The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II Read Online Free PDF Page B

night.”
    The trouble was, neither did the British. Howard decided to deal with the problem of fighting in unaccustomed darkness by turning night into day. He would rouse the company at 2000 hours, take the men for their run, get them fed, and then begin twelve hours of field exercises, drill, the regular paperwork-everything that a company in training does in the course of a day.  After a meal at 1000 hours, he would get them going on the athletic fields. At 1300 hours he sent them to the barracks to sleep. At 2000 hours they were up again, running. This would go on for a week at a time at first; by early 1944, as Parr recalled, “We went several weeks, continuous weeks of night into day and every now and then he would have a change-around week.” And Parr described the payoff: “Oh, we were used to it, we got quite used to operating in nighttime, doing everything in the dark.”
    D Company was developing a feeling of independence and separateness. All the sports fanaticism had produced, as Howard had hoped it would, an extreme competitiveness. The men wanted D Company to be first in everything, and they had indeed won the regimental prizes in boxing, swimming, cross-country, soccer, and other sports. When Brig. James Kindersley asked to observe a race among the best runners in the brigade, D Company had entered twenty runners, and took fifteen of the first twenty places. According to Howard, Kindersley “was just cock-a-hoop about it.”
    That was exactly the response Howard and his company had been working so hard for so long to get. The ultimate competitiveness would come against the Germans, of course, but next best was competing against the other companies. D Company wanted to be first among all the gliderborne companies, not just for the thrill of victory, but because victory in this contest meant a unique opportunity to be a part of history. No one could guess what it might be, but even the lowest private could figure out that the War Office was not going to spend all that money building an elite force and then not use it in the invasion of France-whenever that came. It was equally obvious that airborne troops would be at the van, almost certainly behind enemy lines-this a heroic adventure of unimaginable dimensions. And, finally, it was obvious that the best company would have the leading role at the van. That was the thought that sustained Howard and his company through the long dreary months, now stretching into two years, of training.
    That thought sustained them because, whether consciously or subconsciously, to a man they were aware that D-Day would be the greatest day of their lives. Nothing that had happened before could possibly compare to, while nothing that happened afterward could possibly match, D-Day. D Company continued to work at a pace that bordered on fanaticism in order to earn the right to be the first to go.

    2 -      Getting Started

    THE AMERICANS were eager to get going on defeating the Germans. Eisenhower’s first task as Marshall’s principal advisor had been to save the Philippines, which by January 1942 was already obviously impossible. Meanwhile, Eisenhower was beginning to think on a worldwide scale. On January 22 he scribbled in his diary, “We’ve got to go to Europe and fight, and we’ve got to quit wasting resources all over the world, and still worse, wasting time.” He had concluded that the correct strategy was “Germany first,” on the grounds that the Germans were the main threat, that it was imperative to help keep the Red Army in the war by putting pressure on Germany from the west, and that once Germany was defeated the Americans could go over to the offensive against the Japanese. He recommended to Marshall a program: spend 1942 and the first months of 1943 building an American force in Britain, then invading France. Marshall agreed and told Eisenhower to prepare a draft directive for the American commander in Britain.
    Eisenhower came up with a name-the