D-Day. The Battle for Normandy Read Online Free PDF Page B

Montgomery emphatically in his nasal voice. ‘I would say - Go .’
    Outside in the hall, staff officers were waiting with sheaves of orders ready to be signed by their chiefs. Two sets had been prepared to cover both alternatives.
     
    In the early hours of Monday, 5 June, further data came in to confirm the break in the weather. At the morning conference, Stagg was able to face his intimidating audience with much greater confidence. The tension eased and ‘the Supreme Commander and his colleagues became as new men’, he wrote afterwards. Eisenhower’s grin returned. Further details were discussed, but everyone was impatient to leave and the room emptied rapidly. There was much to be done to get the 5,000 ships from nearly a dozen different nations back to sea and on course down pre-established shipping lanes. A small fleet of minesweepers in line abreast would then proceed in front of them to clear a broad channel all the way to the beaches. Admiral Ramsay was particularly concerned for the crews of these vulnerable craft. They expected very heavy casualties.
    Now that the great decision had been taken, Eisenhower went to South Parade Pier in Portsmouth to see the last troops embarking. ‘He always gets a lift from talking with soldiers,’ his aide, Harry Butcher, noted in his diary. At lunchtime, they returned to Eisenhower’s trailer at Southwick Park and played ‘Hounds and Fox’ and then checkers. Butcher had already arranged for the supreme commander, accompanied by journalists, to go to the airfield at Greenham Common that evening to visit the American 101st Airborne Division. They were due to take off at 23.00 hours for the mission which Leigh-Mallory had predicted would be a disaster.
     
    Unlike the infantry and other arms, who had been enclosed in the barbed-wire ‘sausages’, the airborne troops had been driven directly to the airfields from where they were to take off. The 82nd Airborne Division had been based around Nottingham, while the 101st was spread around the Home Counties west of London. For five days they had been quartered in aircraft hangars and provided with rows of cots with aisles in between. There, they stripped and oiled their personal weapons time and again, or sharpened their bayonets. Some had bought commando knives in London, and several had equipped themselves with cut-throat razors. They had been instructed how to kill a man silently by slicing through the jugular and the voice box. Their airborne training had not only been physically rigorous. Some of them had been forced ‘to crawl through the entrails and blood of hogs as part of getting toughened up’.
    To take their minds off the oppressive wait extended by the postponement, officers provided gramophones which played songs such as ‘I’ll Walk Alone’ and ‘That Old Black Magic’. They also organized projectors to show movies, especially ones starring Bob Hope. Many paratroopers had also been listening to ‘Axis Sally’ 2 on Radio Berlin, who played good music as well as transmitting vicious propaganda on the programme Home Sweet Home . Yet even when she said on repeated occasions before D-Day that the Germans were waiting for them, most regarded it as a joke.
    There were also Red Cross doughnut and coffee stands run by young American women volunteers. In many cases they slipped soldiers their own cigarette ration. The food provided, including steak, chips and ice cream, was a luxury which inevitably prompted more black jokes about being fattened up for the kill. The 82nd Airborne had acquired a taste for fish and chips in the Nottingham area as well as many local friendships. They too had been touched by the population rushing out to wave them off, many of them in tears, as convoys of trucks drove the paratroopers to their airfields.
    A large number of men took their minds off what lay ahead with frenetic gambling, first with the dubious-looking invasion money and then with saved dollars and pound notes. They were