D-Day: Every Man Was a Hero A Military Gamble that Shaped History

(4 of 13)
only say, "How stupid of me! How stupid of me!"

German intelligence had managed to learn in advance that when the BBC broadcast a sequence of two well-known lines of Verlaine's poetry, it was announcing to the French underground that the invasion would begin within 48 hours. At 10:15 p.m. on June 5, a German radio monitor with the Fifteenth Army in Calais heard the second line, "Blessent mon coeur d'une langueur monotone " (Wound my heart with a monotonous languor). The monitor warned his superiors; they ordered an alert, but nobody ever passed the word to the Seventh Army. These German intelligence failures and Eisenhower's daring gamble on the weather combined to give the Allied commander the one great weapon that he absolutely had to have: surprise.

Unaware of the German lapses, the Allies agonized until the last moment about the tremendous risks they were taking. "I am very uneasy about the whole operation . . ." said Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, as late as June 5. "It may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war." In that same final week, Eisenhower's British deputy for air operations, Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, formally protested to Ike about the planned American parachute assault, which he said would result in the "futile slaughter" of two fine divisions.

Eisenhower could hardly help being troubled. "I went to my tent alone and sat down to think," he said. If he canceled the airdrop, that would leave the invaders of Utah Beach vulnerable to a German counterattack. He decided to stick to his plan. There is often, at such times, a sense of fatalism, of something preordained. General Matthew B. Ridgway, commander of the 82nd Airborne, felt it no less strongly. "Sometimes, at night," he recalled, "it was almost as if I could hear the assurance that God the Father gave to another soldier, named Joshua: 'I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.' "

Eisenhower spent that last night among the men of the 101st Airborne, who called themselves the Screaming Eagles. They had blackened their faces with burnt cork, and many had shaved their heads so that they looked like Indian warriors. They were tense and nervous, weighed down with not only rifles, pistols, knives and grenades but also cigarettes, first-aid kits, fresh socks, about 100 Ibs. in all. Eisenhower's talk was simple but encouraging: "Where are you from, Soldier? Did you get those shoulders working in a coal mine? Good luck to you tonight, Soldier."

As the long line of twin-engine C-47s began taking off at seven-second intervals from Welford shortly after 10 p.m., Eisenhower stood there watching, his hands sunk deep in his pockets. He went on watching until the last plane circled into the darkness overhead. A correspondent standing near him said the general's eyes were full of tears. That same afternoon, after he watched the first troop convoys preparing to depart, Eisenhower had scribbled a strange note for himself, a message that would be ready if everything ended in disaster: "Our landings ... have failed ... The troops, the Air and Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."

The 822 C-47s flew in tight, nine-plane V formations