. One of the heavy machine guns swiveled toward the brothers, the gunner peering over the barrel at the fishermen.

“That machine gunner was our Jack Ketch, no question about it,” William told me, using slang for an executioner. “But another German, must have been an officer, held up his hand, and the gunner raised the barrel. The ship slipped by, as black as tar, leaving us bobbing like a cork in its wake.”

As soon as the first R-boat disappeared into the haze, a second emerged, following the white water of the first, long and dark, its twin diesel engines rumbling. It was also full of engineers, and they too ignored the brothers as the minesweeper sailed by. The R-boat was so close William could make out the blue collars of the sailors’ pullover shirts. The collars were worn outside their blue pea jackets.

His hands over his head, Arthur said, “No mistake, you are a dunce, William, bringing me out here this morning.”

“Where are we going to land?”

When he found a theme, Arthur was a dog with a bone. “A dunce. Harold and Timothy will readily agree, when I tell them what we’ve just been through.”

The second motor minesweeper vanished into the murk toward the shore fusillade.

Wiping his palms on his pants, William said, “Our brothers won’t believe it, not a bit of it.”

The brothers would never learn of it. Harold and Timothy Barber were never heard from again. Neither their bodies nor their beach-lugger was ever found.

After having towed the midget submarine into port, the Pettibone returned to station off Benacre Broad. The sub’s ensign had been run up the foretopmast. The ship was patrolling, on watch. Its store of mines had been exhausted days before, and there were no more in all of England.

Uncomfortable in a uniform on loan from the captain and hoping none of the crew would notice the extra piping, Lieutenant Keyes leaned over an aft rail, a pair of binoculars at his eyes. He looked east, to the first traces of false dawn, purple trails low in the sky. The danger would come from the east, from Holland and northern Germany, from Army Group C and its commander, Erwin Rommel.

“See anything, sir?” asked a warrant officer.

“Not a thing.”

“I thought they might be coming this morning, sir. Felt sure they would be sailing right at us.”

“So did I.”

But before them was an empty North Sea, rocking gently in the predawn.

In a weary voice, Lieutenant Keyes said again, “So did I.”

The surf pitched Erich Rogge forward, skimming him along the sea bottom, which raked his wet suit and tore at his legs. He could see nothing through his mask but churning bubbles. When he was tumbled by the next breaker, he lost his bearings and had no idea which way was up or which way was toward shore. The surf pulled him back, then rushed him forward again. The weight of the plastic explosives pulled him toward the ocean floor. Another frogman’s leg smashed into Rogge’s ear, stunning him. He shook his head and kicked, his fins digging into the water.

The water receded, bouncing him on the bottom. He struggled to his feet, pulled off his fins, and began laboring up the beach. The next wave bowled him over, spinning him along the sand. His head dragged on the bottom, tearing his mask away. He spit saltwater and sand, and tried to stabilize his legs under him. He waded ahead.

To his left and right, other frogmen emerged from the water. The nearest engineer wagged a thumb at him. It was Kummetz, his sergeant. The morning was still too dark to see the short hill Rogge knew rose behind the beach, and the ferocious defenses he knew to be there, despite their captain’s scoffing at them. Endless explosions were ripping the beach apart.

He found his first obstacle, a tripod made of steel, half in and half out of the water, designed to tear out the bottom of landing craft. He pulled a charge from his pack and strapped it onto one of the obstacle’s legs. Trailing a wire, Rogge high-stepped to the next one.

Jim Goldschmidt had never liked small spaces. His sandbag bunker surrounded him and his belt feeder on all sides, except for the narrow aperture facing the water through which his machine gun barrel protruded, and a small exit to the rear. The chamber gave him the heebie-jeebies. He would have hated it in there, were it not for the barrage overhead, which made him grudgingly grateful for the place.

The blasts rippled the sandbags, showering him with dust. The explosions were so loud they sounded like they were inside his head, pushing out his eyeballs. He squeezed the grip of his weapon, as if it might save him from the high explosives walking up and down the beach.

His feeder, Ron Mott, tapped his helmet and pointed out the dugout along the barrel. He yelled, “I think I see something out there, out in the surf.”

Goldschmidt had to open his eyes. He looked over the gunsight. He saw nothing but the faint line of surf, almost lost in the haze and night. He shook his head.

Mott squinted. Again he put his lips to the gunner’s ear. “Jim, I swear I’m seeing something move out near those boat traps.”

Mott was hollering as loudly as he could, but Goldschmidt was picking up only a few words. The rest were lost in the pounding. Mott bellowed, “I’m going to ask Sarge to flare it.”

Goldschmidt nodded, still seeing nothing. Mott slid away. The sky might have been lighter than a few moments before, but he could not be sure. Dawn was coming, and it had never been slower. He had slept only two hours that night, on his stomach, the butt of his Browning stabbing at his chest. He ached from his helmet to his boots.

Mott returned. He shouted, “We’ll see if I’m right soon enough.”

A pinpoint of light opened high in the night sky, quickly expanding to a radiant globe, descending by parachute. Out in the surf, a quarter mile away, caught in the white light and seemingly paralyzed by it, were several dark gaps in the surf. They might have been beach obstacles or men dressed in black. Goldschmidt could not tell. But anything out there was fair game.

“Ready?” Goldschmidt demanded.

He didn’t wait for a response. He squeezed the trigger. The Browning bounced. The belt flew into the breech. The machine gun’s roar hardly registered against the barrage all around. Muzzle flashes reached for the black figures.

Erich Rogge had wired five dragon’s teeth. One more to go for a set. He plunged ahead, the water swirling between his knees and the backtow pulling sand out from under him. Kummetz worked parallel to him thirty feet higher on the beach, strapping explosives to metal-tipped wooden stakes. Other engineers, just visible along the surf-line, worked on the obstacles as swiftly as the darkness and surging water would allow.

The engineers were abruptly cast in a stark white light, making the surf pearl white. The saw-toothed boat traps loomed larger in the flat light, and there were so many of them. Rogge kept moving.

Behind Kummetz, the water bubbled angrily, popping and spitting, more than just surf. The churning moved to him. Kummetz screamed. Rogge turned in time to see his friend torn open, from knee to shoulder, then along his ribcage. Kummetz was quartered before he slid under the surf, his blood tainting the roiling water for only a few seconds. Slapping into the water, the bullets searched for Rogge.

He threw himself behind a concrete cone. Bullets chipped away at it, then moved on. The body of another engineer brushed his leg, then was carried away by the receding surf. Rogge pulled a package of plastic from his pack.

The engineers had been told that if they could stay alive for those forty minutes, they would have a lot of company on that beach. Rogge intended to stay alive. He stuck his head out from behind the cone. The beach was suffering blasts so incessantly that the Luftwaffe planes could not be heard. When the flare sputtered and died, Rogge dashed for the next cone, unraveling wire from the spool.

Safely behind it, he threw the switch. The sound of his detonations was lost in the shore bombing and the surf, but the explosives worked well enough. The concrete cones and metal stakes he had wired toppled into the surf. He lifted another charge from his pack.

Being assigned to fly the Owlet would have been an insufferable humiliation to RAF Lieutenant Sidney Baxter, were it not that many of his fellow pilots had no plane at all. The Owlet was a two-seat training monoplane with a 150-horsepower Cirrus-Major engine and an open cockpit, as far removed from a Spitfire as Cheapside was from Windsor Castle.

Baxter was posted to 48 Squadron, Number 15 Group, Coastal Command, stationed at Thorney Island. He was to fly a figure eight reconnaissance sortie, covering fifty miles of water, and he was to be in position at dawn. He was two minutes into the air when the Luftwaffe found him. The enemy must have been looking for scouts from his base.

A stream of machine gun bullets ripped into the empty student’s cockpit in front of Baxter. Tracer bullets seemed to dust his flight jacket. He pushed on the stick, trying to muscle the Owlet from the sky. It might have worked with a Spitfire. The trainer responded slowly, letting another Me 109 find the range. A portion of the port rudder ripped away. Baxter fought to control the Owlet as it began to roll. The German fighter flashed by, then another appeared off his starboard wing. The RAF pilot twisted the Owlet toward the water.

Twenty seconds later, Baxter brought the trainer under control. He anxiously glanced over one shoulder then the other. He had lost the German fighters in the darkness. His altimeter read two hundred feet. He pulled back on the stick and the Owlet gained altitude. The first pale rays of dawn lit the water below. He had come out of the dive heading north, and the beach passed under him. The port rudder was jammed. He brought the right wing up, intent on finding his base.

A stream of oil splashed across his windshield and his goggles. He tried to wipe it away with his sleeve. The engine fluttered, then froze, the dry pistons glued to the cylinders. The plane began to sink and spin.

The lieutenant threw off his safety harness. The ground below seemed to turn on the axis of his fuselage to appear above him as the trainer rolled. Using the windscreen frame for leverage, he climbed out of the cockpit. The wind fought him, pushing him back. He found the ripcord, then jumped free of the plane.

Not quite free. The ragged rudder caught his parachute pack as it passed, violently twisting him. Baxter heard his pack rip. As he plummeted toward earth, he yanked the ripcord.

The white chute played out above him, but the rudder had done its damage, and several of the lines fouled. Baxter felt a tug as the chute caught the air, but only part of it opened. The rest flapped wildly like a flag.

Before he hit the ground, he plummeted through the branches of a tree, then a large rhododendron, then onto a moss-covered stream bank.

He told me after the war, “It’s not the fall that kills you. It’s the sudden stop.”

He broke both arms, six ribs, his right femur, his right clavicle, four bones in his right hand, eight in his left foot, his nose, and his jaw.

Picking up his tone, I asked levelly, “Did it hurt?”

He grinned over his pint of ale. “A Yank would have thought it hurt, I dare say.”

The lieutenant lay on the ground twelve hours before he was found.

I tell Lieutenant Baxter’s story because it is a fair representation of the intelligence regarding the invasion available to the Defense Committee that morning.

Captain Jonathan Goodrich’s spotter called, “Sir, I’ve got something.”

Standing between the barrels of Winnie and Pooh, Goodrich raised his binoculars. The darkness and fog hid whatever was out there below the cliffs. “Locate it for me, Lieutenant.”

“I’ve lost it, sir.” A moment passed. “There it is. One o’clock.”

The captain lifted the pack telephone, spoke a few words, then announced, “If there’s a ship out there, it’s not one of ours. We’ve got permission to fire.”

In the concrete room behind the guns, another lieutenant was preparing a firing chart pinned to the plotting board, marking the position of the illusive target. Yet another lieutenant, the Plans and Training Officer, was speaking into a telephone.

“I see it, a ship,” Goodrich said, his field glasses at his eyes. Again he lifted the telephone.

An electric bell rang and thirty seconds later sounded again. At each ring, an observer trained his telescope on the ship and from the scope’s dials read aloud the compass bearing of the line of sight.

In the chart room, a soldier wearing earphones immediately plotted the same compass bearing in a straight line on his chart. He placed a ruler along the line.

A mile away in an observation post, another soldier repeated the process with his telescope when his bell sounded. A fourth soldier in the chart room plotted the second line of sight. The intersecting lines showed the ship’s position.

A fifth artilleryman threw down a calibrated pointer. One end was attached to Winnie and Pooh’s map location. “Fifteen hundred yards, sir.”

There were ten other soldiers in the plotting room, each a specialist, factoring the ship’s course, the wind, the curvature of the earth, and much else. Some read scales, others traced coordinates, another worked with logarithms. Adjustments were made. Ninety seconds had elapsed from the first sighting. The bell rang again, and all measurements were retaken, tracing the ship as it slipped in and out of the haze.

A row of pin holes appeared on the chart, the ship’s course at thirty second intervals. The final pin hole, the set-forward point, was placed on the map, the target location. Hydraulic engines hummed, and the barrels lifted and swiveled. The guns would fire the next time the bell rang, fifteen seconds away.

“Number one ready,” reported the gun commander. “Number two ready.”

Gunners held the lanyards, ready to yank them on command. The gunroom was silent, everyone waiting for the bell. Ten seconds.

A burst of submachine gun fire came from cliffside, an impossibility, as there was nothing there but a sheer precipice down to the water-washed boulders.

Goodrich called, “Sentries report. Hold steady, gunner.”

A concussion grenade flipped into the gunroom, with a delay just long enough for the artillerymen to find it with their eyes. The blast blacked out Goodrich on his feet.

He awoke later bleeding from his mouth and ears, and with his hands bound behind him. A Wehrmacht commando guarded him and two other gunners who had survived the grenades and automatic weapons’ fire. Everyone else in the captain’s crew was dead.

I have been unable to locate any of the German commandos who took part in the raid on Goodrich’s coastal battery. We know they were the Adler (Eagle) Regiment of the 1st Mountain Division, and we know they arrived by inflatable rafts, scaled the cliffs below the battery using ropes and grappling hooks, thought an impossible feat. We also know they blind-sided the sentries, getting close enough to use knives.

Winnie and Pooh played no other part in the invasion, never loosed a single shot at the invaders. Up and down the beach, other coastal guns were meeting similar ends.

The motor antisubmarine boat had been built by British Power Boat in 1938, but had found few Kriegsmarine submarines in coastal waters, so had been converted to a motor gunboat in 1940. Then its primary mission had been to draw the fire of enemy Schnellboots while RN motor torpedo boats rushed in for the attack.

All that was in the past, however, when the Royal Navy had the equipment to put up a fight. Now, in the early morning Lieutenant Neville Sanders’ boat was on patrol, watching and waiting for the invasion, cruising three miles off the coast, its three Napier Sealion engines pushing it along at seventeen knots, half speed. Two of his six-man crew had binoculars to their eyes. Two other sailors manned the Lewis guns.

The night was lessening its grip, and the lieutenant judged he had two hundred yards of visibility. Fog was drifting toward the coast. Sanders was acutely aware that his mission was only to report and flee. This passive role ran against his grain.

After the war, Sanders told me that the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine must have had little else to do but gang up on his ship, not much of a war prize by naval standards. From the German standpoint, the attack must have been quite boring.

It began with a strafing run by an entire squadron of ME 110c’s, eleven planes in all. “Not their best fighter,” Sanders said, “but good enough for this job, I’ll tell you.”

Five came out of the darkness aft of the gunboat, one after another at over 320 miles an hour, two Oerlikon guns and four Rheinmetall Borsig machine guns spitting metal from each fuselage. Then six more of the fighters roared in from off midships, yellow tracers preceding each of them.

“I don’t think our Lewis guns found a single fighter,” Sanders recalled. “They came too low and too fast.”

Sanders’ most vivid memory was of the slivers of his boat filling the air, dug out by the streams of bullets. The lieutenant rushed from the bridge and found one of his spotters lying on the port gangway, bleeding from a ragged tear in his leg. Sanders dragged him to the edge of the boat, which by then was almost cut in two. He called the abandon ship. An AA gunner dove overboard, followed by another spotter. The wounded crewman’s life jacket was secure, so the lieutenant dropped him overboard.

Sanders was running along the torn up deck toward the engine compartment looking for the oiler when he saw a periscope off the beam. “My only thought then was how silly all this was, a whole squadron of fighters and a submarine, all for my little sixty-footer.”

The U-boat commander may not have seen the Luftwaffe fighters and how well they were doing their job. He launched a torpedo at the gunboat. At that range, it was a dead shot. The torpedo coursed into the gunboat’s aft quarter, which erupted skyward. The blast sent a foot-long wood splinter into Sanders’ thigh and another into his scalp, lifting a hand-sized flap of hair and skin from his head. He collapsed to the deck, and, finding he could crawl to the gunwale, dropped himself over the side.

Little remained of his gunboat, “not enough to sink, really, just enough for us to cling to as we bobbed in the water.”

Sanders and two others in the crew were picked up by a German patrol boat an hour later. Sanders was almost dead from exposure and loss of blood. He never again saw the wounded spotter he had helped overboard or any of the rest of his crew.

The long night had done nothing to lessen Private Douglas Stubbs’ fear. His sergeant had not allowed barrel-clearing of his Browning during the night, and Stubbs had nothing else with which to treat his fright. He had spoken only a few words with his mates of the 3rd Platoon at Pett Level that night. He was not alone in his fear, but that didn’t help.

The Luftwaffe’s bombardment, which must have lasted three hours, had left him partly deaf and gasping for breath, but otherwise unhurt. The beach and the hill behind it were crater-pocked expanses. Amazingly, no one in Stubbs’ platoon had been hurt.

He had released the grip of his machine gun only twice that night, each time to urinate. His hand was so cold he could not tell where his fingers ended and the machine gun began. And he had to pee again. Stubbs had an enormous fear that the next time he left the fortification to urinate, the Germans would be on them, and he would be without his weapon.

And, goddamn, he was tired of squinting out at the channel. He yearned for a view of anything that wasn’t interrupted by a machine gun sight or framed in barbed wire. Nothing but water and waves and darkness and fog all night. And the cold. He was sick of it.

Thank God it was getting lighter. The black had turned to purple, and now streaks of blue were lightening the channel. He could see beyond the crashing waves.

“You awake, Stubbs?” the staff sergeant yelled for the twentieth time.

“Yeah, Sarge, I’m still here and awake, goddamn it to hell.”

“Where would you rather be, Stubbs? With Mommy and Daddy at home in—where you from, Stubbs? Boise? That’s right, Boise—with your radio on and a tuna casserole in front of your face? That where you’d rather be, Stubbs, rather than out here having a fine old time with your new friends in the U.S. Army?”

The sarge might be an idiot, but he was a good guy. This razzing would have to do instead of clearing the Browning’s barrel. “You got that right, Sarge.”

“Me, too, Stubbs. Even if it was your mommy and daddy and even if it was in Boise goddamn Idaho.” He pronounced it “Eye-day-ho.”

Rupert Mitchum, Stubbs’ feeder, laughed, and the squad joined him.

They appeared as if by sleight of hand out of the fog, all at once, covering the water up and down the English Channel as far as the eye could see.

It must have been every ship in the German navy. And they were all headed for Private Douglas Stubbs.

He could not say a word, nor could anyone else in the platoon.

Finally, Stubbs muttered, “Aw, goddamn it.”

The fog—surely it was a smokescreen—was suddenly lifted by the wind. More than he could count, ships of all sizes, led by tiny, buzzing landing craft skipping across the waves toward his platoon. Hundreds of these craft, already close enough for him to make out the individual Wehrmacht soldiers who crowded them.

So many ships Stubbs wondered why the German soldiers just didn’t walk across the channel on them, ship to ship, like a pontoon bridge. Every square yard of water seemed occupied by a German vessel.

Then the Kriegsmarine battleships and cruisers began their shore bombardment, their barrel flashes hurrying the light of morning. Stubbs heard the whistle of the shells, then the molar-rattling roar as they detonated. He tried to dig in lower in the sand to wait. His machine gun seemed to shrink. It was impossibly small, a toothpick. He hoped someone along the line had thought to notify headquarters. He mouthed good-byes to his parents and his kid brother.

“Aw, goddamnit,” he said again.

13

Wilson Clay’s hour was up, and he had promised to call the prime minister. The billiard room was still in a state of controlled tumult, but many eyes were on the general.

“I still don’t know, Jack,” he said as he lifted the green phone. “I thought I would, and I don’t, goddamn the German anyway. Winnie is going to chew my ass.”

As he put the receiver to his ear, the lights in the room snapped off, dropping us into darkness. With curtains over the windows and French doors, no moonlight entered the room, and other than a few black shadows, I could see nothing.

“Captain Branch, I’ve lost the phone connection,” Clay called out. “Get me through.”

“Yes, sir.”

The dogs barked. They were in their normal frenzy, howling and yipping.

A sulphur match sputtered. An oil lamp with a glass flume was lit by a signalman near his station, its wick flaring brightly until he replaced the flume. The lamp’s glow meagerly lightened that end of the room, but left the rest of us in murk.

Clay ordered, “Captain Swain, will you kindly see what is going on.”

Gordon Swain was commander of headquarters company.

A sentry at the veranda doors answered, “He’s already gone to check into it, sir.”

Clay left his desk for the north doors, his hands in front of him to ward off unseen people and officers. I walked after him. He pulled aside the curtains and stepped onto the cobblestones.

The sky was filled with slivers of ice, flashing and dancing in the silver moonlight. It was late spring, and I was astonished. It couldn’t be ice. Yet this ice or snow or confetti filled the air, drifting and rolling, so thick it blocked my view of the stone rail around the veranda. The stuff sparkled and glinted, rushing with wind currents, landing on the porch stones and swirling into soft mounds. I felt I was in one of those water-filled glass balls that you shake to obliterate Santa with snow. It landed on our shoulders and hair, our eyelashes and ears.

“Chaff,” Clay observed.

“Pardon?”

“Antiradar. Strips of aluminum foil dumped overhead, probably by the Luftwaffe.”

I had never heard of this defense. If it disoriented me this well, it must have been excellent against radar. The chaff diminished the world to the general and me, insulating us, and surrounding us with a sparkling gaiety I didn’t feel. I swatted at it.

I returned with the general to his desk inside. He had ribbons of aluminum in his hair, which caught the lamp’s yellow light, making his head appear to have serpent’s scales.

Clay lifted the phone and said again, “Signal, put me through—”

The dogs abruptly halted their insane barking. It had never before been completely silent at the manor. I had thought no force on earth could stop those miserable dogs from yammering.

I was spooked, but Clay looked at me and shrugged.

He resumed, “Signal, get me—”

The pounding of a machine gun came from the garden. The blackout curtain over the French doors billowed into the room, suddenly stitched with holes, and the plaster above my desk shattered and fell to the floor, snapping off the cue chalk holder. We threw ourselves onto the floor, except for the general, who gazed disdainfully at the damage.

“Get down, everybody,” Alex Hargrave yelled unnecessarily.

Several M1s returned fire outside.

General Clay said, “I’m just trying to make a phone call.”

I felt foolish, looking up at him. Three HQ company soldiers ran into the billiard room, bumping into desks in the darkness. Two were carrying Thompson submachine guns, the other an Ml. They surrounded General Clay and pushed him to the floor.

“Excuse us, General,” one of them said. “Orders.”

Clay landed on his rump. “Orders from whom, goddamn it? I give all the orders around here.”

“We’ve got to keep you safe, General,” one explained.

Clay tried to rise, but one of the bodyguards put a hand on his shoulder. “Please, sir. Just for a minute, until we figure out what’s going on.”

From the roof came a crash, then a splintering sound, and another crash.

Clay said, “Go see what that is, Jack. It doesn’t sound good.”

No, it didn’t. I didn’t complain I was not a combat soldier, that I was an academician, and not a brave one at that. I crawled away from the desk on all fours, passing other HQ personnel crouching behind desk and cabinets, out the door into the hallway. I rose to my feet and ran up the broad stairway to the second floor, hoping I didn’t bump into anyone coming down. I couldn’t see a thing.

General Clay’s physician, Colonel William Strothers, joined me as I climbed the narrow stairs up to the servant’s quarters on the third floor. He was carrying a flashlight and a .45. I hadn’t thought to arm myself.

He shook his head. “Terrific,” he whispered, “a pediatrician and a historian in search of heavily armed, crack German commandos.”

“You’re a baby doctor?” I exclaimed in a whisper. “I thought you were a surgeon.”

“I lied to get into the service.”

I nodded toward his pistol. “You ever fired that thing?”

“It went off once by accident when I was trying on the holster. Does that count?”

“Jesus.”

We searched room to room on the third floor, opening each door and flashing the beam in, until we found the cause of sound. A canister the size of a thirty-gallon barrel filled with German rations had fallen through the manor’s roof and the ceiling to land on the floor. It had broken open. Tins resembling our C-rations were scattered across the room. Parachute lines dangled from the hole in the ceiling.

“Chute must have failed,” Strothers said.

I gathered up several cans and returned to the billiard room, leaving Strothers upstairs. I kneeled next to Clay. He extended his hand and I gave him a tin. He opened it. I couldn’t see what was in it.

After a moment of chewing he said, “Sausage. Could use more garlic, but not bad.”

The wall east of the veranda doors buckled, then blew inward with a flash of an explosion. Stones and plaster and wood tumbled to the floor. The bodyguards above us raised their weapons. Shouting came from the porch, then automatic gunfire followed by a smattering of rifle shots. Then silence.

I saw General Clay remove a tiny pill bottle from his trouser’s pocket. He shook it idly. It sounded like it had only one pill inside. I knew he didn’t take medication for his heart, like Dr. Strothers wanted.

I asked, “What’s that, sir?”

“I can’t be taken alive.”

It took me a moment. Then I was aghast. “General Clay, you’ve been carrying around a cyanide pill? You can’t—”

“Don’t worry, Jack. I’m not going to eat it until the last moment.”

“But, damn it—”

He waved away my objection. “That’s why I don’t take those goddamn blood pressure pills Strothers is always lecturing me about. I don’t want to get my pills mixed up.”

Looking back, it seems childish that I next asked him, “Why wasn’t I issued a cyanide pill? I know as much about deployment of our forces as you do.”

Clay thought for a moment. “I tell you what, until I can get another, I’ll cut this one in half and give you a half. That way, neither of us will die, but we’ll both get real sick.”

I think he was joking. He continued to rattle the pill bottle. I was forgotten.

A flare ignited outside. Brilliant light streaked into the room through the bullet punctures in the blackout curtain. The wall above signal carrels was spot-lighted. The hammer of a machine gun came from the garden.

“General Clay?” Captain Swain called out.

“Over here.”

Swain appeared above us. “General, we need to get you out of here.”

“What’s going on out there?”

“Enemy paratroopers. We don’t know how many.”

Clay said gruffly, “Clear them the hell out and let me get back to work. That’s was the U.S. Army is paying you for, Captain.”

“I intend to, sir.” Swain used an obstinate tone the general rarely heard from subordinates. “The army also pays me to insist you evacuate when I deem it imperative.”

Hargrave, on the floor nearby, said loudly, “Get going, General. Gene and I will follow you.”

Clay climbed to his feet, shaking off Captain Swain’s hand at his elbow. “We’re retreating before we’ve fired a shot. Is that it, Alex? I’ll be goddamned if—”

Captain Swain cut in, “Let’s go, General.”

Even in the darkness, I could see the glower on Clay’s face. I thought he was going to bust Swain and send him home. Instead, the general slapped dust off his shirt sleeves and began toward the door. He barked, “Come on, Jack.”

The gunfire faded. A phalanx of Captain Swain’s soldiers met us in the courtyard. They surrounded us, a human shield, and walked us to an M20 armored utility car. Clay and I climbed through the hatch. It was dark and cramped and smelled of oil, exhaust, and the general’s wurst.

The driver said, “Hang on, sirs. We’ll get you out of here.” He had a southern accent. He engaged the gears and accelerated.

We bounced around, banging ourselves against the steel walls, which were over three-quarters of an inch thick.

Clay said bitterly, “This is it, Jack, the absolute nadir of my command, and you can write that down.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Do you realize what I’m doing here? I’m fleeing my command.”

“Sir, I don’t view it that way. I think—”

“Darius, pursued by Alexander, abandoned his family and his traveling palace and his war chariot and his soldiers, so anxious was he to escape, and we remember his infamy twenty-two hundred years later.”

“Well, sir, that’s not really analogous—”

“During the Battle of Camden in 1780, General Horatio Gates was forever disgraced when he fled the field, outrunning his men in his haste to escape.”

“I don’t think—”

“French infantry commander Clerambauld deserted his troops at Blenheim, to his eternal dishonor.”

“Sir—”

“At Gettysburg, General Schimmefennig spent most of the battle hiding in a cellar in town.”

“Sir—”

“At Austerlitz, General Buxhouden escaped, leaving most of his men behind, to his lasting shame.”

From the driver’s seat, the corporal spoke up, “And didn’t old Jeff Davis turn tail and skedaddle from Richmond at the first sight of U. S. Grant’s army?”

Clay looked bleakly at the driver.

“Well, hell,” the driver said, “we don’t hold that against him, much.”

“Thank you, Corporal.” Clay looked back at me and stabbed his head with a finger. “Every one of them memorized, Jack. Every one.”

When we arrived at the air strip, we pushed and levered ourselves out of the armored car. More guards ushered us toward Terry Norman’s plane. The engine was already turning, and even though morning was breaking, I could see flames from the exhaust pipes. I scrambled into my seat behind the pilot.

“Morning, General,” Captain Norman said cheerily. “Where to?”

I expected Clay to order us to I Corps HQ, our reserve headquarters. And I hope my jaw did not drop when he said, “I promised Winnie I’d tell him where the goddamn German is landing, and I intend to do just that. Toward the channel, Captain. Let’s go take a look-see.”

“Righto,” Norman said, grinning.

Clay believed for a while that German commandos had been assigned to assassinate him, either in retaliation for his Flanders raid with the Rangers “or just on general principle,” as he put it.

We later discovered that a plane of Wehrmacht paratroopers lost its engines, and the commandoes bailed out short of their target. They landed at Eastwell only by accident. Captain Swain’s troops killed twenty-three of them, shooting many before they landed in the gardens. Another nine were taken prisoner. A few escaped into the night. Headquarters company lost two soldiers.

I report here also that the next time General Clay fell asleep, which was many hours in the future, I dug into his pocket, found that small bottle, ground the pill into powder, and cast it to the wind. He never mentioned it to me.

I gripped the seat back as the Cub began down the pasture. The engine soon pulled us into the sky. We were in for a rough and frightening flight.

Our men, a wall of them, squared themselves to the danger. Backs to the land, they braced themselves. The Germans appeared with the tide, washing in on the island shore. Crashing and pounding and grinding, the enemy host came. All along the coast, lives were joined. The sound of battle soon soared above the waves.

Today, tide and wind have almost healed those shore battlefields, burying the debris of war, filling craters and dugouts, washing away blood, and covering bones under sand and saltgrass. These days visitors to the beaches pick through the dross of battle, discarding some, carrying some away. Even the most permanent reminders of that day, the concrete battlements, will not last, as moss has begun its work on them.

Memories are more persistent than the waste of war. Bodo Moelders, an infantrymen with a motorized infantry regiment attached to the Wehrmacht’s 7th Division, had never before been in a boat. Even his training had been from a shiplike structure built on dry land. And—he would have laughed at this that morning had he the strength—he had been trained against seasickness on a mechanism resembling a rope bridge, bouncing and rolling as his comrades shook the ends of it. It had not worked. In his youth, Moelders had suffered pneumonia and cholera. He had never been this sick.

He had started vomiting before the ship left Boulogne, and continued to shudder and heave the entire journey. When the whistle sounded to disembark, his legs were too weak to carry his weight. He was left behind on the ship. He told me after the war that he “will carry that shame to my grave” and would brook no argument from me that seasickness was as disabling as any wound and could not be helped.

Oberschutze (private first class) Rudolf Richter made it a little farther, but not much. Richter was a signalman in a Jaeger (light infantry) battalion with the 28th Division. With his pack radio on his back, he climbed down the net of rope from his ship. The Marinefahrprahme bounced against the ship’s hull below him. Richter kept stepping on the soldier’s hands below him as he descended.

Finally, three feet above the bobbing landing craft, Richter jumped. One leg landed on the craft, the other slipped between the ship and the craft just as the vessels rolled together. Richter’s leg was crushed. A moment later, silently weeping from the pain, he was raised to the ship deck in a sling.

Manufacture of specialized craft for opposed landings was new in warfare, “and we Germans didn’t really get it right,” Max Staubwasser said during an interview after the war. Other than those on the new Marinefärprähme and a number of Sturmboots, most of the invaders were transported on canal barges, which had no means of self-propulsion and could accurately be called lighters. The barges were towed by tugs and other vessels, usually in pairs, an unwieldy maneuver fraught with risk, particularly when the vessels reached the range of shore fire, when the tug released the tow line and motored to the aft of the barges and pushed them toward land. This arrangement was clearly inferior to landing crafts, the LCIs and LCMs developed by Americans for use in the Pacific later in the war. But then, as General Clay said, Germans are landsmen.

Staubwasser was with the 17th Panzerjaegerabteilung (antitank battalion) posted to the 17th Division. Slung over his shoulder were a 2cm Solothurn antitank rifle and his carbine. Half his battalion was being ferried to shore on a barge pushed by a canal tug. The barge had undergone few modifications other than a forward sheet of steel passing as armor. “Even to my farmer’s eyes, I could tell that barge wasn’t seaworthy,” he said. “But the channel’s calm water that morning was our great stroke of luck.”

Morning was breaking, revealing the hills behind the English shore, which drew ever nearer. Staubwasser heard the steady pinging of bullets bouncing off the steel plate. The luck ended when the lieutenant colonel ordered the battalion into the surf.

“Six fellow soldiers were ahead of me in line on the barge,” Staubwasser recalled. “They jumped in, one after another, and drowned, one after another. We were too deep. Finally the colonel called a stop to it, and let the barge be pushed further inland. I was the first one off the barge who didn’t drown. Even so, the water came to my chest before my feet found the bottom. I thought my weapons would pull me under, but slowly I made my way up the shore, for all the good it did me. My right foot was blown off by a mine a few minutes later, so my war ended on the beach.”

Not all injuries came from enemy explosives. Matrosen-Gefreiter (Able Seaman) Rolf Deecke was a loader deep inside a battleship turret below a battery of fifteen-inch guns. He was naked to the waist, except for his cap, across which was the name of his ship, Tirpitz. Sweat rolling off his arms and back had soaked his trousers. Deecke’s team handled the block and tackle and sleds necessary to cart the two-thousand-pound shells from the ammunition room into the turret, then into the breech. Some of this maneuver was hydraulically assisted, but much of it depended on back-breaking labor.

“The noise in the turret was paralyzing,” he told me after the war. “The geared turbines, the high pressure water-tube boilers, the turret engines and the gun engines, and of course the blasts of the guns. And everybody yelling. And then there was the suffocating smell of cordite and oil and grease and sweat. And no place could I stand completely upright. I had no idea what was going on topside or anywhere else in the world, only that somebody was being badly punished with our shells. Add to that the certain knowledge among us turretmen that we are never told when our ship is sinking, and the first we’ll learn of it is when the sea water gets to our ankles, because what a Kriegsmarine captain wants to see just before he puts his pistol to his temple is his big guns still firing as the ocean water reaches them and the barrels begin to sizzle steam. That turret was hell on earth.”

Deecke was injured by what Americans call a come-along, a chain-tightener. After an hour of steady firing, a link on a come-along around a shell popped, and the handle snapped up and broke Deecke’s jaw and cheekbone. He collapsed to the deck, was pushed by his fellow sailors to a bulkhead, and remained there, ignored, for three hours until a spare hand could help him to the surgery.

Explosives were blameless in other injuries, such as those suffered by Aloysius Meyer. The rifleman with the 2nd Company, Hindenburg Regiment, 34th Division, waded toward shore, the surf bucking him left and right, bullets splitting the air above him. Courtesy of the German navy, a walking barrage plowed up mountains of sand ahead of him, moving inland at a speed equivalent to seventy paces a minute. He had been told he could safely get to within twenty-five yards of the barrage. He didn’t believe it. He planned to follow it at a hundred yards, close enough.

Meyer heard a warning shout above the bedlam of surf and explosives. He glanced over his shoulder just as one of the newly designed landing boats, a Marinefahrprahme, hit him in the back, thrusting him into the surf, scraping him along the rocky bottom, then sledding over him.

“I rolled and rolled under the hull of the craft, taking in huge mouthfuls of water. My pack was torn off, and I lost my helmet and rifle. I was going to be crushed or drowned, I was sure of it. Then the propeller whirled into me, digging out gouges. Later I saw the wounds in a mirror. My back resembled a plowed field.”

Meyer was spat out the aft end of the landing craft, bleeding but floating. Waves sent him to shore near the landing craft. He crawled onto dry sand and lay there until a medic found him.

Chief Petty Officer Helmuth Goerlitz was at the wheel of a tug, guiding two barges in front of him as the waves nudged the crafts to shore. “I had endlessly trained for this, how to guide the barges to land, how to keep them from jackknifing on me, and I was doing a fair job of it, but I just did not see the dragon’s tooth.”

Hidden from Obermaat Goerlitz’s view by the barges’ armored gunwales and by the Wehrmacht soldiers readying themselves to leap into the surf, a sharpened iron post the size of a man’s leg ripped into the belly of the port barge, cleaving open its underside like a can opener.

“Water shot up from the tear like a geyser, and the barge immediately began to sink. My men, my charges…” Goerlitz turned away as he recalled that day, and could continue only after a moment, “began leaping out of the barge. We were still too deep for walking. Many drowned. I can still hear them cry out as they were pulled down by their jackboots and packs and ammunition belts.”

Crewmen on Goerlitz’s other barge cut the disabled vessel free, and the chief petty officer was able to push it to shore, leaving the damaged craft tossing in the surf, “a hulk, doing nothing but clogging up those who came after.”

Unterfeldwebel (Staff Sergeant) Waldemar Rasch had jumped into the surf from a Sturmboot, a powered raft launched by cradle skids. from an auxiliary minesweeper. Rasch’s most vivid memory of that morning was of his exultation when he reached dry sand with his entire squad of ten soldiers.

“Our boots sank with every step, as if the sea was trying to reclaim us, but I was overjoyed we made it out of the water,” the sergeant told me after the war. “And then it seemed some terrible, silent, swift disease, a plague, hit my squad. One after another they pitched forward onto the sand and lay still. All ten of my men. Not one of them made a sound that I could hear, all down within the course of fifty yards of beach, hit by enemy rifle fire.”

Suddenly a leader without followers, Rasch waited a few minutes behind a concrete cone until the remnants of another Wehrmacht squad passed by on its way inland, and he joined it.

Corporal Lonnie Linder may have caused the demise of Rasch’s squad. The corporal was with the 138th Regiment, 35th Infantry Division, overlooking St. Mary’s Bay. He was from Kansas, “born with a deer rifle in my hand,” he said. “By age four, I was already a better shooter than anybody in my company would ever be, which ain’t saying a whole hell of a lot.”

Linder went on, “The service-issue M1 was a pretty good weapon, I have to admit, but I brought with me my Winchester Model 70, a 30-06 bolt action repeater, outfitted with a five-power sight, the same rifle I’d been hunting and plinking with for years. I’d worn the wood shiny. Our lieutenant, a goddamn ninety-day wonder, didn’t like me bringing my own rifle much, but he shut his trap soon enough.”

Linder began loosing off bullets when the Germans were still three hundred yards away, far out of effective range for other riflemen in his company. The invaders began to fall, one per shot. “I started out with five shells in the rifle, and a cardboard box of fifty more on the sandbag next to me. I emptied the cardboard box before we were taken. And I think I missed four shots.”

Astonished, I asked this latter-day Sergeant York, “You mean you brought down fifty-one Germans?”

“Those krauts didn’t have the sense God gave a goose, because the more of them I killed, the closer the rest of them got. Easier than the target shoot at the county fair. And a lot easier than recovering from the fourteen assorted bullet and shrapnel wounds that put me out of action a few minutes later. So the krauts, they kind of evened things out, don’t you see?”

Rushing up the beach, Dieter Wolff felt betrayed when he saw the coils of barbed wire ahead of him. “Miles of it, rows of it, intact and waiting for us.”

Captain Wolff felt he had been double-crossed by the Kriegsmarine, which had promised it would cut apart the wire before his company reached it. “We were told that so much antiwire explosive would be thrown at the British beach that no piece of wire would be larger than a forearm, and we’d be able to run right over it.”

Wolff was trapped. With machine gun and rifle fire pouring down at him, he pushed ahead, right into the coils. “It seems stupid now, looking back,” he told me. “But I surely was not going to retreat, and I had nowhere else to go.”

The captain continued, “That wire must have been alive, like an octopus. It reached for me and pulled me in, suspending me above the sand. And there I stayed for two hours, helpless. I did not have anything else to do with S-Day, other than to blunt those wire barbs with my skin—I had over two hundred punctures and cuts—and stop two bullets, one with a thigh and one with my shoulder.”

The captain also felt betrayed by Goethe, who had witnessed the famed barrage at Valmy during the French Revolutionary Wars. “Goethe described the cannonade as ‘the humming of tops, the gurgling of water, and the whistling of birds.’ Nothing of the sort. Artillery sounds like men screaming.”

Corporal Alfred Junger’s Bergepanther may have been the first Wehrmacht vehicle to reach the beach. Junger was a driver, and the Bergepanther was a refitted Panther ausf D, with the turret replaced by a two-foot-high steel box across the width of the hull and along its length. Most Bergepanthers were tank recovery vehicles, outfitted with winches or earth spades, but Junger’s tank chassis was equipped with a mine flail.

“I was first in line,” he remembered. “And when the barge hit the sand, the plank was lowered, and I rolled my Bergepanther right onto English soil. I engaged the accessory gear, and the drum out front began to whip the chains around, beating the sand, throwing a cloud of it into the air.”

A Wehrmacht lieutenant crouching behind a dragon’s tooth fifty feet inland motioned to Junger. “I could see some of his soldiers lying on the beach, horribly injured by mines. I pressed the clutch and turned my Bergepanther toward him. I passed him—trying to dodge the wounded, but I’ve never been sure how well I did—and immediately the flails detonated mines, one after another, blast after blast under the drum. I drove toward the enemy redoubt at the top of the beach. Behind me the lieutenant set out green smoke canisters to signal a pathway through the mines.”

A bullet entered the Bergepanther’s viewing portal, missing Junger by the width of a hair. “The bullet bounced around inside the driver’s box. I still remember it pinging and whistling, and then it punched into my neck hard enough to bruise my spinal cord.”

Junger instantly collapsed, his feet slipping forward on the dual clutches, bringing the flail to a stop. The Wehrmacht lieutenant ran forward, climbed into the driver’s compartment, and pushed Junger aside. “The officer, I’d never seen him before, was bleeding along his left arm, but he got the Bergepanther going again, and we didn’t stop until we got to a grassy hill behind the beach, where an antiarmor mine blew the tread off the flail.”

The lieutenant was killed as he tried to climb out of the Bergepanther. Junger remained inside, slowly regaining sensation in his arms and legs as the lieutenant’s blood cascaded down onto him. His disabled flail was ignored for the rest of the battle.

Gefreiter (Lance Corporal) Hans Langangke remembers the charge as an eerie dream. Langangke carried his submachine gun across his chest as he sprinted up the sand. “I looked down at my boots as I ran,” he told me when I interviewed him, “and one lace was undone, was flapping against my ankles. It was the oddest thing—I was oblivious to everything else for a while except the unfairness that my boot lace had to be undone now of all times. Then I noticed as I ran that I could hear nothing but my own breath, loud inhales and exhales that oddly drowned out the shouts and the explosives. I saw my sergeant yell right at me, and I simply could not hear him.” It was like a dream, Langangke recalled, with some sensations muted and others amplified, much of it nonsensical.

The soldier in front of Langangke fell, so Langangke took a few side steps to run with a friend of his, who immediately was shot. “Right through the neck, and down he went. This was the worst place in the world to be alone, so I moved a little further left to run with my sergeant. And just then he took a bullet in the chest and collapsed. I knew then that I had the power of life or death over my comrades. Anyone I neared would die. God alone should have this authority.”

He went on, “All the way up the beach to the American dugouts, any Wehrmacht soldier I neared was killed. And then I got to the Americans, and they started to die, but this time I had something directly to do with it, my Schmeisser and I.”

God was with the Wehrmacht soldiers that day, many of them agreed. Wolfgang Kleber felt a presence beside him, guiding him, as he struggled up the beach. He looked left and right. No one was there, other than his fellow infantrymen. But when Kleber stumbled over a wounded soldier, he felt the presence again, lifting him by the arm and helping him on.

Berndt Klein also claims to have been visited by God. Klein’s head was grazed by shrapnel, knocking him to the sand. He felt a spirit next to him, nothing but a soft light, lifting him to his feet. “I saw nothing, but knew it was there anyway.” The spirit put a hand on Klein’s back, moving him up the shore safely through the still life of the dead and dying.

Franz Eberbach tripped when a bullet tore into the leather heel of his boot. He lay face down on pebbles and seaweed for a moment, unable to rise, uninjured but terrified. Fellow soldiers passed him, dashing up the beach. He tried to rise to his knees, but fear had frozen him. Then a warm gust of air brushed him and lifted him to his feet.

“I know it will not make sense to you,” he said, “but I was escorted across the minefield and through the streams of machine gun bullets. The spirit held my arm, guiding me.”

I asked Eberbach if he was talking about intuition.

He fiercely shook his head. “A force, something as tangible as my helmet or rifle. I’m telling you, it was the embodiment of a merciful God.”

As part of their feint, the Wehrmacht had landed at low tide. It may be presumed OKW knew the price that would be paid, and Private Douglas Stubbs extracted that price. Crouching behind sandbags and his Browning machine gun, he fired until his barrel jacket was glowing, until Rupert Mitchum’s hands were bleeding from ammo belts coursing through them.

An area receiving machine gun fire is called the beaten zone. “When they first got off the boats, they must have been three or four hundred yards away. I fired at a steep elevation, so my bullets fell over a wide area, pretty much randomly on the beaten zone. Then when the enemy got closer, I fired at fixed points, compact cones of fire, coordinating with other Third Platoon gunners. But, son of a bitch, there were still some left, marching up the beach as if they didn’t give a damn what I did to them, so I switched to short-range tactics, traversing bullets in an arc across the line of attacking troops.”

“And they still came?” I asked.

He pointed out an angry crease behind his ear and another along his leg. “A stick grenade got us first. Knocked me cold, then I think some kraut, likely mad as hell, stood over me and fired into me three times.”

Stubbs and I were sitting in a restaurant in St. Louis, but that didn’t prevent him from standing and pulling up his shirt to show me three scars from puncture wounds. “I have no idea how I lived through it, none whatsoever. My next memory is of lying on a narrow litter in a German hospital ship. Rupert never made it, though. He was seventeen years old, and he’ll remain seventeen forever.”

Arnie Fowler, the Cincinatti pitcher, waited for the Germans with two dozen grenades. “I was so accurate with the grenades, I thought the Germans would never get within fifty yards of me. I was ready and able to put those babies right down their shirt fronts.”

Fowler saw his first German, raised his arm to launch the grenade, and felt a searing heat in his hand. Shrapnel from a Wehrmacht mortar round had severed tendons in his throwing hand. He was taken prisoner moments later. “I never threw a grenade, and I never pitched in the bigs again, either.”

Corporal Allen Wilkes, of the 38th Field Artillery Battalion, to whom General Clay had lectured about German radio propaganda, remembers his arm tiring from pulling the howitzer’s lanyard. “We loaded grapeshot canisters, one after another, and I’d yank the cord, time and again. Hardly bothered to aim the gun. I just don’t know how the enemy made it up that beach. General Clay was right, the Germans were sitting ducks. It’s just that there were a lot of ducks.”

Wilkes’ pillbox was wild with smoke and thunder, with too many soldiers crowding each other and a weapon that bucked dangerously with each round. Orders were given by pantomime, as all had lost their hearing. “Open, eject, load, slam, yank, open, eject, load, slam, yank, endlessly.”

Then a grenade came through the gun aperture and landed near the howitzer’s spokes. A loader calmly scooped it up and punched it back through the portal. Outside the pillbox, the grenade’s blast did no damage.

Wilkes told me, “I had this insane idea, kneeling next to the howitzer with the cord in my hand, that that potato-masher must be the best the goddamn Third Reich could do, and we were home free. That was the Germans’ one shot at us, and they failed.”

But next came the nozzle of a Flammenwerfer 41, and the pillbox filled with an evil hiss and rushing fire. The stream shot over Wilkes, with only drops of flame splashing onto his back and arms. “My throat burned, as if I’d inhaled the flame. The loaders were covered in fire. They ran around, human torches, until a couple of the poor bastards found their way out the back of the pillbox, where they were shot down. The others just toppled over, scratching blindly at the ground, and died.”

Among his howitzer team, only Wilkes survived. He spent much of the next two years in and out of hospitals, fighting pneumonia and infection in his scalded lungs.

Ray Chase won his race to the parapet. The instant the barrage ended, he scrambled to the top of the trench. There, arrayed before him, was the German infantry scurrying his way. “The enemy was pouring through gaps in the barbed wire. Somehow the Germans had even gotten tanks to the beach. Behind all this, the channel was so filled with German ships it looked like a city skyline.”

The barrage had ended, but the strafing had not. Just as Chase swung his M2’s barrel toward the invaders, a tracer lashed into a nearby sandbag, spraying dirt and wood splinters into Chase’s eyes, instantly blinding him. Screaming in pain, both hands to his eyes, he slid back down the trench, where he sat until captured. “I didn’t fire a shot.” He regained the sight of one eye several weeks later, but one eye remains blind.

Private Karl-Heinze Brennecke was a machine gunner aboard a Leichter Panzerspahwagen, a four-wheeled light armored car. The car resembled a beetle, riding high on its chassis, with its steel body at seemingly disjointed angles to deflect antiarmor shells. The 2cm KwK gun had been replaced by a machine gun. The armored car followed a flail up the beach, with Brennecke not bothering to answer the small-arms fire that smacked into the car, sounding like a spoon beating a pan.

Brennecke braced himself behind his machine gun, an MG 42, waiting, feeling almost safe as they rolled up the beach. The true danger to armored cars comes from rolling over at high speeds. And Brennecke’s driver, Padewski, was a madman, straight from Wolkenkuckucksheim (cuckoo cloud-land), who liked to accelerate the Horch engine until it sang soprano. Here on the beach, what could Padewski do, tucked behind the Bergepanther flail and in low gear?

At the top of the beach, with so many bullets glancing off the car’s armor Brennecke was reminded of a ringing telephone, Padewski turned the Panzerspahwagen parallel to the first trench. Brennecke raised his grip and fired the weapon into the trench.

“Padewski zigged and zagged, following the trench, and every time he turned, another bunch of Americans who hadn’t seen us coming were surprised into fits. I’d fire and fire. I wore a reinforced glove, because after five belts of fifty rounds each, I’d have to change barrels. I’d release the catch, toss aside the hot barrel, put a new one on. I could do it in five seconds. I don’t think I missed any of the Amies. I was good with a machine gun, I assure you.”

What had finally stopped his car?

“Padewski was a goddamn Pole from Danzig, although he liked to pretend he was a German. He zigged when he should have zagged, and the Panzerspahwagen’s right wheels fell over the side of a trench. The car toppled into the ditch. I wasn’t hurt, but fuel began pouring on me, and I feared my barrel would ignite it. So I scrambled out of the car, which was standing on its nose.”

An American charged from the rear, and a bayonet blade popped out the front of Brennecke’s uniform blouse. He lay in his own blood at the bottom of the trench until Wehrmacht corpsmen reached him. He does not know what happened to Padewski.

Brennecke laughed. “Can you imagine? I was probably the only soldier in the entire battle to be undone by a bayonet, something out of the Franco-Prussian War.”

Father Rafael Rodriquez knew better. “I gave final offices to hundreds of soldiers. On a number of bodies, broken bayonet blades were still protruding from chests or stomachs, the result of savage hand-to-hand fighting. I spent the entire day saying last rites, hardly had time to catch my breath between them.”

Captain Ross Walton knew that his command, Baker Company, 1st Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment, was slipping away from him. He ran forward from his post along a communication trench to the first dugout, then along the trench, stepping over some bodies, slipping on others, feeling like a tightrope walker.

Under a machine gun post that was still operating, he yelled into the ear of one of his lieutenants, “You making it?”

The lieutenant flinched as a grenade detonated nearby. “Half my men are down, sir. Same with Brown down the line.”

“Let’s get out of here. Tell the machine guns to give you three minutes, and we’ll cover their retreat from the rear.”

“Sir?”

“You heard me. We’re pulling out.”

Overhead, the gunner groaned and slipped sideways on his platform. He clung to the weapon’s grip, and the barrel swung across the sky, firing in a useless arc. Blood splattered onto Walton, dripping off his helmet onto his shoulders. Then the gunner fell, bouncing at the captain’s feet.

“Get going, Lieutenant.”

Captain Walton told me after the war, “I should have accounted for all my men. I should have carried away our equipment or destroyed it. I should have waited for orders to pull back. A dozen other things I should have done. But only ten minutes elapsed between when we saw the first Wehrmacht infantryman and when we were overwhelmed. No time for any of it. Sometime during those few minutes a bullet passed through my right biceps, and I didn’t know it. I didn’t have time to notice it.”

Nor was there time anywhere else along the English Channel. Thousands of little dramas, explosive and bloody, fearful and appalling, were being played out. And it was quick work, taking only the few minutes before dawn. The sun had not even risen on S-Day, and our Allied beach defenses had already been overrun.

14

Winston Churchill later called the general’s flight “Clay’s caprice.”

That snappy phrase was all he allowed to leak to the press. To Clay’s face, the prime minister termed the flight “brazen, asinine, senseless, eccentric Yankee clownishness, a crack-brained, muddle-headed, clottish, dizzyingly stupid act of puerile glory-hoarding.” (General Clay replied, “Let’s not mince words here, Prime Minister.”)

Churchill was correct, in a way. Clay risked himself—the commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Force and all the experience, judgment, and knowledge incumbent in that position—for a glimpse of the action.

Justifying his flight, Clay later claimed that even as late as daybreak, AACCS did not know the location of the invasion. History has supported his argument. It is difficult to believe now, with time’s precise hindsight, that the Germans could by sun-up have occupied for an hour a sixty-mile strip of English soil without the Allies knowing with certitude the locations of their landings and without the Allies fully abandoning their notion that the invasion would take place—indeed, was taking place—across the North Sea. General Clay’s report was the first irrefutable evidence provided to the Defense Committee and AACCS that the German horde was coming from France.

The English Channel at Folkestone was only sixteen miles from headquarters at Eastwell, and we arrived moments after take-off. The low cloud cover was spotty, and Captain Norman piloted the Cub from cloud bank to cloud bank, plunging us into white blindness, then abruptly emerging to view the coast below, each time with more clarity as we neared the coast, as if we were increasing the powers of a laboratory microscope.

We turned southwest at Folkestone to follow the channel, and there below us was the vast panorama of the invasion. The silver water was strewn with German vessels. Countless ships. I could not imagine where the Kriegsmarine would have fitted in more ships, had they the ships. Barrage balloons floated above many of them. As far as the eye could see to the west, the channel bristled with the vessels, a staggering display of Teutonic will and strength.

General Clay said over the hum of the Cub’s engine, “Any more ships, we’d have to sandbag the coast just to keep the seawater from overflowing.”

Terry Norman jinked the plane into another cloud. He had scarcely bothered to look at the channel. There were as many Luftwaffe planes over the coast as there were ships below. To this day I have no adequate explanation why our tiny, slow, defenseless Cub was not spotted and shot down. Certainly Norman’s evasive piloting helped. With typical modesty, he claimed later the Luftwaffe was consumed by ground support and was rightfully anticipating weak resistance from the RAF. They weren’t looking for us, so they didn’t see us. Or perhaps the German pilots mistakenly identified us as a German spotter. So many Luftwaffe planes buzzed around us we could have been part of a Luftwaffe formation. I was terrified.

“Take notes and photos, Jack.”

“Yes, sir.”

Clay dictated, “The vanguard of the invasion fleet, the mine-sweepers and buoy-layers and motor launches and cutters, have already turned around. Approaching the shore west of Folkestone are four, no, five lanes of ships. A battle ship, the Tirpitz, and three cruisers, one is the Scharnhorst, stand off shore, and are now shelling,” he paused to look through binoculars “three or four hundred yards inland.”

I could see the flash and smoke of their targeted fire, a rim of explosives that had walked inland from the beaches.

“Barges, hundreds of them, ranging out five miles to sea. Also, there’s a pocket battleship further along the line. The Lutzow, I think. Yes, the Lutzow.”

I hadn’t thought the general knew ships from Shinola, but he continued his dictation as we ducked in and out of the clouds. “The transport fleet is an amalgam. In the first waves are mine-sweepers and the others. In the second are the barges and smaller craft, a number of them already ashore. In the third are freighters and coastal steamers, some look like rust-buckets. Also numerous tankers. I’ll be damned, I also see an ocean liner.”

We found out later it was the Europa. I removed the Leica from its leather case, then leaned over Norman’s shoulder to take several photographs.

Clay went on, “Surrounding the convoy at its edges are antisub patrol boats, S-boats, and destroyers. Further out look to be depot ships and tenders, two hospital ships. And oilers.”

We learned later this convoy was ferrying the soldiers of the XIII Corps. They had set sail from Rotterdam, Antwerp, Ostend, Dunkirk, heading west in four lanes, converging in an assembly area in the channel German sailors promptly dubbed Unter den Linden.

Our plane bobbed and weaved over Dungeness to Rye Harbor. Here the Wehrmacht’s VII Corps (we determined later) was landing, having sailed from Antwerp and Calais. The soldiers swarmed ashore along the coast from Rye to Hastings. General Clay described as much as he could, including sighting the passenger ship Bremen and the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper.

“A fantastic array,” General Clay said. “Every goddamn stick of wood that can float in the Third Reich is down there. Look at them.” His binoculars were jammed to his eyes. “River patrol boats, Mediterranean pleasure yachts, and, by God, they’ve enlisted the Horst Wessel, their cadet training sailing ship.” He pointed across Norman’s nose. “It’s under power.”

We flew low over the hills behind Hastings, emerging at the coast again at Bexhill, where the XXXVIII Corps was landing, between St. Leonard’s and Beachy Head. They had sailed from Boulogne and Etaples, in the Artois region of France. From our height, the battle seemed frighteningly one-sided. The mighty procession of war ships was pressing against the coast, and the only visible resistance was the swinging sprays of AA tracers. Most death in battle occurs in narrow killing zones. Here it was the beach, where the war was being waged with ferocity we could not see.

Clay pointed to a transport ship listing offshore, then to another. We could see the soldiers climbing down lines into the sea as the ships rolled. “Looks like we’ve gotten a few licks in.”

We found out in subsequent days that in fact the Allies had given very few licks. The ships in trouble had foundered on the treacherous spits and rocks along the coast, another price the Germans willingly paid for the surprise of a low-tide landing. Rocky ledges emerged at low tide off some of the coast, such as at Bexhill. At other places, such as Dungeness, sand bars allowed only two feet of clearance. Some of the obstacles were notorious in maritime history, such as the Royal Sovereign Shoals, lying from four to eight miles east of the lighthouse at Beachy Head toward Dungeness.

Nowhere along the invasion coast were there adequate port facilities for the taking. Brighton’s famous promenade piers stood in shallow water, and in any event had been rendered unusable by RN engineers. Rye Harbor was inaccessible. The pier at Eastbourne Bay allowed only ships with drafts of less than two feet at low tide. The entrance to Shoreham harbor, west of Brighton, was made dangerous by rocks at depths of two to nine feet. Those few ports with sea-going capacity, such as Folkestone and Newhaven, were heavily defended. So the Germans had to hit the beaches.

General Clay’s comment on the loss of German shipping during the assault was, “You throw enough cow pies at the side of a barn, some of them will stick.”

And they were sticking. Despite the perils of the channel and of our defenses, the Kriegsmarine’s movements seemed precisely synchronized and perfectly executed. From three thousand feet, we could see little of the chaos German soldiers and sailors would tell me about after the war: bungled rendezvous, vessel collisions under smokescreens, detonations of overlooked mines, barges sinking under the weight of armored cargo, blasts from remaining Allied coastal artillery, vessels splitting open on unseen rock shelves, the dogged harassment from the surviving Royal Navy ships, the drownings and fires.

In the Cub, our horizon was distant and hazy, and the scene below was plodding, even peaceful. For German servicemen at the waterline, the short horizon was filled with the bizarre and the violent and the dead.

We flew behind Beachy Head toward the River Cukmere. Along this shore, from the Head to Rottingdean east of Brighton, VIII and X Corps were landing. They had crossed from Le Havre.

The western edge of their front ended before Brighton. Clay said, “They didn’t hit the towns. Folkestone, Eastbourne, Brighton, all are being ignored. Know why that is, Jack?”

“Of course. Against—”

“Against stiff resistance it can take twelve hours to clear one city block. So the German just skips the towns. He’ll come back and clean them up at his leisure. Or raze them.”

Clay spoke dispassionately, as if he were working an adding machine in some office. Bofors shells exploded near our left wing, rattling the Cub. Norman seemed not to notice.

I repeat here that I was cold with fright. I later leafed through the notes I took during that flight, and my handwriting is crabbed and scratchy, and not from Norman’s tight maneuvers with the Cub. I was grateful for the engine noise, because my voice was wavering even during the few syllables allowed me by the general.

Clay said, “That looks like all of them. Sixty miles of coast, from Folkestone to Brighton. Let’s head north.”

That was not all of them. A hundred ten miles to the west of Brighton, thirty thousand soldiers of the German II Corps were landing. They had departed from Cherbourg and sailed northwest to assault the beaches at Lyme Bay. There the British V Corps reeled under a massive assault. We learned later that the Germans employed over four thousand vessels on S-Day.

I was vastly relieved to be away from the coast. General Clay said only one sentence the entire way to London. “Winnie is going to crap himself.”

We landed in Hyde Park forty minutes later. The streets were eerily empty. Londoners were inside at their radios, listening for word from the BBC. We quickly arrived at the war rooms and were escorted inside. It was just after 7:30 in the morning.

Clay paused at the door to the cabinet room a moment, with me at his shoulder. The intelligence chief, General Cadogan, was at his map. Near him, talking with animation, were Generals Stedman and Alexander. Winston Churchill stood over his place at the felt-covered table, staring down at a report. Other Defense Committee members were in front of maps or at telephones along a wall. Tension was thick, apparent in the rigid stances, in the few inches separating the noses of arguing generals, in uncharacteristically large gestures, in the wadded fists and narrowed mouths. I actually saw the prime minister close his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose. But only briefly.

General Cadogan’s map was spotted with colored flags, reports of engagements with the enemy. Many were on the channel coast, and many were along the North Sea coast, some as far north as Edinburgh. The map reflected the confusion. The enemy had been on English soil for over two hours and still arguments raged as to whether they had come from the east or south.

The room abruptly quieted when General Clay appeared. He was supposed to be at Eastwell. Only the sound of several swivel fans could be heard as he walked toward Cadogan’s map. His chest was out and his jaw set. This was now his show.

“The German has landed from here”—he punched a finger at Folkestone and in a historic sweep brought it east to Brighton—“to here.”

Cadogan brushed back a wave of hair. “Yes, well, we do have increasingly reliable reports to that effect, but also, we’ve heard from—” He moved to point to the shore north of London.

“General,” Clay interrupted forcefully. “Here to here.” He slapped the map twice, Folkestone and Brighton.

Winston Churchill said, “We cannot be absolutely sure yet, General Clay.”

“But we can.” Clay’s sense of timing was exquisite. He waited one long breath. “For I have seen the invasion with my own eyes.”

General Clay’s flight has become one of the fabled adventures of the war, and the story has already gained a high gloss. Soaring over the crescent of battle, impervious to shot and shell, one man, one lonely soldier, risked his life to bring word of the battle. A Paul Revere or Pheidippides. Another braid on the Wilson Clay legend. The tellers of tales and singers of songs will likely forget—have already forgotten—that Captain Norman and I were also in the plane.

The German subterfuge, called Herbstreise (autumn journey) “was sheer goddamn military genius, I guarantee you that,” Clay concluded when the operation’s breadth became clearer.

He asked, “Jack, do you know who said, ‘Deception is the sharpest weapon’?”

I wrinkled my brow. “Thomas Edison?”

“Jesus H. Christ, Jack. You’re going to make me burst an artery one of these days. It was the Chinese philosopher of war Sun Tsu, and he was right.”

OKW reaped immense rewards for its risky deceit. In the Allies’ rationing of battered and scarce military resources, hard decisions had been made, and they were made wrongly, thanks to Herbstreise. The finest Allied soldiers—veteran British troops—had been assigned to defend the east coast, while the green Americans were given the beaches less likely to be hit. The more complete RAF squadrons were assigned to Group 12, guarding the east coast from Digby, Wittering, Duxford, and other stations. The devastated Royal Navy posted a preponderance of its remaining ships to the North Sea. Just before the invasion, the Defense Committee released the British XI Corps, which had been held in reserve north of London, to the east coast.

In the weeks before the invasion, the committee had been painfully aware it might be taking the bait of an elaborate trap. But General Clay and most other committee members firmly believed the Germans would come to the eastern shore. He later said, “We had to act on our best information. And we did, to our sorrow.”

How were we fooled?

Parts of Herbstreise were revealed to the stunned Allies the morning of S-Day. Other fragments of the deception were disclosed only when Wehrmacht commanders began bragging about them—publicly tweaking our noses—later in the war. Intelligence contacts tripped over some of the plan. And in interviews for this narrative, I dug up a few segments of the puzzle myself.

Here too I tried to talk to the first person to know, the first person to discover some portion of the German plan that so grandly duped us.

Peter Vanderhoff was a bulb grower near Schiedam, just west of Rotterdam. Two months before S-Day, an official from the Reicharbeitsdienst (National Labor Service) drove up to Vanderhoff’s small home, rolled down the window of the black sedan, and announced that Vanderhoff and his family were to be off the property within twenty-four hours. The RAD officer drove away without further explanation or any apology.

It was the Dutch experience that their German occupiers meant what they said. Vanderhoff, his wife, and three children moved into his brother’s tiny cottage in Schiedam the next morning, bringing in their cart every stick of furniture and their dog. Two days later Vanderhoff tried to visit his farm, but was turned back at a road block. On his toes, Vanderhoff could see construction in the distance. The Wehrmacht sentry grabbed his shoulders, spun him around, and shoved him away. Every four or five days, the bulb farmer had returned to see if the Wehrmacht would give back his property.

That morning, which Vanderhoff would later learn was S-Day, the roadblock and the sentry were gone, unexpectedly and mysteriously. He walked along the dirt road toward his farm, his black and white Border collie spinning and yipping at his heels, ecstatic to recognize old smells and sights. The dog was worthless, except for its frantic carrying on at Vanderhoff’s feet, which the farmer had learned to enjoy, except for the dust cloud the collie always kicked up with its happy whirling. Vanderhoff walked in a low cloud most of his days.

Vanderhoff approached his home cautiously. He was within a hundred yards when he saw the tanks of a Panzer regiment in his tulip field. Dozens of tanks, aligned in rows. He groaned at what they must have done to his crop.

Yet where were the tank crews and mechanics and support vehicles and the commotion that always accompanied an armored regiment? The Panzers sat there in his field, unattended and ignored. Vanderhoff stepped along his walkway. The Germans had taken his front door and his planter boxes that had hung under the leaded windows. Why would a Panzer unit need planter boxes? The bastards.

He rounded the corners of the cottage. The nearest tank was parked in back of his toolshed. When he opened the shed, the dog rushed in. It was empty. The Germans had taken the lot of it. Bastards. In a rage, the farmer slammed the shed door. He ran toward the nearest tank, intent on spitting on it.

This Panzer was peculiarly disheveled, its armor plating a bit awry—and could it be that the cannon barrel was bent out of true? Vanderhoff slowed and squinted. He was astounded. The barrel had a crook in it. He would have expected the Germans, of all people, to be able to mill a straight tank barrel. It was part of their genetic inheritance.

As he drew near, the tank began losing definition and menace. And by the time he reached it, he knew it was made of wood, coarse planks nailed together haphazardly, then painted gray, with cupolas and tank wheels drawn in black. The barrel was a wood pole. A mock tank. His dog lifted a leg to it. The farmer walked around the vehicle. Fake tread marks had been dug into the ground behind the tank, maybe with the shovels and hoes they had stolen from him.

Vanderhoff turned a circle. The other tanks in his field, dozens of them, were also wood facsimiles. Vanderhoff bit his lower lip, not making sense of it at first. Then he understood, and he prayed the British across the North Sea had discovered the ruse before he did.

The bulb farmer returned to his shed hoping the Germans had overlooked his crowbar. He wondered how long it would take him to disassemble the tanks. His brother would help. There would be a strong market for wood planks in Rotterdam, he suspected.

Johann Lubbers was twelve years old and preferred fishing to schooling. The boy had been born in Amsterdam, but when the war started, he and his mother were sent to a farm near Vlaardingen, on the river below Rotterdam. He fished on the Nieuwe Maas, the right branch of the Merwede, which enters into the North Sea at the Hook of Holland. He did not care what he caught. His mother could cook anything, even eels, and was grateful for anything be brought home. There was usually little else on their table.

A month before, barbed wire barricades had appeared overnight on the riverside road, blocking him from reaching his favorite fishing bank on the lower river. Gruff sentries in field-gray uniforms turned him away at a road barricade. They were soldiers of the Kriegsmarine infantry. While he watched, the sentries waved through a caravan of trucks, most of them Johann recognized as Opel Blitz three-tonners, a standard Wehrmacht transport. He regularly dumped handfuls of dirt into fuel tanks of unguarded Opel Blitzes, a risky little business he had told his mother nothing about. Had the sentries looked closer, they might have seen that Johann’s rod was notched forty-two times above the handle, just like the gunfighters in America that Johann read about in his Karl May westerns. But Johann’s notches were for tires he had slashed on Wehrmacht vehicles. Anderson the barber had once told him during a haircut that if he truly despised the Germans, he should come and talk to him on his thirteenth birthday. Johann could be useful some way, he had promised. The barber had said nothing more, and Johann knew not to ask. But the boy wanted a record of success to tell Anderson the barber when they talked in two months.

Johann had walked home that day with an empty net. Over the weeks he had returned frequently, checking to see if the Germans had abandoned his fishing grounds, and looking for unprotected Opel-Blitzes or Kübelwagens or Borgwards. On the morning he would later learn was S-Day, the saw-horse barricades across his road were untended. The guardhouse was vacant.

He passed by the barricades carefully, looking over his shoulder, wondering why the Germans would suddenly abandon what they had so painstakingly guarded for weeks. He nervously walked along the dirt road, feeling the onus of his one-boy underground war.

He had fished many times from a rickety pier on the river. As he approached it, he saw that buoys now surrounded the structure, set in a pattern that ran perpendicular to the pier. At each float was a strange shallow-bottomed craft.

Johann walked down the gravel approach to the river, then stepped onto the pier. He could recognize the fishing boats that used these waters, and the Kriegsmarine’s patrol launches and mine-sweepers and S-boats. These vessels were nothing he could identify. They were square and flat. He realized they were unfinished, not much more than floating boxes.

The vessels were tied to each other, bow to stern, and anchored to the buoys. Johann lowered his small tackle box to the pier, then braced himself on a pylon, leaned toward the water, and pulled a line. The boat drifted nearer. He was perplexed. It was nothing but a box, with a beam of about five meters and a length of fifteen meters, and crudely constructed. What he had thought at a distance to be the boat’s equipment—bitts and capstans and cleats and lines—was painted on the flat surfaces of the vessels. An AA gun had been drawn in black paint on the nearest craft.

Johann knew instantly what this counterfeit navy portended for the British. With his pole in one hand and his tackle box in the other, he sprinted from the pier and turned toward town. Anderson the barber would know what to do with this news.

Captain Siegfried Neuss prided himself on his position as leader of the only signal company with the XXX Corps, stationed at Bremerhaven, at the mouth of the Weser River in north Germany. He told me he may have been the lowest-ranking Wehrmacht officer to know of the magnificent illusion.

Neuss’ invasion duty ended the day before S-Day, when radio silence had been imposed. By his figuring, he had slept less than four hours a day over the past week. The 120 signalmen in his scattered unit—some in the hut, others in Wilhelmshaven and other posts in Lower Saxony, and still others in Groningen in Holland—had worked just as hard. They had joked about their hoarse voices and cramped sending hands, their bleary eyes and jaws strained from yawning.

On that day, utterly exhausted, he watched the second hand on the wall clock, and when it reached twelve, he called out, “That’s all, men. Congratulations.”

His soldiers applauded and hooted, then rose from their chairs, rubbing their shoulders and working out the kinks in their legs and backs from sitting so long. They left their stations, the banks of radio equipment lining the communications hut’s walls. Neuss rose from his desk at the back of a hut to shake their hands one by one as they filed by. They headed to their bunks in the nearby barracks.

The signalmen in his unit had transmitted, again by Neuss’ figuring, over 210,000 messages in the past week. Every one of them bogus. Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine and Wehrmacht messages. All fraudulent.

Not just random broadcasts. The messages had been drafted one by one to form an intricate pattern showing that an entire Wehrmacht army had formed and was readying for transport by the navy, a growing wave of broadcasts, a crescendo of military communication.

There were times these past few weeks when Captain Neuss almost started to believe his own messages. With this much planning, with this many signals, there had to be Germans units acting on them. There were none, of course. His messages, all 210,000 of them, were ignored by the invasion forces. But not by the British.

Neuss walked to his quarters. He laughed aloud around a yawn. No, certainly not by the British and their partners, the Amies, poor fools.

Luftwaffe Lieutenant Friedreich Rollman was also exhausted. His duties were ending the morning of the invasion, and he had flown all the previous night. He tipped his plane at the runway, jockeying the stick. One more landing, and he could sleep in a cot, a real cot. He blinked away sleep. His eyelids seemed to have weights on them. The runway dipped and rolled in front of him. The plane closed on it.

His plane, a Messerschmitt Bf 109B, was a veteran of the Condor Legion in Spain. It was outdated, with a top speed of less than three hundred miles an hour, but adequate for its duties from the airbase at Aalborg in northern Denmark. Two MG 17 machine guns had been removed, leaving only the gun in the propeller boss. Two supplementary fuel tanks had been added.

Rollman’s assignment had been to stay in the air as long as humanly possible, or for as long as his plane would hold out. He had spent weeks dodging in and out of British radar and being spotted by Royal Navy patrol boats. Sightings of his plane filled the British Observer Corps’ logbooks at their CH stations at Crone Hill, Danby, and West Beckham, and the CHL stations at Easington and Shotten and Cresswell, all in the English eastern counties.

His crew had performed maintenance on the Messerschmitt while the lieutenant slept in the cockpit. He had been rationed caffeine pills. He had flown himself groggy. And, finally, as he approached the runway early S-Day morning, he knew his mission was over.

He touched down on all points, then bounced along the runway as the Messerschmitt slowed. He turned it to the hangar. His crew was jubilantly waving handkerchiefs at him. He flipped off the fuel lines, then pulled to a stop in front of them. He threw the engine switch and unhooked the cockpit latches. He climbed out. The leg bag caught on a clasp, rupturing, spilling urine down the inside of his flight suit. Nothing new there.

The shouting mechanics pulled him off the wing and carried him on their shoulders toward the barracks, patting his back and yelling congratulations. The lieutenant was asleep before they lowered him to his cot. His was the sound sleep of victory, despite the urine. For a week, Rollman had successfully imitated an entire flight of Luftwaffe airplanes.

After the war I spoke with Inspector Charles Bradley of Scotland Yard’s counterespionage department. MI5 insisted on a representative at the questioning of selected prisoners of war, and Oberleutnant zur See (Senior Lieutenant) Gerd Haas was deemed eminently worth the inspector’s time. Haas was the commander of the Kriegsmarine midget submarine caught by the Royal Navy off Benacre Broad. Bradley spoke German.

The interrogation of Haas was conducted in an empty munitions warehouse in Lowestoft, on the North Sea shore in Suffolk. Lieutenant Haas had endured hours of questioning, during which he gave his name and rank and nothing else. His confidence increased when he began to understand the British limited their tools of interrogation to psychological ploys rather than truncheons. Inspector Bradley recalled with some irritation that toward the end of the questioning, Haas appeared rather relaxed.

At the end of the last session with Haas, Bradley said to the German, “Do you know that your countrymen have landed in Kent and Sussex and Dorset?”

The submariner had no visible reaction. The RN interrogator ordered the guards to remove Haas and bring in the next German sailor, one of Haas’ crewmen.

Charles Bradley told me, “Of course, we suspected by then the German pathfinder submarine had been part of the deception. Despite his obstinate refusal to say anything, Haas confirmed it to us. He couldn’t help it, I presume. Just a surge of joy.”

“How did he confirm it?” I asked the inspector.

“On his way out of the room, Haas passed Petty Officer Manfred Detmers, one of Haas’ crewmen, who we were bringing in for another go at questioning. Haas grabbed Detmers and gave him a huge hug. Right there in front of us all. It quite startled Detmers.”

“A hug?”

Bradley nodded. “The submarine’s mission had been to misdirect. They succeeded. That hug was all we needed to confirm that Haas had deliberately allowed his sub to be captured by the RN.”

Jean Lechavalier was the owner of Café Anglais on Rue Victor Hugo in Le Havre. He was also a sector chief for the French underground, responsible for six resistance cells in the city. The cells were insulated from each other, and Lechavalier knew many more of his maquis than knew him.

The café had been short-handed since the war started. One evening shortly after S-Day, he was waiting tables. In one corner a German officer and a French woman ordered a Pernod and à pression. The very idea of a French woman consorting with the despised occupiers sickened Lechavalier, and he vowed to make a few inquiries to determine her identity. After the war, he promised himself, she would regret this indiscretion.

But when he bent low over their table to deliver the beer and aperitif, he recognized by the candlelight one of his soldiers, a woman who had never seen his face, Clara Gaudet, the prominent physician.

“That terrible instant will be pressed into my memory forever. Here she was in my café, toasting the progress of the war with a Wehrmacht colonel. And she was one of my own.”

By the time Lechavalier told me the story, he had lived with the revelation for years, yet he stilled purpled when he told it. “Three of my fighters died stealing the radio she used. And, my God, how many English and Americans fell because of her treachery?” He spat, “The infamy, the perfidy, the outrage.”

I asked him why she would be so careless as to be seen with a German officer in a café.

“Her assignment was complete,” Lechavalier reasoned. “She was no longer useful to the Germans, because once the true location of the invasion was known, the Allies could readily deduce she had fed them lies and that she was an Abwehr double agent. She must have hated her countrymen so, to rub our faces in her treachery by publicly celebrating with a Bosch officer.”

“Would she not be in danger from your underground?”

Lechavalier looked at me as he might at a simpleton. “Good God, I would have strung her intestines over my brasserie had I been able to find her without her Wehrmacht colonel. But mission accomplished, she disappeared.”

Mme. Gaudet’s lies were that the Wehrmacht 8th and 28th Divisions were moving from Normandy toward Belgium. She had provided another part of the false puzzle for the Allies.

I interviewed her daughter, Anna, at length. I also spoke with several of her Le Havre friends and even an Abwehr controller. No one knew what turned Clara Gaudet, of the tragedy or avarice or confusion that led her to betray her country to the Germans. She took the secret to the grave after the war. She was placed in her coffin with her neatly guillotined head under her arm.

The British have not released the name of the originator of the second false radio signal received just before S-Day, this one from Merksem about the claimed movements of the Wehrmacht’s 30th Division. They will undoubtedly deal with the double agent when he or she is found.

The citizens of Norwich were more successful than Jean Lechavalier in seeking revenge. Many townfolk are ashamed of it now, though some swear they never will be. Their ancient town lay in ruins from the Luftwaffe fire-bombing. I walked through Norwich after the war. It reminded me of old photographs of San Francisco after the earthquake and fire of 1906. Some buildings had one wall remaining. Others had nothing left above ground but plumbing standing stiffly into the air. A dusty pall hung over the town. Even years after the bombing, my footsteps blew up puffs of ash.

Townspeople had quickly concluded that the devastation of Norwich had been part of the ruse. The Luftwaffe turned their village into an inferno, forcing citizens to flee into eastern county roads, clogging them, further convincing the Allies that the invasion would come from across the North Sea.

Two weeks after S-Day, a Luftwaffe pilot—the only survivor of the only bomber shot down over Norwich—was being transferred from Norwich Castle, which had escaped destruction, to a POW camp in Scotland. The castle had been used as a prison from the reign of Henry III to 1884 and was so used after the fire bombing. The airman was still wearing his tan, summer flying suit over his service tunic, and his breeches were tucked into his tall leather and suede boots. His steps were reduced by shackles, and his hands were bound behind his back. He was easily recognizable for what he was.

As he was marched toward a truck, an elderly man stepped from his tent, pushed his spectacles back on his nose, then yelled, “That’s one of them. Right here, one of them.”

The old man was a resident of a tent city erected since the fires burned themselves out. He continued to shout, and other residents of the canvas shelters emerged to stare at the German.

Someone yelled, “Look at him. Bloody cocksure and proud.”

Another followed with “We’ve got nothing but ashes, and he goes to a camp to eat our food.”

“He killed hundreds of us.”

A crowd gathered. The army guards hurried the German along the street toward the truck.

“My boy is dead, and he’s to blame.”

“He shouldn’t live when our town died.”

“Rotter.”

At first the assembly stepped hesitantly toward the airman, but anger urged them on. They spilled into the street after the prisoner. The homeless throng quickly grew to a hundred. The guards might have outrun them, but the German was hindered by the leg irons. He tripped, stumbling into a guard, who tried to right him. The crowd gained on them.

The cries were of outrage and sorrow. Motion added to the rage. The pack roughly pushed aside the guards and clutched at any part of the German the villagers could reach. He was lifted above their heads, carried on a dozen pairs of hands toward an elm tree, denuded of leaves by the fire’s heat, “but with enough spring left for our purposes,” one Norwich resident who wished to remain anonymous told me.

A rope was produced from somewhere. A boy was hoisted to the first branches. While the crowd cheered, he climbed as high as he could before tying a rope end to the trunk. He dropped the rope to the mob.

Many hands pulled on it, bending the tree top almost to the ground. Another Norwich citizen opined, “You Americans are better at nooses than we are. This wasn’t art, but it did its duty.” The noose was fitted around the terrified German’s neck.

With cries of “Stand back, stand back,” the rope was released. The elm straightened like a bow, dragging the hapless airman after it.

A witness said, “He kicked for five minutes, would have been longer but for the leg irons weighing him down. Then he hung there for a full day before anybody had the courage to cut him down.”

Omar Hacheim had been on the German payroll for ten months and on the British payroll for nine. Hacheim was a man of principle, but he cared not a whit for either side in the war that had engulfed his homeland, so his principle was to collect as much salary as possible from both and thereby guarantee that at least one of his currencies would be worth something after the war.

Hacheim was a water vendor, a trade inherited from his father. Omar had sold his father’s camels, and by dint of hard work now owned four tanker trucks, supplying water to whichever line he found himself behind. He also sold information.

Two days after S-Day, Omar and his drivers were in the German-held town of Derna on the north coast of Libya, a hundred miles east of the British line at El Gazala. Hacheim kept his notes in a tin under the dashboard of his lead truck. Lately few pages had been filled.

He was encamped near the north end of the sand airstrip at Derna. The sun was high, and Hacheim and his workers were idling. They heard the soft drone of a small plane. When it drew nearer, Hacheim recognized it as a Fieseler Storch, a scout plane. It landed lightly. Heat waves rising from the oiled runway seemed to twist the wings and fuselage. When a Mammut command car drove to the edge of the runway, the water vendor lifted his binoculars from the truck seat. Few Germans rated a Mammut.

The plane taxied to the command car. Hacheim squinted into the glasses. Out of the plane climbed a stout, thick-necked officer who moved quickly from under the wing toward the car.

Rommel, Hacheim knew at once. It must be. But Rommel had left Libya and was commanding an army in northern Europe, or so Hacheim had heard. The heat waves cleared momentarily, blown back by prop wash. Hacheim could see clearly as the German officer withdrew a pair of Perspex goggles from his bag. Rommel’s trademark. The general had returned to the desert, back to the red sand and shrieking ghibi.

Hacheim reached into the cab for his notebook, changed his mind and left it hidden. He would remember Rommel without notes. The British in Alexandria had given him a wireless he kept under the truck seat. They would pay well for this intelligence.

After the war Omar Hacheim complained bitterly to me that he had been cheated out of his reward for information about Rommel reappearing in Africa. By the time he sent it, Rommel’s return to Africa was old news and worthless to the British.

The disastrous sum of these and a hundred other parts was that the German Army Group C, that battle-hardened Wehrmacht and Waffen SS army ready to pounce on England from across the North Sea, was a Schatten army, a shadow army.

The deception had been built nail by nail and plank by plank. The XXX and XXIV Corps and the XII Waffen SS Corps were decoys, intricately crafted chimeras. The supporting Luftwaffe squadrons were paper formations. Unknown to the Allies, the German navy had virtually abandoned the North Sea by S-Day.

The shadow army existed only in our minds. There it waited, in ominous detail and with fearsome purpose, until the dreadful revelations of S-Day.

15

Biographers of brilliant men suffer for their subjects’ brilliance. Genius is mysterious to those of us without it. Twists and turns of a facile mind may be invisible to the writer. Nuances are lost. So I fear it is with my record of General Clay. Put bluntly, he was smarter than I was. I missed a lot.

My chronicle has been of Clay’s travels, his close calls, and his histrionics. The mechanics of his command were more complex than I have so far been able to relay.

Only five percent of a commander’s responsibility involves devising and issuing orders. The remainder is spent insuring those orders are carried out. But that five percent wins or loses the battle. One hour of Clay’s command, examined closely, gives an idea of the general at work.

At ten o’clock of S-Day morning we walked into Bilswell Manor near Storrington, where Clay had met his commanders the night before. On Clay’s orders AEFHQ had been moved there while we were in London. The planes with HQ personnel and equipment were still landing. Bilswell was also I Corps headquarters. The location was ten miles inland from the channel town of Worthing.

Here is the one hour. At 10:05, Clay conferred with Lieutenant General Alex Hargrave, who reported that the enemy units that had landed between Brighton and Beachy Head (we learned later it was the Wehrmacht’s VIII Corps) were off the beach and were pressing across the South Downs toward Lewes. Initial reports indicated they were wheeling west behind Brighton. Toward us, I might add.

At 10:09, Clay put a call through to General Franks of the 1st Armored, which was between Portsmouth and Worthing. Franks told him that his beach units were not engaged, and nothing was on the channel horizon. While Franks waited on the telephone, Clay consulted with Hargrave, then said into the phone, “Roger, we think the German has staked out his beaches and that his second wave will hit exactly behind the first. Any beach not hit by now won’t be.”

Franks must have agreed, since Clay then said, “We’ll need support along a line from Horsham to Worthing. Tell me what you can do.”

After a moment and a nod from Hargrave, Clay said, “Do it immediately.”

Clay turned to a stenographer. “I have approved the movement of the 13th Armored Regiment east toward Horsham and the 1st Armored Regiment east along the South Downs in the direction of Brighton. They are directed to form a perimeter roughly between Worthing and Horsham.”

He waited until the stenographer looked up again, then ordered, “Read it back to me.”

The stenographer complied.

Clay said, “I want you to have Franks’ steno repeat it when you’re done, Corporal.”

“Yes, sir.” The stenographer hurried to the signal station.

Headquarters personnel from Eastwell filtered into the room. Clay moved toward the fireplace and turned his back to it as if to warm himself. He rose on his toes several times, his arms behind his back. There was no fire. I joined him.

He said, “You know why I always have them repeat it?”

“Yes, sir, I do,” I replied.

“History is replete with appalling tragedies due to misinterpreted orders. During the Crimean War, Lord Raglan’s order to Lord Lucan, bungled somewhere in the transmittal, resulted in the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade, and ‘All that was left of them, left of six hundred.’”

“Yes, sir.” I add here that Clay maintained a running dialogue with me throughout S-Day and the days that followed. He gave his own play by play, just like a radio broadcast of a baseball game. Most of the time he cared not at all whether I heard or understood him. He needed to fill the brief silences with the sound of his own voice.

“At Colenso during the Boer War, General Buller upped the time of attack by forty-eight hours, but forgot to send the order to General White, which resulted in a debacle.”

“Yes, sir.”

I thought I was in for a long siege, but at 10:14 General Clay was called over to the dining room table where David Lorenzo had spread out his ever-present maps. Alex Hargrave followed us. Signalmen were working swiftly, pulling lines through a window and unpacking more communications equipment. A TWX was already clicking.

Lorenzo never fully trusted technology and was always accompanied by cages of London messenger pigeons, but wire was the first significant technological advance in military communication in the millenia, and the G2 took full advantage of it. He already had a telephone at each ear. His dark brows were knitted together, and he dictated positions to subordinates, who marked them with colored stickers on a map of Kent and Sussex.

Lorenzo handed the phones to a signalman. He pointed at a map and said to Clay, “Those sporadic reports of German commandoes from Selindge and Stanford, behind Hythe, now indicate a full-scale airborne operation there.”

His finger traced an eight-mile arc behind Hythe, a town on the channel. “They’ve landed on this stretch, three, four, and five miles inland from the town. We think as many as two or three brigades, maybe as much as a division, have dropped.”

We learned later these were the troops of the Wehrmacht’s 7th Parachute Division.

“This has taken a while to confirm, General,” Lorenzo went on. “But instead of punching inland, the German paratroopers are almost doubling back, moving east, paralleling the channel inland, toward Dover and Deal. The 134th has been hit hard.”

“Behind our beach lines,” Clay commented, his finger following Lorenzo’s. “They’re trying to roll us up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any reports yet of landings on the Thames estuary?”

“Nothing.”

Clay spoke with General Hargrave for a moment, then turned to Captain Branch. “Get me Carsen.”

At 10:18 Clay was connected to Roderick Carsen, commander of the 5th Infantry, at his headquarters near Canterbury. Clay plugged an ear against the increasing noise. He spoke with Hargrave again. Clay’s deputy, Lieutenant General Patrick Neil, joined them and added a few sentences. I couldn’t hear much of what was said. Then Clay spoke again into the phone to Carsen.

He waved over another stenographer and said, “I have approved advances of the 5th Antitank and the 19th Field Artillery battalions and the 10th Infantry Regiment to the south on a line corresponding to the Canterbury-Dover Road, the mechanism left to Carsen’s discretion. Read it back.”

The steno did so, then left for Branch’s desks. Yet another stenographer replaced him. They had been trained to run in relays.

At 10:23 one of Clay’s secretaries announced, “General Stedman is calling.”

Clay pointed to one of Lorenzo’s telephones, and a few seconds later it buzzed. He put on his spectacles, lifted the phone, bent over Lorenzo’s map, and said, “I’m putting my G2 on the line, Arthur.”

Lorenzo lifted a telephone. He pulled over another map and began tacking colorful markers on it.

Clay said, “A diversion, you think, Arthur?… Too heavy?… Where’d they come from?… Do you need anything from my end?”

Clay was learning of another prong of the German attack, the landings at Lyme Bay.

The general continued, “I’m going to order the same thing, Arthur, as much as it eats at me. What does Alexander say?”

Alexander was commander in chief of Joint Army Operations, Clay and Stedman’s superior.

“I’ll hear from you soon, Arthur. We’ll make it.” Clay lowered the receiver onto its brackets.

While Lorenzo took more reports, Clay walked out of the dining room. He lit a Pall Mall, then said to nobody, “Stedman will be my Eugene, my Jackson.”

Clay was immodestly referring to the most successful military partnerships in history: Marlborough with Prince Eugene of Savoy, and Robert E. Lee with Stonewall Jackson.

At 10:28, General Hargrave approached Clay again. Hargrave had left his pipe somewhere. I was startled. I did not think he had an existence apart from his pipe. His mouth was a thin line. He said quietly and precisely, “We have lost contact with 9th Infantry Regiment and the 15th Field Artillery Battalion near Hastings. I presume they have been overrun.”

Hargrave was interrupted by a signalman who handed him a report. He glanced at it, then said, “Colonel Williams of the 38th Infantry has requested pullout of his regiment to positions inland. Burt Jones has approved. Williams estimates the 38th has a seventy percent casualty rate. Two battalion commanders, Lieutenant Colonels Halperson and Lawton, have been killed.”

“We’ll go with Jones’ decision,” Clay said with a curled mouth, as if from an acrid taste.

At 10:33 David Lorenzo waved for Clay. His cluster of red tags had moved inland on his map. He said, “Generals Girard and Hammond on the line.”

Clay took the telephone. He listened for a moment to the commanders of II Corps and the 35th Infantry, then said, “Did any battalions get out?… Any companies?… All right, move right now to save remaining shore regiments. Pull them back. Don’t reinforce defeat by throwing in your reserves. I will get back to you within ten minutes.”

He put down the phone, pointed at the map, and said, “The enemy punched through and enveloped the 137th Infantry and two regiments of the 60th Artillery. The Wehrmacht arrived just in back of 60th’s positions, destroying supply and signal. Those units are lost.”

By 10:36 David Lorenzo had his team in place and his large map pinned on the east wall of the dining room. G2 clerks stood in front of it much like Wrens before a RAF filter room map table. Messages flooded Bilswell Manor. Lorenzo’s staff, now numbering about fifteen in the manor house, sorted and routed them. Divisional level communications were immediately given to the G2. Others were studied by Lorenzo’s subordinates, who would order a change on the maps if necessary. Other clerks logged the messages.

Bulletins from the line were unremittingly bleak. Breaking through, flanking, encircling, pursuing, the AEF was on the wrong end of it all. Red flags, moving progressively inland, showed the tenacity of the assault. Our coastal wall was proving to be porous. Each tiny shift of a red flag represented a mad melee, a cosmos of terror and death.

Without looking away from G2’s new map, Clay ordered, “Captain Branch, put me through to the War Ministry. And tell Lieutenant Gupka to keep his seat. We don’t have time for the niceties.”

Clay and Hargrave and Lorenzo discussed the evolving map for a few minutes. At 10:52, Branch yelled from the dining room, “The prime minister and Generals Barclay and Alexander are on the line, sir.”

Clay again lifted the telephone. He briefly summarized reports. Then he said, “I advise we establish a new defensive line from Worthing inland to Horsham, then east to Uckfield, Tenterden, Ashford to Canterbury, then south to the channel again at Dover.”

With those words, the general admitted he could not hold much of the southern counties. The new perimeter would be ten to fifteen miles inland from the channel.

Clay said, “Yes, Prime Minister, I fully realize that I propose to cede a third of the English soil between the channel and the city. It is an exchange of land for time.”

He paused for a moment and said to Hargrave and Lorenzo, “Winnie and the others are arguing among themselves.”

The general lowered his chin to the telephone again. “Yes, Prime Minister, I understand England does not have a thousand miles of steppes to cast before the enemy, as the Russians did before Napoleon.”

He paused, then argued, “U. S. Grant gave ground at Shiloh.”

Clay waited again, then said, “Yes, sir, I’ll henceforth keep my American history to myself…. No. We will hold Ramsgate and the peninsula because I can turn my 5th Infantry around slicker than hell, and I don’t think the German can cut through to the Thames estuary there. The line will run from Canterbury to the channel.”

Another moment elapsed, then he said, “Good. I’ll issue the orders immediately. I also request that the Canadians be released to my command.”

The Canadian I Corps was in reserve just east and south of the London.

Clay listened for a moment, then argued, “I don’t give a good goddamn if Henry will have a fit. I don’t want to quibble with that quarrelsome Canuck about committing them when the time comes.”

The general grimaced, then said, “I hope you’ll get back to me on that quickly, General Barclay. And XI Corps?”

The British XI Corps had been held inland until the day before, when it was ordered to reinforce the North Sea coast. It had done an about-face that morning and was now returning south in a daylight march. It was suffering murderous losses to the Luftwaffe.

Clay listened, staring at a point above the entry to the dining room. “General Barclay, I’ve got to have those soldiers under my command. Our area of exposure is now known to us and all the rest of God’s people. It’s my area. Troops of my 35th Division are as green as an Englishman’s teeth, and I’m going to need your people right now.”

The general was quiet for a few seconds, then continued, “All right. Let me know within an hour, General Barclay…. Yes, Prime Minister?… All right, I’ll listen to the BBC at nine o’clock tonight if I have time.”

Clay pursed his lips. “It won’t go to my head…. Yes, I understand that the flattering things you’ll be saying about me to the British people tonight are only part of your morale-lifting campaign and are not to be taken seriously by me…. We’ll speak again shortly, Prime Minister.”

Clay tossed the phone to his G2. “Jesus, I wonder what got under Winnie’s skin.”

I offered, “Perhaps it was having the Germans invade his homeland and having his people’s teeth called green, all in the same morning.”

Generals don’t listen to ADCs at times like this, fortunately for me.

He called out, “Pat, will you come here?”

AEF’s deputy commander trotted in from the living room signal station. The building had filled and was bustling.

It took Clay less than sixty seconds to outline his plan. He finished with “We are going to retreat in an orderly and fighting fashion, in short stages just in front of the enemy. We will inflict casualties as we pull back, and we will avoid any hint of a rout.”

He brought his gaze up from the map. “Pat, you are to relay this to Gene Girard at II Corps.”

“Yes, General.”

“You tell him in no uncertain terms that the 5th has got to come about.”

“Yes, sir.”

This was not the winking, chuckling commander who had reviewed his troops on the beaches the day before. General Clay always showed a harder face to his staff and intimates, except to me, because I was a proxy for him when he was talking to himself.

Hargrave and Neil went to their business. Clay grasped his hands behind his back and walked back into the manor’s main room. I walked with him. He said, “Short and sweet.”

“Pardon, sir?”

“Keep orders short and sweet. Never more than a page. Do you know why?”

Why bother replying?

He explained, “In the Great War, Haig’s chief of staff, General Kiggel, issued an order for attack consisting of fifty-seven goddamn pages, excluding appendices. Never issue an order that takes longer to read than it does to execute.”

“Yes, sir.”

He stepped around to face me directly. He locked me up with his gaze. This time he was not talking to himself. “Nothing is ever as bad as is reported to headquarters, Jack. Remember that.”

I believed him, despite all the evidence.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning of S-Day. The evidence was bad, and it would get worse.

I can recall General Clay and the prime minister’s argument about courage as if I had taken notes. It occurred in Churchill’s study at Chartwell a week before S-Day. The topic was whether a drunk can be courageous. An hour and a half I listened, contributing nothing but an occasional cough.

I sat near the Tudor doorway, in front of a table on which were several unidentifiable busts and a cigar box. Above me were rafters and beams dating from before the Renaissance. A bronze cast of Jennie Churchill’s hand was on the windowsill. Bookshelves lined several walls. Two desks were opposite each other across a worn Persian rug. The taller desk was for working while standing, with a slanting top in the Victorian fashion. Churchill was wearing his work outfit, a scarlet, green, and gold dressing gown. We were drinking three-ounce scotches, Churchill’s brand, Johnny Walker Red.

Churchill said, “But we do not praise a drunken man for his fearlessness. Valor must be sought. Shakespeare termed it ‘The pursuit of the bubble of reputation even at the cannon’s mouth.’”

“Shakespeare?” the general replied mildly. “The English writer?”

The prime minister’s glare could have burned through metal.

Clay ignored it and said, “Forethought is not a requirement of courage. It can be impulsive.”

“You are saying then, General, that an animal may be courageous?”

“Of course.”

“Rubbish. A dog in its ignorance is fearless, which is far less than courageous.”

The general countered, “Lincoln said, ‘Courage can be found in the suddenness of the moment.’”

“Which Lincoln?”

They went on and on, and believe me when I say history will forgive me for not recording it all here. General Clay always wanted the last word, and he invariably had to wait until he and I were alone again to get it. This time, as we entered the jeep, Clay said, “Palmerston, Pitt, Baldwin, they all liked the sauce. Now Churchill. Something about leading the English people turns a man to drink.”

I set out a portion of their debate on courage because on this argument the events of S-Day made me side with General Clay.

Five Congressional Medals of Honor were granted for exploits of the invasion, and two Victoria Crosses. I have read these citations and similar ones for German servicemen and have talked to some of the soldiers and sailors. These gallant acts may not have occurred had there been time to think of them. At least, that is the servicemen’s testimony. Let me mention a few.

A sure way to win our nation’s highest decoration for bravery is to fall on a grenade. Private Murray Cooperman did just that and lived to tell about it. Cooperman was a rifleman with Company B, 2nd Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment at Pevensey Bay, the precise landing place of William the Conqueror 876 years earlier.

Cooperman said, “But unlike the Anglo-Saxon defenders, we had automatic weapons and bazookas, which can be helpful in those situations.”

His squad was defending a fortified house two hundred yards behind the beach. The survivors of the beach bulwarks were streaming past in stunned and wounded disarray.

“I remember that lull, between the last staggering American to clear our field of fire and the first Germans. Seemed like two hours, but it was five minutes. Then an enemy squadron appeared from behind some bushes, and they ran full bore toward the house, no cover, nothing. I opened up with my Ml, but I was a piss-poor shot and don’t think I hit a one of them. We had a light machine gun at another window, and that made them dive for cover.”

Cooperman went on, “But I give the bastards credit. They kept coming, using high grass, hugging the ground, as there wasn’t anything else to hide behind. I’d see an enemy’s helmet here, a quick movement there, a muzzle flash somewhere else, always closer, but never much of a target, like prairie dogs. They were providing cover for a grenadier.”

A spray of bullets hit the sill below Cooperman, some bursting through wood and plaster into the sandbags. The rifleman ducked, and more bullets coursed through the window, stitching the wall behind him. Cooperman’s sergeant went down with a pierced thigh. A grenade came through the window.

“The potato-masher can be thrown farther than an American grenade, but that German was right under the window. I don’t know how he got there. So I left my rifle and leaped across the room to fall on it.”

“What were you thinking?” I asked Cooperman after the war.

“I didn’t think.”

I was determined to get to the bottom of such a crazed act. “Surely something entered your head. I mean, a body just doesn’t fall on a grenade.”

“Yes, it does, and mine did. And nothing entered my mind, or I probably wouldn’t have done it.”

The stick grenade was silent.

“After about twenty seconds our medic crawled over. With my nose dug into the floor, I said to him, ‘These things got about a five-second fuse, don’t they?’ The medic said they did, and I said, ‘Well, I’m no chicken and this’s no egg, and my time is up warming this goddamn thing.’”

That’s what Cooperman claims he said anyway.

The rifleman was shaking so violently the medic had to help him up. “I felt somewhat foolish. I picked up the grenade gingerly, like it was a tea cup, my little finger sticking out, and I crawled back to the window and dropped it out. That’s when it exploded, killing the fellow beneath the window. A faulty fuse saved my life. But I got the medal anyway. My captain, who was in the room and saw it all, saw to that.”

General Clay once told me that the receipt of wounds, rather than the infliction of them, is historically how the British demonstrated courage. He said, “Witness the 27th Regiment, the Inniskillings, who at Waterloo stood in their square, motionless for four hours, while being cannonaded by Napoleon’s artillery.” If Clay was correct, then Edgar Sisler won the Victoria Cross in the time-honored manner.

Sisler and I had a few beers after the war. Between carefully measured sips, Sisler told me, “I look much the worse for my Victoria Cross, I must say.”

Indeed, Sisler had more scars than I have seen on any other person, and in my travels for this narrative I have seen plenty. His scars ran like road maps from place to place, with perforations at some locations, rolled and pleated scar tissue at others, a mess. He was proud of them.

Sisler was a machine gunner at Lyme Bay. His weapon was a .303 Vickers. He said, “A machine gun is used to freeze the front. And we wanted it frozen right there on the beach. But the Germans kept coming, and our captain ordered a retreat. I volunteered to cover it. He kindly left his service pistol for me.”

Sisler twisted the Vickers left and right, spraying the beach as his mates pulled back. “On defense, the machine gun must be kept firing at any price, so I had to stay the course, don’t you see.”

Alone, Sisler tried to keep the invaders at bay, firing at anything that moved in front of his dugout. A bullet passed through the meat of his right arm.

“I don’t remember any pain from that one,” he told me. He put down his beer to roll up his right sleeve. Just above his elbow was a crater the size of a quarter in his biceps and another rougher one caused when the bullet exited the triceps.

He continued to fire. A few seconds later another bullet took off half of his right ear.

At the pub, he pulled back his hair to show me the remainder of his ear. It was clipped neatly. “The upper half, fortunately,” he said. “I can almost hide it under my hair.”

Then the Germans employed an antitank grenade launcher against him. “It hit the front of the sandbag and the blast took off quite a bit of my scalp,” he said, which explained the purple and blue welts covering his forehead.

“A machine gun gets all the attention, and that was my problem at that point,” Sisler told me, signaling for another beer.

While he was reloading, a bullet creased his neck.

He lowered his shirt collar to show me the ridges of skin.

When he took the Vickers’ grip again, a bullet dug into his wrist and wormed its way up the length of his left arm to pop out at his elbow.

He again lowered his beer to the table. He rolled up his other sleeve to display the line of damaged tissue extending from his wrist to elbow.

He kept firing. “I was a madman, I tell you. There was nothing left on this earth but that Vickers and me. A grenade blast threw shrapnel into my left leg.”

Sisler rolled up his pants. By now everyone in the pub was watching him, including the publican behind the counter, a woman whose figure resembled a barrage balloon and whose mouth was turned down in disapproval. Sisler’s leg was serrated horizontally with scars, looking like evenly spaced railroad ties.

Another grenade blast knocked him over, and he rose to find his left arm was limp.

“So I used my right hand,” he explained as he unbuttoned his shirt far enough to show me the streaks of scar tissue on his shoulder, looking as if someone had applied the scar with a putty knife.

He kept firing. Another explosion, and steel needles entered his chest and cheeks.

Over the beer he pointed them out, pleats of purple skin that looked drawn with blue ink.

That detonation bent the Vicker’s barrel out of true. Sisler lifted his Enfield rifle and began rhythmically pulling the trigger. “Blood was coming down my face in sheets. I had to wipe my face with my sleeve.”

Another bullet hit him in stomach.

“That’s the wound that told me my time was nigh.” He stood over the beer, lifted his shirt, and pointed to the abdomen scar.

It reminded me of an egg fried over easy.

He does not remember how many rounds he fired from the Lee Enfield. “There was a two-minute period there when I didn’t receive any new wounds. I was quite encouraged. Then I ran out of shells for the rifle. I reached for the captain’s pistol, a Webley. Didn’t take me long to empty that, either. I fired blindly, blood blocking my vision, until the hammer was falling on empty chambers.”

He continued, “The Germans must have thought I’d gone for a burton. So they rushed the dugout. I swung my rifle by the barrel, like a cricket bat. I killed two of the buggers that way. Then I fainted dead away. A man only has so much blood.”

“What accounts for you sitting across from me today?” I asked.

“My captain, bless him and his children, returned after he had taken the others back. Now you might be wondering why I sit on this bench at an incline.”

I hadn’t noticed.

He said, “The captain threw me over his shoulder and ran back along a communication trench. My rump was exposed, and it took more shrapnel, which tore out some padding. I’d take down my trousers to show you, if the proprietor weren’t a lady, at least from outward appearances.”

Obergefreiter Franz Stahl and the others in his rifle platoon were trotting behind two panzers across a narrow pasture, between rows of trees. He preferred open areas because then the tanks led. In woods or thickets, the infantry led the tanks. It was safer at the rear, far, far safer.

A mine detonated under the lead tank, throwing the panzer’s tread. Stahl remembers it as being an insignificant explosion rather than a hint of what was to come, a muffled puff that sent a few treads off their rail. Abruptly propelled by only one tread, the tank spun left. Then the treadless wheels dug into the soft pasture. The panzer stalled. The second tank almost rammed into the disabled panzer. The vehicle turned left just as an AT barrage opened up.

Fifty yards behind the panzers, Corporal Stahl heard the metal clang and smothered roar of an AT hit on the second tank. The fire came from a 37mm gun hidden in the woods. The weapon was being directly layed, fired over open sights, because barrages did not work against armor. The second tank’s cupola flew open, and Stahl saw a hand try for a grip, then a torch of flame blew out, and the hand disappeared within it. The crew was cooked alive.

A machine gun sounded from the woods, ringing the first tank like a bell. Small arms fire scattered clods of dirt in front of Stahl, who dove to the ground. He heard a scream to his left. It sounded like his sergeant.

The lead panzer’s cupola opened and out came the commander. He was instantly hit, and he slid off the turret into the camouflage foliage strapped to the aft deck. His black uniform was designed to disguise grease and oil stains common among armored crews, but it also masked blood. Even so, Stahl saw the red blotch spread along the commander’s thigh.

Undoubtedly knowing the AT gun would soon find their disabled tank, the gunner, loader, and driver came next, one at a time, each to be cut down before they could find cover. The tank commander remained alive, and perhaps the driver. The commander began crawling away from his vehicle, but was waved back by Stahl’s lieutenant, who yelled, “Minen, minen!”

“Well, perhaps I was inspired by Hansel and Gretel,” Stahl told me after the war. “But actually I can’t recall making any sort of decision.”

Stahl rose and began pumping for the tank. As he ran, he dropped parts of his kit, first his canteen, then his spade, then his respirator case, then his haversack, marking his path through the minefield.

“I ran in a straight line, and I knew that any step might be my last,” he recalled. “Bullets flew all around, making this funny fizzing sound.”

Hours later, when the corporal had a moment to take inventory, he found two holes on the left side of his tunic, where a bullet had passed between his arm and his chest.

Breathing heavily more from fear than exertion, Stahl rounded the burning tank to reach the crew of the lead tank. He sank to the ground among the panzer’s dead and wounded crewmen. The tank commander’s eyes were closed, but his mouth was moving. He was alive. The driver moaned, alive also. Stahl lifted the commander onto his own back, then crawled toward the nearest marker, his haversack, which loomed like a harbor beacon in front of him. By then his platoon had set up their two machine guns and were returning fire, covering him.

Stahl made his way steadily, arm over arm, his face just above ground. He felt the tank commander’s blood on his pants. They passed the haversack, then the respirator case. He heard a shell scream into the lead tank. When he glanced behind, the turret had been blown off the chassis and was upside down on the ground, looking like a turtle on its back.

He carried the tank commander to the platoon, which was now dug in and giving more than they were getting. The American machine gun may have been knocked out by this time, Stahl was not sure. He immediately turned on his belly and retraced his route, wondering when his luck would end, spitting out grass and bits of thistle that caught in his mouth.

The driver was still alive when the corporal returned. Stahl yanked him onto his back, and began again toward his platoon. The driver’s mouth dropped onto Stahl’s ear, and every time Stahl pushed himself forward, the driver clamped his jaw painfully onto his rescuer’s ear. The corporal’s legs were cramping. His back felt like flame was searing along it. His throat was so dry it felt like canvas.

Except for his gnawed ear, Stahl made it back to his platoon unscathed. Gunfire from the woods redoubled. A squadron had encircled the American unit. Wehrmacht soldiers had been told the Yanks were underequipped, undernourished, and undertrained. They would not last long.

Stahl received a firm handshake from his lieutenant. The Reich was more generous, awarding him the Knight’s Cross.

General Clay once said, “Canadians are odd ducks, and the French are crazed, so when you add the two, the combination can scarcely be imagined.” Sergeant René LaPoint, a French-Canadian, may have proven the general correct.

LaPoint, from the town of Laval near Montreal, had joined the British Army the day after the German invasion of Poland. His avocation was training dogs for search and rescue in the north country, and he was a member of the Quebec Rescue League. LaPoint shipped four dogs with him to England. I have seen the memorandum written by Commander in Chief, Home Forces, Arthur Stedman, reluctantly approving La-Point’s plan. The memo stressed the dire shortage of antitank weapons.

LaPoint taught his German shepherds that food would be found under a tank. For weeks, he fed them only under a panzer mock-up, and in the days before S-Day, he kept them a bit hungry. He endured the taunts of his fellow soldiers, who called him Canine René. He vowed he would show them.

On S-Day, the 4th Panzer Grenadiers, an armored infantry regiment, pierced the line and gulped up half a dozen miles of southern England. The sergeant, his dogs, and two other French Canadian canine trainers had been detached from their unit and rushed south to meet the German armor. The Germans who had landed east of Brighton were pivoting west. The sergeant and his dogs found the 4th Panzer just inland from Worthing.

LaPoint and his team hid in a farmhouse north of Worthing. He was gratified when the panzers stormed by, then paused to regroup a hundred yards behind him. The armor had outrun their infantry support.

He left the house with the other two trainers and his four dogs. The animals were on tight leather leashes. Robespierre—whom LaPoint had nicknamed the Incorruptible, the same nickname given to the revolutionary—led the way. On each dog was a pack containing three sticks of dynamite and a detonator. The sergeant carried rolls of wire, an electric switch, and a battery. The tanks had churned up a cloud of dust, which helped hide the French Canadians as they ran tree to tree, closing in on the German armor. Danton, the second dog, barked. LaPoint flicked the German shepherd’s nose to silence him.

The AT team stopped behind a hedgerow fifty yards from the nearest panzer. The tanks were painted in what was called an ambush scheme: patches of red-brown over a yellow base coat with spots of yellow on top of it all, to simulate sunlight filtering through trees. The tanks were almost invisible, even at LaPoint’s short distance. Through the dust and tree branches he thought he could see a tank commander standing in the cupola of his machine, using his radio.

Messerschmitts soared overhead. The sergeant connected the wire to Robespierre. He quietly thanked the dog, wished him God speed, then ordered, “Robespierre, go.”

The dog trotted around the end of a hedgerow. The wire peeled off the spool in LaPoint’s hand as Robespierre traveled toward the nearest tank, an Ausf E.

Feverish with his imminent redemption from all the jokes that had been told about him and his dogs, the sergeant readied his hand on the switch. At his feet, Danton and Marat and Abbé Sieyès patiently waited their doom.

Twenty yards from his target tank, Robespierre paused to lift his leg on a beech tree. Then the German shepherd looked over its shoulder at LaPoint and apparently decided it was not hungry enough to crawl under a tank. Robespierre lay down, resting his muzzle on a foreleg, duty forgotten.

LaPoint heard the other two French Canadian soldiers laugh derisively from the safety of the hedgerow.

Rage enveloped LaPoint. His failure would be reported to all his scoffing friends. He was still angry when I interviewed him at his home in Quebec after the war. “That mangy cur, that ingrate, that mutt.”

Flushed with anger, the sergeant jumped over the hedgerow and ran through the woods to his dog. “I was so mad it didn’t cross my mind that I could be spotted by the tanks.”

Robespierre leaped up to greet him, panting, happy for the sudden reunion. LaPoint yelled, “You do as I tell you, goddamn it.”

He reattached the leash to Robespierre’s collar and started toward the tank. Just then the panzer’s driver wound up his engine, and the dog balked. This was no wood mock-up. Cursing, the sergeant dragged the dog between trees toward the panzers. LaPoint bellowed at Robespierre, “I will not be disgraced by a bastard mutt.”

But twenty yards from the nearest tank, Robespierre dug in his heels and refused to take another step. “The Germans must have expected nothing to approach from their rear. They simply didn’t look back.”

Blind with fury and humiliation, LaPoint yanked the dynamite sticks out of Robespierre’s backpack. “This is what I’ve trained you to do, you son of a bitch mongrel. You watch this.”

Carrying the explosives, the sergeant dashed to the rear tank. He threw the packet under the chassis and retreated, trailing the wire behind him. Robespierre followed.

LaPoint threw the switch. The explosion ruptured the tank’s belly and was quickly followed by the blast of its ammunition, which blew the vehicle onto its back and knocked down three nearby trees. The ground under LaPoint’s feet shuddered with the tank’s weight.

“The Incorruptible, my ass,” LaPoint said as he attached another wire to Robespierre. LaPoint’s fellow soldiers looked on in awe from the hedgerow. The sergeant signaled one of them to bring another package of dynamite.

The lead panzer’s commander had dropped back into his turret, and the three other tanks slowly moved ahead and fanned out, looking for the American AT team. They rolled over elm saplings, which bent to the ground under the panzers’ weight.

LaPoint dropped the dynamite into the satchel and made the connection. “Now, Robespierre, go.”

The dog took off again, aimed at another tank. The wire played out from the spool. The German shepherd ran, then walked, then dawdled, then sat and yawned, looking without interest at the burning, overturned tank.

“Bastard,” LaPoint screamed over the guffaws of his friends.

In a white fury, he raced again to Robespierre. “You flea-infested pile of fur. I’ll teach you if I die trying.”

Again he withdrew the dynamite from the pack and bolted after the German armor. The aft tank’s turret spun his way, but stopped before it drew a bead and then swiveled back. The sergeant gained on the tank, hurdling over fallen elms. “That goddamn kraut dog.”

The tank abruptly stopped. LaPoint ran up the tank’s exhaust plume and hurled the sticks under it. He retraced his steps, playing out the wire. The panzer turned in its own length. LaPoint felt the cold wash of fear and sensed the periscope finding him.

The ball-mounted MG 34 spewed bullets, felling a tree near LaPoint and Robespierre. The sergeant flipped the switch.

According to the two French Canadian onlookers, who testified on behalf of LaPoint’s decoration, the panzer lifted five feet off the ground, all fifty tons of it, then dropped to the earth in a landing that must have shaken the entire county.

LaPoint made it back to the hedgerow and was reaching for another charge when the other French Canadians wrestled him to the ground. They shouted that he would never make it again, that his berserk luck would surely end.

Frothing, LaPoint yelled back, “I’m going to strangle that goddamn Robespierre.”

They held him on the ground, LaPoint shaking with rage and screaming he was going to kill the dog the first chance he got. Then panzer machine gun bullets piped overhead, sobering the sergeant. Without another word the three rose and scampered along the hedgerow, a full retreat, the dogs in tow.

“I’ve never felt I deserved the Victoria Cross that I received,” LaPoint told me. “But my friends testified that I ran up to the two panzers and destroyed them single-handedly. They never mentioned that mutt Robespierre or my demented rage.”

At the end of our interview, I asked him what had happened to Robespierre. LaPoint shrugged, “He’s in the kennel out back with the others. I’m trying to teach him to find lost hikers, but as you’ve gathered, he’s a slow learner.”

A silver star is not a Congressional Medal of Honor or a Victoria Cross. But I’m proud of mine, and let me report here how I earned it.

Five days before S-Day, General Clay and I were on one of his endless inspection tours, this one in Kent. We had just finished meeting with Colonel Richard Barnes of the 46th Field Artillery Battalion, assigned to the 5th Infantry Division, and were driving by a supply depot on our way to the 5th’s headquarters near Canterbury. The depot was hidden among trees, with camouflage tents strung from trunk to trunk. An air raid siren sounded—the constant refrain of my stay in England—so I pulled the jeep under a roadside glade of trees to wait for the all-clear.

AA guns near the depot rumbled. The general and I stepped out from under the branches to watch the shells explode high overhead. German airplanes—I couldn’t tell which kind, or even if they were fighters or bombers—flitted in and out of the clouds.

Its stertorous sound indicated the AA gun was a three-inch M3, which fired shells to an altitude of over three miles. At the beginning of the war, the Americans guessed that one German airplane would be shot down for every fifty AA shells fired from the ground. “We had hoped for the Kipling equation,” Clay said, “‘Ten thousand pounds of education drops to a ten rupee.’” Events had proven the ratio to be one plane for every twelve thousand shells. The AA units’ long and pounding productions usually produced very little. “All pop and no punch,” Clay summarized.

But this time, as he shielded his eyes against the luminous clouds, the general said, “I’ll be go to hell. They got one.”

The AA gunners were on a ridge two miles to the east. Their victim left a blazing trail as it fell from the sky. The pilot desperately tried to right the plane, and he almost accomplished the maneuver, but the craft dipped and rolled. As it rushed across the sky toward us, I recognized the plane as a Heinkel Griffon, a fighter bomber that appeared to have only two nacelles and propellers, but I knew to have four engines in pairs on each wing. Prone to engine fires, it was an experimental plane that had somehow made it into general Luftwaffe service. German pilots called it the Flying Coffin.

“Jack, with that plane gliding right in at us, I’ll bet you’re tempted to run or duck,” Clay said.

It came on steadily, billowing black smoke.

I replied, “Not at all, sir.” A whopper. The damned thing seemed headed straight for the bridge of my nose.

Losing altitude quickly, the Griffon streaked across the pasture east of us, then ripped into the trees fifty yards up the road. An explosion shook the trees, and a yellow mushroom of flame lifted skyward.

The general and I arrived at the crash sight a moment later. The plane had landed in the depot, tearing away camouflage nets and branches before it skidded into a Quonset hut to explode, shooting balls of flame in all directions. The remains of the Griffon were lost in the roaring conflagration. A dozen fires dappled the depot grounds. Three flatbed trucks were blazing, as was a hill of gunny sacks, perhaps flour. Fire was eating at one end of a stack of crates. Stripped away by a tree, one flaming wing had spun into the quartermaster’s tent. Pillars of flame rose from the canvas, lapping at the tree branches above.

Clay climbed out of the jeep, intent on directing fire control. I heard a cry from the tent, then a muffled whimper. I dislike reporting here that my first thought was, “I shouldn’t be expected to check this out.”

There was no one else near, so I ran toward the tent. I slowed several times, praying someone would overtake me. No one did. The wing had sliced off half the immense tent. Flame crawled along the remaining portion. The fire made a frightening hiss. I circled the tent until I found the entrance. The flap was on fire. I stepped toward it, close enough to feel the heat on my face. I heard the cry again.

“Goddamn it, I don’t want to go in there,” I said to myself bravely.

Inexplicably, I did, bowing my head and raising my arm, a fullback’s charge through the flap. Heat engulfed me. I took a breath and the air seemed to scour my throat and lungs. Mad waves of fire danced all around.

Two soldiers were on the ground at the back of the tent, trapped in the canvas that had been pulled down on them by the wing. One had a bloody slash on his forehead and was burbling, but may have been unconscious. The other, tightly swaddled in the canvas, was wailing in terror. Fire was crawling along the rumpled and twisted canvas toward them.

Unable to breath, I stumbled forward. The conscious soldier’s arms were pinned behind him, so I grabbed him by his armpits and yanked. I was losing strength to the heat. I pulled again and again, tugging him bit by bit from the cloth. He finally slipped out, kicking and yelling. He stood, but locked his legs against moving toward the burning flap. I took him by an arm and towed him through.

God, it was wonderfully cool outside that tent. I breathed an enormous draft of air. I felt parboiled. A stave snapped, cruelly reminding me there was another soldier inside and inviting me in for another go.

I later told General Clay, “I was scared to death, and I honestly don’t know why I ran back into the tent.”

He replied, “You knew that if I saw you standing there picking your nose while one of my soldiers burned to death, I’d shitcan your ass back to San goddamn Diego before the last embers died.”

“That must have been it, all right.”

I lunged back through the flaming flap. The tent roof sagged. Fire was all around, shimmering walls of it. I was terrified. I dug into the canvas folds, trying to pry the other soldier free. A piece of flaming canvas dropped onto my back. I frantically brushed at it. The place was filled with bitter smoke, making me cough and gag. I lifted rolls of the canvas, burning my hand, then tugged as hard as my ebbing strength would allow. I kicked at the canvas and shoved it back, grabbed him, then slid him out. Walking backwards, I dragged him through the tent. The burning flap raking my back.

When Wilson Clay later pinned the silver star on my chest, he said, “Don’t let this go to your head. I give these away like candy at Mardi Gras.”

I knew better. And as he said it, his voice caught in his throat.

16

Lady Anne Percival stalked General Clay like a coyote after a rabbit. She traced him across the sky like a gunsight on a Browning .50 caliber. She set a snare for him, carefully laying the wire across his path. I’m tempted to add half a dozen more bad similes.

But after the war, when General Hargrave and I were sharing memories, he offered his own, “You know, Wilson Clay lit out after that English woman like a hound on a scent.”

I was astonished. General Clay chasing Lady Anne? What sort of heretical revisionism was this?

I was a civilian by then, so I could risk impertinence. “You’ve got it backwards, don’t you, General?”

Alex Hargrave laughed. “You were devoted to the man, Jack, and like a government mule, you were wearing blinders.”

Devoted, to be sure. That’s part of an ADC’s duty. But blinders? I doubt it. General Clay and Lady Anne’s relationship was a patchwork of meetings. I witnessed most of them, thinking at first they were happenstance, then suspecting otherwise.

Much of General Clay’s job was to show the flag and cement the alliance. After a long day at his desk or on inspection, he would fly to a social engagement to fraternize with Britain’s powerful. He loathed this assignment, or so he said.

Shortly after the general and Lady Anne’s first meeting, she began appearing regularly at these dinners, escorted by an earl or a viscount—she had an inexhaustible supply of nobility—whom she would discard at the first opportunity. Then she would materialize alongside the general.

She appeared at Admiral Fairfax’s home in Portsmouth wearing widow’s black and diamonds, a breathtaking vision. She was on Viscount Vanderman’s arm, until she left him at the bar in the library. She spent the rest of the evening in General Clay’s circle, which, predictably, became Lady Anne’s circle. She showed up at General Stedman’s dinner at his London flat, escorted by Sir William Tally, who mysteriously disappeared after cocktails. She sidled up to General Clay near the globe in the library, and they were scarcely apart the remainder of the evening.

She appeared once at Chartwell for a dinner, the hottest ticket in the kingdom. She came in with General Sutton of Fighter Command, a notorious bachelor, who grinned slyly as he handed her over to Clay as if by some prearrangement. At an opportune moment, I asked Churchill’s valet as tactfully as possible how Lady Anne’s invitation to this dinner came to pass. With the innate confidence one underling has in another, he replied out of the corner of his mouth, “I’ll be deuced if I know.”

Lady Anne sent the general a series of gifts, always delivered by a liveried servant in a Bentley. So peculiar were the presents that I took them for a code. She sent him a canary in a cage, then came a French horn with a dent in its neck. Next came a crocheted shawl, white with a red fleur-de-lis in the center. Then came a boa constrictor wrapped in a death grip around a mongoose, one of those taxidermal horrors common in taverns in the States.

General Clay accepted these gifts without saying anything, until the boa and mongoose. As he inspected the thing, holding it away from him as he might a soiled diaper, he muttered, “This woman’s crankcase may have frozen long ago, Jack. What do you think?”

I wanted to shout, “Good Christ, yes, General. Abandon ship and save yourself.” I knew better, so I clucked noncommittally.

Among the soldiers of the 1st Armored, General Clay was venerated not so much for his command abilities or his bravery, but for the thirty minutes he spent in one of their tanks.

We were inspecting one of their units, the 13th Armored Regiment south of Guildford, midway between London and Portsmouth. The 13th had made a fine show of it, with a parade roll-by and an intricate maneuver replete with crewmen on the turrets waving red flags to indicate when the tanks fired. Ammunition was too scarce to waste on maneuvers. Clay congratulated Colonel Joe Dane on the 13th’s performance.

Just as we were about to return to the plane, Lady Anne’s maroon Bentley rolled up. This was an outrageous breach of decorum—breaching decorum being among her singular traits—and I expected her to receive a curt dismissal from the general. Instead, he grinned widely, helped her from the automobile with a flourish, and introduced her to Colonel Dane.

Dane nodded uncomfortably, and his eyes widened with distress when Clay said, “I’d like to take Lady Anne for a ride in one of your new Shermans, Joe.”

“Of course, General,” he answered briskly, but with a strychnine expression. “You want a driver, or will you steer the English lady around yourself?”

“Calm yourself, Joe, and I’ll thank you for a driver.”

Lady Anne was wearing a sable coat over a black silk blouse and four strings of pearls in a choker. We walked toward one of the Shermans. Her two-inch heels sank in the churned ground, and when she climbed to the deck of the tank, her coat scraped along a patch of grease, picking up a black stain. She seemed indifferent to the spoilage.

The congregation of soldiers around the general was increasing quickly, curious about the limousine. Anxious for a glimpse, tank crewmen were popping up from their cupolas and drivers were leaving their fuel trucks. Major General Franks drove up in his command jeep and without getting out asked me, “Now what?”

The general and Lady Anne disappeared through the turret. Her coat trailed after her like a squirrel’s tail. The driver followed, to the catcalls of some of his mates.

The Sherman blew exhaust and trundled forward. It traveled less than a hundred yards across the pasture, away from the armored formations, then stopped. The Continental engine was turned off. After half a moment, the driver climbed out through the hatch and jumped to the ground. Grinning, he walked toward us.

When he arrived he announced loudly, “The general wanted to give the lady a tour of the inside of my tank, but didn’t need my help.”

This was greeted with hoots and whistles. The crowd was growing, but maintained its distance from Clay’s tank. The minutes passed. Speculation among the gathering soldiers as to events transpiring in the tank was rampant and lewd. Several wagers were made.

Out of loyalty to my commander, I felt it necessary to leave the ribald talk, so I walked toward the tank, across the pasture, following its track, avoiding flattened cow pies when possible. I arrived at the tank and leaned against a forward fender, trying to appear inconspicuous, which was difficult when two hundred tankmen were pointing at me and calling out vulgar suggestions.

I spent the next thirty minutes glancing at my watch, cracking my knuckles, scratching my nose, and doing other small gestures to look occupied. The gathering of onlookers increased all the while, becoming an irreverent mob. The tank was silent.

Finally, the cupola slid open and General Clay’s head appeared. The throng let loose with a roar. Clay smiled and climbed out. He bent over the cupola to assist Lady Anne. She emerged and the ovation grew. He helped her from the turret to the deck, and I took an arm to assist her to the ground.

Then, by God, in the next instant before the general descended from the tank, she gold-plated forever the general’s reputation among the soldiers of the 1st Armored. I was blocking the tankmen’s view of her. She quickly reached to her neck and yanked on her blouse, tearing it from the collar to the second button, exposing a glimpse of her brassiere. She ran the same hand along her lips, smudging the lipstick. And then she ruffled her black hair. By the time the general landed at her side, she was in a state of unmistakable sexual disarray.

The general did not notice, or seemed not to. The three of us marched back across the pasture, leaving the tank. We reached the soldiers, who parted for us. She smiled demurely, something I did not think her capable of. For a moment the soldiers were quiet, stunned, I think. But as they surveyed Lady Anne (she had deliberately slowed her pace), the commotion grew, and grew.

Now, I saw two games of the 1940 World Series, and not once did the New York fans cheer as wildly as those troops of the 13th Armored Regiment at that moment. Their general was a stallion, and he had proved it in one of their Shermans.

I’m sure General Clay was puzzled, but he was not one to let that expression cross his face. He grinned, even bowed slightly, and escorted Lady Anne to her Bentley.

The inspection of the 13th Armored took another hour, and as he passed them in review, the soldiers grinned and leered, gave the thumbs up and flashed V-for-victory signs, an unprecedented, regiment-wide display of impertinence.

The tank was later rechristened Clay’s Lay.

What do I think happened inside that Sherman? Less than Lady Anne would have us think, but, otherwise, how would I know? I was separated from General Clay and Lady Anne by two inches of protective steel and am glad of it.

Then there is the Mystery Flight, as my memory has named it. Only three people in the universe know the answer to the impenetrable riddle presented by the Mystery Flight, and I am not one of them. Captain Norman is, but he would not talk, at least with a straight face.

The flight occurred several weeks before S-Day. We had been inspecting the 68th Field Artillery Regiment, 1st Armored, near Chichester, and were scheduled to depart from the RAF sector airfield at Tangmere. The jeep drove along the airfield to Terry Norman’s plane, and just as I thought we were to board, the general said, “Let’s wait a moment, Jack.”

Twenty minutes elapsed. Clay did paperwork on a clipboard. I made entries in my journal. In the Cub’s cockpit, Captain Norman made his endless checks and adjustments.

At noon the dreaded Bentley appeared, rolling silently up to the plane. Lady Anne emerged, beaming at Clay. She was wearing black pearl earrings and a white and red print dress. He climbed out of the jeep and shook her proffered hand.

The general said, “Jack, I’ll be back shortly. Wait here for me.”

To my consternation, he helped her into the Cub and closed the hatch, leaving me on the runway. Norman gave me a desultory salute and revved the engine. The Cub pulled away. I got behind the jeep’s steering wheel and followed the Bentley to the edge of the runway. The chauffeur found a protected area under several trees, and I parked the jeep next to the limousine.

I waited. The sun set, and the English chill settled on the airfield. I waited. Midnight. Her chauffeur invited me to sleep in the backseat. He and I spent the night in the Bentley. He rolled up the window separating the driver from the passenger seat to block out my snoring. Morning came, and I was still waiting. An RAF cook thoughtfully brought us breakfast, then lunch.

I was beginning to feel like the famous Labrador retriever in Portland, Oregon. The dog’s name was Angel. One day its master ordered him to wait outside a downtown store. A few minutes later, the master died from a heart attack on the second floor of the store. His body was removed from a rear door. A night watchman fed the dog that night, and every night for the next seven years until Angel died, still at the department store’s entrance, obedient to his master to the end.

The Cub reappeared at two in the afternoon. They had been gone twenty-six hours. The chauffeur and I drove our vehicles out to meet them. General Clay and Lady Anne stepped down from the Cub, and he bid her a businesslike goodbye. She was wearing the same clothes and earrings.

General Clay lifted his clipboard from the jeep’s seat and said, “Have Signal tell Burt Jones to meet me at 0200 at the 2nd’s HQ.”

I followed him back into the Cub. Thus began a stream of orders that continued until we touched down in London.

Later that day, I asked Terry Norman, “Where the hell did you take them?”

“Well, two minutes after we took off, the Cub’s engine started coughing. So I put down at Portsmouth, ten miles west of here. The general did his generaling from there until the plane was repaired this morning. Then he and the lady came back to get you.”

“You must think Norma and Ed Royce of San Diego, California, raised a complete dunce for a son, Terry.”

He smiled. “Well, that story is good enough for you and me, I’m told.”

I heard later that Lady Anne was sighted in Dublin that day. So perhaps the Mystery Flight was to Ireland. I won’t speculate further as to their destination. And I won’t speculate at all as to their purpose.

I hasten to add that the Mystery Flight was the only holiday General Clay took during his long stay in England. And with Lady Anne along, he probably wasn’t relaxing.

Had you asked General Clay how well I served him, he probably would have replied that I carried out my duties diligently, conscientiously, and loyally, which would have sounded like a Legion of Merit citation. But in his heart of hearts, he knew I served him best in my affair with the Brighton Times.

One morning while we were meeting at the 5th Infantry’s headquarters near Canterbury, the general abruptly turned to me and said, “Jack, the Brighton Times plans to run a photograph in tomorrow’s edition that shows me standing with Lady Anne at the Duke of Norfolk’s home. I understand the newspaper may run some idle gossip along with the photo.”

He paused a moment. I prompted him with, “Sir?”

“I want you to stop them.”

“Sir?”

“I’m releasing the Cub and Captain Norman to you. You get down there and fix it.”

“Yes, sir.”

He turned back to General Carsen. I left Canterbury without a plan, shaken by the responsibility. I landed near Brighton, and first visited the 4th Engineer Battalion, 4th Motorized. Then I arrived at the Brighton Times building, a three-story stone edifice on St. James Street, and was shown into the corner office of the newspaper’s publisher, Taylor Hayworth.

“Mr. Hayworth, I am General Wilson Clay’s aide, Colonel Jack Royce.”

“A pleasure to meet you, sir,” he said without conviction. He spoke loudly, above the sudden sound of heavy trucks on the street below. His face was drawn, with sunken cheeks and a pencil mustache. Strands of gray hair were swept across his baldness, making his head look wet.

“Mr. Hayworth, the American Expeditionary Force has a problem, and I’m afraid only you can help us with it.”

He smiled uncharitably. “I know your problem, and it is going to appear in tomorrow’s Times, right on the first page. And you’re here to talk some sense into me, as you Americans say.” He rose from behind his desk. “It won’t work, Colonel. You can save your breath.”

I worked my face into a puzzled expression. “Pardon me, Mr. Hayworth? I’m having difficulty following you.”

“Don’t toy with me, Colonel.”

I shrugged. “Let me begin again, Mr. Hayworth. As you know, the AEF has been charged with the defense of Brighton. We have decided to redouble the city’s fortifications. Our engineers have determined that only the heaviest street blockades will deter panzers. So we are requisitioning your printing presses in your basement.”

Perplexed, he chewed on his mustache a moment. Then he began to color, first a pink, then a gratifying red. “You—you have the gall to come in here and bluff me like some Chicago gangster?”

“If you will step to your window and look below, Mr. Hayworth.”

Stiff with anger, he rose from his chair and marched to the window. He leaned out to see the street.

The 4th Engineers were staging quite a production. Filling St. James Street were bulldozers and a crane and two backhoes, generator and compressor trailers, and several 6x6 heavy trucks. Engineers were removing jackhammers from the trucks.

I said over the roar from the street, “We intend to remove your printing presses by their roots, and place them across King’s Road at the foot of West Street. Those presses, plugging up the street, will give the panzer commanders something to worry about after the invasion.”

Hayworth’s voice sounded as if his collar had been suddenly cinched from behind. “This is an outrage. For you—you foreigner to dare come into this office—”

“I only request any architectural plans you may have, so the engineers can best avoid structural damage to your fine building here.”

An engineer started an air compressor. A jackhammer fired, echoing along the street.

Hayworth gasped for breath. “This is filthy blackmail.”

“I also recommend that your people leave the building for the rest of the day, for their own safety.”

He held up his hands. His breathing was ragged. “All right, Colonel. I surrender. I will cancel the photo and story.”

“Sir?”

“I won’t print it. Call off your dogs.”

“Once again, Mr. Hayworth, I’m not following you. But perhaps in the interest of cooperation among allies, I can postpone this operation, if that’s your request. And several days from now I’ll review whether we need your printing presses.”

I nodded good-bye and left him standing at the window. Half an hour later, when the last of the 4th’s machines pulled out of St. James Street, he was still at the third-floor window and still red.

The photograph was never published. The gossip was never printed.

Next day, General Clay threw that morning’s Brighton Times on my desk and said only, “How is a baseball fan supposed to follow the Dodgers when all he’s got are these goddamn English newspapers?”

General Clay met with Lady Anne’s father, Earl Selden, half a dozen times before S-Day. General Stedman usually went with us. The three would pore over their charts and move their tank models over a table. I would watch Lady Anne as she sat in a leather wingback chair, her legs crossed, her red mouth slightly puckered, her sable hair framing sublime features. She seemed to be simmering.

She was a skilled pianist. Frequently, as her father and the two generals discussed tactics, she would walk to the Bosendorfer piano and play Chopin or Debussey from memory. She played liltingly, hauntingly, in sharp contrast to her character, I thought. At these times she appeared contemplative, staring at the wall or the dried flowers. General Clay was so immersed in the earl’s lessons and the tactics they were hammering out, I’m not sure he ever heard her.

But this ethereal piano-playing may have been a ploy, another part of her carefully constructed self. On one occasion, Generals Clay and Stedman and the earl left the study for a walk, the earl first dipping into a humidor to remove three Cuban cigars. The moment they were out of earshot, Lady Anne broke into boogie woogie. It was an American beer hall tune, “Over the Bars,” by James P. Johnson. Her head bent low, she beat the keys while her leg jumped in time. I would not have been more surprised had she broken wind.

When the boogie was finished, she moved immediately into a stride tune I didn’t know, another St. Louis number, her left hand fanning left and right as she pounded out the bass. She shook the piano. A line of sweat appeared on the nape of her neck, glistening in the low light. After she had flattened the keys with the last chord and the echo had fled the room, she said to herself, “Well, let’s be proper, shall we?” And it was back to Chopin well before her father and the generals returned. I never mentioned her boogie to the general, because I didn’t think he would have believed me.

In all the time I was with General Clay and Lady Anne, the only time she recognized my existence, other than by handing me her wrap on occasion, was during the last meeting at the earl’s home. She was sitting under a lamp gazing at a prewar copy of Country Life without turning the pages. She wore the inward, focused expression of one scheming.

Abruptly she looked up from her magazine. Her gaze swept the room to find me. She caught my eyes for a full five seconds. Then she winked. A full-blooded, daring, omniscient wink. Something an American steelworker would do. She stapled me to the chair with it. She smiled quickly and returned to her magazine.

I confess it worked. Layers of intrigue fell away from her. Light in the room seemed to shift, making shadows on her face less wicked. The breezes of conspiracy that always brushed her hair and carried her scent were stilled.

With the wink Lady Anne told me she was in this life for a frolic. I believed her, and I worried less about General Clay from then on.

But I’m not done with my examination of her, or of their relationship.

Why mankind is afflicted with war is an enigma that may never be solved. The question has perplexed our greatest thinkers for centuries, and I will leave the puzzle to them.

But each war, each battle, produces a host of small riddles, miniature mysteries made trifling by the vast sweep of appalling events. I list several here because they were as much an ingredient of the invasion as were the combatants’ lofty military tactics, and because, unlike the grand questions of the ages, these puzzles are more my size.

Six days before S-Day, a Stuka swept across a field on the Isle of Sheppey in the Thames estuary. Its Jumo engine had stalled for lack of fuel, probably due to a leak in the tank, Coastal Command later concluded. Ten feet above the ground at the edge of a field of winter wheat, the dive bomber’s starboard wing clipped a power pole. The plane flipped. The Stuka landed on its back, crushing the pilot and copilot. The plane did not burn.

Coastal Command removed the bodies, the machine guns, and ammunition belts. Curiously, the plane was not carrying its standard complement of three bombs. Rather, under each wing, where a 110-pound bomb usually was, was a wood crate.

“Rather fragile wood boxes,” Harold Dartmore told me. “They were designed to crash open when dropped from the dive bomber.”

Dartmore was with the Civilian Repair Organization during the war. A day after the Coastal Command stripped the Stuka of everything lethal, Dartmore and his crew arrived with their blow torches and trucks. Anything of use would be wired onto RAF planes or melted down. Sixty percent of all damaged RAF fighters were returned to the air by the CRO, an amazing record.

“We stopped the lorries on the road, intent on first inspecting the plane,” he told me. “The power pole was still down, so we gave the wires a wide berth. The Stuka was about fifty yards in from the road. I walked across the field, the green wheat not much above my boot tops, and I tripped over a clump of dirt. Almost fell to my knees. Only it wasn’t a clump of dirt. It was a rat, dead as you please.”

Dartmore and his crew continued toward the German plane. “Then my boot hit another rat, lying still in the furrow, and nothing is more dead than a dead rat. Its little eyes were bugging out, and there was a patch of dried spit at the corner of its mouth, and the flies were working on it. I would have felt sorry for the rat, had it not been so ugly.”

Dartmore and his crew became more careful, watching their steps. “We circled the plane and found a dozen more rats, all dead. The closer we got to the Stuka, the more there were. And some dead birds also.”

The CRO team then found the wood boxes, shattered, their contents spread over the furrows. “And there was meat inside the boxes, or what was left of the boxes. Some of the meat had been strewn about by the impact. There seemed to be oatmeal mixed with it. It appeared the Germans were bombing us with Scottish haggis.”

The meat had poisoned the rats and birds. Laboratory tests later showed the meat to be horse, which along with the oatmeal had been spiked with cyanide.

“Now why would the Germans want to bomb us with poisoned meat and porridge?” Dartmore asked me. “It’s a mystery, and I’ve never figured it out.”

I told Dartmore that the Stuka’s mission had puzzled General Barclay, AACCS commander in chief, and others of the Defense Committee when Barclay presented details. General Clay had shaken his head, without a clue. Then Winston Churchill had rumbled forth: “That dive bomber’s mission is obvious.”

“The prime minister knew of our Stuka?” Dartmore asked me, gratified.

“Certainly.”

That day in the war cabinet rooms, Churchill said, “They were after the ravens.”

All heads nodded with immediate understanding and agreement. Only General Clay and Admiral Stanton, commander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet East, were still stumped.

As I relayed this to Dartmore, he said, “And I’m still stumped.”

I replied, “The Tower ravens.”

Dartmore’s eyes widened. “Of course.” He slapped a palm on the pub’s table. “How could I have not known? That’s just what the jerries would do.”

The six ravens in the Tower of London loiter on the Tower Green, squawking and preening their clipped wings. When one dies, it is replaced by another. The birds are cared for by a raven-master. And they are well cared for, because legend has it that if all the ravens die, the British Empire will fall.

The Stuka’s mission had been to murder the ravens. Hitler, a mystic, may himself have believed in the legend. Or perhaps it was an attempt to cripple British morale. But it was a puzzle for many, until the prime minister, with his fabled lucidity, had quickly solved the riddle.

Not all answers were revealed. Private Philip Hardin was a rifleman with Charley Company, 1st Battalion, 137th Infantry Regiment near Dymchurch on the channel. He told me, “The Wehrmacht’s 17th Division hit us so hard on the beach we just collapsed. I was blown down by a blast, and when I raised my head, I was looking into four German rifles. I may have the humiliating distinction of being the first American captured on S-Day.”

Hardin and ten other stunned and bleeding 1st Battalion survivors were huddled together on the beach, guarded by two Wehrmacht soldiers. German soldiers raced up the beach. Shells crackled through the air overhead.

Hardin recalled, “I had fallen on my rifle stock and knocked out my front teeth, top and bottom. My clearest memory of those two hours on the beach is of the blood in my mouth and the beach master’s whistle. I can’t imagine where he found the wind, blowing and blowing. All the while German troops and traffic roared up the beach from their landing vessels.”

A Wehrmacht lieutenant appeared above the group of POWs. “He was carrying a notebook, and he glanced at it. Then he said in accented English, ‘You prisoners come with me.’ He held a Luger on us, and marched us up the beach.”

The guards lowered their rifles. The German lieutenant followed the POWs closely, keeping them in line.

“He walked us toward the hill rising behind the beach, then up and over the hill. Fighting had pushed inland, and we marched toward the line, past a barn and several houses. Wounded were lying all about, German and American. Machine gun fire was steady. We walked, but I can’t remember how far. My head was still foggy. I started to wobble, but one of the other prisoners put my arm over his shoulder and helped me along.”

Hardin and the other prisoners were ushered into a cottage, half of which had been destroyed by artillery fire. Bewildered and frightened, the prisoners lowered themselves to the floor. Hardin told me, “And then our captor put the pistol into his holster and said, ‘You men are now behind American lines. You’ll want to get further inland as fast as possible.’ One of the other POWs tried to ask him a question, but the German cut him off by saying in English, ‘Get going. You don’t have much time.’ And that was the last I ever saw of the lieutenant.”

The POWs limped north, their hands over their heads. They were soon hailed by American troops, who turned them over to the medics.

“Then a day or two later, it suddenly hit me that the words the German lieutenant said to us in the cottage were completely free of an accent.”

I asked, “You’ve admitted being groggy. Maybe your memory of his accent, or anything else, isn’t accurate.”

“No question about him being a German, at least his uniform was. He was wearing an olive green tunic and a cap called an M1938 officers’ side cap. He wore a decoration, the German Cross in gold, below his right shirt pocket. I know all this because I studied Wehrmacht uniforms after the war, looking for an answer.”

Then Hardin smiled as he handed me a sheet of paper. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me. Here are the names and addresses of three other prisoners who were with me on that beach. You give them a call, and they’ll confirm my story.”

I did, and they told me identical versions of their mysterious liberation.

Whether the officer was an American in a dead Wehrmacht lieutenant’s uniform or a sympathetic German officer with a mastery of English may never be known. Nor, probably, will his fate.

Another small mystery. Never was I more impressed with Wilson Clay’s composure under fire than that day in the cabinet war rooms when the Execution Order, as it came to be called, was produced. The Defense Committee was in the middle of an interminable discussion of convoy problems when Winston Churchill said, “I must interrupt this discussion to ask our American friend General Clay a brief question.”

I, and the other Flying Buttresses, detected a change in the prime minister’s tone, a strange tinniness. We lowered the front legs of our chairs to the floor, expecting a show.

Churchill raised a sheet of paper from the green table and rattled it. He brought it closer to his eyes, then moved it away in a display of distaste. He intoned, “I regret even having to ask this of you, General Clay.”

All eyes turned to Clay.

“I have in my hand an order over President Roosevelt’s signature. I cannot tell you at this time how I came to possess this document.”

Churchill looked over the edge of the paper at Clay. He said, “It directs you, General Clay, in the event of an imminent surrender of Great Britain, to carry out the assassination of the British royal family to prevent their possible collaboration with the Third Reich.”

I could hear my heartbeat in my chest. The men around the table were as still as a photograph.

Churchill asked, “Do you have a comment on this order from the president?”

Clay slowly moved his hand up from the table. He pointed at the sheet of paper and perhaps at the prime minister. He said in an iron voice, “I state this categorically. That document is a forgery. It was planted by England’s enemies, by those who want to destroy the Anglo-American alliance.”

The prime minister said calmly, “I never thought otherwise, of course. You might want to investigate it, General.” He passed the document along the table to Clay.

The meeting continued, but Generals Alexander and Douglas could not take their eyes off Clay. They may have been horrified by the audacity of the forgery. Or perhaps deep inside their minds, made fertile and distrustful by their island history, they suspected us Americans of diabolical treachery.

General Clay made no further comment during that conference. But the minute he and I were alone, he slammed the document into my hand and ordered, “You get to the bottom of this, Jack. Jesus H. Christ, I want someone hung by the balls.”

I never found anybody to hang by the balls, try as I did. But proof of the forgery came easily. I forwarded the document to the FBI in Washington. They readily proved that although the typewriter, the ribbon ink, and the paper had been manufactured in the United States, the ink on the printed White House logo at the top of the document had been made in Dresden by the Fascht Company, renowned in Germany before the war for the manufacture of printed wedding invitations. The FBI also found that the chemical breakdown of the ink indicated it had been made since 1940.

I gave this information to General Clay, who immediately forwarded it to the prime minister.

The next time they were together, Clay said, “Prime Minister, I hope you reviewed our FBI’s report on that forged document.”

Churchill waved his cigar. “I am offended you think I need proof it was a forgery.”

Clay said, “But you read the report?”

The prime minister put the cigar in his mouth, pushed it to one side, and said, “Closely, General.” He smiled at me. “Very closely indeed.”

A forgery, proven beyond a doubt. But the precise origin of the document, the implausible scheming by an unknown team in Berlin, may be cloaked in mystery forever.

Then there were the tiny household puzzles reported by English citizens. Randolph Deacon, an air raid warden in Ashford, fled inland on S-Day, leaving behind everything he could not carry on his back.

He told me after the war, “It broke my heart to leave my belongings. But I was an essential worker and couldn’t evacuate until the last minute. So I buried a few things under the floorboards, including the beautiful Black Forest cuckoo clock my father brought back from the Great War. It kept time well, but the cuckoo had never worked. My father said he broke it showing it off on the way back across the channel in 1918. And the only times I ever saw the little cuckoo bird was when I pried open the door to look inside.”

After Ashford was overrun, Wehrmacht troops used his home as a bivouac.

Deacon said, “I returned to my home after the Germans had pulled out. The place was in chaos. My furniture had been reduced to ashes in the stove. The plates and saucers were gone. Many of the windows were broken, with glass lying all about.”

Deacon was distraught, until he saw the clock on the wall. “I’ll never forget that moment. It was one minute to noon. Amid all the debris of my shattered possessions, there was my clock, in perfect running order, its Black Forest oak polished, its pendulum swinging. Someone had found it under the floor and placed in on the wall. Then, for the first time in almost a quarter of a century, the cuckoo shot out to call the hour. It chirped twelve times.”

I asked Deacon how this could possibly be.

“Some German clockmaker, drafted into the Wehrmacht, fixed my clock. How else?”

“Why would he have done that?” I asked.

Deacon shrugged. “That’s the puzzler, isn’t it? But I’m thankful to him, whoever he was. The cuckoo has worked ever since.”

Another small event, perfectly explained by the evidence of its own existence, is the painting John Bridgman found on his return home. Bridgman was an amateur landscape artist. After the war he said, “I had a better eye than I had a hand. I knew just enough about painting to know I’d never be much of a painter. Not for lack of trying, though.”

Bridgman lived in Horsham. His row house was given over to his passion for painting. Canvases, empty frames, easels, and tubes of paint and thinner filled it, often covering his bed and desk, cluttering his tiny kitchen. Bridgman escaped the town a few hours ahead of the Wehrmacht.

“My flat was filled with half-completed landscapes. I usually put my brush down intending to finish a canvas, but seldom did, once I looked critically at it.”

One of the unfinished paintings in Bridgman’s sitting room was of the Silent Pool near Guildford. Legend said that King John had watched a local girl bathing at the pool. When she discovered him, she drowned herself in a fit of shame.

“I had tried to capture her spirit in the green pond and in the trees circling the water. But I had failed and gave up on the project. I left the half-finished painting behind when I hastily departed Horsham and thought nothing further of it.”

Until he returned. Bridgman told me, “My building was the only one standing in the block. All the others had been reduced to rubble. I climbed the stairs, hoping against hope that the Wehrmacht soldiers had not destroyed my flat. The door lock had been kicked in, but other than that, there was no damage to my place. And standing in the middle of my sitting room was my painting of the Silent Pool.”

Bridgman showed me the piece. The canvas was now filled with paint. I asked, “So you finished the painting?”

He stared at me for a moment, then asked, “You know nothing about art?”

“Sorry.”

“This landscape was finished by another hand. You don’t need to know anything about art to see that.”

“I guess I know even less than that.”

Bridgman nodded. “Have you ever heard of Wilhelm Udet?”

“Sorry.”

The painter rubbed his forehead with frustration. His story was losing momentum due to my ignorance. He continued, “Udet is a seminal German painter. He joined the Dada movement right after the first war and then became a founder of surrealism. He is famous for his precise execution of fantastic visions.”

“That does ring a bell,” I granted, lying.

“Wilhelm Udet was in my flat right after S-Day, and he finished this painting. See for yourself.” Bridgman held the painting closer to me.

He explained. “I paint upper left toward lower right. The lower right half of this work is fully his. Notice the bold, decisive brush strokes, the immeasurably better use of the blues and greens.”

“Now that you mention it, I do notice it.”

“And look here, under the waters of the Silent Pool is a fish with Satan’s head. Nice touch, but nothing I would ever do.”

True enough, the fish, barely observable below the shimmering surface, had horns and was carrying a red trident in a fin.

He said, “Then he signs it in black. His signature reads, ‘One-slash-two Udet.’ Half Udet.”

Bridgman beamed. “That’s as close to a great painting as I’ll ever do. Half Bridgman, half Udet. But why he thought to finish my painting remains a mystery.”

Another mystery, this one grotesque, began with the bombing of Madam Tussaud’s waxworks in London. The morning after the blast, many of the costumes were missing. The police were baffled, and Londoners were outraged at this petty crime committed during the horror of the London bombing.

As General Clay put it diplomatically to the prime minister, “You English have a penchant for bizarre crime, but you aren’t looters, normally.”

Pedro Esteban was with the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service. His duty was to locate and attempt to identify the bodies of soldiers killed during the invasion, then move them to approved cemeteries.

Esteban complained to me after the war, “I signed up hoping to be a Ranger, and I ended up using a number two idiot stick my entire enlistment.”

Several citizens of Coldred, a tiny village just inland from Dover, suspected a common grave was to be found in a pasture east of the town. Pedro Esteban and his crew arrived to find freshly turned earth and the faint scent of rot.

“We began digging, knowing what we’d find. In those two years, I dug up more bodies than Carter’s got pills.”

After several shovels of dirt were tossed aside, the blade hit a metal belt.

“A gold belt,” Esteban said in his Spanish accent. “I brushed aside more soil to find gold and jewels on a breastplate. I thought I’d dug up an old English king. Damn, we were excited. We dropped to our knees and began brushing aside dirt with our hands, figuring we’d hit it rich, just like Forty-Niners.”

Esteban learned later the jewels were cut glass and the gold was paint. “The body was real, though. A German with a hole through his neck. Then one of my team shouted, “That’s Henry VIII.”

So it was. The Wehrmacht soldier was wearing one of Madam Tussaud’s costumes.

“We lay the king aside and pulled up another body. This one had on a dress and a white wig. I didn’t know it then, but it was Marie Antoinette’s costume. That German’s lower legs were missing, probably from a mine. Then we pulled out Lord Nelson, then Ben Franklin, and Dick Turpin, the highwayman. All were Wehrmacht soldiers who looked like they’d been killed in action.”

Esteban and I were sipping tequila, which, frankly, I wasn’t familiar with. I will relay his final words of the interview as accurately as I remember them. He said, “You know, we in the Registration Service began to think after only a week on the job that we’d seen everything. How many goddamn ways can a guy be killed, and how awful can they look when they’re dug up? I thought I’d seen it all. But I never saw anything like this, before or since, and it spooked me. I never figured it out.”

Neither did the U.S. Army or Scotland Yard. The costumes were returned to the rebuilt waxworks after the war, where they appear today, little the worse for wear. I suspect their appearance in a Kent pasture will always remain a mystery.

I have had a bit of fun setting out these insignificant puzzles for you. But I’m done with it and must return to the battle for England. There was nothing mysterious and nothing fun about the largest armored battle of the invasion. We move to that next.

17

“Ihave visited hell,” Fritz Stumpff told me, “and now I’m afraid of dying because I might return there.”

Stumpff’s hell was in the turret of a Panzerkampfwagen III during the Battle of Haywards Heath, which lasted most of the second day of the invasion. Corporal Stumpff was a gunner with the 4th Panzer Regiment, 8th Division, in the first landing wave.

The engagement is known by the name of the village where opposing armored forces first came fully to grips.[3] But Haywards Heath was only the easterly edge of the fray, which was fought on a fifteen-mile long, fifteen-mile deep battleground. There are early indications that Haywards Heath may surpass Custer’s Last Stand (342 books with doubtless more to come) as the most analyzed battle of all time. But I find that sacrifice is necessary for this narrative, lest I bewilder myself and you by trying to write down all I learned about Haywards Heath. Rather, I take a magnifying glass to the battle map and focus on several small skirmishes, negligible of their own right, but accurate miniatures of the vast and bloody contest.

“Our Schwerpunkt broke through the American line,” Stumpff said. “But then, just when my company pivoted left to hit their flank, we came to a fierce pocket. It mauled us.”

The panzer regiment was caught in what Earl Selden called a web defense. No one in the history of blitz warfare had divined how to stop panzers massed on a narrow front. The old British armor theoretician came close.

“The inside of the turret was about the size of two coffins placed side by side. So you see my problem, don’t you?”

I conceded that I did not. We were sitting in the rebuilt Hoffbrau Haus in Munich, the site of the beer hall putsch in 1923. He pushed the bench back and stood. He was over six feet tall.

He explained, “I’m too big. Panzer units usually recruited people a head shorter, or else they’d get bumped around too much. At the physical exam, I slouched low, compressed myself, so I was allowed to join an armored regiment. Shows how smart I was.”

He pulled at his beer and said, “So there were three of us in the turret: the commander, the loader; and me. We sat almost shoulder to shoulder. And below us were the driver and radioman, who was also the hull gunner. We had destroyed two American tanks and were looking for our third.”

The tank commander, a lieutenant, sat directly below the cupola. Stumpff was to his left, bent forward, an eye on the sighting telescope and his forehead against a rubber bumper. His left hand was on the elevation handwheel. On his left was the traverse indicator, and on his right was the 50mm gun breech, which had a shell case deflecting shield to prevent spent shells from ejecting into the commander’s face. The gun was muzzle-heavy, so a lead ingot was mounted on the deflecting shield as a counterbalance.

To the right of Stumpff’s head were two voice tubes. Behind him was a gas mask canister. Also in the turret were a co-axial machine gun in front of the loader, water canteens, machine gun belt bags, a signal flare bag, a rack of spare vision blocks, and a Schmeisser submachine gun and a service pistol on racks.

Five rounds for the cannon were under the gunner’s seat and another twenty-two were in a locker behind Stumpff. Seventy-six more rounds, each the size of an arm, were stored elsewhere. Surrounding the crew was rolled homogenous steel plate.

“It was close, very close, inside that turret, you understand,” Stumpff said. “Every time the tank hit a bump or a hole, which was constantly, I banged my head or my chin or my shins or an elbow. But even so, we felt invulnerable. Tank crewmen feel indestructible. That’s the big lie that makes any young man want to be a panzer crewman. Why be a Landser, carrying a puny rifle with only your trousers for armor, when you can be a tank crewman, surrounded by all that steel, unconquerable.” Stumpff laughed harshly, lest I miss the irony.

The driver yelled through the tube, “Panzerspähwagen, links fünfzig.” Armored car, fifty degrees left.

Stumpff adjusted the sight and found an American M8, a six-wheeled vehicle carrying a 37mm gun and a crew of four. The car was three hundred yards in front and to the left of Stumpff’s panzer, and was traveling at less than ten miles an hour.

“They didn’t see us,” Stumpff concluded, waving at a waitress.

The commander ordered, “Kill it. Fire when ready.”

Stumpff cranked the handwheel. Stumpff and the commander’s seats were attached to the turret, and swiveled as the turret spun, but the loader had to walk after the gun breech, scooting left and right, trying to avoid being hit by the swinging breach and deflector. “Loaders were as dumb as they came, so it gave them something to think about.”

Stumpff switched to the fine-laying gear and traversed the gun into line with the moving armored car, leading it like a bird. He turned the range wheel until the required marking was opposite a pointer at the top of the sight. By manipulating the traverse and elevation controls, Stumpff lay the sighting mark onto the target.

“Got it,” he cried above the panzer’s Maybach engine.

Stumpff pulled the trigger. The gun fired, filling the turret with a roar. A hydropneumatic buffer containing filling liquid, known as a Braun, absorbed the recoil.

Smoke hid the target from Stumpff, but the driver called out, “A hit.”

Wind moved the smoke. The corporal then could see what remained of the armored car, little more than three wheels and a twisted chassis. Its rear-mounted engine compartment had disappeared. Shards of metal lay about. Fire boiled from the remnants.

“You learn quickly not to gaze into the wreckage of a kill, or else you see black and twisted things you’ll never forget.”

The panzer’s loader opened the sliding door behind him and removed a round. He was wearing a glove to protect his hands against hot shell cases. He slid it into the breech and slammed it shut. The temperature in the turret rose as it filled with propellant gases from the breech and engine exhaust leaking into the fighting compartment. The panzer was buttoned up, and there was little ventilation.

“Sweat began rolling down my forehead,” Stumpff said. “Every few seconds I would have to wipe the headrest with an empty ammunition bag to prevent the eyepiece from fogging.”

The panzer rumbled forward. The commander yelled into his radio, coordinating movement with the other armored vehicles in the platoon. With every gear change, the turret sounded as if it had been hit with a hammer. Only by bellowing could the crew be heard above the tank’s engine. From below came the sound of the machine gun, an ear-rending racket. The tank’s steel plate acted as a sounding board, capturing and amplifying the sound and turning it inward. The radioman had seen something. He swore loudly.

“Smoke,” the commander yelled. His face was pressed against a green-tinted glass block on the cupola. He moved the shutter latch from its intermediary to the open position. “Shit, I can’t see anything.”

He spoke loudly into the tube to the driver, then said, “Werner’s blind, too.”

The commander twisted to another vision block in the cupola. “Goddamn it, I’m blind in all directions.” He turned to the loader. “You get yourself on your machine gun and cover me. I’m going up for a look.”

The commander reached for his binoculars hanging from a stud on the turret. He raised himself on his seat, unlatched the hatch, pushed it up, and swung it to one side. Smoke poured into the turret from above. He slowly stood.

Stumpff said, “His legs immediately buckled, and he collapsed back through the hatch onto the turret floor. His jaw had been shot off. Nothing below his nose but ooze and blood. A ragged hole opened to his throat. He screamed and screamed, clutching his head. Blood spread along the turret deck and seeped down onto the driver.

Stumpff was second in command. He roughly pushed the lieutenant to one side and climbed into his seat. He would now act as commander and loader. The loader crawled over the wounded man to the gunsight. Every soldier could do every one else’s job in the panzer.

Stumpff stuck the voice tube onto his mouth, “Werner, full ahead. Get us out of here.”

Over the intercom, the radioman said he had lost contact with number two tank, probably knocked out. The engine howled. The lieutenant wailed and burbled, his legs flailing at the gun breach.

The panzer jolted ahead and soon approached twenty miles an hour, then abruptly twisted right in a wild spin.

“We had thrown a tread,” Stumpff told me, spreading his arms. “Blown off by a mine, probably.”

More feared by tankmen than being cooked alive by an armor piercing shell is dismounting the tank in a firefight. When the tank is disabled, there is no choice, because antitank squads will quickly home in on it, wanting the crew as prize as well as the tank.

The corporal shouted at the loader, “Get out of here. Make for the tree line, and I’ll lay fire for you.”

The loader launched himself at the hatch, threw the hasps, stepped on the deflecting shield for support, and scrambled out, almost. He tumbled back, bounced off the breech, and slid onto the commander, who shrieked with renewed agony.

Stumpff recalled, “The loader’s head had disappeared, just blown off. A geyser of blood from his severed artery sprayed the inside of the tank, splashing across me and painting the turret walls.”

Stumpff thought the enemy might have crawled onto the turret, ready to drop a grenade. He yelled into the mouthpiece to abandon the tank, then grabbed the submachine gun. He fired it up through the open hatch.

“The engine blare, the Schmeisser racket, the commander sobbing and moaning and kicking. The fumes, the splashing blood, the heat, the sweat, my tears. The ejected submachine gun shells bouncing around, smoke funneling down the hatch into the turret. God, what a mess.”

“I see what you mean,” I said. “Hell on earth.”

He looked at me scornfully. “It had been a picnic so far.”

Stumpff hesitated, then looked away from me, his eyes glistening. “I couldn’t leave the lieutenant there, and he was suffering a horrible, slow death. So I ended it for him with his service pistol.”

Just as the corporal gathered his feet under him to make his dash out the turret, a tracer shell, perhaps from a strafing Luftwaffe fighter trying to clear the turret for the panzer crew’s escape, skipped down through the hatch and ricocheted inside the turret.

“It was like a bell ringing, clang, clang, clang. And between each clang a piece of me was ripped off. Chunks of my thigh, my forearm, a crease across my stomach. Finally the bullet, still glowing, lodged itself in an ammunition bag. And, damn my luck, if it wasn’t the flare bag.”

A signal flare instantly ignited, filling the turret with blinding light and ferocious heat. Stumpff fell back against the commander’s seat, then slipped on the bloody turret deck. He pitched forward into the gun breach, breaking his jaw and his nose. The flare filled the turret, setting Stumpff’s uniform and his hair on fire and blasting his eyebrows from his face.

“I felt like I was inside a burning coal, nothing but red-white light, no escaping, no retreating from it. With every breath I seared my thoat.”

Stumpff lashed out with his legs, fighting upward like a drowning man. His head bounced against the extractor fan housing, then against the cupola ring. He pushed off against the commander’s chair.

“I squirted through the hatch. I must have looked like a flare myself, all on fire. I slid off the turret to the engine deck, then fell to the pasture. I rolled and rolled to smother the fire, then I crawled away from my panzer, thinking it might blow. It didn’t, but I never found out what happened to the driver and radioman.”

I tried again. “Hell on earth.”

“I’m not done,” he said testily. “So there I am in that pasture. Burned to a blackened stump. Wounded and bleeding in four or five places from the tracer. My jaw and nose broken. But the worst was to come, because I lay in that field for two days before the medics could get to me. Of all my terror and pain, the worst was my thirst during those days. I almost died for lack of water and a kind word.”

During the Battle of Haywards Heath, while we quickly dismantled HQ at Bilswell Manor because the panzer thrust was closing in from the east, General Clay explained to me the Wehrmacht’s moves. Or he might have been talking to himself. “A panzer regiment acts as the spearhead, rushing ahead on a narrow front, sometimes only three thousand yards wide. The tanks’ guns are concentrated in a wedge, called a keil. Each wave has been assigned destruction of some defense. The panzers punch through by their sheer weight. Then come the motorized rifle regiments to take out bypassed points of resistance and hold captured ground. Next come the antitank units to defend against counterattack. Then come the mechanized artillery batteries to support the tanks with fire against heavily defended points slowing the advance. It’s all according to the book. I read the book.”

The most decorated American unit in the war was the 82nd Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, universally called the Slant Eyes. The battalion’s 640 soldiers were all Japanese Americans, largely from California.

General Clay said, “We were short on antitank weapons, but I knew if I sent the Japs against the panzers, they’d fight like demons. They are a warrior race, and they’d try to make up for their treacherous cousins at Pearl Harbor.”

Wilson Clay made a better general than he would have an ambassador.

David Yamashita told me after the war, “They called us a reconnaissance battalion, but that was a lie so that we wouldn’t be scared. We were a tank destroyer unit without antitank weapons.”

Private Yamashita had been told that panzers without infantry leading them to point out targets were largely blind and could be snuck up on.

“Can you imagine?” he asked me. “We were trained to single-handedly stalk and disable tanks. We had been told that because tanks are so noisy, they can’t surprise you and so killing them would be fun and easy. In theory, it should have been, I suppose.”

“Was it?” I asked.

Yamashita laughed lightly. “The maxim was that tanks were no longer a technical surprise, but only a tactical surprise. To hell with that. One of a panzer’s chief effects is on morale. They just scare the crap out of you.”

“I can imagine.”

“You were an aide at headquarters, so you probably can’t imagine.”

This was a theme I heard again and again during my interviews. I didn’t like it much.

Yamashita snorted, “We didn’t have bazookas, so they gave us mines and smoke bombs and called us ‘assault engineers.’ All you need to be an antitank assault engineer are Jesse Owens’ legs and a frontal lobotomy.”

An assault on a panzer was made by a two-man team, the smoke-layer and the mine-layer. “My teammate, Francis Noguchi, and I flipped a coin. I won, so I was the mine-layer, which was lucky for me because the smoke-layer usually gets killed.”

At the Battle of Haywards Heath, Yamashita and Noguchi had run ahead of a lead panzer that was engaged in a short-lived firefight with a Sherman. They used a glade for cover. A hundred yards ahead of the German armor, they sprinted into the pasture and threw themselves onto their stomachs. Yamashita and Noguchi were forty yards apart, waiting as the growl of the tanks’ engines grew closer.

“The grass wasn’t very high, and my nose was right down in the dirt. And on they came. The ground trembled under me. It was my first crack at this duty, and I was so afraid I started chewing the dirt under my mouth. I’ve no idea why I did that, but it calmed me some.”

The panzers were in a loose deuce formation, two of them side by side. Both rolled east of the American antitank team. Noguchi waited until the nearest panzer drew abreast before he jumped to his knees, twisted the fuse on a smoke bomb, and hurled it in front of the nearest tank. He pulled another grenade from his belt and threw it mightily. Then he sprinted toward the panzer and threw yet another.

Smoke billowed from the grenades and began drifting across the field in trailing gray clouds. The nearest panzer’s turret immediately swung toward Noguchi, who was still lobbing one grenade after another. The smoke layer dropped to the grass, but the turret machine gun roared. Bullets bit into the field in swaths that after two short swings found Noguchi, lifting him into the air above the grass, then blowing him back, rolling him over and over.

He had accomplished his mission. The panzers’ vision was obscured by thick haze, and they could not cover each other.

Yamashita leaped to his feet and charged the nearest tank, a Tauchpanzer, a diving tank, made for amphibious landings and river crossings. Rubber sheets had covered the commander’s cupola, the hull machine gun hatch, and the mantlet, but had been blown off by small charges detonated from inside the turret once the tank had gained dry land. The Tauchpanzer’s crew had not had time to cut away the air hose, held on the surface by a buoy when the tank was under water, and the tube followed the tank like a tail.

The panzer’s turret began its terrifying swing toward Yamashita, searching for him. But it took the gunner forty-four cranks on the traverse handwheel to bring the turret half a circle, a slow operation. The tank began pivoting on its tracks. The panzer crew would know he was coming.

“It was a matter of geometry, really,” Yamashita told me. “I had to stay in the blind zone until I got to the undefended angle.”

The blind zone was on either side of the tank when the turret was pointing ahead or to the rear. The undefended zone was below the turret and hull machine guns’ ranges, in the dirt insanely close to the grinding monster. The co-axial machine guns’ vertical movements were severely limited.

“I sprinted as fast as my legs and the AT mine and Thompson I was carrying would let me. I truly believe I was crazed with fear, simply out of control. I was yelling at myself, ‘You’re running the wrong way, fool. You’re running the wrong way.’ But, by God, I beat it. I dove and rolled toward the treads. The turret swung above my head, its machine gun blasting. The bullets soared harmlessly over me.”

Yamashita grinned at me. “I have never felt better before or since. I was the king of England, standing alongside this fifty-ton killing machine, knowing it was utterly helpless.”

The Tauchpanzer whirled on its treads, spinning to find its tormenter, but Yamashita ran easily alongside it until he came to a U-bracket on the aft deck. He tossed the mine onto the engine deck and climbed after it, keeping his submachine gun aimed at the commander’s cupola.

He crawled forward. Heat rose through the engine screens. The turret swung. He gained his feet and walked around the deck to keep pace with the undefended back of the turret. He glanced over his shoulder. The smoke screen was still holding. He bent to attach the mine where the turret met the ceiling armor. He threw the switch, then jumped from the deck.

To protect the mine-layer, the mine had only a two-second delay. “Just as I hit the ground, the panzer’s turret blew a dozen feet into the sky, rotating twice in a full circle, looking like a maple seed pinwheel, before it landed on the ground.”

Yamashita lifted a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, and lobbed it over the road wheel fender and into the exposed turret ring. The fiery blast soared skyward.

“I used the dead tank as cover as I ran back into the trees. I was laughing all the way. A fool’s laugh, I suppose. But I felt good.”

General Clay explained Earl Seldon’s invention. “He called it ‘islands of resistance,’ and its innovation was its depth. There was something repelling about deliberately letting Wehrmacht armor through the line, but he convinced us it was the only way to stop them.”

The islands of resistance were pockets of antitank guns, mortars, machine gun nests, and medium artillery. Depending on terrain, the islands were five hundred to a thousand yards apart. The weapons could fire to the flank or rear as well as to the front.

Clay said, “Each island could defend itself with fire. But also, two, three, or four islands could cross fire into open spaces between them. And each island could protect one or more of its neighbors with fire.”

Earl Seldon’s islands were designed to absorb the shock of the Schwerpunkt, the hard point. General Clay had held back units of the 1st Armored and 4th Motorized divisions from the beach front to form the AT pockets.

Clay said, “The islands acted like sponges, sucking the tanks in, absorbing them. Instead of breaking through a strongly defended line and then finding everything behind it easy traveling, the Wehrmacht was caught in withering crossfire wherever they turned.”

Corporal Jamie Shaw was harnessed into the driver’s seat of his Sherman, Cock of the Walk. His hands were wrapped around the track steering levers. His waxed paper bag was tucked into the top of his uniform blouse like a napkin to keep it at hand. It was half full. He was leaning forward, his eyes squinting at the direct vision visor, around which were stowed gas capes tied against the turret with lengths of leather cords.

“I was in fourth gear,” he told me after the war, “traveling about twenty miles an hour. My commander saw something and ordered me hard left, so I shoved in the left clutch pedal and pulled on the left track lever.”

At that instant, the entire tank chimed like a barrel hit with a hammer. A German AT shell coming in at too great an angle had wormed under the hull above the tread. The glancing blow fouled the left brake and gear box. Another would surely follow. The commander ordered Shaw left into a glade of wild rhododendrons.

“I yelled that I couldn’t turn that way. I had a runaway power train to the left side. So he ordered us right, anything to get out of the line of fire. I spun us around, and through the visor I could see a Panzerfaust crew lifting another pipe to the gunner’s shoulder. Three of them, the gunner and two mules.”

The Panzerfaust, a one-shot disposable unit resembling a plumber’s helper, was the best hand-held antitank weapon of the war, far outshining the American bazooka.

“We opened up with the turret and hull Brownings. Wiped them out just as they loosed the shot. Their round soared over us.”

Shaw’s Sherman was crossing an oat field, chased from the protection of a nearby thicket by Wehrmacht AT teams. The Sherman rolled into the middle of an enemy tank charge.

“We were all alone, boxed by three panzers. I was so afraid. I knew the Sherman was prone to catching fire. Tank crews called it the Ronson. I had nightmares about being brewed up.”

And Shaw was regurgitating. “Swaying, swerving, weaving, rolling, lurching up and down. God, I was sick. I threw up breakfast, dinner from the night before, an entire enlistment of mess hall food. At least, with our left side out, I had a free hand to hold the waxed bag to my mouth.”

I spoke with four Wehrmacht soldiers who witnessed Cock of the Walk during the next ten minutes, a panzer driver, two members of an AT team, and an ME 109 pilot, all of whom were trying their best to perform the coup de grâce on the lame Sherman. They described a berserk tank that raced, twisted, and crashed through anything and everything.

“Well,” Jamie Shaw said, “that about sums it up. I do remember busting through a nice picket fence, then through a tool shed, then turning right and going sideways through a barn. I was locked into fourth gear, and it was twenty miles an hour or nothing. And we went through a dog run, then smashed through the front porch of a house. All the while, I was vomiting up my lungs.”

Shaw’s memory is selective, and perhaps with his Sherman in and out of the enemy crosshairs every few seconds, it deserves to be. I have pieced together those runaway ten minutes during which Shaw’s Sherman dodged the increasingly impatient Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe. In addition to the collisions remembered by Shaw, Cock of the Walk ran over six telephone poles, destroyed a dozen apple trees, blew through a power substation, demolished five farm implements (a disk, binder, harrow, and two hay-balers, all of which belonged to farmer Felix Armstrong, who opined after the war that perhaps a German occupation would not have been so bad by comparison), crushed a goat shed, dug up a three-hundred-year-old cemetery, crumpled a Bedford truck, ripped out the newly constructed annex on the St. Bernard parish church, and burst through Edward Petrie’s shed, in which was stored a Panhard automobile, manufactured by the Daimler Company in 1895 and lovingly preserved by three generations of Petries.

Edward Petrie said later, “There was nothing left of my beloved Panhard larger than my fist, and knowing as I do how ungrateful colonials often feel about their mother country, I suspect that Sherman traveled back and forth over my Panhard three or four times.”

“I didn’t do any of that on purpose,” Jamie Shaw defended himself. “First, we were running for our lives, and second, I’d filled up my waxed bags, and my periscope and direct vision visor were covered with puke, and I couldn’t see too much. Plus, hot drops of oil from the breech were dropping down the back of my neck.”

Shaw went on, “Our gunner, Dinkie Welch, was a prodigy. I once saw him spit a horsefly out of the air. He was just as good at the gunsight.”

While Cock of the Walk crushed under tread much of southern England, Dinkie Welch repeatedly fired the Sherman’s 75mm gun. Shaw said, “Every time I straightened the tank out, he’d let loose another round. And one kill I’ll never forget. Our shell blew the panzer’s turret and the hull hatches straight into the air. When the turret came down, its gun barrel slammed into the open driver’s hatch. So the turret was stuck in the air far above the hull at the end of the long barrel. It reminded me of a child’s lollipop, sticking up there.”

The list of the Cock’s kills reads like a child’s math primer: five armored cars (four Mercedes Benzes and a Krupp command car), four panzers, three half-tracks (one Demag and two of unknown manufacture), two Marder self-propelled guns, and one Radschlepper (artillery tractor).

“If Dinkie could see it, he could bust it,” Shaw said.

Low on fuel and ammunition, Cock of the Walk then fled west. When Shaw needed to turn left, he had to spin the vehicle almost a full circle.

“From a hill, my squadron leader was able to watch the last half mile of our retreat, and when we climbed out of the tank, he demanded to know what I’d been drinking. And I was covered with vomit, which confirmed for him I’d been tipping the bottle inside the hull. It took me a while to convince him otherwise.”

But convince him Shaw did. Mechanics worked on Cock of the Walk for three hours, and away Shaw and his crew went again. “I had time to eat lunch, a Spam sandwich. It tasted better going down than it did coming up, which it did as soon as we were underway again.”

The stories I have told of the Battle of Haywards Heath are random samples. Similar incidents ranged over Sussex as far north as Crawley and as far south as the channel. Estimates are that over seven hundred German armored vehicles were engaged in the battle and almost five hundred Allied vehicles. The battle entered military history as one of the most ferocious armored engagements ever fought.

“Earl Seldon’s invention worked,” General Clay summarized. “We bloodied the panzers. I’m sure OKW was stunned by our resistance island tactic and by the extent of their losses.”

But by then, the German second wave was rolling into battle. Clay said, “They just kept coming, more and more of them. And they finally broke our back.”

Truly decisive battles are rare events. But by nightfall of the invasion’s second day, Allied defenders in Sussex had been overwhelmed. “To German commanders, it must have appeared that little now lay between them and London,” General Clay said. “And it sure as hell looked that way to me.”