S-Day: A Memoir of the Invasion of England

INTRODUCTION

Germans call the day of launching a military operation S-Tag, or S-Day. There was a time when we thought Great Britain would be spared that day.

After the massing of German war materiel on the coasts of occupied France and the Low Countries in 1940, there came a long pause. For most of the next year, Hitler delayed his decision about England and apparently toyed with the idea of marching into Russia. Hope burned throughout England that the German chancellor had forgotten the lessons of Charles XII and Napoleon and that he would exhaust his country’s demonic energy on the endless Russian steppes.

That was not to be, of course. Hitler had indeed read his history, perhaps knew Frederick the Great’s warning that an attempt to seize Moscow would be “contrary to reason and common sense.” By late 1941, it became clear that the Soviet Union was forgotten and that the Germans would attempt what had not been done in almost nine hundred years: to conquer the British Isles against hostile defenders.

American troops began arriving on English soil shortly after Pearl Harbor, and by May 1942 the American Expeditionary Force was in place alongside forces from the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries. General Wilson Clay was commander of the American army. I was his aide-de-camp.

The term “aide-de-camp” is not often used these days, and certainly was not by the general, who simply called me his aide or his ADC. I was with him almost all his waking moments during that critical time. He ordered that I keep a journal, usually recorded by me late at night and transcribed the next day by a headquarters secretary. From that journal and from operations logs, numerous commanders’ war diaries, recently declassified documents, captured enemy records, and over five hundred interviews, I have drawn this account.

“Write a history of a battle?” asked Wellington. “As well write the history of a ball.” I have not tried. After-action reports and divisional histories have already been published, and the army’s Office of the Chief of Military History will soon release its multivolume study. Many other books on the invasion are sure to follow. I leave the retelling of field-by-field, house-by-house military maneuvers to them.

This is the story of people—servicemen and civilians, Allied and German—swept up in the turmoil of S-Day.